In his monthly crypto tech column, Israeli serial entrepreneur Ariel Shapira covers emerging technologies within the crypto, decentralized finance and blockchain space, as well as their roles in shaping the economy of the 21st century. The White House came out with an executive order on regulating crypto recently. Across the sea, European legislators defeated a legislative push that could have spelled major trouble for proof-of-work networks. These developments should be ringing a bell that most crypto aficionados have long grown used to: Regulation is still very much on the agenda, and even though the blockchain community is now way more …

DeFi has continued to grow at an unprecedented pace, introducing the world to new ways to send and receive funds, invest, take out loans and even enjoy a new form of collectibles. However, as the technology quickly advances and more use cases come to light, users are beginning to find the diverse landscape more and more complex to navigate. Even wallets, which were once viewed as little more than an asset storage tool, have grown in functionality to become an access point for decentralized exchanges (DEXs), DApps and games. Although these entry points into the DeFi industry are more readily …

The Li Finance swap aggregator has experienced a smart contract exploit leading to the loss of around $600,000 from 29 users’ wallets. The exploit took place at 2:51 am UTC on March 20. The attacker was able to extract varying amounts of 10 different tokens from wallets that had given “infinite approval” to the Li Finance protocol. Among the stolen tokens were USD Coin (USDC), Polygon (MATIC), Rocket Pool (RPL), Gnosis (GNO), Tether (USDT), Metaverse Index (MVI), Audius (AUDIO), AAVE (AAVE), Jarvis Reward Token (JRT), and DAI (DAI). TLDR: • ~$600K have been stolen from 29 wallets • User don’t …

While decentralized finance (DeFi) token prices may be going down, new forms of utility like liquid staking are on the rise and some believe that more people may be drawn to DeFi as more institutions jump into the fray. According to Eric Chen, CEO and co-founder of Injective Labs, while the DeFi sector has witnessed massive growth since 2020, there are still issues to solve such as gas fees, scalability and liquidity. Chen said that the entire DeFi industry is focused on building infrastructures to address these problems. “It still has a lot of problems to solve before being able …

Behind the KuCoin creation, there are two tech geeks who were early blockchain adopters. Having started coding at the age of 8 and founded his first startup at 16, in 2012, Michael heard about Bitcoin (BTC) from his boss Eric at a private equity investment firm IDG Capital, and immediately began mining. While he tried to sell some Bitcoin on the Mt.Gox exchange, which was the world's largest trading platform at the time, he discovered how difficult it was for beginners to navigate. By the end of 2013, realizing the potential of crypto, Michael and Eric wrote the first code …

A new community proposal was introduced in the Uniswap governance forum to deploy the protocol on the Celo blockchain, which is a mobile-first, carbon-negative and Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible network. The new proposal was created on behalf of Blockchain at Michigan, and in partnership with the Celo Foundation and the Celo Climate Collective. Once passed, Uniswap will be accessible to nearly six billion mobile phone users. Currently, MetaMask mobile app enables using Uniswap or other decentralized exchanges via an in-app browser. The Celo foundation will commit $10 million of CELO in Uniswap-specific user incentives and grants along with $10 million in …

The first 100,000 Jamaican citizens to use the country’s new central bank digital currency (CBDC) known as Jam-Dex, will be given a free $16 payment in the hopes of promoting widespread adoption. Jamaican prime minister Andrew Holness first announced the news in a Facebook post on Thursday. The post received a mixed response as some Facebook users praised Holness for “embracing a digital future”, while others expressed concern about the motivations of the Jamaican government, accusing Holness of trying to “bribe” citizens into the federal banking system. According to the Jamaica Observer, approximately 17% of the Jamaican population is currently …

As the decentralized world continues to heat up, exchanges are becoming the latest hotspot for users. The current crypto market offers a number of decentralized exchanges (DEX), each providing different incentives and utility to the end-user. The result is that where some platforms are excelling, others struggle to meet the precedence set by their competitors. Therefore, users must be careful to weigh concerns around the transaction cost, block creation times, the involvement of the community, in which they can provide feedback, and opportunities for lucrative decentralized finance (DeFi) rewards. The question for users then becomes, “is it possible to check …

The price of the native asset for cross-chain decentralized exchange THORChain (RUNE) has spiked by 34% in a day following the activating of synthetic assets on the network. At the time of writing the price had settled back to a 21% gain over the past 24 hours to sit at $5.27.. Crypto synthetics or synths are derivative tokens of other digital assets that are pegged to the value of the underlying collateralized asset such as Bitcoin (BTC) or Ether (ETH). In THORChain’s variation, the project has opted to back its synths with 50% of the underlying asset and 50% in …

Similar to the mid-1990s dot-com era, cryptocurrencies are said to be nearing a phase of hyper-adoption, where growth hits an inflection point and begins a trajectory towards the moon. Looking at the past decade, cryptocurrency adoption can largely be attributed to the emergence of exchange platforms. With numerous exchanges at play, many first-time users have successfully braved the path into the world of digital currencies. Ironically, while these exchanges have been key to the success of cryptocurrency adoption to date, they have also been the cause for a new debate, one between using a centralized exchange (CEX) or decentralized exchange …

Decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator KyberSwap has launched on the layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum network. The move puts Kyberswap on its seventh network or scaling solution along with Ethereum (ETH), Polygon (MATIC), Fantom (FTM), BSC (BNB), Avalanche (AVAX), and Cronos (CRONOS). KyberSwap joins SwaprEth, Balancer Labs, Curve Finance, and SushiSwap as the DEXes available on Arbitrum as of the time of writing. KyberSwap DEX Aggregator Launches Integration with L2 Scaling Solution @OffchainLabs #Arbitrum Network Trade tokens on #KyberSwap at faster speeds and with lower costs, with the best rates! Trade and earn now: https://t.co/Yl4MTlr0di Learn more: https://t.co/ksSu1YjQkt pic.twitter.com/sUI00hnsk5 — Kyber …

Decentralized finance projects like Ren pumped in 2021, only to finish the year right back when they started as high fees on Ethereum (ETH) led to decreased activity for many protocols and DeFi took a backseat to more popular sectors like nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Now, it appears as though that downtrend is in the process of reversing course after recent global events highlighted the benefits of DeFi and holding assets outside the traditional financial system. This week REN price climbed 69% from a low of $0.247 on Feb. 24 to a daily high of $0.418 on March 3. Three reasons …