The collapse of FTX has shown that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. In a year filled with jaw-dropping unveilings, none compare to the bewildering fall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange. While many were stunned, there were a few tell-tale signs that may have indicated not everything was peachy-perfect over at FTX headquarters. These issues began to compound and, on Oct. 5, I published a detailed commentary about my decision to begin pulling funds out of FTX and short FTT. Im taking all of my capital out of @FTX_Official and going short $FTT FTX has been swinging and missing all year …

The long-anticipated plans by the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) to use blockchain to bring its clearing and settlements system into the 21st century have just been canceled. In a Nov. 17 statement, ASX announced it had paused all current activities of its “CHESS replacement project” following an independent review from technology consulting firm Accenture, which identified “significant challenges with the solution design and its ability to meet ASX’s requirements,” stating: “Current activities on the project have been paused while ASX revisits the solution design.” For the last five years, ASX had been working on a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) solution …

The global decentralized finance (DeFi) market size was valued at $11.78 billion in 2021. This number is expected to increase as DeFi advances, yet it is still in its infancy. Therefore, a number of banks and traditional financial institutions still tend to be unaware of DeFi’s potential. While this may be, industry experts within the crypto sector are predicting that decentralized finance will overtake traditional financial institutions in the coming years. For instance, Mike Belshe, CEO and co-founder of BitGo — a digital asset custody provider — told Cointelegraph that he believes DeFi will replace institutions in the next three …

Is the International Monetary Fund (IMF) really hostile to crypto? Many in the cryptocurrency/blockchain space think so. In January, the fund asked El Salvador to drop Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender. In May, it reportedly pressured Argentina to curtail crypto trading as the price for an IMF loan extension, and it also recently warned the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) that raising a digital currency to the status of legal tender could “raise risks to macroeconomic and financial stability as well as financial integrity.” “I do believe that the IMF is an implacable foe of crypto,” David Tawil, president …

Western Union may be preparing to offer crypto-related services, judging from trademark applications filed by the company last week. This is the latest of several attempts the company has made to enter the cryptoverse. So far, it has had limited success. Western Union filed for three trademarks on Oct. 18. According to trademark attorney Mike Kondoudis, activities covered by the applications include managing wallets; exchanging digital assets and commodities derivatives; issuing tokens of value and brokerage and insurance services. Western Union is a major provider of cross-border remittance services, and it showed its interest and uncertainty in cryptocurrency early. It …

In its continued efforts to identify the ideal future monetary system, The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) revealed the edge of the crypto ecosystem over the present-day fiat economy when it comes to fulfilling the policy goals. While sharing its vision for the future monetary system, the BIS outlined eight high-level goals it hopes to achieve — safety and stability, accountability, efficiency, inclusion, user control over data, integrity, adaptability and openness. In its study, BIS found the crypto ecosystem outweighs the traditional finance when it came to broadly fulfilling the policy goals. The above table shared by the BIS shows …

The Carbon Bankroll Report was released on May 17 as a collaboration among the Climate Safe Lending Network, The Outdoor Policy Outfit and Bank FWD. The collaboration made it possible to calculate the emissions generated due to a company’s cash and investments, such as cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. The report revealed that for several large companies, such as Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce, the cash and investments are their largest source of emissions. The energy consumption of the flagship proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain network, Bitcoin, has been a matter of debate in which the network and its participants, especially …

In April, United States-based retirement plan provider Fidelity Investments moved to allow 401(k) retirement savings account holders to invest directly in Bitcoin (BTC), the flagship cryptocurrency, making crypto a potential part of one’s savings for the future. A 401(k) is a retirement savings plan offered by many U.S. employers that give the saver tax advantages and allow for several different investment options. Fidelity’s move will make it easier for Bitcoin to be among those options. In a typical 401(k) plan, employees agree to have a percentage of each paycheck paid directly into an investment account created for the plan, while …

The concept of lending and borrowing is as old as time itself. Regarding finances, while some individuals have more than enough for themselves, others barely have enough to get by. As long as there is this imbalance in finance distribution, there will always be a need to borrow and a desire to lend. Lending involves giving out a resource on credit with the condition of it being returned upon an agreed period of time. In this case, such resources would be money or any financial asset. The lender could be an individual, a financial institution, a firm or even a …

Loans based on cryptocurrencies have become a mainstay of the decentralized finance (DeFi) universe ever since the smart contract-based lending/borrowing platforms began offering the service to crypto users. The Ethereum network, the first blockchain that scaled the smart contract functionality, sees most of the total value locked (TVL) on DeFi protocols dominated by cryptocurrency lending platforms. According to data from DeFi Pulse, the top 4 of 10 DeFi protocols are lending protocols that account for $37.04 billion in TVL, just 49% of TVL of the entire DeFi market on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum leads in terms of being the most …

Grayscale Investments’ latest report “Reimagining the Future of Finance” defines the digital economy as “the intersection of technology and finance that’s increasingly defined by digital spaces, experiences, and transactions.” With this in mind, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many financial institutions have begun to offer services that allow clients access to Bitcoin (BTC) and other digital assets. Last year, in particular, saw an influx of financial institutions incorporating support for crypto-asset custody. For example, Bank of New York Mellon, or BNY Mellon, announced in February 2021 plans to hold, transfer and issue Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as an …

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, has established itself as a force capable of disrupting traditional systems. While DeFi still mostly keeps opposing itself to traditional finance, the centralized operators are actively looking for ways to integrate into the established system. The institutional interest pushes both decentralized and centralized participants to ask questions about DeFi, its role and a possible collaboration with centralized finance, or CeFi. Related: DeFi proved resilient during the March 2020 and May 2021 market crises Of course, the situation isn’t uniform for both centralized and decentralized institutions, but the main generic concerns are the following: Can there even …