In the less than two weeks since the European Commission opened its “Digital euro for the EU” initiative up to public consultation, more than 11,000 individuals and organizations have left their feedback on the website. The feedback section will be open until June 14. Besides the open-ended comments section on the website, there is a targeted consultation questionnaire that aims to collect information from the industry representatives, authorities and experts regarding such aspects of the prospective digital euro as privacy and data protection, Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combatting the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) rules, the impact on financial stability and …

Opera, one of the major crypto-friendly internet browsers, announced the integration of eight blockchains in a continued effort to introduce Web3 to more than 380 million mobile and desktop users worldwide. In Jan. 2022, Opera launched the Crypto Browser project, a Web3-focused initiative for facilitating navigation across decentralized applications (DApp), games and metaverse platforms. As part of this initiative, the browser company added support for eight major blockchain ecosystems, including Bitcoin (BTC), Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC), StarkEx, Ronin, Celo, Nervos DAO and IXO. Opera said in the announcement that its users now have access to the Polygon and Solana DApp …

Fragments Inc, the team responsible for the development of the Ampleforth Protocol, has announced that the protocol will be integrated into popular blockchain Avalanche to facilitate the introduction of unit-of-account denomination model AMPL. AMPL is an algorithmic computer programming language that holds promise as a decentralized method of denominating stable contracts for core functionalities in the DeFi space such as lending, borrowing and the deployment of on-chain derivatives. Ampleforth's rebasing mechanism of daily adjusted supply levels enables the metric measurement of price value for user's token accumulation, as opposed to the traditional method of price-tracked volatility. These systemic rules are …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) project Cream Finance will bring its lending and borrowing services to Moonbeam, a smart contract platform on Polkadot. In a Thursday announcement, Moonbeam said Cream Finance would be integrating with its ecosystem, starting with a parachain on Kusama, Moonriver and then on Polkadot. Kusama and Polkadot users will be able to use Cream’s services to deposit digital assets as collateral or lend them out. “Lending and borrowing protocols lie at the heart of a productive DeFi ecosystem,” said Moonbeam founder Derek Yoo. “The integration not only provides a critical capability to the growing DeFi ecosystem on Moonbeam, …

The Harmony blockchain has opened registration for a hackathon starting next month with more than $1 million in seed funding and prizes for participants. In a Thursday announcement on Twitter, Harmony said the hackathon would be focused on bringing in more people from traditional finance for challenges bridging their fields and decentralized finance. The protocol said there would be four challenges in each category of social wallets and keyless security, cross-chain and trustless bridges, and cross-border with fintech integration. “In blockchain, finance is where we are seeing product market fit,” said Harmony. “But most of DeFi was created by people …

After investing in travel app Maps.me and decentralized finance protocol Oxygen, Alameda Research will be putting $20 million into Reef Finance, the Polkadot-based DeFi platform. According to Reef Finance, Alameda Research will be purchasing $20 million worth of the firm’s native tokens, REEF — roughly 528 million at the current price of $0.03787. The investment will reportedly allow the two companies to collaborate on technology and strategy “in the near future.” Reef CEO Denko Mancheski added the additional funds would help the firm develop DeFi applications for the Reef blockchain. The $20 million in Reef comes after a $40 million …

Swipe wallet and crypto debit card platform has integrated Chainlink (LINK) data oracles to improve the accuracy of reward issuance and token burns. Swipe CEO Joselito Lizarondo said Chainlink’s decentralized price feeds will provide more accurate and fair token conversion prices for users and was an important step towards greater decentralization: “This is important to us to bring transparency to our users, especially as we're kind of leaning towards starting to migrate from custodial products to noncustodial products in the future. So this is a starting point of decentralization in our system to ensure that our users are seeing a …

Plasm, a smart contract protocol built on Polkadot’s Substrate framework, has integrated Chainlink’s (LINK) price feeds. Interestingly, the oracle project itself will likely soon become a Polkadot parachain. Polkadot has a modular design wherein various parachains serve particular use cases. Its mainnet does not have smart contracts, but Plasm hopes to fill this void. Plasm CEO, Sota Watanabe, told Cointelegraph that they intend to use Chainlink’s data oracles for Plasm’s Lockdrop — a token distribution mechanism pioneered by Edgeware. In order to receive Plasm’s tokens, a user needs to lock Ether or Bitcoin in a smart contract. In return, the …

Chainlink (LINK) introduced a new community grant program focused on making smart contracts “the dominant form of digital agreement”. Chainlink’s positive feedback loops. Source: Chainlink. Dominating digital agreements The grants will be awarded to projects that are “accelerating two positive feedback loops.” Such loops include the increased availability of on-chain data and increased security guarantees for users. The eventual goal is to make smart contracts a dominant form of digital agreements. Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov elaborated on these points in a statement to Cointelegraph: “We are accelerating the adoption of smart contracts as the dominant form of digital agreement, by …