SBI Digital Asset Holdings, a fully owned subsidiary of Japanese banking giant SBI Holdings, announced a joint crypto venture with Switzerland’s SIX digital exchange (SDX). The joint venture would be set up in Singapore through a crypto issuance company and aims to become a regional liquidity hub for institutions. SBI Holdings CEO Yoshitaka Kitao said: “This is an important step in building the necessary global infrastructure for widespread institutional adoption of digital assets. Together with SDX‘s strength in Switzerland and our planned digital exchange in Osaka, this venture will establish a powerful institutional corridor between Europe and Asia.” The partnership …

Metaverse-based social trading platform Enso Finance has announced its plans to launch its platform by performing a “vampire attack” on six major crypto index projects on Dec. 9. A vampire attack is when a platform entices users and liquidity from a competing platform by offering higher incentives for use. In September 2020, SushiSwap performed a vampire attack that led to about $1.5 billion moving from Uniswap to SushiSwap. The Enso team tweeted on Dec. 7 that the attack would focus on Index Coop, Tokensets, PieDAO, dHEDGE, Powerpool, and Indexed. Each of these protocols offer crypto index products which aggregate the …

On Monday, the Bank of International Settlement, or BIS, a financial institution owned by central banks worldwide, published a report scrutinizing the development of the decentralized finance, or DeFi, industry. The article opened by saying, "There is a "decentralization illusion" in DeFi since the need for governance makes some level of centralization inevitable, and structural aspects of the system lead to a concentration of power." It continued: If DeFi were to become widespread, its vulnerabilities might undermine financial stability. These can be severe because of high leverage, liquidity mismatches, built-in interconnectedness and the lack of shock absorbers such as banks.' …

IDEX, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX) based in San Francisco, has announced the upcoming launch of its v3 Hybrid Liquidity DEX on Polygon. The hybrid model will merge traditional order book functionalities with automated market maker (AMM) liquidity pools in a bid to cultivate higher financial returns for the services liquidity providers, as well as provide typical investing tools such as stop-losses, limit orders and real-time execution. According to the platform, operating on the Polygon network enables lower transaction costs to the value of "10,000-100,000x cheaper" than typically witnessed on Ethereum layer-1, in addition to benefitting from the networks full-stack …

Recent research shows that impermanent losses have become an increasing issue for liquidity providers on Uniswap v3. A Nov. 17 report by Topaz Blue and the Bancor Protocol found that 49.5% of liquidity providers on Uniswap v3 have incurred negative returns from impermanent loss (IL). The report highlighted that Uniswap v3 generates the highest fees of any automated market maker (AMM) today, but IL surpasses those earned fees. The research surmised that hodling may have been a better option for liquidity providers. “The average liquidity provider (LP) in the Uniswap V3 ecosystem has been financially harmed by their choice of …

This week cryptocurrency traders turned their focus to the pack of dog-themed meme tokens as altcoins like Shiba Inu and Dogecoin (DOGE) saw a surge in volume which resulted in SHIB hitting a new all-time high and the remaining Dogecoin clones booking some juicy gains. Traders are now debating whether the launch of the first Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) kicked off the next leg of the bull market or if meme-tokens rallying is a top signal. While SHIB, DOGE and Samoyedcoin are the hot flavor of the week, there are other tokens which are equally bullish and posses stronger …

Project Serum, a decentralized derivatives exchange for the Solana network, has launched a $100 million liquidity mining program as part of a broader effort to attract users to the ecosystem. The initial allocation was approved by Serum’s decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, the project announced Thursday. The sum, paid out in Serum’s native SRM token, will be used as a reward mechanism for automated market makers that work directly with Serum’s on-chain order book. Liquidity mining is an effective tool for DeFi protocols as it incentivizes automated market makers to supply liquidity and enhance the network’s overall operation. As a …

Automated market maker (AMM) MonoX has announced the official launch of its mainnet platform, offering investors a full complement of swap and liquidity capabilities on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchain networks. With the release of this new service, Mono X is aiming to establish a cost-effective and accessible infrastructure for liquidity providers seeking to propel their projects to the market and traders interested in engaging in token swap services. In the case of traditional decentralized exchanges (DEXes) such as dYdX, it is necessary for projects to provide two tokens to build a liquidity pair, a requirement that increases the capital …

2021 has been a year ripe in the cryptocurrency market, bringing about many new business concepts with the potential to take the world by storm. With cryptocurrency comes the ability to democratize the traditional financial system and create a true peer-to-peer medium for data and monetary exchange. The result is that the possibilities brought about by this technology are endless. Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, said it best by sharing that “whereas most technologies tend to automated workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away from the center." Therefore, “instead of putting a taxi driver …

High transaction costs have been a thorn in the side of investors and developers for more than a decade and the issue became worse in 2021 after the emergence of decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFT) led to record-high levels of activity across the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Since the completion of Ethereum's London hard fork, cross-chain bridges and layer-2 solutions have been revised as options for mitigating the high fees on the Ethereum network. In the past two weeks, Celer, a layer-two scaling solution that utilizes off-chain transaction handling to help increase the throughput capacity of its network, has seen …

The emergence of decentralized finance (DeFi) has reshaped the landscape of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which was once dominated by centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance and helped to make it more accessible for users and projects seeking to gain access to the markets. As DeFi emerged as a cheaper, more accessible option for investors and projects, centralized exchanges saw their reserves of BTC and Ether dip and they began to compete for users as growing numbers of investors opted to give DeFi a try. Instead of taking a 'centralized only' approach, LCX exchange has adapted its model to offer centralized …

Sommelier, a co-processing protocol to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM, announced a research and development partnership with Mysten Labs to increase liquidity transaction speeds and launch smart contract applications on the Cosmos blockchain on Tuesday. Founded in 2020 by Zaki Manian, a core developer on the Cosmos protocol, Sommelier is a test-net protocol designed to deliver enterprise-grade automated financial transactions such as limit orders, batched orders and portfolio rebalancing to decentralized finance, or DeFi, traders and liquidity providers, or LPs. The blockchain, which combines the Tendermint consensus layer, Cosmos Stargate SDK, and dual-way Ethereum bridge, will work with Mysten …