In a short statement today, Bitfinex — the sister company to centralized stablecoin Tether — announced that it has repaid Tether an outstanding loan balance of $550 million. This action fully closes out a larger $750 million loan from a $900 million credit line first issued in 2018 — a credit line which has been at the center of a market manipulation lawsuit in New York and a broader lawsuit from the New York Attorney General, among other legal proceedings. “Bitfinex is happy to announce that in January it repaid the remaining balance of $550,000,000 of the outstanding revolving loan …

SIA, an Italian company specializing in e-payment services, is working on a blockchain-based system to enable secondary credit trading. The upcoming platform will allow banks, funds and financial operators to negotiate secondary credit transactions via blockchain, SIA announced on Tuesday. A spokesperson for SIA told Cointelegraph that the company plans to pilot the platform in the second quarter, while the full-scale launch is expected in the second half of the year. SIA’s new credit trading platform is being developed in collaboration with fintech startup WizKey. The Milan-based firm is building financial solutions with a focus on structured finance products and …

Little by little, cryptocurrencies are becoming a bigger part of the financial ecosystem. Mainstream platforms such as PayPal are allowing users to buy and sell digital assets, Bitcoin is attracting favorable column inches in newspapers, and countries are unveiling regulatory frameworks that allow virtual currencies to thrive. But one startup argues that there’s a major hurdle that’s yet to be meaningfully addressed: Giving crypto enthusiasts a trusted marketplace where they can spend their coins freely. DeFi For You says it is building an e-commerce platform that’s based on the Binance Smart Chain where goods can be bought, sold, rented and …

In a blog post on Saturday night, Warp Finance — the latest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol to suffer a smart contract exploit — announced promising strides towards recompensating users following a nearly $8 million flash loan attack. As Cointelegraph reported on Friday, the DeFi protocol, which offers stablecoin loans on liquidity pool token collateral, lost $7.7 million in USDC and DAI when an attacker used multiple flash loans to create liquidity pool tokens, manipulate Warp’s price oracles, and drain Warp’s stablecoin coffers. Following the attack, a group of whitehack hackers convened to assist the protocol in assessing the damage and …

Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov believes that increasing the decentralization and scalability of oracle technologies are key to ensure trust in the DeFi ecosystem. Oracles play a key role in the correct functioning of DeFI protocols by connecting them to real-world data. However, the trustworthiness of oracles becomes compromised in instances where they rely on a single data source to retrieve information. For instance, according to Nazarov, excessively centralized oracles enabled five recent flash loan attacks, which resulted in DeFi protocols losing around $40 million. Flash loans, a form of loan that does not require any collateral, can be used to …

An increasing number of mainstream financial activities have become blockchain integrated in line with the growing crypto segment. Now tokenized debt markets are entering the space as well. “CoinFLEX has created a new market for short-term commercial paper, enabling private companies to borrow USD and BTC unsecured for crypto trading purposes,” the company said in a public statement on Thursday. In traditional finance, corporate bonds act as a way for participants to give businesses funds in exchange for interest, as described on Investopedia. Investors receive their initial capital back at the expiration of the bond. The new offering from CoinFLEX …

Taking on debt is a complex personal decision that should not be entered into without great care and financial consideration. With Bitcoin's (BTC) recent return to all-time price highs, some moonstruck Bitcoiners have begun taking out bank loans to increase their position on the asset. While this may seem like a short road to riches for some, others view such financial moves as foolish, given the inherent volatility in the space. In a Friday tweet from Peter McCormack, the What Bitcoin Did podcaster said he had purchased 2.55 Bitcoin using a $46,250 loan with the expectation he would have to …

The decentralized finance niche of crypto has boomed in 2020, paying users interest on locked funds (collateral) in exchange for loans. DeFi protocol Aave recently unveiled its second version, V2, adding further potential to the sector. “In DeFi, assets that were being used as collateral were tied up, but now with V2 they are free to be traded,” Aave founder Stani Kulechov says a blog post on Thursday. “Users can trade their deposited assets, across all currencies supported in the Aave Protocol, even when they are being used as collateral.” Various fad DeFi protocols and their related assets have surged …

Origin Dollar (OUSD), the yield-generating stable token launched by Origin Protocol in late September, has been hacked to the tune of $7 million. On Nov. 17, Origin Protocol founder Matthew Liu announced the stablecoin had been hacked, noting that $1 million of the $7 million in lost funds, which included Dai and Ether (ETH), had been deposited by Origin’s founders, employees and the company itself. The team currently does not know the exact nature of how the exploit was carried out, however they noted a flash-loan transaction that appears to be “the root of the attack.” The transaction cost nearly …

Amid a year of significant growth for the decentralized finance space within the crypto industry, British Virgin Islands-based crypto exchange Bitfinex has unveiled its new lending service today, called Bitfinex Borrow. "Bitfinex Borrow is a borrowing platform," Bitfinex chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino told Cointelegraph. “This particular offering isn’t about lending out your crypto and obtaining a rate of return on it," he said. “The crypto loan is obtained via Bitfinex’s peer-to-peer lending platform, though it may consist of a pool of available credit," he explained. So essentially, crypto borrowing and loans are not directly tied to a direct and …

Swipe, a Binance-owned cryptocurrency debit card provider, is expanding its offering with a new crypto Visa card that allows users to borrow funds using blockchain technology. Dubbed the “LendFi Visa Card,” the new product deploys major decentralized finance protocols to provide “near-instant access to lending balances.” The card is integrated with the LendFi app — a decentralized lending platform that is connected with the borrower through their mobile device. At launch, the platform will support major DeFi protocol Compound, a spokesperson for Swipe said. According to an announcement, the new blockchain-based lending platform approves loans for users and disburses them …

The decentralized finance platform Cred will now use Visa’s extensive reach to further push the adoption of lending and borrowing of digital assets. On Sept. 8, Cred announced that it has joined the international payment behemoth Visa’s Fintech Fast Track program — a program that helps payment startups use Visa’s network, toolkits and expertise to build payment solutions. Cred will use the payment giant’s reach and security to popularize decentralized lending and borrowing of cryptocurrencies, or crypto loans. Cryptocurrency lending and borrowing shot to popularity recently with the launch of the Ethereum-based lending platform Compound. At the time of writing, …