Cryptocurrency brought us peer-to-peer payments that continue to elevate participation in the global economy for millions of people without access to traditional banking services. The rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) promises to further expand access to financial services, including savings, lending, derivatives, asset management and insurance products. This innovation, which empowers financial inclusion, should be allowed to flourish in a regulated environment where individuals and institutions are protected and suspicious activity is identified and reported. But how do you regulate these decentralized products without completely removing the core attributes of financial inclusion and decentralization? Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures are …

When blockchain made its debut in 2008, the technology was completely overshadowed by its application — Bitcoin. From an infrastructure technology perspective, there was a team that believed beyond the context of cryptocurrency, there’s a promising future where businesses and individuals will thrive in a more efficient, interactive and inclusive digital economy. ParallelChain claims to have identified the attributes that limit the use of blockchain in the real world, addressed them one by one, and built a new base layer blockchain from scratch. “Since its birth in 2018, ParallelChain has been a private network for traditional finance (TradFi). The purpose …

Shidan Gouran of Gulf Pearl: Shidan is a co-founder of Gulf Pearl, a Canadian merchant bank and advisory firm with a focus on emerging technologies. “With respect to blockchain technology, the ability to easily move wealth from one country to another and to prevent seizure of assets due to belonging to a particular religious, political, social or ethnic group is a very powerful feature that public blockchains can enable. All truly democratic countries should implement safeguard measures against the potential of a tyrannical government formation because no system is perfect. I believe digital bearer instruments enabled by blockchains are one …

James QU, currently the CTO at PlatON Network, comes from a traditional corporate background. Before joining PlatON, he worked as an executive director for Morgan Stanley and associate director for UBS Securities Tokyo. “I focused on electronic and algorithm trading for decades,” he shared. In 2015, following the Chinese market crash, QU left Morgan Stanley, where he had worked for over nine years, and started an algorithmic trading company, which remains one of the top companies in China till this day. QU was first introduced to blockchain technology in 2016 and admitted that he realized right away that it would …

Federal authorities in Russia are moving forward with a plan to closely monitor cryptocurrency activity for illicit transactions and deanonymize crypto users’ identities. The Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service, also known as Rosfinmonitoring, has selected a contractor for developing a platform for tracking cryptocurrency activity. According to data from Russia’s state procurement website, the country will allocate 14.7 million rubles ($200,000 USD) from its budget to create a “module for monitoring and analyzing cryptocurrency transactions” using Bitcoin (BTC). According to the official data, the procurement contract was granted to a company referred to as RCO, which is reportedly indirectly backed …

A new report on the potential for blockchain identity management solutions to become integrated across sectors has forecast strong growth for its global market, at a compound annual rate of close to 71%. The report grounds its predictions on a study broken down into segments by sector — e.g., government, healthcare, banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), geography, and applications. It was published by the Lyon-headquartered market research solution provider ReportLinker. Drawing on an analysis of several existing blockchain identity management market vendors — Accenture, Amazon, Bitfury Group, Civic Technologies and others — the report expects the total global market …

A high-performance, layer-two solution based on zk-rollups is designed to bring cross-chain privacy to digital assets. The Zecrey protocol enables account balances and transaction amounts to be encrypted — delivering anonymity and hiding relationships between senders and recipients. It also means that only an owner knows how much crypto is in their wallet. Bridges to a number of blockchain platforms also ensure a number of digital assets can interact with each other, all while ensuring confidentiality isn’t compromised. This is thanks to the use of the customized Sigma protocol. All of this is achieved without foregoing speed, and the protocol …

A network that’s home to tools and applications championing anonymity has announced that it is exploring the development of oxUSD, a privacy preserving stablecoin. Oxen’s network is already used to power the anonymous messaging app Session — as well as Lokinet, a router that offers an alternative to Tor. However, the project’s team say their infrastructure is capable of handling so much more. They believe a private stablecoin would be a powerful complement to the products that are already on offer, delivering instant and untraceable digital payments. When it comes to the rationale behind launching such a digital asset, Oxen …

Developers of privacy-oriented cryptocurrency Monero (XMR) have identified a bug that could potentially impact users’ transaction privacy. On Monday, the official Monero Twitter account warned users of a “rather significant bug” that has been spotted in Monero’s decoy selection algorithm, a system designed to hide real output transactions among 10 decoys in a ring. First identified by software developer Justin Berman, the bug causes a sufficient probability that users’ output transactions can be identified as the true spend among decoys if users spend funds immediately following lock time in the first two blocks, or 20 minutes after receiving funds. The …

A self-funded, community-driven decentralized blockchain wants to create a privacy coin ecosystem that doesn’t consume large amounts of energy. This platform, called BlackHat Coin, will use proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mining in addition to implementing its privacy layer on the zk-SNARK sapling protocol to provide fast, anonymous, and untraceable payments. “Today, it is not a secret to anyone that artificial intelligence-based systems for analyzing cryptocurrency transactions have been developed, terms of tokens use have been tightened, the interests of various centralized projects have been lobbied in every possible way,” the project said in its whitepaper. According to them, despite the fact …

The number of reachable Bitcoin network nodes has crossed the 13,000 mark for the first time. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, the previous all-time high was 11,613 achieved back in January. According to data from Bitcoin network statistics dashboard Bitnodes.io, this milestone was reached back on July 5 when the number of reachable nodes clocked in at 13,374. At the time of writing, Bitnodes’ data puts the current network node count at about 12,835, Coin.Dance, another tracking website, also has Bitcoin’s node count at a new all-time high of 12,825. Nodes running the Bitcoin Core software make up 98.77% of …

In the 19th century, the barons of American industries rose to prominence by leveraging their hold on tangible resources like oil and steel. Today, corporate titans seek to attain even greater heights of wealth by gathering consumer data. But now, like then, the benefits of accumulating such resources come paired with a significant business risk: spillage. Like oil spills, data leaks — regardless of whether they occur accidentally or as a result of hacker interference — can cause companies and consumers significant financial, legal and political harm. Consider the fallout at Facebook earlier this year. In April, the phone numbers, …