Cion Digital, a developer for an enterprise SaaS blockchain orchestration platform, announced on Jan 4 that it had closed out its recent seed funding round at $12 million. The round was overseen by Green Visor Capital and 645 Ventures who have since joined Cion Digital’s board of directors. Additionally, Cota Capital, Epic Ventures, Hourglass Capital Partners, BAT Ventures, Greycroft and Ulu Ventures were also participants. Following the raise, the company said that it intends to allocate these funds toward its new resource and development center in Pune, India in an effort to further expand the project’s payment infrastructure. There, the …

Evedo, a platform consisting of business-to-business, or B2B, & business to consumer, or B2C, marketplaces, seeks to provide blockchain solutions for businesses and participants involved in organizing events. In an exclusive ask-me-anything, or AMA, session with Cointelegraph Markets Pro, Stoyan Angelov, Founder & CEO of Evedo & Fragmint, discussed the business dynamics and tokenomics of Evedo. Evedo tokenomics | Source: Evedo Technical Deck CT Markets Pro User: How does Evedo use blockchain technology for the events sector? Will the ecosystem be available for everyone or just artists and big events organizers? Stoyan Angelov: The EVED token is a utility token …

According to data compiled by CryptoRank and Santiment, Cardano (ADA) was the most developed crypto on Github in 2021, with over 140,000 events. Rounding out the top three were Kusama and Polkadot at second and third places, respectively, with roughly the same number of events over the year. Cardano beat Ethereum's development activity by a wide margin, with the latter coming in at fourth place. Santiment defines a Github event as either creating an issue, creating a pull request, commenting on an issue or pull request, and forking/starring/watching a code repository, among others. The Most Developed Cryptos on @Github in …

Samsung Electronics America announced Monday at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas its partnership with veritree, a blockchain-based climate solutions platform, to plant 2 million mangrove trees in Madagascar over the next three months. Veritree uses blockchain technology to manage the reforestation process and verify each tree that is planted. The tree-planting initiative is part of Samsung’s nature-based action plan on environmental sustainability, specifically to capture and sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. The goal is to restore roughly 200 hectares of land and sequester roughly 1 billion pounds of CO2 over a 25-year period. Veritree, developed by …

South Korean tech giant Samsung revealed a new smart TV lineup with an integrated NFT platform. Samsung’s 2022 smart TVs such as Micro LED, Neo QLED and The Frame will have an NFT Platform app that can be used “for discovering, purchasing and trading digital artwork,” according to the announcement on Monday. “With demand for NFTs on the rise, the need for a solution to today’s fragmented viewing and purchasing landscape has never been greater,” the company noted. In 2022, the company aims to introduce the first smart TV NFT explorer and marketplace aggregator. The upcoming platform would enable viewers …

Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, have become one of the most discussed markets in the crypto space this year. A recent report from Cointelegraph Research found that NFT sales are aiming for a $17.7 billion record by the end of 2021. This may very well be the case, as a number of mainstream brands have begun launching NFTs. According to recent research from Bain & Company and the online luxury fashion platform Farfetch, digital interactions with consumers are becoming increasingly important for brands. The report specifically states that “digital interaction with peers is on the rise when choosing to purchase a …

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) started out as a simple concept envisioned as organizations, created by an idea and fueled by developers, that automate business functions and processes by leveraging smart contracts and all the fundamental tenets of blockchain. The core idea was to flatten the complex business process that various organizations are mired in and facilitate movement of assets to a very future-oriented digital interaction that needed no intermediaries — promising faster, cheaper and more transparent transaction processing. By replacing many intermediaries, the DAOs themselves acted as digital intermediaries that provide transparency and scale, giving them the stature of an …

Ahmed Al-Balaghi of Biconomy Ahmed is a co-founder of Biconomy, a developer platform that empowers blockchain developers to enable a simplified transaction and onboarding experience for their Web 3.0 project. “The progress made by Ethereum was one of the most outstanding things to come out of 2021, and if all goes as planned, Eth2 will continue to help scale the ecosystem. The milestones reached by Ethereum also paved the way for other protocols to adopt market share, which has created even more innovation industry-wide. The rise of NFTs has also been a great outcome for the industry. It has brought …

André Neves of Zebedee: André is the chief technology officer of Zebedee, which enables programmable payments and small transactions to power economies for virtual worlds. “2021 has been the year of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, which even still might be the best-kept secret in crypto. El Salvador adopting Bitcoin as legal tender by leveraging LN was certainly the biggest news, but it has been an incredible year of innovation, launches, funding rounds and growth all around for the Lightning Network. NFTs have captured the spotlight this year, but I believe Lightning, connected to use cases like gaming, made the biggest …

Tim Draper of Draper Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Tim is a pioneer of business ventures in the United States and a co-founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a leading investment firm in early-stage tech startups. “I think anyone with a young brain already has a wallet. The rest will follow. The same thing happened with internet adoption.” These quotes have been edited and condensed. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors’ alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph. Sebastian Markowsky of Coinsource Sebastian is the chief strategy officer at Coinsource, …

What is a crypto honeypot and why is it used? Smart contracts programs across a decentralized network of nodes can be executed on modern blockchains like Ethereum. Smart contracts are becoming more popular and valuable, making them a more appealing target for attackers. Several smart contracts have been targeted by hackers in recent years. However, a new trend appears to be gaining traction; namely, attackers are no longer looking for susceptible contracts but are adopting a more proactive strategy. Instead, they aim to trick their victims into falling into traps by sending out contracts that appear to be vulnerable but …

Tristan Frizza of Zeta Markets: Tristan is the core contributor to Zeta Markets, an under-collateralized DeFi derivatives platform, providing liquid derivatives trading to individuals and institutions alike. “We’ve seen a Cambrian explosion in the DeFi ecosystem in 2021, with peak TVL approaching $300 billion vs the 2020 peak of $21 billion. This sounds like the growth surely has to slow. Yet, DeFi still represents just a fraction of CeFi trading volumes. At Zeta, we see a clear opportunity for more and more CeFi infrastructure to be built on-chain in a permissionless manner. This will unlock innovative products that have previously …