Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Polygon has announced the hiring of Bhumika Srivastava in a bid to consolidate its strategy and cultural ambitions for the company’s 500-employee global workforce. Serving as the head of human resources and director for employee experience at Airbnb for the past five years, Srivastava arrives with an illustrious portfolio and plethora of experience from her work in Web2, having occupied senior roles at Adobe, Yahoo, Tesco PLC and Snapdeal. Srivastava’s appointment marks a consistent trend in Polygon’s hiring strategy of prominent figures within the Web2 space, such as the former head of gaming at YouTube, Ryan …

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky tweeted a poll on Monday asking his roughly 400,000 followers what they wanted from the rental platform in 2022. Chesky has today revealed that the majority of respondents want to be able to pay with Bitcoin (BTC) or other popular digital currencies when renting their next house or apartment on Airbnb. Other requests included clear pricing displays, a loyalty program for visitors, up-to-date cleaning charges, and enhanced customer service. Got 4,000 suggestions. Here are the top 6: 1 - Crypto payments (top suggestion) 2 - Clear pricing displays 3 - Guest loyalty program 4 - Updated …

With digital currency comes innovation, efficiency, and perhaps most importantly, equality. However, before this happens, digital currencies must become simple enough for everyone to use and accessible so that anyone can do so. As it stands today, most crypto services are difficult to use and hard to understand. Moreover, functionality such as participating in spot transactions, futures trading or staking services are not readily available for those already active in traditional markets. Therefore, for mass adoption to become a real possibility, the entire process from purchasing coins to executing a more complex trade needs to be straightforward. The leading crypto …

Anybody who uses Airbnb knows that the company is resting on its laurels as the first mover in the home-sharing economy 1.0, but its dominance rests atop exploitation of the hosts and guests that are actually doing the sharing and creating the value. The guests pay too much and the hosts are paid too little. The resulting situation is akin to feudalism, rendering hosts as serfs who rent out their homes, keep things clean, deal with guests, and do the actual work. Yet the value derived from Airbnb’s peer-to-peer exchange goes directly to shareholders who are multiple steps removed from …

Pro-crypto travel booking agency Travala.com is releasing a decentralized property rental service. In a Wednesday announcement, Travala said it had partnered with former executives from Airbnb, Expedia, and other companies to launch Dtravel, a decentralized vacation rental platform that may serve as a competitor for sites like Airbnb and Vrbo. The platform is community governed through Dtravel’s Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO, and uses DeFi to facilitate smart contracts between hosts and guests. Dtravel claims to repair “the broken relationship between hosts and guests created by existing centralized home-sharing platforms.” The platform said that issues stemming from centralized control on …

American crypto exchange giant Coinbase went public on Wednesday with a direct listing on Nasdaq. The company’s performance on day one has been hailed as being positive overall, with Coinbase becoming the most valuable exchange in the United States ahead of legacy players such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Coinbase’s first day of trading was seen by market commentators as a watershed moment for the crypto space, but how does its performance compare with that of other major companies to go public in the last decade? Trading under the ticker “COIN,” Coinbase stock opened at $381, which as expected, was …

FTX, a crypto derivatives exchange, has added Airbnb to its list of stock offerings on the eve of the online rental marketplace’s highly anticipated initial public offering. As of late Tuesday, cryptocurrency traders can gain exposure to Airbnb through a pre-IPO derivatives contract directly on FTX. As a pre-IPO product, the performance of the contract is linked to the market capitalization of Airbnb at the end of its first trading day. FTX says these derivatives contracts "will automatically roll over to Fractional Stocks contracts" at the end of Airbnb's first public trading day. The exchange adds: "If Airbnb stock does …

Short-term accommodation booking platform Airbnb has filed a prospectus for a $1 billion initial public offering with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on Nov. 16. Hidden away in the 350-page document is a half page dedicated to the risks of not being able to adapt to changes in technology. The document reels off a list of buzzwords that savvy investors may want to be sure are under consideration: “Our future success will also depend on our ability to adapt to emerging technologies such as tokenization, cryptocurrencies, new authentication technologies, such as biometrics, distributed ledger and blockchain technologies, artificial …

The sharing economy’s potential is massive, but firms in this burgeoning space often struggle to survive unless they have a sizeable war chest like Airbnb and Uber. Now, a new blockchain-based protocol says it is aiming to tear down unsustainably high barriers to entry that are stopping startups from flourishing. The TimeCoinProtocol provides a platform so that fledgling projects can build a sharing economy service. The team behind this new concept also believes it can solve some of the biggest challenges in the gig economy. Through the platform, users can sell “time tickets” — effectively tokenizing their business hours. These …

Today’s most successful entrepreneurs tapped into their wealth through startup technology companies such as Amazon, Oracle, Facebook and Microsoft. Just ask Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, who continue to serve as the world’s tech leaders. Yet, the stage is still open for additional leaders to join this round table of sorts, and the invitation is floating throughout the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. With leaders such as Binance’s Changpeng Zhao and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, many cryptocurrency companies today are still hoping to capture the Silicon Valley promise: aiming to shift away from centralized businesses and transform existing …

Bitcoin payments app Fold now supports home-sharing giant Airbnb, the firm announced on Nov. 11. Now Fold users can get 3% back in Bitcoin (BTC) on every stay and experience booked on Airbnb. $25 and $100 Airbnb gift cards for Bitcoin Airbnb is now listed on its rewards program called Fold Kickbacks. The program supports Bitcoin’s second layer Lightning Network (LN) allowing to buy gift cards for Bitcoin with 3% cashback. Currently, Fold offers $25 or $100 gift cards on its website. Launched in July 2019, the Fold Kickbacks program already supports some big-name retailers including Amazon, Starbucks and Uber. …

Cryptocurrency trading platform SFOX has announced the closure of a $22.7 million Series A funding round with participation from Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, according to an August 16 press release. Co-founder and partner at Tribe Capital and Social Capital, Arjun Sethi, led the Series A funding round for the U.S.-based cryptocurrency dealer SFOX, with participation from Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Blockchain Capital, and Blecharczyk. The press release notes that the cryptocurrency dealer aims its services at “large-scale investors such as funds, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals,” and has more than $9 billion in transaction volumes to the …