A publicly listed company in Japan that is a shareholder of one of the country’s first cryptocurrency exchanges says it is exploring new use cases for its digital asset. FISCO is planning to roll out lending for the FISCO Coin (FSCC) — with multiple businesses set to be involved. The company is also going to launch a platform that’s home to a range of DApps, all of which will be positioned as tools to make FSCC more valuable. These DApps are being established as part of a joint venture that also includes the IT development company Kuskim, as well as …

The popularity of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, shows little sign of slowing down, despite the extraordinary marketwide crash that wiped more than $1 trillion off the crypto market cap. According to a report by decentralized app marketplace DappRadar, the average number of NFT sales rose almost 300%, from 21,815 per day in January, to 82,373 in May (so far). This number rose even higher as crypto prices started to plummet on May 12, with sales surging to almost 94,000 NFT transactions a day. The crypto market crash, which created a widespread panic as almost 1 million leverage trades got liquidated, …

Reach, a blockchain development platform for decentralized applications, has raised $12 million from investors to further its goals of simplifying the DApp creation process, the company announced on Wednesday. The latest funding round takes the total sum raised by Reach to $48 million as the firm aims to produce a JavaScript-like programming language for use in building blockchain applications. At present, most major blockchains launch with their own unique programming languages, meaning the applications built on each platform are rarely compatible with any other. Reach launched in 2019 and has thus far achieved compatibility with the Ethereum and Algorand blockchains, …

Polygon, a leading platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development, has attracted 75,000 new users over the past seven days, highlighting growing demand for layer-two decentralized applications. The data, courtesy of DappRadar, shows that the top 20 Polygon decentralized applications, or DApps, were responsible for the increase. In this case, new users refer to active wallets interacting with Polygon DApps. The influx of new users brought in nearly $1 billion in volume. In the last four weeks, the number of Polygon DApps tracked by DappRadar has grown to 93 from 61. Forty-six of these DApps are in the decentralized finance, …

The decentralized finance, or DeFi, space exploded over the last year, with a total value locked in DeFi of around $90 billion, according to DeBank. The DeFi ecosystem includes projects like Maker, Aave, Compound, Uniswap and more, with new ones rapidly emerging. DeFi is a broad concept to describe an emerging area of finance built using decentralized technological tools and characterized by being open, permissionless, disintermediated and with no single point of failure. The spectrum of DeFi is broad, and the exact degree and mixture of various technological and governance features determine how decentralized a particular DeFi project is, or …

Traders valued Internet Computer (ICP) at $630 in its debut on Coinbase on Monday. On Binance, however, the dollar bids for the token surged to as high as $3,093 as of Tuesday. Meanwhile, HitBTC reported ICP at a peak of roughly $407. The huge price differences across multiple cryptocurrency exchanges showed a berserk trading sentiment in the Internet Computer market, landing ICP in the list of top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, surpassing even veterans such as XRP, Dogecoin (DOGE) and Cardano (ADA), and reaching as high as the fourth spot. Major price corrections followed on profit-taking sentiment. Entering the …

After rallying 1.510% in 2021, QTUM price hit a $35.70 all-time high on May 7. This relatively obscure altcoin launched in September 2017 is a fork of the Bitcoin Core 0.13 version, but it also integrates the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) and smart contract execution capability. Following Bitcoin's (BTC) April 23 crash down to $47,500, QTUM faced a 52% correction in 4 days before bottoming at $10. However, the situation for the altcoin improved on May 5 as QTUM initiated a 160% rally in two days, reaching the $35.70 peak. Qtum combines Bitcoin's transaction model with Ethereum smart contracts The …

An oracle system has launched on Binance Smart Chain — enabling developers to create DApps and decentralized autonomous organizations that are fueled by real-world data. Bridge Oracle, which first made its debut on Tron, says the expansion of its easy-to-use infrastructure is a significant milestone. Now, a diverse range of data sources can be integrated into smart contracts — boosting their utility immeasurably. Data can be fetched using HTTP and HTTPS requests, or through the computational knowledge of WolframAlpha. Oracles can be used to generate random numbers, and this infrastructure also paves the way for enterprises to integrate blockchain technology …

Polkadot’s parachain auctions will mark the most significant milestone on its roadmap since the mainnet launch in 2020. Currently in the testnet on the Rococo network, the next stage of the launch will involve the rollout of parachains on Polkadot’s crazy cousin, the “canary network” Kusama. The rollout of Polkadot parachains on the main network will follow. What does this mean? The Polkadot mainnet has officially been in live operation for nearly a year now. However, only the central Relay chain has been up and running, with the last 12 months of development focused on implementing the platform’s decentralized governance. …

Another rainy Sunday night. You’re browsing on Facebook and Twitter — inundated with photos of your friend’s new baby, jokes that have been copied from poor hard-working comedians, and memes that certainly were funny… when you first saw them four years ago. Undeterred, you keep scrolling. There’s a tweet that proclaims a hot new cryptocurrency is going to surge to $1 million, and another claiming the self-same altcoin is destined to plunge to zero. You then see links about the latest developments in the DeFi and NFTs space, and your eyes light up. Finally — content you’re interested in! Existing …

A startup in a blockchain ecosystem says it eliminates the conflicts of interest that are often seen on fiat platforms. Value Network enables users to create binary options markets based on their very own parameters, including asset pair, price level and time of expiration. This peer-to-peer approach means they don’t have to bet against centralized brokers, some of whom have been linked to scams and fraud in a largely unregulated space. Binary options expire at a set date in the future — with a yes or no outcome. A successful bet means users win the funds of those who had …

A smart contract platform aimed at the decentralized finance market seeks to make it easy to transfer decentralized applications from clogged, expensive Ethereum to Polkadot. The open-source project’s goal is to create easy-to-use blockchain infrastructure that will improve the interoperability of cross-chain assets, attracting developers of DeFi projects. Clover Finance wants to build a one-stop infrastructure platform that will make it simpler and less expensive for developers of DeFi projects to migrate their DApps onto Polkadot, a potential Ethereum killer that achieves scalability by running many blockchains in parallel, each with its own design and each serving a specific purpose …