As the Fair Data Society puts it, we are laborers in the data economy. Our personal data — basically, the digital blueprint of our lives — gets collected by platforms we interact with, most often in a non-transparent way. At best, it is used to improve our user experience. At worst, our privacy gets breached, monetized and even weaponized against us. It all started with the emergence and growth of the user-generated web, as seemingly free social media networks, search engines and companies saw a new opportunity of profiting and went into the business of gathering, storing, analyzing and selling …

The burning rate of Ethereum has spiked to new all-time high (ATH) levels following the heavily anticipated sale of tokenized land plots in Yuga Labs’ upcoming Metaverse project the “Otherside.” Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), sold 55,000 virtual land nonfungible tokens (NFTs) dubbed “Otherdeeds” on Sunday. The overwhelming demand for the tokens saw Ethereum gas fees shoot up so high that a handful of users paid as high as 2.6 Ether (ETH), or $7,400 at the time of writing, to 5 ETH, or $14,270, just to get their transactions through. A base fee of …

Global crypto exchange Bitstamp released its Crypto Pulse survey on Tuesday, concluding that both institutional and retail investors believe crypto will overtake traditional investment vehicles within a decade. Specifically, 80% of the institutional respondents and 54% of the retail investors answered the question in the affirmative. The survey also polled opinions on whether crypto will see mainstream adoption within the next 10 years. With slightly higher results, 88% of institutional respondents and 75% of retail investors responded affirmatively. This overall bullish attitude came from 28,563 respondents, including 5,450 senior institutional investment strategy decision makers and 23,113 retail investors, from 23 …

Metaverse skeptics fear the prospect of unprotected data and large-scale user surveillance on a scale never seen before. Ironically, the largest company pushing the Metaverse, Meta (previously known as Facebook), has faced its own fair share of privacy scandals in the internet’s current iteration, culminating in Mark Zuckerberg being infamously hauled before the United States Congress to answer for Facebook's inability to combat hate speech and data privacy violations. In a U.S. Senate committee hearing, whistleblower Frances Haugen accused Meta of prioritizing “profit over the well-being of children and all users” when it came to creating manipulative algorithms that tap …

The Terra blockchain’s algorithmic stablecoin Terra USD (UST) has flipped Binance USD (BUSD) to become the third-largest stablecoin on the market. UST is a United States dollar-pegged stablecoin that was launched in September 2020. Its minting mechanism requires a user to burn a reserve asset such as Terra (LUNA) to mint an equivalent amount of UST. According to CoinGecko, UST’s total market capitalization has surged 15% over the past 30 days to sit at roughly $17.5 billion at the time of writing. The figure currently places UST as the third-largest stablecoin after it flipped BUSD with a slightly lower market …

United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase sent waves across the cryptocurrency ecosystem on Apr. 11 when it released a list of 50 crypto assets that were under consideration for listing in the second quarter of 2022 in a bid to increase the transparency of its listing process. Responses to the release were mixed and led to some allegations of insider trading by crypto sleuths, while a majority of crypto traders took a deeper dive into the list in an attempt to discover diamonds in the rough. Following a week’s worth of trading that saw many of the tokens on the list …

CoinShares data revealed on Tuesday, March 29, that institutional investments into cryptocurrencies are at the highest levels in three months, a sharp rise from the previous week which saw outflows of $47 million. The Digital Asset Fund Flows Report revealed that investment products for digital assets saw total inflows of $193 million last week, a level not seen since early December 2021. The last time investment levels were near the current figure was in the week ending on December 3rd, which saw $184 million worth of inflows. The fund flows had a big focus on Bitcoin (BTC), with just over …

Data security and accessibility have become important issues of the modern age as the world slowly progresses towards a Web3 future that establishes blockchain technology as the underlying infrastructure for the new internet. One project that is looking to capitalize on this growing trend by establishing tools for the new Web3 data economy is Ocean Protocol (OCEAN), a blockchain ecosystem that helps individuals and businesses unlock the value of their data and monetize it through the use of datatokens. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that, over the past two weeks, the price of OCEAN has rallied 86.4% …

Digital asset analytics provider The TIE has closed a strategic investment round backed by some of blockchain’s most prominent investors, underscoring heightened demand for crypto data and software services. The TIE raised $9 million in Series A funding at a valuation of $100 million, making it one of the largest crypto analytics services in the market. The funding round was led by Blizzard, an Avalanche-focused investment fund, with additional participation from executives at Golden Tree Asset Management, Nexo, Gemini, Frontier Fund, Republic Capital, Hudson River Trading and New York Digital Investment Group, better known as NYDIG. The TIE said the …

New Jersey-based crypto financial institution BlockFi confirmed a data breach incident via one of its third-party vendors, Hubspot. BlockFi’s proactive warning about the breach aims to deter the intentions of bad actors in repurposing the user data for fraudulent activities. According to the announcement, the hackers gained access to BlockFi’s client data on Friday, Mar. 18, that were stored on Hubspot, a client relationship management platform: “Hubspot has confirmed that an unauthorized third-party gained access to certain BlockFi client data housed on their platform.” As a third-party vendor for BlockFi, Hubspot stored user data such as names, email addresses and …

As the growing digital economy undergoes a transition from Web2 to Web3, oracle and data providers are becoming an increasingly important sector of development to ensure the reliable sharing and transfer of information. The Graph (GRT) is one protocol that is spearheading the integration of blockchain technology with data management and retrieval through the creation of open APIs known as subgraphs. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since hitting a low of $0.3155 on March 13, GRT has climbed 38.6% to a daily high of $0.44 on March 15 where it is now attempting to flip this …

Blockchain-data analysis firm Chainalysis has announced the fast-tracked launch of two primary ‘sanctions screening’ tools that it will provide free of charge to the cryptocurrency industry. According to the report provided by Chainalysis on March 10, the screening tools include two main components of new tracking software that will assist exchanges in screening wallets and transactions for activity that appears to be skirting economic sanctions. The first tool, which is immediately available, is an on-chain oracle. An on-chain oracle is a smart contract aimed more specifically at DeFi (decentralized finance) projects. It validates whether or not a cryptocurrency wallet address …