Will emojis become the Web3 version of a username? That’s what Nashville-based tech startup Yat believes and with 160,000 sold worth a combined $20 million, it seems plenty of ordinary people agree. A Yat is a string of between one and five emojis that can be used as your digital username, website URL and as a payment address for your digital wallet. It’s sort of a cross between a nonfungible token (NFT) and domain address — though not all Yats are tokenized. “Yat lets you use emojis as your universal username and identity on the internet,” the company wrote in …

At the core of cryptocurrencies is decentralization, eliminating intermediaries and empowering users to manage their own money. With decentralization being the very goal of digital assets, it is no wonder that regulation seems to have no place in this sector. While this opinion is popular among cryptocurrency users, history has proven this viewpoint to be shortsighted. Purchasing from a lesser understood asset class that exists in the “Wild West” does little for investor confidence. Subsequently, as cryptocurrency assets continue to grow in value, the media has been quick to point out the number of scams, insider trading and market manipulation, …

Blockchain holds significant promise for avid cryptocurrency investors and the world at large. Unfortunately, the keyword in this phrase is “promising.” Upon an initial industry inspection, high computing costs are among the apparent barriers before the technology is ready for prominent, real-world applications. Addressing this concern then comes down to lowering the cost of processing power to be affordable for the average user. If this wasn’t already challenging in itself, problems in processing costs only become more prevalent with the rising interest in nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and the surrounding metaverse. Experts from Intel suggest a 1,000x increase in power will …

A Phoenix couple tied the knot with their digital identities this weekend in the first marriage to take place in the Metaverse. The wedding ceremony took place in Decentraland, complete with witnesses, Supreme Court Justice officiant Clint Bolick, and a virtual crowd of 2,000 guests on Feb. 5. The bride and groom, Ryan and Candice Hurley hired Rose Law Group to legally formalize the marriage. The group’s Founder and President Jordan Rose claims it was the first-ever wedding hosted on any blockchain-based Metaverse. That much anticipated wedding @decentraland @decentraspots @DCL_Events @peopleofdcl @Decentralovers @DCLDating @WearablesDCL @roselawgroup Congrats Ryan and Candice!!! pic.twitter.com/RA7oG9Qmcq …

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) offer a new way of organizing businesses in a non-hierarchical structure that encourages participation from every member of a community. With no central leadership and decisions made collectively, DAOs could revolutionize the way we think about work, but their implementation is not without challenges. The term DAO is sometimes used to refer to a system of software processes that coordinates and operates itself in a fully automated way, relying on humans only indirectly via outsourcing specific pieces of work to them as needed. The classic example would be a blockchain-based network that sells file storage space …

While the organizational structure of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is fundamentally meant to be “decentralized,” some of the biggest DAO protocols including Uniswap are not. A lot of the day-to-day activities within DAOs still involve a few core members of the organizations to make major decisions. This raises the question as to whether DAOs are completely decentralized. And, if not, is complete decentralization even possible? More broadly, DAOs can be compared to how democratic nations are run. While the ideology is to have decisions for the country made by the people, it’s mainly governed by a few powerful individuals …

Li Jiang, COO at Harmony, believes that a bridge connecting all existing blockchains is key to onboard the first 1 billion users on Web 3. “We think that the future is multichain and cross-chain, that you should be able to move assets very easily from one chain to another, with good prices, with good rates and very fast.”, he told Cointelegraph in an exclusive interview. Harmony is a Layer-1 blockchain protocol that aims at creating bridges with all major blockchains and becoming a “unifying Web 3 platform” by 2026. Jiang acknowledges that blockchain technology is not mature enough to onboard …

Solana (SOL) became one of the worst performers among the top cryptocurrencies on Feb. 3 as traders assessed its links with the second-biggest hack to date. $325M worth of wETH gone SOL price dropped by 5.50% to below $96.50 as Wormhole, a bridge between Solana and Ethereum blockchains, reportedly lost $325 million worth of Wrapped Ethereum (wETH) due to a technical vulnerability. Prior to the hack on Wednesday, SOL was trading as high as $112. Solana security hole needs fixing asap? Seems their consensus proceeds with only 33% of the nodes Hard math proofs show you need 66%+ for safety. …

“Web3” may be one of the biggest buzzwords of 2022, but the idea of creating an entirely decentralized platform to host decentralized applications has long been a vision of the crypto community. While it’s notable that some blockchain companies began building out Web3 applications four or five years ago, the Web3 space has only started gaining traction recently. The recent growth of Web3 was highlighted in a new report from Electric Capital, a venture capital firm that has been investing in Web3 companies since 2018. The “Electric Capital 2021 Developer Report” analyzed data from nearly 500,000 code repositories and 160 …

Ethereum (ETH) started the nonfungible token (NFT) craze, but it turns out minting and trading NFTs while adopting the concept for larger projects or integrating it into metaverse and other ecosystems might not be feasible given the high gas fees, especially when there are several viable alternatives. OVR, a decentralized augmented reality (AR) project that relies on NFTs, has recently decided to move from Ethereum to Polygon (MATIC) – a layer-2 chain that ensures greater scalability and flexibility. Decentralized AR experience OVR started as an Ethereum-based open-source AR platform that lets users with a mobile device or smart glasses interact …

Shortly after Meta, formerly Facebook, officially gave up on its stablecoin Diem, some of the key people in the project have become increasingly vocal about the uncensorable nature of Bitcoin (BTC). David Marcus, a co-founder of Diem, originally known as Libra, took to Twitter on Tuesday to predict that Bitcoin will be the number one asset in the next two decades. It’s become clear to me that #Bitcoin will be the one asset and L1 still around in 20+ years with increased compounding relevance over time. The #2 slot (for a different use case) is still tbd. #Ethereum is in …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) and the control it gives users over their assets is one of the most applicable sectors of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, but the general public is still hesitant to interact with most DeFi products due to the steep learning curve and the possibility of losing funds. One decentralized exchange (DEX) that is taking strides toward bridging the gap between DeFi and centralized finance (CeFi) is QuickSwap (QUICK), the top ranked DEX on the Polygon network. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the price of QUICK saw a rapid 50% spike in value from $166.40 on …