Without a doubt, the internet has transformed how the world could receive information, from reading news on Twitter, instead of picking up the daily paper to communicating with friends from around the world through instant messaging. As significant as the contributions of the internet have been, these developments have resulted in an entirely new concern, which one can define in three words — monopolization of power. Although the internet has low barriers to entry for anyone to begin participating in, fewer than a dozen megacorporations have dominated the digital space. Since social media platforms have so much authority, users willingly …

Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter. Following a bearish decline for many of the leading decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens, it is within the fundamental news where the optimism for growth and prosperity lies. Read on to hear about the most impactful DeFi stories of the last seven days. What you’re reading is the shorter, snappier version of the newsletter. For the full roundup of DeFi developments across the week delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe below. Secret Network offers $400M community fund scheme Secret Network, a privacy-oriented layer-one blockchain, announced the launch of a $400 million …

The competition among the computing networks is warming up, with decentralized players coming into the stage with backing from the crypto ecosystem. Decentralized storage and computing network Aleph.im completed a $10 million funding round led by Stratos Technologies. Zeeprime, NOIA Capital, Theia, Bitfwd Capital have contributed to the funding, among others. The cross-blockchain network aims to provide fully decentralized computing power and censorship-resistant data storage, according to the announcement. Aleph.im scheduled its first computing resource node rollout for January following the funding round. The nodes would eventually become the decentralized network’s main processing power source. Aleph.im rewards its core channel …

In a speech entitled “Digital currencies and the soul of money,” Agustín Carstens, the general manager of the Bank of International Settlements,’ criticized private stablecoins and decentralized finance (DeFi), touting central bank-led financial innovation as the best possible path to the future of money. Carstens, who served as governor of the Bank of Mexico between 2010 and 2017, delivered his remarks at the conference on "Data, Digitalization, the New Finance and Central Bank Digital Currencies: The Future of Banking and Money" at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. The economist’s argument revolved around the institutional foundations of money and how, even …

Nonfungible tokens have proven to be successful across a number of industries. From gaming to high-end luxury fashion, NFT use cases have demonstrated the importance of creating lasting connections between a company or a brand and its users/customers. As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the billion-dollar event-ticketing industry is on its way to being disrupted by nonfungible tokens. Specifically, the online event-ticketing sector — which is expected to reach $60 billion by 2026 — will likely see an increase in NFT ticket platforms and marketplaces that issue virtual tickets across a blockchain network. Colby Mort, head of …

The Hedera Governing Council has officially voted to purchase the intellectual property rights to the hashgraph consensus algorithm from founding architect and inaugural member of the council, Swirlds Inc, for an undisclosed fee. A Jan. 19 announcement also details plans to transition their code to an open-source model this year under Apache 2.0 license, in addition to transferring core team members such as CEO Mance Harmon and chief scientist Dr. Leemon Baird from Hedera to Swirlds Inc. as the CEO and CTO respectively, and deploying community staking and node opportunities, among other updates. Hedera Hashgraph is an enterprise-grade distributed ledger …

Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter. Despite the market printing bearish numbers for a second consecutive week, the industry is not short of bullish fundamental news. Read on to hear about the most impactful DeFi stories of the last seven days. What you’re about to read is a shorter, more succinct version of the newsletter. For a comprehensive summary of DeFi’s developments over the last week, subscribe below. Vitalik is optimistic for multichain, not cross-chain, Web3 world Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, shared a candid assessment of the security limitations in implementing fully functional cross-chain …

Russian punk rock collective Pussy Riot is planning to launch a DAO for LBTQ+ and women artists. As the group’s co-founder Nadya Tolokonnikova told Cointelegraph, The DAO will be working on reducing the gender inequality that still marks the NFT space and, more broadly, the crypto industry. Despite the large gender gap in crypto — around 60% of US crypto investors are white men according to a survey from August 2021 — Nadya is convinced that it is still early enough for Pussy Riot to make an impact. “The NFT space is still so small, I feel that with a …

dYdX, the layer-two derivates protocol, has published the fourth iteration of its roadmap detailing their intentions to evolve into an open-source, community-governed and fully decentralized exchange by the end of this calendar year. The platform currently runs on a hybrid model whereby a portion of operations are decentralized, most notably staking and governance, while other components such as the off-chain orderbook and matching engine are managed by dYdX Trading Inc, alongside external support from a number of partnered centralized servers such as Amazon Web Services. "There will no longer be central points of control or failure of the protocol", they …

On Wednesday, Komodo, a multichain architecture network, announced the introduction of 12 protocols on its non-custodial multi-coin software wallet and atomic swap-powered decentralized exchange AtomicDEX. The 12 protocols consist of Avalanche, Polygon, Harmony, Fantom, smartBCH, Ethereum Classic, Moonriver, KuCoin Community Chain, Huobi ECO Chain, Ubiq, Arbitrum and Optimism, with the latter two being wallet-only. After the upgrade, users will be able to swap Avalanche tokens to Polygon, Ethereum to Binance Smart Chain (BSC), etc., and vice versa. Unlike cross-chain functionality, multi-chain enables users to access their crypto without the use of wrapped or proxy tokens, with potentially better security results. …

Decentralized finance, better known as DeFi, may not be “decentralized” enough as attackers exploited centralized weak points to drain users of billions of dollars in 2021, according to research from blockchain security firm CertiK. In a new report on the state of DeFi security in 2021, CertiK researchers said “centralization issues were the most common attack vector” within decentralized finance. The blockchain security firm cited 44 DeFi hacks totaling $1.3 billion in lost funds in 2021. That’s an increase of over $500 million compared with 2021. “This underscores the importance of decentralization and highlights the fact that many projects still …

The sad reality is that most decentralized finance (DeFi) wallets and protocols are complicated to use, especially for beginners. Although rich in functionality, these products are often designed by technologists and not for the everyday user who needs more guidance to get started. With consumers used to the simple interface on apps like Tinder, the “swipe left, swipe right mentality” has since transcended into all other consumer-facing products, finance included. The result is that while cryptocurrency assets and DeFi grow, so has the breadth of their functionality, and therefore, their complexity, as features become split across multiple chains and applications. …