Some people think that permissioned distributed ledger technology can perform better than open blockchain because it is tweaked to address the issues of the latter. Such systems are also called “permissioned blockchain,” as if blockchain is a high-level concept and “permissioned” is one of its variants. But this statement is controversial and down below, you will come to understand why. Is “permissioned” decentralized? There are a lot of other options to choose from in DLTs: permissioned, private, enterprise, federated DLT, etc. And frankly, sometimes, it is not easy to distinguish between them. Therefore, for this level of discussion, let us …

Last week, China’s heavy-handed crackdown on crypto trading briefly sent shockwaves across the market as Bitcoin (BTC) and altcoin prices saw a sharp drop following the announcement, but as is the case with all things crypto-related, the market bounced back as resilient traders found other ways to participate in the market. Part of China’s goal in limiting citizens' ability to trade cryptocurrency seems focused on discouraging the use of cryptocurrencies and the growing decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, but these maneuvers appear to be having the opposite effect, as the token price and protocol activity for projects like Uniswap and dYdX …

High transaction costs have been a thorn in the side of investors and developers for more than a decade and the issue became worse in 2021 after the emergence of decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFT) led to record-high levels of activity across the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Since the completion of Ethereum's London hard fork, cross-chain bridges and layer-2 solutions have been revised as options for mitigating the high fees on the Ethereum network. In the past two weeks, Celer, a layer-two scaling solution that utilizes off-chain transaction handling to help increase the throughput capacity of its network, has seen …

Decentralized exchange dYdX's native token DYDX surged by nearly 80% this week as traders assessed its potential against China's recent ban on crypto transactions. The DYDX price hit a new high of $26.50 on the FTX exchange after trading at around $13 a week ago. The China ban was an apparent boost for the dYdX decentralized exchange (DEX) that offers perpetuals, margin and spot trading, as well as lending and borrowing services to its users. Holding DYDX gives owners the right to propose and vote on changes to dYdX's layer 2 protocol. DYDX stakers receive rewards by depositing to the …

Social token infrastructure provider Roll raised $10 million in Series A funding, bringing the company’s total funds raised to $12.7 million to help creators tokenize their interactions with communities. Led by IOSG Ventures, the funding round saw participation from Animoca Brands, Alchemy, Huobi Ventures, Weekend Fund, Mischief Fund, Audacity and existing investors like Galaxy Interactive, Hustle Fund, Gary Vaynerchuk, Trevor McFederies, Ryan Selkis and Balaji Srinivasan. Social tokens are blockchain-based digital currencies that have the potential to be used as the basis of a decentralized creator economy. “Through Roll, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and communities can tokenize, trade and gate-keep …

Facebook has announced it will allocate $50 million to a two-year fund tasked with beginning work on realizing the firm’s vision for a virtual metaverse. A Monday announcement articulates Facebook’s roadmap for building its metaverse, with the funding slated to back “global research and program partners” looking to build out the platform in addition to internal research. “The metaverse won’t be built overnight by a single company. We’ll collaborate with policymakers, experts and industry partners to bring this to life,” emphasized the announcement. The metaverse will allow people to interact with one another, digital objects and the physical world through …

The relationship between crypto and mainstream media (MSM) is complex, and it’s probably fair to say that some in the crypto community haven’t been overjoyed with the treatment they’ve received over the years. MSM has largely ignored Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies outside of occasional reports of hacks, ransomware attacks and other illicit activities. “They’ve done a fairly poor job of coverage for the last decade and it’s almost always negative coverage,” Samson Mow, chief strategy officer at Blockstream and CEO at Pixelmatic, told Cointelegraph. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a positive piece of news about Bitcoin.” But recently, the …

Uniswap (UNI) prices staged a solid rebound after crashing last week in the wake of China’s decision to intensify its anti-Bitcoin (BTC) and cryptocurrency rhetoric. UNI price gained 14.90% on Monday to reach an intraday high of $26.26. UNI/USD’s climb came a day after it dropped to a monthly low of $17.63. As a result, it churned out more than 48% profits for the dip buyers within the last 24 hours. Adoption FOMO UNI serves as a governance token inside Uniswap’s decentralized exchange (DEX) ecosystem. As a result, its holders get to vote on matters that help steer the future …

A new stablecoin is arriving on the Cardano blockchain to provide a tool for decentralized finance (DeFi) operations and avoid transaction fees. Cardano’s payment gateway provider, Coti, will be the official issuer of Djed, a new DeFi-focused stablecoin for the Cardano network, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson and Coti CEO Shahaf Bar-Geffen announced Sunday at the Cardano Summit. The new stablecoin will be based on an algorithmic design using smart contracts to ensure price stability and providing an instrument for DeFi transactions. The stablecoin is designed for paying transaction fees on the Cardano network in order to avoid “volatile and exorbitant …

Decentralized technologies are starting to revolutionize the world of finance, with cryptocurrencies applied in different ways to recreate traditional financial instruments. However, since cryptocurrencies aren’t backed by anything but people’s faith in them, they are extremely volatile. That means, when it comes to loaning value with crypto, neither party can be sure that they will get a fair deal. There needs to be a way to secure the value of the assets loaned, which can be done by backing them up with a value in the real world. Here is where the tokenization of real assets comes in. This process …

The growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has been a recurrent headline throughout 2021 and to date, hundreds of billions of dollars in crypto assets are locked on protocols across numerous blockchain networks and earning a yield for their holders. What started off as a simple Ethereum-based swap interface that allowed ERC-20 tokens to be exchanged in a decentralized manner, called Uniswap, has exploded into a vast ecosystem full of decentralized exchanges, yield farms, lending protocols and staking platforms. As development continues and older protocols become more established, newer projects have emerged to incorporate more pieces from the traditional …

Avalanche (AVAX) prices recovered on Sept. 22, paring a portion of losses that hit cryptocurrencies at the beginning of this week, led by worries about potential contagion in China’s housing market. The AVAX/USD exchange rate surged by as much as 12.05% to log an intraday high at $66.08. The pair’s gains came as a part of an interim rebound that started Tuesday after it bottomed out at a local low of $50.68. As a result, AVAX’s net rebound stretched by up to 30.37%. Cointelegraph’s VORTECS™ Score also flipped bullish ahead of the Avalanche token rally. The VORTECS™ Score is an …