Billions of dollars have flowed into decentralized exchange protocols based on the automated market maker (AMM) model, which bootstraps network effects by incentivizing liquidity with project tokens, thereby creating a self-contained ecosystem of traders and yield earners. This mechanism has allowed decentralized exchanges (DEXs) to compete for the first time with centralized counterparts, such as Coinbase, which can afford to use cash from their balance sheet to pay for user acquisition (e.g., through sign-up and referral bonuses). As a result, AMMs have been hailed as the cornerstone of decentralized finance (DeFi), spawning multiple permutations and sparking the yield-farming trend that …

Frank McCourt, a billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is backing a new effort for a decentralized social media project based on blockchain technology. McCourt is investing $100 million into an attempt to reinvent the foundations of social media by building a publicly accessible database of people’s social connections on a blockchain, Bloomberg reported Sunday. “Project Liberty” aims to allow users to move records of their interactions between social media services instead of being locked into a few dominant applications. The project would use blockchain technology to construct a new internet infrastructure called the …

It is a given that connected devices need reliable, distributed ledger, technology-based digital identity solutions. That is an essential requirement for the Internet of Things (IoT). In the machine economy, devices must be able to recognize and communicate with one another; robust identity management solutions are key to effectively securing data and processes. But what about the multitude of analog “things” all around us? Surely they can also benefit from the advent of digital identity. Imagine the following: You are just back from a grocery run or a walk in the park with your pooch when you suddenly realize the …

Imagine a fantasy MMO role playing game in which every character is an NFT that can be equipped with other NFTs. A nonfungible token can be a suit of armor or a magic sword that can be put on the character to use in the game, stored in a backpack (itself an NFT), or sold at an auction house. The backpack holds other NFTs the player collects while in the game: Magic potions that give more strength or speed, food to keep the character moving at full speed, rope that can be used to climb a building. Even a curse …

A decentralized platform on a quest to merge the physical and virtual world through augmented reality has unveiled a live, ongoing integration with Chainlink. OVR’s collaboration with the decentralized oracle network is already being put through its paces. Chainlink’s infrastructure is being used to fairly and transparently select a grant fund winner from a list of competitors taking part in the OVRLand Treasure Hunt. Looking ahead, OVR intends to ensure that Chainlink’s oracles are used throughout its platform as it builds a virtual experience that is influenced by the real world. Through this platform, augmented reality and virtual reality can …

The Graph Foundation, the grants program behind the Ethereum (ETH) indexing protocol, has tapped StreamingFast to further the development of its so-called decentralized internet, potentially setting the stage for more real-world use cases of Web 3.0. StreamingFast will provide The Graph with its infrastructure platform, core IP and API products, as well as access to core developers and other human resources, the companies announced Thursday. In addition to receiving the $60 million grant, StreamingFast will become part of The Graph’s ecosystem and a core component of its long-term infrastructure plans. Although The Graph has purchased a portion of StreamingFast’s IP, …

A crypto project says it is changing the game of decentralized portfolio management — and delivers an all-in-one platform that brings everything users need under one roof. DEXKIT has been built to provide a genuinely user-friendly way of managing and trading digital assets. The application features a DEX aggregator, professional exchange, NFT marketplace, and dashboard where users can monitor asset performance. The DSwap aggregator continually monitors more than 30 decentralized exchanges on the Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum networks, delivering up-to-the-minute crypto data. Swaps can be filled by multiple protocols at once which can result in more tokens for trades. …

Pro-crypto travel booking agency Travala.com is releasing a decentralized property rental service. In a Wednesday announcement, Travala said it had partnered with former executives from Airbnb, Expedia, and other companies to launch Dtravel, a decentralized vacation rental platform that may serve as a competitor for sites like Airbnb and Vrbo. The platform is community governed through Dtravel’s Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO, and uses DeFi to facilitate smart contracts between hosts and guests. Dtravel claims to repair “the broken relationship between hosts and guests created by existing centralized home-sharing platforms.” The platform said that issues stemming from centralized control on …

NFT art may be the current Next Big Thing in the cryptocurrency world, but as art, it’s actually somewhat limited to one broad genre: Digital art. This leaves out a fairly large chunk of the art world — paintings, drawings, sculpture, fabrics, pottery — the physical arts that live in three dimensions. That’s where AvatarArt by ByteNext comes in. The Singapore-based NFT artwork company is turning the biggest of those physical arts — painting — into 3D reproductions that are backed by the actual artwork. For each NFT, there isn’t just the blockchain-verified original image. There’s an actual painting in …

Developers in the DeFi space are currently confronted with a terrible choice: Build something quickly and risk losing people’s money, or write bug-free Solidity code that takes time — meaning they miss market opportunities. With Solidity developers now spending up to 90% of their time securing code and only 10% being creative, a blockchain project says the DeFi world deserves better, and is promising to deliver a way to create DApps quickly and securely. The Radix Engine uses a new programming language called Scrypto — and the team behind this initiative say their smart contracts run on the same logic …

Pandora Finance, a decentralized platform for NFT-backed real-world assets, recently completed a multi-million dollar seed round backed by some of the biggest venture capital firms in the blockchain space. In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, CEO Pushkar Vohra outlined his company’s vision — namely, how Pandora Finance aims to create a bridge between the illiquid world of real-world assets and the blockchain. Vohra believes the gap between these two domains represents one of the biggest adoption challenges for decentralized technologies. “We are uniquely positioned to solve the biggest problem,” he said, adding: “There are around $300 trillion of real-world assets …

A DeFi platform says it offers the first artificial intelligence-powered yield farming aggregator that works across Binance Smart Chain and Solana. KingDeFi has adopted a medieval theme as it interacts with users, who are referred to as “knights.” The ecosystem wants to take the guesswork out of finding new and exciting opportunities in the decentralized finance space. Knights can provide liquidity and stake directly through the platform — and an intuitive monitoring function unlocks an at-a-glance insight into all of the major protocols operating on BSC and Solana. With one click, users can receive automatic suggestions on where the best …