When European Central Bank board member Fabio Panetta addressed the European Union Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs in April, he emphasized the importance of privacy in any potential future CBDC rollout. The ECB had conducted a public consultation on the possibility of a digital euro, canvassing the opinions of over 8,000 individuals and businesses. The responses that came back suggested privacy was the number one concern surrounding the issuance of a central bank digital currency. With 43% of respondents highlighting privacy as the core requirement, Panetta declared that the digital euro could meet those requirements without relaxing security standards. …

A crypto-focused company with an array of products and services has revealed the next priority on its ambitious roadmap — a cutting-edge staking system that is set to transform the relationship between high-profile content creators and their fans. TimeTicket Inc. provides a skill sharing economy platform called TimeTicket, which is home to a community of about 500,000 people. This platform enables users to purchase the time of others — and receive help with website production, writing services, IT support, translations, counseling, and more. Work is under way to create a decentralized version of this platform that’s available internationally. Another of …

The MakerDAO Foundation has returned 84,000 MKR tokens from its development fund to MakerDAO’s governance module, marking a milestone in the project’s path to decentralization. In a May 3 blog post, the foundation notes that “no conditions or expectations” have been placed on MakerDAO regarding the returned tokens, with Maker Governance now having complete control over the tokens. The announcement states that with the return of the development and the completion of recent technical contributions to Maker’s liquidation engine and its DAO’s core unit framework, the foundation will now focus on working toward its own dissolution to further decentralize the …

A crypto payments platform has undergone a rebrand — and has launched a new suite of easy-to-understand applications that are designed to deliver innovation in decentralized finance. Mimo is a new protocol that serves as a successor for TenX, which captured the imagination of early adopters by allowing them to complete crypto transactions anywhere using a card. Much of the foundational technology used to build TenX is now being implemented in Mimo, which aims to bring exciting new features to the DeFi space. At the center of its offering is Parallel (PAR), which has been billed as the first decentralized …

Blockchain technology is one of the most promising technologies of our times, and the core concept of it is really simple. Essentially, it is a public ledger or database, and I think that public education about what blockchain actually is can be the key to its mass adoption. Lack of knowledge and perception from the general public of the differences between blockchain technology and cryptocurrency are the major hurdles of mainstream adoption. Hollywood and the mass media still portray the industry as having a deep criminal element, associating it with the shady past of Silk Road and the darknet. Related: …

This is Part Two of a multipart series on blockchain and crypto in China. Read Part One about the digital yuan here. When Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the Bitcoin (BTC) white paper over a decade ago, it was hard to imagine what role the cryptocurrency sector would play in global finance. Some argue that the invention of blockchain technology is comparable to the revolution brought on by the invention of the internet back in the 1980s. Starting as a niche space for tech enthusiasts, in just 12 years Bitcoin has become a serious player in the financial field, with its market …

It is a pivotal moment in the development of the new digital economy. Interest in all things crypto keeps growing exponentially, and investment follows closely. There has arguably never been so much money poured into a product class that was so poorly understood, both by the wider public and by most investors. In lieu of actual understanding, stakeholders in the crypto space have to operate on reputation and trust instead. This necessity has given rise to a dangerous new con. Unlike blatant scams like OneCoin or Bitconnect, today’s blockchain opportunists and confidence tricksters often play the faux science card. “Read …

Crypto-friendly web browser Opera is expanding its integration of decentralized web pages provided by blockchain domain name provider Unstoppable Domains — a blockchain firm backed by the high-profile Bitcoin (BTC) advocate Tim Draper. On Wednesday, Opera said that users of the browser on any platform — iOS, Android, Windows, Mac or Linux — will now benefit from full, native integration of Unstoppable Domains’ .crypto domain names. The move extends access to decentralized web pages to all of Opera’s estimated 320+ million monthly active users and marks Opera out among mainstream web browsers in supporting a domain name system that is …

Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital and host of the popular podcast The Portal, urged his followers over the weekend not to get caught up in Bitcoin’s (BTC) daily fluctuations. He seemed to feel that it was wiser to focus on the cryptocurrency’s ability to hedge against currency debasement at the hands of central banks. Bitcoin and other “hard-money” assets like gold and silver could be sound alternatives to the “disguised actions” of central banks, Weinstein tweeted to his nearly 485,000 followers. “Figuring out how we hedge against central bankers printing and devaluing fiat currency remains our upcoming rendezvous …

An open-source, decentralized, interoperable platform has announced that it will be the home of a multichain decentralized finance protocol. Gene Finance launched on Metaverse on Friday and is designed to help cryptocurrency enthusiasts “easily deploy and optimize their digital assets within the DeFi space.” An intuitive dashboard has been built that enables users to manage their DeFi portfolio across a plethora of products — including yield farming, algorithmic stablecoins and liquidity mining. Metaverse, which recently launched its mainnet, is providing an all-important infrastructure layer that results in a faster, cheaper, more efficient transaction experience for DeFi’s ever-expanding user base. According …

As central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, continue to garner mainstream traction across the global financial landscape in recent years, almost all central banks are actively researching the benefits and risks of offering a digital currency to the public. In its most basic sense, a CBDC is a digital form of fiat money, backed by a suitable amount of monetary reserves like gold or foreign currency reserves. Each CBDC unit acts as a secure digital instrument equivalent and can be used as a way of payment, a store of value and an official unit of account. What distinguishes them from …

We are in an unprecedented period of social, political and economic turmoil. As the decentralized financial infrastructure powering billions of dollars of value and building thousands of companies grows, we need to recognize instability around us. The systems, protocols and incentives we create now can be less susceptible to censorship, government overreach and misinformation. Ethereum 2.0’s design has a number of attractive attributes that make it exceptionally well-positioned to reliably operate through the choppy waters ahead as a neutral infrastructure, not as a biased platform. Individuals, enterprises and governments can be confident that Ethereum 2.0 will continue functioning in the …