A blockchain-based travel booking site has teamed up with a leading online travel agency in a deal that could bring its consumer-focused hotel and airfare reservation marketplace before a global audience. Australia-based Webjet has invested $4.1 million into LockTrip with a view toward integrating the consumer travel site and its LOC blockchain into the Webjet OTA platform — an industry leader in its home country and New Zealand. In addition, Webjet will explore migrating its own enterprise blockchain project, the Rezchain booking verification system, onto LockTrip’s decentralized, proof-of-stake Hydra Chain. That would be a big step towards LockTrip’s ultimate goal …

Free TON is a multi-blockchain platform that can handle thousands of transactions per second thanks to its dynamic sharding mechanisms, which create new shards as needed. As a result, it is the fastest blockchain available, according to developers. Despite that, the Free TON blockchain is still in the early stages of attracting DApp developers to its platform. Even with its scalability, an important task at this stage is to bring more liquidity to the platform. To do that, developers have announced the launch of Wrapped TON, a tradable TIP-3 token built on its native TON Crystal token. With the ability …

Decentralized lending protocol Cream Finance is backing another major effort to improve the security of decentralized finance. On Tuesday, Cream Finance announced a new security campaign in collaboration with several DeFi platforms like Immunefi, Armor and DeFiSafety to bring stronger security to its protocol and the wider DeFi ecosystem. As part of the campaign, Cream Finance is launching a $1.5 million bug bounty program with blockchain bounty platform Immunefi to strengthen Cream’s protocol, API and website security. The new bug bounty will focus on Cream Finance’s smart contracts and the prevention of potential exploits against user funds, assets and data …

Over the last couple of years, we have seen a lot of interest from central banks and governments in the stablecoin market. The reason behind it lies in the development of central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. The idea of issuing a digital alternative to cash is a great motivator for central banks. It allows them to gain more control over the transition and processing of cashless transactions, which are currently overseen indirectly through private payment processors and banks. Related: Did CBDCs affect the crypto space in 2020, and what’s next in 2021? Experts answer There have been a number …

A decentralized autonomous organization that governs a growing number of protocols says the initial vision for DeFi “has been corrupted by greed, inefficiency and sheer incompetence” — and says a drastic new approach is needed to ensure this sector reaches its full potential. According to Jigstack, the Ethereum landscape is fragmented, with thousands of DApps that offer varying degrees of quality. Millions of dollars in user funds have been lost, hacked, stolen or fraudulently misplaced in the past year — and “everything the industry promised to deliver has yet to be brought to life in a professional manner.” Jigstack’s founders …

A new contest is taking place that aims to test a node written in the Rust programming language — with the ambition of breaking the world record for the bandwidth of blockchain protocols in a real network. Free TON's current node is written in C++ and already has the ability to process thousands of transactions per second. Sharding plays an instrumental role in this network, as this means that smart contracts can be processed in parallel. It’s believed that a node written in Rust would be dramatically quicker due to better process parallelization, and organizers of the Rust Cup believe …

Over the past decade, the proliferation of blockchain technology has resulted in hundreds of networks that are unable to talk to each other. With data siloed and developers’ options now extremely limited, the sector has been described as being at a “historical crossroads” — and unless this industry evolves and expands, it’s feared that blockchain will struggle to achieve the same reach and interconnectivity that the internet enjoys. Interoperability has been one of the hottest phrases in the blockchain lexicon in recent years. Although this cross-chain mentality is encouraging, it could be argued that many of the solutions being touted …

With adoption accelerating, blockchain’s potential to transform life in every way — from how business is conducted to labor division, operating systems and methods of collaboration — comes closer to fruition every day. If blockchain is the foundation to a truly digital model, then governance is the key to linking together the on and off-chain worlds. Governance itself encompasses and dictates the functionality of blockchain, from its organization structure to workflow execution, voting and incentives. Conceptually, governance can be understood as on and off-chain; the former being divided into protocol and contract levels. With the blockchain space rapidly diversifying, governance …

This is the year cryptocurrency finally starts to break into the mainstream. From Elon Musk and Tesla investing in and accepting Bitcoin (BTC) to the recent nonfungible token craze, the days of blockchain tech being the domain of cypherpunks and coders are behind us. Still, the technology has not quite advanced to the stage where the average person will feel comfortable using it. And the longer the usability of cryptocurrency takes to reach the level where it connects with nontechnical users, the higher the risk that centralized companies will take over the task of improving accessibility instead, harming the censorship …

While blockchain itself provides the technology constructs to facilitate exchange, ownership and trust in the network, it is in the digitization of value elements where asset tokenization is essential. Tokenization is the process of converting the assets and rights to a property into a digital representation, or token, on a blockchain network. Distinguishing between cryptocurrency and tokenized assets is important in understanding exchange vehicles, valuation models and fungibility across the various value networks that are emerging and posing interoperability challenges. These are not just technical challenges, but also business challenges around equitable swaps. Asset tokenization can lead to the creation …

A platform that vows to make cryptocurrency and decentralized finance trading available to the masses is gearing up to launch its decentralized autonomous organization. Mute says that Voice Control is the first DAO to boast a dual-token system. The project aims to ensure that it is as simple as possible for enthusiasts with varying degrees of technical understanding to get involved — and this is being achieved through simple language and a visually unique decentralized application. Voice Control enables members to have their say — or delegate their votes to a trusted community member. This distinctive configuration helps ensure the …

TON Labs, the development arm behind the Free TON blockchain, raised $6 million through an investment round led by venture capital firm Runa Capital. The funding will go toward building out a new product environment for the Free TON blockchain, which the company describes as the fastest decentralized protocol due to its unique dynamic sharding mechanisms. Dmitry Chikhachev, a general partner at Runa Capital, said TON Labs is the only blockchain company to receive direct funding from his firm. “As a deep tech and software investor, we appreciate the technical challenges solved by the company and see a strong potential …