To function effectively, society has long depended on people having faith in their institutions. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and wide-ranging failures of leadership, that faith has been tested like never before. Nowhere is the decline in trust more evident than in the financial services sector. In its 2021 Trust Barometer, Edelman found that only 53% of American respondents said they trusted those in the U.S. to "do what is right" — down 5% from its 2020 survey. You can see this in the battle between Main Street and Wall Street, which played out in January’s GameStop rally. More than …

According to a security analyst, sensitive personal information for over half a billion Facebook users was leaked on a well-trafficked hacking forum earlier today — a potential risk to millions of cryptocurrency traders and hodlers who now may be vulnerable to sim swapping and other identity-based attacks. The trove of information was first discovered by Alon Gal, CTO of security firm Hudson Rock, who posted on Twitter about the leak earlier today: All 533,000,000 Facebook records were just leaked for free. This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the …

The Internet Archive, an American nonprofit behind major digital archive Wayback Machine, has received a $10 million cryptocurrency donation from the Filecoin Foundation. According to a Friday announcement, the Filecoin Foundation has donated 50,000 Filecoin (FIL) tokens to the Internet Archive, worth more than $10 million at the time of writing. The grant is designed to help the Internet Archive increase access to its online library including books, data, web pages, music and software. In addition to the donation, the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle and director of partnerships Wendy Hanamura have joined the boards of advisors for the Filecoin …

Cinedigm, a major American content distribution company, is applying blockchain technology to one of its streaming channels. The company has partnered with decentralized video delivery network Theta Labs to integrate Theta's peer-to-peer streaming technology and cryptocurrency rewards into its CONtv Anime channel airing a wide range of anime series and movies. CONtv Anime will feature micropayments in Theta Fuel (TFUEL), one of the two native tokens on the Theta blockchain. The token will be used as a reward for sharing video content by utilizing excess bandwidth and computing resources as well as watching the channel’s content. According to the announcement, …

A decentralized platform that provides infrastructure services for DApp developers and users says its goal is to deliver safety and stability. According to Apron, the world remains reliant on the centralized artifacts of the Web 2.0 era — and its network is designed to serve as the foundational layer for the next generation. While the team acknowledges that Ethereum has contributed to DApps exploding in popularity, they say operating nodes on this blockchain is both expensive and energy intensive — prompting a centralized support structure to emerge. Apron Network is designed to shake things up by improving the infrastructure service …

A new decentralized autonomous organization management platform is being built on Polkadot — and aims to shake up the way organizations are run. Companies, open-source projects, foundations, hedge funds and NGOs are among the entities that can be created and managed through the Idavoll Network. Basic functions such as shareholder votes, disputes and accounting matters can be executed with ease — and the organization’s behavior and operating rules are enshrined through the use of smart contracts, delivering “openness, fairness and justice” to all. Anyone within an organization can submit proposals that their peers can vote on, and a dispute mechanism …

Recent political developments in the United States demonstrate the critical challenges that centralized technology platforms pose to democracy — in stark contrast to the powerful role social media played in pro-democracy movements in the Middle East and Hong Kong. U.S. election misinformation and disinformation, as well as white nationalism, spread throughout online groups, and prominent political and social leaders found means to amplify falsehoods through technology platforms. Within both the public eye and darker corners of the internet, organizers, including members of the Proud Boys, planned the storming of the U.S. Capitol to stop what they believed to be a …

The internet has undoubtedly revolutionized the way we live. It has changed how we work, access information, travel, communicate and interact with each other. Along with it comes a greater level of freedom that we enjoy because of democratizing and decentralizing information. By doing so, the internet has opened up to a greater debate, analysis and scrutiny by the general public on matters that impact them and the world. Thanks to the internet, the sphere of influence is shifting away from centralized authorities and the mainstream media. In our rush to grasp the freedoms offered by the internet, we have …

When it comes to computer data storage, it can seem like we are running out of numbers. If you are old enough, you may remember when diskette storage was measured in kilobytes in the 1980s. If you are a little younger, you are probably more familiar with the thumb drives denominated in gigabytes or hard drives that hold terabytes today. Humanity’s unfathomable data footprint But we are now producing data at an unprecedented rate. As a result, we are going to need to be able to grasp numbers so large that they seem almost beyond human comprehension. In order to …

Ethereum developers recently proposed a network change called EIP-1559 — a proposal meant to combat the network's rising transaction fees. Expected to take effect in July of this year, the move would send a part of every transaction fee to the Ethereum network itself. Ether allocated in this manner would then be burned, reducing the number of coins in circulation. This change would also decrease the amount of rewards going to the network's miners, leading some to protest the move. A vocal group of participants have since begun to advocate for a demonstrative network takeover, which could threaten the security …

A 44-page report commissioned by CPA Australia delves into the status of central bank digital currency development worldwide, while exploring viable blockchain candidates for hosting CBDCs in the coming years. The report offers up evaluations of the three most transacted cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and XRP — and analyses their suitability (or lack thereof) for use by central banks. Bitcoin’s decentralized network and lack of oversight by banks or governments make it generally unsuitable for use in a national CBDC network, notes the report. Although Bitcoin is still accepted as a medium of exchange the world over, its …

With an explosion of video streaming as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and now around $40 billion locked into decentralized finance protocols, it’s time for decentralized finance and the film industry to meet. Film financing is a cumbersome and inefficient system. Investors are the first to put their money in but last to see any return. There is no transparency into how funds are being used during production or how profits are allocated after distribution. Investment decisions are generally based on very little data about what people actually want to watch, so the chances of a film’s success are …