There’s never a good time for a crypto winter, but it would be difficult to envision a worse time than right now. Even before 70% of Bitcoin’s (BTC) value evaporated seemingly overnight, things were not going great in the court of public opinion. Negative sentiment was everywhere; a Twitter account documenting crypto bros taking it on the chin racked up hundreds of thousands of followers. Now the biggest crypto exchanges in the world are laying off full-time employees by the thousands, and the self-proclaimed “Cryptoqueen” has landed a spot on the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Ten Most Wanted …

Iota Foundation, a nonprofit distributed ledger technology ecosystem provider, has partnered with tech giant Dell Technologies to develop a data-driven solution for the real-time tracking of carbon footprints. Dell’s edge solutions team announced the onboarding of Iota, climate change-focused technology company ClimateCHECK and BioE to develop a solution on top of Dell’s in-house Data Confidence Fabric (DCF) and Project Alvarium initiatives. We've partnered w/ @Iota, BioE, & @ClimateCHECK to develop real-time carbon footprint tracking through a #data confidence fabric! Hear how #ProjectAlvarium accurately tracks carbon footprints w/ #DellTech Edge solutions. https://t.co/u5CxmbMBAL@Intel #IOTA #Sustainability pic.twitter.com/52RENnEW3X — Dell Edge & Telecom (@Dell_Edge) …

The Iota Foundation and Imperial College London recently announced the launch of a four-year distributed ledger technology, or DLT, initiative designed to research and develop solutions to foster socially conscious, circular economic models and businesses around servitization. The Imperial-Iota-Infrastructures Lab, known as the I3-Lab, will operate within the Dyson School of Design Engineering and has adopted the tagline “infrastructure powered by Iota; analytics powered by Imperial; use-cases powered by the community; and impact powered by partnerships.” Expected to commence this summer, the I3-Lab has been initially funded by a $1 million philanthropic grant from the Iota Foundation and will soon …

On Thursday, the Iota Foundation, which oversees developments in the namesake Internet-of-Things transactions blockchain (IOTA), announced that it had been selected as one of five contractors by the European Commission to develop blockchain and distributed ledger technology in the region. According to the announcement, phase 2A aims to advance European Blockchain Services Infrastructure, or EBSI, in five areas: It will investigate the feasibility of sharding as to exponentially scale the Iota network on EBSI. Develop an approval weight consensus mechanism that will be highly flexible and allow both permissionless and permissioned use cases. Ensure any Iota-based solution for cross-border transfers …

The cost to purchase one Bitcoin (BTC) has dropped almost 10% in the last seven days and has been eyeing extended declines as it drops below $40,000, its interim psychological support, on Jan. 10. Nonetheless, the losses suffered by Bitcoin still appear lesser than some of its top crypto rivals' performances. For instance, Cardano (ADA), the seventh-largest cryptocurrency by market valuation, has dropped by nearly 11% to around $1.15 in the last seven days. Similarly, XRP, the eighth-largest by market capitalization, has dipped by around 10% to nearly $0.75 in the same period. Meanwhile, some cryptocurrencies listed among the top …

On Friday, Assembly, a decentralized layer one smart contract network built within the IOTA ecosystem, announced it had raised $100 million from private investors, including LD Capital, HyperChain Capital assembly, and Huobi Ventures. The project stated that the funds will be used to accelerate the development of decentralized finance protocols, nonfungible tokens, and play-to-earn crypto games. IOTA is a blockchain designed for facilitating internet-of-things transactions. Its proprietary technology consists of a system of decentralized acyclic graphs that can connect to one another in multiple vectors as opposed to in-series as with a regular blockchain. As a result, one new block …

Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter. A week packed with positive advancements in the DeFi space including nine-figure fund raises, successful product launches and soaring token prices was somewhat tarnished by the news of two severe security exploits. Read on to get the full scope of developments across the week. What you’re about to read is the smaller version of this newsletter designed for brevity. For the full version of DeFi’s developments over the last week, drop your email below. Borderless Capital launches $500M fund to support Algorand ecosystem Capital venture firm Borderless Capital announced the …

Iota has announced the release of decentralized layer-one smart contract network Assembly, and accompanying ASMB token, in a bid to accelerate the expansion of smart contracts across a multitude of sectors, including decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Assembly utilizes the Iota network's existing architecture, most notably the directed acyclic graph structure, to operate adjacently as an interoperable, self-sovereign bridge that reaps the benefits of scalability and robust security, among others. Decentralized application, or DApp, developers have the ability to create their own smart contract chains and set individual parameters for low-cost execution fees, a function that also enables …

Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter. Read on to discover why almost half of the liquidity providers on Uniswap v3 are losing capital due to impermanent loss. What you’re about to read is the smaller version of this newsletter. For the full breakdown of DeFi’s developments over the last week, subscribe below. Acala wins Polkadot’s debut parachain auction Decentralized finance protocol Acala was announced as the winning project in Polkadot’s inaugural parachain auction this week, beating fellow competitor Moonbeam to the finish line with a seismic total of 32.5 million DOT ($1.28 billion) raised from 24,934 …

The IOTA Foundation has announced the upcoming launch of a staging network, Shimmer, in a bid to advance the IOTA roadmap towards fully functional decentralization. The layer-1 network will act as an innovation testbed for developers and builders in the community seeking to evaluate decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) applications. This sandbox model will allow them to establish the efficiency and compatibility of applications prior to launching on the IOTA mainnet, ensuring smooth deployment. The first major network upgrades hosted on the Shimmer network are programmable multi-asset ledger, smart contracts, full decentralization, and sharding. The IOTA Foundation is …

The Iota Foundation has announced the release of its beta version smart contract functionality, with the objective to solve market challenges of scalability limitations and high transaction fees, as well as reportedly debuting components not witnessed thus far in the space. Iota’s nonprofit foundation is focused on open-source research and development initiatives to drive adoption in the distributed ledger technology space, alongside its native platform, the Tangle. The smart contract service will foster interoperability and standardization through the integration of Ethereum Virtual Machine; multi-capacity for developers to write program languages with Tiny Go, Rust, and Ethereum’s Solidity; as well as …

The European Commission's blockchain initiative has selected the Iota Foundation as one of seven projects to participate in the preliminary stage of designing an EU-wide distributed ledger technology platform. The initiative seeks to increase the efficiency and accountability of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI), a network of nodes dedicated to facilitating the efficiency of EU-centric transactions, as well as the expansion of the region's supply chain through the adoption of emerging technologies, all the while reducing European carbon footprint. The Iota Foundation — a non-profit organization supporting the Tangle, an open-source DLT platform — will support EBSI in cross-border …