General manager of the Bank for International Settlements Agustín Carstens spoke at the Singapore FinTech Festival on Feb. 22 and described the digital financial infrastructure he believes would best suit central bankers’ needs. He called that infrastructure a “unified ledger.” Carstens compared the theoretical unified ledger with a smartphone, saying they both work seamlessly with a variety of components. Unlike a smartphone, a unified ledger would have open architecture, however, and would show programmability and composability, that it, it would run and bundle smart contracts. There are over 2 million apps available to smartphone users, Carstens noted. He said: “A …

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week. Industry experts are confident in DeFi and believe the sector would continue to see adoption despite its security flaws, primarily due to the mammoth failure of centralized exchanges. Despite the continued growth, however, the decentralized exchanges have lost $30 million on liquidity provider incentives. Popular hardware crypto wallet Ledger introduced a new DeFi tracking feature that pairs with its hardware wallets to monitor performance analytics of over 1,000 protocols. The Lodestar Finance protocol that …

Users and developers are seeking out ways to stay both safe and informed after a year of volatility and uncertainty. During this shift, the hardware wallet developer Ledger announced a new integration for users to track the value of their assets. Ledger and Merlin, a decentralized finance (DeFi) portfolio tracker, announced their new partnership on Dec. 13 to bring live DeFi performance analytics to Ledger Live users. The app, which connects to Ledger’s cold storage wallets, services over 5 million users. The newly integrated DeFi tracker connects over 1,000 DeFi protocols across ten blockchain networks. Users will have access to …

One of the oldest pieces of contrarian investment wisdom is to buy when there is blood in the streets. If it were that easy, crypto investors would be euphoric at all the buy opportunities right now. If you’re rattled by the bear market, which has been especially brutal even by crypto standards, don’t beat yourself up over it. Cryptocurrency is still an unproven asset class that operates in the shadow of regulators. I don’t blame you for not buying an asset class that’s down over 70% this year. With those caveats in mind, a quiet herd of smart money investors …

Hardware wallet provider Ledger, known for its cold-storage devices, announced its seventh crypto wallet in collaboration with the creator of the original iPod. Tony Fadell, the inventor of the iconic iPod Classic model, has partnered with Ledger to help the company design its latest wallet device known as Ledger Stax. The company broke the news on Dec. 6 at Ledger’s bi-annual Web3 developer event, Ledger Op3n, in Paris. Ledger’s upcoming new hardware wallet is a credit card-size device that features a large E Ink display, capacitive touch, Bluetooth support, wireless charging and more. For the first time in Ledger's product …

The cryptocurrency exchange Binance is making a move in the hardware wallet industry, with its venture capital arm investing in the cold wallet platform Ngrave. Binance Labs has made a strategic investment in the Belgian hardware wallet firm Ngrave and will lead its upcoming Series A round, the firm officially announced on Nov. 21. Founded in Belgium in 2018, Ngrave specializes in self-custody, providing a security suite comprising three major elements, including connectionless hardware wallet Zero, key backup tool Graphene and the Liquid mobile app. Yi He, co-founder of Binance and head of Binance Labs, pinpointed that security remains one …

Amid growing concerns over centralized cryptocurrency exchanges in the wake of the FTX crisis, investors are increasingly moving to hardware crypto wallets. A major hardware wallet provider, Trezor, has recorded a major uptick in wallet sales in the aftermath of the FTX contagion, the firm’s brand ambassador Josef Tetek told Cointelegraph on Nov. 15. Trezor saw its sales revenue surging 300% week-on-week and it’s still growing, Tetek reported. The platform has also recorded a significant spike in its website traffic, which increased 350% over the same period, the exec noted. According to Tetek, Trezor is quite certain that the uptick …

Hardware-based cryptocurrency wallet provider Ledger has experienced some issues due to massive outflows from crypto exchanges amid the FTX bloodbath, according to its chief technology officer. Ledger saw a “massive usage” of their platforms and suffered a “few scalability challenges” on Nov. 9, Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet reported in a statement on Twitter. Guillemet reasoned Ledger’s issues by the outcomes of the ongoing crisis of a major global cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. The CTO said that crypto investors have been increasingly offloading their holdings from crypto exchanges to Ledger, stating: “ After the FTX earthquake, there's a massive outflow from exchanges …

Ripple Labs’ director of engineering Nik Bougalis is exiting the firm after nearly 10 years, becoming the latest of crypto's long-time serving executives to depart from the space. In an Oct. 22 tweet, Bougalis noted that: “my decade-long journey at Ripplehas been a fantastic (if exhausting and all-consuming) one. I got to work on a project that I love, towards a goal I believe in. But that journey will be coming to an end in a few weeks.” “All good things…” My decade-long journey at @Ripple has been a fantastic (if exhausting and all-consuming) one. I got to work on …

Fantom (FTM) is known for its speed and inexpensive layer-1 blockchain. Like other blockchains (for example, Solana (SOL) and Avalanche (AVAX)) that scale better than their counterpart, it has been dubbed an “Ethereum killer.” After raising $40 million in funds, Fantom launched its mainnet in December 2019. Since then, it has grown to become one of the most popular blockchains, sitting in the top 10 blockchains by total value locked (TVL) with $1.3 billion in TVL. Fantom’s high-throughput blockchain is an open-source smart contract platform. It is scalable and EVM-compatible, meaning you can deploy and run your Ethereum decentralized applications …

Ethereum's blockchain Merge is expected to take place around 05:05 UTC on Sept. 15. It is a milestone that marks a full transition towards Proof-of-Stake (PoS) for Ethereum, and eliminates the need for energy-intensive mining by a projected 99.9% when compared to Proof of Work (PoW). Some miners are also getting ready for a hard fork that would allow them to continue using PoW consensus. Forked coins have proven to be lucrative in the past. The holders of Ethereum (ETH), for example, came to possess an equivalent amount of Ethereum Classic (ETC) when it forked in 2016. In the event …

Blockchain analysis firm Glassnode recently characterized the 2022 bear market as the worst on record. This seems to be the case due to events such as the war in Ukraine and rising inflation, coupled with serious problems among centralized crypto exchanges. Yet, the bear market hasn’t negatively impacted all players in the crypto ecosystem. Hardware wallet providers seem to be benefiting from the massive amount of crypto withdrawals from centralized exchanges. Pascal Gauthier, CEO of hardware wallet crypto firm Ledger, told Cointelegraph that the company’s revenue dropped about 90% during the 2018 crypto winter, but this hasn’t been the case …