In a wide-ranging discussion, a panel of blockchain industry personalities at the World Economic Forum (WEF) concluded that the economy will become increasingly tokenized in the future. Carbon credits, housing, electricity, government bonds, forex, and other real-world assets will be traded on the blockchain, according to the panel. The event, titled Tokenized Economies, Coming Alive, featured Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, Bitkub Capital CEO Jirayut Srupsrisopa (also known as “Topp”), Finland Minister of Transport and Communications Timo Harraka, and Yield Guild Games Co-Founder Beryl Li. According to Topp, the Thai central bank will be implementing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) …

Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group, has posted an open letter on its website encouraging the new class of United States congresspeople to protect privacy. The letter has attracted dozens of companies and organizations as cosigners. “Increasingly, the incredible creative power of US software developers is being chilled by clumsy, misguided legislative and regulatory actions,” the authors of the letter wrote. This is in spite of the fact that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects code as speech, the letter added, and that was why many technologies to protect privacy were created in the United …

Manta Network has recently completed the largest trusted setup ceremony ever, with over 4,000 people participating, according to a press release provided to Cointelegraph. The setup was done in order to help create MantaPay, an app that intends to allow for private payments between individuals. 8/ 2022 also saw the launch of the world’s largest trusted setup on Polkadot by @MantaNetwork, spanning 177 countries with over 13,000 participants and counting. This technology is essential for building a better, more secure web that keeps sensitive information private. — Polkadot (@Polkadot) December 31, 2022 According to the company, MantaPay will run on …

The cryptocurrency ecosystem underwent a turbulent year in 2022. Criticism inside and outside of the crypto industry was fueled following the collapse of FTX, Celsius, Three Arrows Capital and the Terra ecosystem. A number of losses have been recorded from these events. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis released a report in December of last year, which noted that the depegging of Terra’s stablecoin, Terra USD Classic (USTC), saw weekly-realized losses peak at $20.5 billion. Findings further show that the subsequent collapse of Three Arrows Capital and Celsius in June 2022 saw weekly-realized losses reach $33 billion. While these events may have …

200 million Twitter users’ private information, including their email addresses, was put for sale after a breach exposed 400M users’ private information in the last week of December 2022. The hacker behind the December breach has earlier demanded $200,000 from Twitter in a bid to return the stolen data and warned if the demand is not fulfilled, the data will be released for free. The latest set of data posted on the hacker forum has been traced back to the same breach from December 2022. I went to change my email address and Twitter isn't working. This hack puts activists …

On its surface, Andy Greenburg’s new book, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, is a standard crime story. Fans of true crime podcasts will enjoy the crypto version and get a seat in the Federal Bureau of Investigation van as United States federal agents track down criminals through their crypto transactions. The first story recounted is that of a crooked Drug Enforcement Agency agent who stole funds from the online drug market Silk Road. It also addresses the hunt for Dread Pirate Roberts, aka Ross Ulbricht — Silk Road’s founder. Ross’ operational security …

A key set of crypto tax reporting rules is being delayed until further notice under a decision made by the United States Treasury Department. The rules were supposed to be effective in the 2023 tax filing year, in accordance with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in November, 2021. The new law requires that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) develop a standard definition of what a “cryptocurrency broker” is, and any business that falls under this definition is required to issue a Form 1099-B to every customer detailing their profits and losses from trades. It also requires these firms …

While censorship resistance and privacy are not the same thing, they are closely intertwined. When the government or another entity, such as an advertiser, can track everything you do, they can also sanction you for bad behavior. Instead of working backward to try and cover up seismic cracks in Web2 with duct tape, it may be time to move full speed ahead on ensuring these same mistakes don’t happen in Web3. By being proactive, the purported internet of the future could actually protect our private information and prevent overzealous or oppressive censorship before these issues become unmanageable. Using crypto to …

One of the most powerful moments in a new crypto user’s journey happens the first time they send a sizable amount of money to their private wallet. It’s an awe-inspiring, serious moment — and it’s a little scary to experience the power and personal responsibility of the technology firsthand with your own real money. A second powerful moment occurs when the same user is introduced to a block explorer, looks up their address and sees that same transaction there on the blockchain for all to see. There are competing visions of what Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and other cryptocurrencies will …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) markets may have cooled down over the past year, but the technology powering these applications continues to advance. In particular, smart contract platforms that enable transactions to take place across DeFi applications are maturing to meet enterprise requirements. While it’s notable that enterprises have previously shown interest in DeFi use cases, smart contract limitations have hampered adoption. A report published by Grayscale Research in March puts this in perspective, noting that “Despite handling millions of transactions per day, smart contract platforms in their current state would be incapable of handling even 10% of the worlds’ internet traffic.” …

Smart contracts are self-executing lines of code that run atop blockchains and are triggered once a set of predetermined conditions are met. They are used to automate the execution of online agreements without the involvement of third parties. Today, they are used across many industries, including the healthcare industry. The healthcare sector stands to benefit a lot from the widespread implementation of these self-executing programs, especially when it comes to streamlining arduous manual processes, automating bureaucratic procedures and alleviating issues caused by human error. Today, many healthcare institutions rely on highly centralized conventional management systems to handle sensitive tasks such …

RNS.id, a digital Web3 identity platform developed to support the application and issuance of sovereignty-backed IDs, announced on Nov. 30 that it is integrating with zkSync for on-chain KYC. RNS.ID indicated in a release shared with Cointelegraph that its on-chain KYC solution is designed on a “privacy engine” to encrypt users' identity attributes or properties into different “hashed slices” with multiple signature verifications. RNS.ID aggregates users’ fragmented identity properties data and uses ZK-proofs to generate encrypted proofs from metadata. Additionally, the company stated that RNS.ID enables users to create their own "minimal disclosure identifying information system" for constrained usages, thereby …