The philanthropic arm of Binance — Binance Charity — is set to fund 30,655 scholarships to students keen on forging out a career in Web3 in 2023. The Binance Charity Scholar Program (BCSP) will provide free Web3 education and training courses which will enable tech-savvy students to upskill without having to leap-frog any unnecessary financial barriers, Binance Charity explained, in a January 20 blog post: “We recognize that digital education and skills development can be out of reach for many, resulting in a blockchain industry that lacks diversity and talent. The Binance Scholar Program changes all that, covering the costs …

The small Nordic country of Norway may not be particularly notable on the global crypto map. With its 22 blockchain solution providers, the nation doesn’t stand out even at the regional level. However, as the race to test and implement central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) accelerates every day, the Scandinavian nation is taking an active stance on its own national digital currency. In fact, it was among the first countries to begin the work on a CBDC back in 2016. Dropping cash In recent years, amid a rise in cashless payment methods and concern over cash-enabled illicit transactions, some Norwegian …

Amid ongoing investigations around the defunct crypto exchange FTX, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) questions the due diligence conducted by institutional investors and their accountability regarding the loss of users’ funds. CFTC Commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero stated that VCs that had to write down their investments in millions of dollars to nearly zero raises “serious questions” about the due diligence conducted over the last year, speaking to Bloomberg. She raised concerns about FTX CEO John Ray’s revelations in court about not having any records and controls over the exchange’s financials. I'm glad Mr. Ray is finally paying lip service …

This week NFT Steez met with Cryptoys founder Will Weinraub to discuss the current role of play and toys in regard to their integration with nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and Web3 as a whole. Weinraub believes that the act of play is “not restricted to children” and believes that as adults, “we still crave the element of play throughout life.” According to Weinraub, through the development of technology, “play has evolved.” NFTs, especially in gaming, have highlighted this layer of ownership through play. Weinraub and Cryptoys theorize that “adults are just looking for ways to feel like kids again.” Keeping the …

Blockchain technology has revolutionized the way we think about data storage and transactions, but it can also be a complex field for developers to navigate. One tool that can help simplify the process is ChatGPT, a large language model created by OpenAI. A language model is a type of artificial intelligence model that is trained on a large corpus of text to generate or predict text. It can be used to generate new text, such as in machine translation, or to predict the likelihood of a sequence of words. It uses natural language processing and machine learning techniques to learn …

Web3 technologies continue to infiltrate various mainstream industries to bring innovation to old systems. This includes legacy creative fields such as the music industry and more recently, the film industry. This year, the Slamdance Film Festival, an oscar-accredited film festival for indie filmmakers, will see the premiere of the new film “Fuzzy Head,” which received its funding through the blockchain-powered crowdfunding platform Untold.io. Ali Aksu, the CEO of Untold.io, told Cointelegraph that filmmakers, as in the case of Fuzzy Head, can use blockchain technology to democratize their financing process and open up investment opportunities to both accredited and unaccredited investors. …

Over the last year, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) continued to play an important role in the growing Web3 industry. NFTs initiated a shift away from hype-based drops, to utility-centric projects with long-term value. A new DappRadar report on blockchain and decentralized application (DApp) adoption in 2022 revealed that the NFT sale count last year reached 101 million. This is a 67.57% increase from the previous year. According to the report, the Ethereum ecosystem holds the top spot in the NFT ecosystem, holding 21% of the market share and over 21.2 million transactions processed. It is followed by Wax (14.5 million), Polygon …

While traditional asset classes fail to foster broader adoption among women, crypto seems to have found success in bringing women on board, according to a recent survey. Data sent to Cointelegraph by the eToro team highlighted that crypto is now the second most widely-owned asset class for women second only to cash. This comes from the results of eToro’s latest Retail Investor Beat, which surveyed around 10,000 global retail investors in 13 countries. According to the survey results, there is a significant rise in crypto ownership among women. Data shows that ownership increased from 29% in the third quarter of …

Venture capitalists battling with the difficulties of proper crypto firm due diligence should be looking at getting back to the basics — to "trust the chain," a crypto-focused venture fund executive argues. Speaking to Cointelegraph, John Lo, head of digital assets at Recharge Capital — a $6 billion fund with crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects on its portfolio — said that FTX shook the "confidence in this industry." "There will be a lot of soul-searching," he said. According to Lo, due diligence has always been a problem in the venture space, even outside of crypto. He said the action …

China’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) — the digital yuan, or eCNY — has received upgrades giving it smart contract functionality alongside a series of newly unveiled use cases. The smart contract function was launched on the Meituan app, a Chinese app offering retail and food delivery services, according to a Jan. 17 report by local cryptocurrency media outlet 8btc. When Meituan users place an order and pay with their e-CNY wallet, a smart contract triggers and searches for keywords and purchased items in their order. If a user buys something on the list of keywords for the day, they …

The Bank for International Settlements looked under the hood of decentralized finance (DeFi) in a new working paper and introduced the DeFi stack reference (DSR) model to illustrate the technology’s functionality and risks. The report discussed the integration of DeFi with traditional finance and suggested ways to assess its risks during that integration. The paper examined the architecture, technical primitives and functionalities of DeFi protocols in considerable technical detail. “A deep understanding of DeFi is still lacking in many circles,” the authors wrote, “which calls for a specific framework for an improved working knowledge of the technology.” The effort is …

If the foreign exchange market starts using DeFi protocols instead of the current centralized systems, the cost of remittances could be reduced by “as much as 80%,” according to a Jan. 19 paper jointly published by researchers at Circle and Uniswap. On-chain foreign exchange (FX) is a new model of global value exchange that offers a faster, cheaper, and more efficient alternative for cross-border payments. Our recent research paper with @circle has it all https://t.co/NGniRo8yrp — Uniswap Labs (@Uniswap) January 19, 2023 The paper, titled “On-chain Foreign Exchange and Cross-border Payments,” was written by Uniswap Data Scientist Austin Adams, Circle …