Cointelegraph’s Joseph Hall sat down with Silvio Micali, founder of Algorand, as part of its on-the-ground coverage of Paris Blockchain Week Summit. Algorand is a blockchain that uses a pure proof-of-stake (PPoS) protocol, and the company was one of the main sponsors of the summit. Micali started by explaining that the blockchain trilemma — which claims that no blockchain can be both secure, scalable and decentralized — is false. He affirmed that Algorand is actively working to solve this so-called trilemma by pushing the limits of scalability via its PPoS algorithm. With Ethereum set to transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake …

How does Bitcoin (BTC) mining incentivize green technology? What are the biggest barriers to crypto adoption among institutions? What’s next for stablecoin regulations? Cointelegraph Business Editor Sam Bourgi sat down with Kevin O’Leary at this year’s Bitcoin conference in Miami to discuss the latest developments in the crypto asset space. O’Leary, who’s known as “Mr. Wonderful” for his starring role on Shark Tank, provided a hard-hitting analysis of crypto’s role in reshaping the investment landscape. After admitting in December 2021 that crypto could reach 20% of his portfolio, O’Leary revealed to Cointelegraph some of his top picks for 2022 and …

The Bitcoin (BTC) community is at it again, dismantling FUD and orange-pilling officials in far-flung destinations. At the foot of Lake Atitlán, a bucolic yet impoverished region of Guatemala, a Bitcoin project has managed to get a miner into the hands of the local mayor. The process has boosted local incomes while also improving the air quality. In Panajachel, Guatemala a community of almost 20,000 people is coming around to Bitcoin after the local mayor, Cesar Piedrasanta was gifted an old S9 Bitcoin miner. It’s the first municipality in Central or South America to mine BTC. While this is exceptional …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently spoke about his biggest concerns about the crypto industry with TIME Magazine. Following the interview's publication, Buterin responded to tweets that negatively compared his appearance to that of Tom Brady, retired NFL star and founder of the NFT marketplace Autograph. The quote tweets on the new time article about me are truly amazing. These are barely even cherry picked, it's pretty much one piece of awesome after another. Highly recommend scrolling. https://t.co/teyd3ROqrT pic.twitter.com/BDzbwvekhw — vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 18, 2022 Buterin viewed the critical comments as comical and even posted collages of the "highly recommended" tweets. …

While decentralized finance (DeFi) token prices may be going down, new forms of utility like liquid staking are on the rise and some believe that more people may be drawn to DeFi as more institutions jump into the fray. According to Eric Chen, CEO and co-founder of Injective Labs, while the DeFi sector has witnessed massive growth since 2020, there are still issues to solve such as gas fees, scalability and liquidity. Chen said that the entire DeFi industry is focused on building infrastructures to address these problems. “It still has a lot of problems to solve before being able …

Cointelegraph sat down with Leah Wald, CEO of digital asset investment firm Valkyrie Investments, to learn more about the importance of a Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) and the future of digital assets. For context, Valkyrie Investments was launched in 2021 and is one of the only asset managers to have three Bitcoin-adjacent ETFs trading on the Nasdaq. Valkyrie launched a Bitcoin Strategy ETF in October 2021, which offered indirect exposure to BTC with cash-settled futures contracts following a United States Securities and Exchange (SEC) approval for a similar ETF from ProShares. Valkyrie also has a balance sheet opportunities ETF …

With crypto being in the sights of many regulators, many have wondered if regulation is good or bad for crypto. However, Christian Borel, Senior Executive Officer at SEBA Bank, says that if the laws are clear, it may push crypto adoption forward. In a Cointelegraph interview, the banking executive mentions that institutions are likely to adopt crypto following the advent of clear regulations. Additionally, the presence of “regulated counterparties” within the banking industry creates a secure and trusted way for institutions and their stakeholders to have access to the crypto sector. “I expect to see a considerable acceleration in engagement …

With the recent attack on OpenSea highlighting blockchain vulnerabilities, Charles Guillemet, the CTO of Ledger warns users about “blind signing” which he defines as “consenting a transaction to be signed blindly, without understanding what it means.” In an interview with Cointelegraph, Guillemet broke down the problems and highlighted issues with blind signing. The Ledger CTO notes that consenting to transactions requires signing a message to be sent to the blockchain. A user is the only one capable of signing transactions with the private key, while others can verify if it's correct. "The issue is that this message is not intelligible …

Anton Bukov, the co-founder of 1inch Network, thinks that Ethereum will likely become the main settlement layer for a multi-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. “There is like a high chance that most of the chains will try to commit their states to Ethereum as a higher layer,” Bukov said in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph. Bukov, who is number 39 in Cointelegraph’s Top 100 list for 2022, acknowledges that in order to achieve that, Ethereum needs to solve the scalability issues that limit its transaction output. DISCOVER COINTELEGRAPH’S TOP 100 IN CRYPTO AND BLOCKCHAIN 2022 According to Bukov, the best …

Music-based nonfungible tokens are an emerging frontier in the crypto and NFT space, but the first questions that come to mind are: What are they? And what are their utility? Music NFTs are relatively new to the scene and cannot be pinned down by one definition. At the most basic level, however, they are verifiable digital collectibles, with a core component being the integration of a song. One of the first collections was “Audioglyphs,” which cemented itself as revolutionizing the way users consume music, synthesizing an infinite stream of audio for each NFT. Creators and investors began to discover the …

Among the original founding fathers of Ethereum (ETH) is Gavin Wood, who joined a group led by Vitalik Buterin that set out to build Bitcoin's competition. Wood is the computer scientist who wrote the first smart contracts for the Ethereum blockchain back in 2014. In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Wood admitted that at the time, he just needed a job. A self-described "technologist at heart" he knew coding was his calling, and made the "obvious" switch from building LEGO bricks to writing blocks of code from an early age. He first discovered Bitcoin via The Silk Road, the online …

Ethernity Chain (ERN) is an authenticated and licensed NFT marketplace in the business of acquiring intellectual property, or IP, from big-name brands in sports, history, music and entertainment. Among these notable figures is Shaquille O'Neal, Leonardo Messi and brands like DeLorean and Toys"R"Us. Cointelegraph spoke to Nick Rose, Ethernity Founder and CEO, about the launch of the company's newest arm, Ethernal Labs, and its goals to become a comprehensive NFT ecosystem studio. Think Disney, NBCUniversal or Sony but for Web3 content creation. That's the kind of disruption Rose spoke about when he described Ethernal Labs as a multidisciplinary studio and …