Last month, Cointelegraph interviewed Reserve CEO Nevin Freeman and the payment decentralized application’s community manager Yens Michiels about the company’s mission to provide access to stable currencies. More recently, Cointelegraph spoke to a couple of users based out of Venezuela and Colombia who shared their positive experiences with Reserve. Reserve is a tool to exchange fiat currency like Venezuelan bolivares for U.S. dollars via the Reserve (RSV) stablecoin. From everyday purchases to family remittances, Reserve has said that its use cases are increasingly growing in Latin America. After one year on the market in Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Argentina, there …

On Thursday, Frax Finance, a developer of algorithmic stablecoins, announced it would launch the Frax Price Index, or FPI, on the Partisia blockchain. The benchmark would have its stablecoin pegged to it and serve as a competitor to the standard Consumer Price Index, or CPI. Although the latter is a near-universally adopted inflation gauge, skeptics have claimed that its methodology does not account for items such as housing prices, college tuition, healthcare, etc. All of which have risen significantly in the past decade in the United States. Brian Gallagher, co-Founder at Partisia Blockchain, elaborated on the development: Together with Partisia …

Despite some senators in the United States opposing Meta launching its digital currency products, the development of the social media giant's digital wallet, Novi, continues apace. Stephane Kasriel, the head of Meta’s cryptocurrency and fintech unit Novi, officially announced on Dec. 8 that Meta’s messenger subsidiary WhatsApp has started testing transactions through Meta’s Novi wallet. According to the exec, the new feature is available for a “limited number of people” in the United States, allowing users to send and receive money on WhatsApp “instantly and with no fees.” There's a new way to try the @Novi digital wallet. Starting today, …

Stablecoins, or crypto assets which peg their value to less volatile fiat money, are useful tools for a variety of reasons. They can be used to cash out crypto investments, send or receive stable money abroad, and to pay for everyday consumer transactions without fear of fluctuation. A recent estimate from the Bank for International Settlements, or BIS, put the total stablecoin supply at roughly $150 billion. But central banks, the issuers of traditional fiat money around the globe, do not seem to be big fans of stablecoins. A sharp increase in supply coupled with a lack of relevant regulations …

Hong Kong venture capital firm Chiron Partners has launched a new ecosystem fund dedicated to Terra (LUNA), opening the door to new innovations for the layer-one decentralized finance, or DeFi, protocol. The Chiron Terra Fund I, also referred to as CTI, will deploy $50 million in capital to support innovative projects building on top of the Terra ecosystem. Projects at the intersection of decentralized finance and “metaverse-linked” nonfungible token platforms are eligible for support, the company announced Wednesday. Built using Cosmos SDK and Tendermint, Terra is a DeFi protocol that uses fiat-pegged stablecoins to power global payment systems. The native …

The United States House Committee on Financial Services released a memorandum detailing the points of discussion during the hybrid hearing on digital assets, to be held today at 10:00 a.m. ET. Addressing the members of the Financial Services Committee, the memo confirmed that the hearing will dedicate one panel to six executives from the crypto community as witnesses. The list includes Circle’s Jeremy Allaire, FTX’s Samuel Bankman-Fried, Bitfury Group’s Brian Brooks, Paxos’ Charles Cascarilla, Stellar’s Denelle Dixon and Coinbase’s Alesia Jeanne Haas. The hearing, entitled “Digital Assets and the Future of Finance: Understanding the Challenges and Benefits of Financial Innovation …

Stablecoins are an integral part of the the centralized crypto sector and the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems that have sprung up over the course of the past few years because they provide the liquidity needed for traders to easily swap into different assets. They also serve as a shelter against strong downside swings like the 25% correction seen on Dec. 3. One project with a stablecoin component that has seen its price surge to a new all-time highs despite the wider market pullback is Terra (LUNA), a multi-sector blockchain protocol aimed at building a global payments system through the use …

Sber, Russia’s largest bank, is apparently struggling to obtain a regulatory approval for its digital asset issuance platform as the company continues delaying registration plans. Sber CEO Herman Gref announced Dec. 7 that the bank now expects to get its digital asset issuance platform registered with the Bank of Russia by the end of 2021, local news agency Prime reported. "We are in constant contact with the central bank, and we are discussing various issues. We really want to believe that the platform will be registered by the end of this year,” Gref said. The new comments come almost a …

According to The Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei), one of the world's largest financial newspapers and the entity behind the Nikkei 225 stock index, Japan's Financial Services Agency, or FSA, will propose legislation next year restricting stablecoin issuance to only bank and wire transfer companies. Theoretically, this would prevent entities such as Tether (USDT), which does not operate as a bank and is only regulated in the British Virgin Islands, from conducting business with Japanese customers. However, the new proposed rules would only affect some stablecoin issuers. For example, USD Coin (USDC) issuer Circle plans to become a crypto bank chartered …

On Monday, the Bank of International Settlement, or BIS, a financial institution owned by central banks worldwide, published a report scrutinizing the development of the decentralized finance, or DeFi, industry. The article opened by saying, "There is a "decentralization illusion" in DeFi since the need for governance makes some level of centralization inevitable, and structural aspects of the system lead to a concentration of power." It continued: If DeFi were to become widespread, its vulnerabilities might undermine financial stability. These can be severe because of high leverage, liquidity mismatches, built-in interconnectedness and the lack of shock absorbers such as banks.' …

Cross-chain asset transfer has been around for several years. The concept developed almost as soon as multiple blockchains were developed and began to gain adoption. In its initial application, the transfers focused on swaps between the chain’s native assets and tokens, which led later to several decentralized exchanges. While exchange of assets has its utility, pure transfer and movement of assets and other data easily across blockchains without changing their identities is just as important, and is becoming more frequent. Currently, 400,000 Bitcoin (BTC), and increasing, exist and are used in transactions outside of the Bitcoin blockchain. A good amount …

This week Ether (ETH) price came within 2% of its all-time high, and on Dec. 2 the altcoin reached its highest price in Bitcoin (BTC) terms since May 2018. Ether hitting 0.0835 in its BTC pair represents a 229% gain for 2021, but Ether bulls might come out empty-handed from this Friday’s $680 million options expiry. Notice the ascending channel formation initiated in mid-October, which likely reflects the network’s $177 billion total value locked in smart contracts (TVL). Moreover, Ether's ETH 2.0 beacon chain balance reached an 8.45 million high, which is a 4.5% increase in November. Last week, four …