All eyes are on Bitcoin (BTC), with the largest cryptocurrency shooting up past $40,000 on Monday. Unsurprisingly, the price increase happened shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the electric-car company would potentially accept BTC payments once more miners confirm green energy initiatives. Yet, while Musk’s tweet may have driven the price of Bitcoin up, some industry experts believe that Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency that should be leveraged. For example, during an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph at Bitcoin 2021 in Miami, Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of Avanti Financial, said that unlike other cryptocurrencies, solvency matters more than …

Cryptocurrency asset managers Pantera Capital and Arrington XRP Capital have co-led a $5.8 million private investment round for Unbound Finance, an up-and-coming DeFi treasury protocol for pooled tokens. The funds will be used to further develop Unbound Finance’s cross-chain stablecoin platform, including the development of native bridges for instant transfers between its native UNB stablecoin and other synthetic assets, the company announced Wednesday. Unbound Finance operates a so-called “liquidation-free collateralization platform,” which, as the name suggests, allows users to obtain interest-free loans against collateralized tokens. Automated market makers are “DeFi's Zero to One Innovation and we are building the aggregator …

There has been much commotion about stablecoins among central bankers, regulators and lawmakers in recent years, most notably in the furor surrounding Facebook’s repeated attempts to launch variously designed stablecoins that would be native to its multiple social media platforms. Not everyone in the financial world is that perturbed though. A new speech for the Westminster eForum Policy Conference by Christina Segal-Knowles, executive director of the Bank of England's Financial Market Infrastructure Directorate, is titled “What’s Old is New Again” and aims to tone down some of the excitement and agitation surrounding the issue. Restricting her focus to stablecoins that …

A new release from a foundational DeFi protocol seeks to combine two popular asset swap models into a hybrid that may reshape the nature of the automated market maker (AMM) space — a DeFi primitive currently accounting for well over $40 billion in total value locked, per DeFiLlama. Earlier today Curve Finance announced the launch of a new “algorithm for exchanging volatile assets.” Curve’s base functionality is designed to enable low-slippage swaps between similar assets, such as one type of stablecoin to another — USDC to DAI, etc — by concentrating liquidity on a bonding curve weighted towards a particular …

The Bank of England is continuing to devote significant resources to researching digital money in both private and public forms. With an eye on both the domestic and international context, the central bank’s latest discussion paper, published June 7, outlines the role and possible developments of both in the ongoing evolution of money. Commenting on the paper’s publication, BoE governor Andrew Bailey said that “the prospect of stablecoins as a means of payment and the emerging propositions of CBDC have generated a host of issues that central banks, governments, and society as a whole, need to carefully consider and address. …

Challenges stimulate progress. Technology, pretty much like life itself, cannot be static. Only dynamics stimulate positive changes. Amid the collapse of the cryptocurrency market in mid-May, many retail and institutional investors began to lose faith in the bright future of cryptocurrencies in general and Bitcoin (BTC) in particular. Corporations and institutions, whales, and early adopters converged in a single impulse — the internet was overwhelmed by a wave of mistrust towards “cryptocurrency number one” as the best defensive asset, superior to gold and everything else that had been invented prior. One needs to see the full picture here to realize …

Welcome to Cointelegraph Market’s Altcoin Roundup, an in-depth newsletter that focuses on investing from the perspective of fundamental analysis and seeks to identify emerging blockchain projects and tokens that fill niche demands within the growing cryptocurrency market. The concept of multi-sector investing has long been advocated in traditional finance as the conventional approach to building a balanced portfolio. Typical allocations include representation of stocks, government and corporate bonds, commodities and real estate. Now that the cryptocurrency market has grown to a multitrillion-dollar ecosystem with numerous emerging assets, clear sectors are beginning to emerge. Savvy crypto investors looking to apply portfolio …

The European Central Bank has warned that a CBDC or digital euro may be required to head off the spectre of “artificial currencies” dominating cross-border payments. In ECB’s annual review of the euro dubbed “The international role of the euro”, economists Massimo Ferrari and Arnaud Mehl conveyed concerns over the rise of artificial currencies led by unnamed “foreign tech giants” — likely a veiled reference to Facebook’s Diem project: “One concern could be a situation in which domestic and cross-border payments are dominated by non-domestic providers, including foreign tech giants potentially offering artificial currencies in the future.” “Not only could …

Crypto companies have been on the rise in tandem with the industry’s growth in recent years. A report from Forbes recently detailed a number of large investments into blockchain and digital asset entities, with one $440 million play rising to the forefront. “Circle, creator of the second-largest stablecoin, USDC, has just raised $440 million in private investment from an array of private equity, institutional and strategic investors,” Forbes wrote on Friday. Circle inked the deal on Friday, capturing investment from Fidelity Management and Research company, FTX, and others. The article recapped the details around the top-12 most sizable monetary contributions …

Stablecoin issuing platform ICHI has launched a Decentralized Monetary Authority, or DMA, that enables cryptocurrency networks to more easily mint their own stablecoins securely. By utilizing ICHI’s DMA, cryptocurrency communities can create and govern their own fully-collateralized stablecoins and set their value at exactly $1. ICHI’s developers say their platform solves the myriad of challenges associated with existing stablecoins, including the need to sell other cryptocurrencies to mint more tokens. This problem is akin to selling a stock, which simultaneously decreases the value of that stock. ICHI’s platform seeks to provide the benefits of fiat-backed coins like USDC and USDT …

The decentralized finance (DeFi) sector faced its first real challenge during last week’s market sell-off that saw more than $1 trillion wiped from the global cryptocurrency market cap as traders feverishly ran for the safety of stablecoins amid tumbling prices. Despite rapidly declining token prices, the nascent DeFi sector held its own as decentralized exchanges experienced a record $11.7 billion in trading volume on May 19. Uniswap (UNI) led with $5.7 billion in volume, followed by SushiSwap (SUSHI) which saw $2.8 billion in 24-hour trading volume. According to the recent DeFi Uncovered report from Glassnode, blue-chip DeFi tokens including, UNI, …

The Fed’s governor has argued that The United States must be at the forefront of developing a central bank-issued digital currency, or CBDC, to bolster the role of the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency. In a May 24 announcement, Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard asserted that leading CBDC projects could have a “significant effect” on the global financial system, urging the U.S. to ensure it plays a leading role in the burgeoning CBDC ecosystem: “Given the potential for CBDCs to gain prominence in cross-border payments and the reserve currency role of the dollar, it is vital for the …