A production company called Optimist has raised 1035.96 ETH for a documentary about the development of Ethereum; at the moment, that’s nearly $1.9 million. According to the filmmakers, “Ethereum: The Infinite Garden” will feature interviews with Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, as well as Aya Miyaguchi, who runs the Ethereum Foundation. The film was funded via NFTs on the crypto-backed blogging platform Mirror. It’s a variation on the “tiered” rewards model popularized by sites like Kickstarter and Patreon: the more you donate, the greater your reward when the movie eventually comes out. In this case, the rewards are crypto collectibles of different rarities—animations by the crypto-friendly digital artist Pplpleasr, with sound by the ambient musician Past Palms. Backers also get 1,000 $INFINITE tokens for every 1 ETH… [Read More...]

Decentralized finance giant Aave will launch an alternative to Twitter using Ethereum this year, the protocol’s founder told Decrypt.  Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of DeFi lending protocol Aave, said that users will be able to monetize the content they post and govern the rules of the network. “We believe that content creators should own their audiences in a permissionless fashion, where anyone can build new user experiences by using the same on-chain social graph and data,” he said.  Social media is entirely different from Aave’s main product, which lets users lend or borrow cryptocurrency via smart contracts—automatic computer code. Aave is the largest DeFi protocol in terms of the amount of money running through its system—which currently stands at $10.92 billion, according to DeFi… [Read More...]

Singapore-based derivatives exchange Bybit today announced the launch of a new spot trading feature. The exchange, which in the past week alone has tallied $33 billion in trading volume, said that the feature would come with zero maker fees—typically charged when an order isn’t immediately picked up by a buyer or seller.  Bybit is one of the world’s largest derivatives exchanges in terms of trade volume, according to Nomics data. A derivatives exchange allows users to trade contracts on crypto assets rather than the assets themselves. With futures, for instance, people trade a contract that obliges them to buy or sell a cryptocurrency at a later date.  A crypto spot trade, by contrast, is when traders can buy and sell an asset such as Bitcoin. With… [Read More...]

Testifying today before the House of Representatives, Fed chairman Jerome Powell said stablecoins should be subject to stricter regulation, and treated like bank deposits or money market funds. A stablecoin is a kind of cryptocurrency that’s pegged to the price of a physical currency, typically the US dollar. The idea is that the peg keeps the price of the coin “stable,” granting traders some of the flexibility and transparency of crypto without the volatility. Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH) asked Powell specifically about Tether—now the most valuable stablecoin, and the one that’s faced the most scrutiny over the business practices of its backing company. While Tether once claimed that each of its coins was backed by a real dollar, sitting in a bank somewhere, it’s since… [Read More...]

Americans are paying higher prices for cars, gas and electricity, and even food. That’s right: inflation is up again, with goods and services now costing 5.4% more overall than they did a year ago, per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI). It’s the highest inflation increase since August 2008, a time shortly before Bitcoin—a deflationary asset—was introduced. Yet as dollar inflation tracks upwards, Bitcoin’s price is headed down. The coin, heralded as a store of value, has lost 15% of its value in the last month.  Bitcoin: Inflation Hedge or Not? So what’s going on? The shrinking buying power of the dollar should, in theory, play into Bitcoin’s hands. After all, Bitcoin is supposed to be a store… [Read More...]

The United States Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is upping its focus on cryptocurrency. Michele Korver, who previously worked for the Department of Justice, will be FinCEN’s first Chief Digital Currency Advisor, the government agency said today in a statement. Korver will work to prevent “illicit financial practices and exploitation,” according to FinCEN, which has proposed new rules that would allow closer monitoring of cryptocurrency transfers.  “Michele brings a wealth of digital currency expertise, and will be a tremendous leader in coordinated efforts to maximize FinCEN’s contribution to the innovative potential for financial expansion of opportunity while minimizing illicit finance risk,” FinCEN’s acting director Michael Mosier said. Korver was previously the digital currency counsel in the DoJ’s money laundering and asset recovery section. There… [Read More...]