In recent months, Russian legislators have been preparing measures to fully institutionalize crypto as a properly taxable investment asset and a possible tool for foreign trade in Russia. Now, they want to make clear that the upcoming regulatory turn won’t include any windows for adopting digital financial products as a payment method. On Tuesday, June 7, Anatoliy Aksakov, the head…
The National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) has said it does not recognize cryptocurrencies as a legitimate method of payment and that residents must avoid using them. The bank insists the local birr currency is the only lawful means of settling transactions in Ethiopia. Illegal Transactions The Ethiopian central bank has warned citizens against engaging in “illegal” cryptocurrency transactions, a report…
The total trading volume of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) went from $200 million in 2020 to over $12 billion in the first quarter of 2022. For that value to be sustainable, there needs to be more to NFTs than just market hype and FOMO. It’s still very early days as far as discovering real-world use cases for NFTs goes. But the…
Osmosis, a decentralized exchange built using CosmosSDK, has been exploited, draining its liquidity pools for approximately $5 million. Developers have halted the Osmosis blockchain to prevent further damage. The decentralized exchange was stopped at roughly 10:49 pm EST today at a block height of 4,713,064, according to an announcement from Mintscan, an Osmosis block explorer. The exploit happened just two…
Major cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea have delisted Litecoin (LTC) weeks after flagging its privacy-focused MimbleWimble (MWEB) upgrade. In a public announcement on Wednesday, Upbit cited the Act on the Reporting and Use of Specific Financial Transaction Information, which prohibits anonymous transactions as the key reason for ending support for LTC. The delisting comes in the light of the much-awaited…
The price of LINK, the token underpinning the decentralized oracle network Chainlink, has soared to a daily high of $8.86 on Wednesday, a level last seen on May 10. Though a minor correction has brought LINK to $8.41 by press time, it still represents a solid increase of 10.42% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. This also makes…
An International Monetary Fund (IMF) study on energy consumption revealed the importance of design choices within the crypto ecosystem to build an environmentally friendly mainstream payment system. In the study entitled “Digital Currencies and Energy Consumption,” the IMF examined the energy consumption of crypto assets based on their distinct design elements to evaluate the ideal mechanism for developing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Estimates of…
Custodia, the crypto bank founded by former Morgan Stanley managing director Caitlin Long, today sued the Federal Reserve for what it claims has been a “patently unlawful delay” in reviewing the bank’s application for a master account. Custodia, formerly known as Avanti, is one of a select number of businesses permitted under a Wyoming law to become Special Purpose Depository…
John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, one of the leading real-time 3D engine providers, has predicted that the internet will become part of the metaverse in the next several years. The executive predicted that most websites will become metaverse destinations and that this change will be mostly completed by the year 2030. However, legacy sites will still be around at the…
Australian crypto exchange Swyftx wants to eventually offer seamless trading between traditional and crypto-asset classes, with its first step being the completion of its $1.5 billion merger deal with online investing platform Superhero. The deal to combine the two was revealed on June 8, with the merged entity set to become the first in Australia to offer both decentralized and…
