Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko announced the Shapella (Shanghai/Capella) upgrade is scheduled for Feb. 28. The Shapella network upgrade will activate on the Sepolia network at epoch 56832. Shanghai and Capella are the names of the upcoming Ethereum hard fork. Shanghai is the name of the fork on the execution client side, and Capella is the upgrade name on the…
The Bank of Japan is preparing to launch a pilot test for a digital yen, its central bank digital currency (CBDC), later this year. Shinichi Uchida, executive director of the Bank of Japan, explained that the goals of this new pilot are to test the technical feasibility of the currency and to include private businesses in its design process. Bank…
Cardano is a proof-of-stake (PoS) platform launched in September 2017 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. In September 2021, Cardano added support for smart contracts, which paved the way for developing decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) applications. NFTs landed on Cardano’s blockchain in 2022, with Cardano’s native cryptocurrency ADA (ADA) utilized to buy and sell them. The deployment of…
Payments giant PayPal and investment management firm Galaxy joined hands to raise $20 million in seed funding for Chaos Labs, a New York-based cloud platform for securing blockchains and protocols. Chaos Labs protects crypto protocols against external exploits and risks with an automated risk management platform. The platform does this by offering agent- and scenario-based simulations, which in turn, helps…
The United States Congress needs to take control of crypto legislation to make it a more “open process” where the entire marketplace is looked over “comprehensively,” suggests the chief of the prominent U.S. crypto industry body. In a Feb. 22 Bloomberg interview, Blockchain Association CEO Kristin Smith said the industry needs U.S. lawmakers to lead crypto legislation despite it making…
The Lebanese pound’s fall to its lowest ever versus the U.S. dollar, 80,000 to 1, has piled more misery on residents whose local currency-denominated savings have been decimated by inflation. The ongoing strike by banks demanding the passage of capital control legislation has compounded matters for residents. Lebanese Pound Devaluation According to several local media reports, Lebanon’s currency recently plunged…
The co-founder of the social media website Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, reportedly bought 50,000 Ether (ETH) for just $15,000 during the cryptocurrency’s presale in 2014, a cost of just 30 cents per coin. Ohanian, who left the social media giant in 2020, told Forbes in a Feb. 21 article that he found the idea of a decentralized store of value to…
The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)-operated golf startup, LinksDAO, may soon put in an offer to purchase the newly marketed Spey Bay Golf Club in Scotland worth about $900,000. LinksDAO — self-described as a “global group of golf enthusiasts” that is on a mission to build the “world’s greatest golf community” — officially opened the proposal vote on Feb. 20, which…
A self-confessed crypto trading addict and father of two is facing the dire prospect of losing his family forever after secretly racking up $180,000 in debt from his crypto trading habits. Posting his story on the r/relationship advice subreddit on Feb. 21, Reddit user “Leather_Opposite2135” said he started dabbling in cryptocurrency trading around 2021. Fast forward two years to the…
Attorneys working on behalf of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried have agreed to pay for a security expert to assist the federal judge overseeing his fraud case in navigating modern encryption technology to aid in possibly modifying Bankman-Fried’s bail terms. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers Christian Everdell and Mark Cohen sent a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan on Feb. 21 agreeing with his…
