Eco, a fintech wallet app built atop crypto has announced a significant pivot. Although the Eco app is currently a custodial solution, the company is moving toward self-custody—thereby putting the spotlight on its second product, the non-custodial Beam wallet. “Building custodial crypto products just doesn’t make any sense,” Andy Bromberg, CEO of Eco and Beam, told Decrypt, so they are…
Apple and Goldman Sachs scrapped plans to launch an app for futures trading, CNBC reported on Sept. 19, citing people familiar with the plans. The project had an initial rollout date for 2022, but it was put on hold last year as economic conditions deteriorated, with a rise in interest rates and inflation pressures driving investors away from risky assets.…
Shrapnel’s Head of Studio Don Norbury shares his perspective on the “tumultuous” video games industry and the Unity fee news that’s upset developers with Decrypt’s Kate Irwin. Source: https://decrypt.co/videos/interviews/F09XirN4/shrapnel-studio-head-talks-unity-fees-and-game-industry-challenges
During its annual Devices event, Amazon showcased its latest products and features that bring artificial intelligence into the Amazon ecosystem and for smart home devices, including new Amazon Echo, frame glasses, and Fire tablets that integrate Amazon’s Alexa chatbot. While the concept of artificial intelligence has been around for decades, Generative AI—technology that uses prompts to make an AI produce…
Debate in the United States House Financial Services Committee during the markup of the CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act on Sept. 20 occasionally wandered beyond strictly financial and technical issues. Star Wars and anarchists were mentioned in the discussion at various points, as were crypto bros. Beneath the rhetoric, the value of research, U.S. citizens’ privacy and the role of government…
PayPal today announced that Venmo users will soon be able to buy the payment platform’s stablecoin. The company said in a Wednesday statement that Venmo “select users” can already buy PayPal USD (PYUSD), with the option being available to all users “in the coming weeks.” PYUSD is an Ethereum-based, dollar-pegged stablecoin, backed by cash equivalents and short-term treasuries. PayPal launched…
The payments platform said PayPal USD will be “rolling out fully in the coming weeks” after announcing its launch on Venmo. Source: https://cointelegraph.com/public/index.php/news/paypal-rolls-out-pyusd-stablecoin-venmo
A group of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols have teamed up to solve liquidity problems in the Cosmos ecosystem. The teams involved include cross-chain bridging protocol Wormhole, liquidity aggregator Swing, lending protocol Tashi, and Cosmos network Evmos. According to statements from two of the teams involved, Wormhole will register five new bridged tokens for use on Evmos: Tether (USDT), USD Coin…
A streaming platform and marketplace specifically focused on music created with AI tools, called Musixy.ai, is set to launch with an aim to bring legitimacy to the burgeoning—but divisive—scene. The service will let creators to upload their own AI-generated tracks to the platform, while the company behind it has also worked with producers to create their own songs. Early samplings…
In this week’s newsletter, read about how marketplace Magic Eden integrated compressed nonfungible tokens (NFTs) into its platform and how Meta launched its metaverse game on mobile and web. Check out why the Bitcoin Ordinals creator proposes changing the protocol’s numbering system and learn about Atari founder Nolan Bushnell’s perspectives on play-to-earn gaming. In other news, the United States Securities…
