Bitcoin News and Finance: What You Need to Know

PRESS RELEASE. Tidal Finance, a high-yield insurance platform, offers the ability to hedge against the failure of a DeFi protocol or asset. While reinventing the way decentralized insurance works, Tidal Finance plans to attract participation from the community through a Balancer liquidity bootstrapping pool on 25th March . The Tidal IDO on Polkastarter was oversubscribed by 500 times garnering massive support from the community. Backed by KR1, Hypersphere Ventures, Spartan Capital, Kenetic Capital, QCP Capital and AU21 Capital, Tidal Finance integrates its decentralized smart cover solutions in various protocols to protect the nascent DeFi industry from malicious threats to fuel DeFi adoption. The Tidal platform allows users to cover multiple protocols at the same time with increased capital efficiency. It also offers competitive insurance premiums to its buyers, thus attracting increased participation from DeFi users. On a Mission to Reinvent the Way Decentralized Insurance Works ...

While a number of countries are working on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), on Tuesday, the Bank of Jamaica (BoJ) announced it will soon be piloting a CBDC project. The BoJ is working with a firm called Ecurrency Mint Incorporated and plans to pilot the cryptocurrency in May. Jamaican CBDC to Pilot this May Jamaica, the island country situated in the Caribbean Sea has plans to pilot a CBDC this May as it has been working with an “extensive procurement process.” The country’s central bank, the BoJ, has chosen a technology provider to help with the CBDC solution. The startup the bank found dubbed Ecurrency Mint Incorporated stems from the BoJ’s Fintech Regulatory Sandbox. “Ecurrency Mint will also be the provider when the national CBDC roll-out begins in early 2022,” the central bank’s announcement notes. The CBDC pilot will be tested thoroughly in May and all the way until the end of December 2021. According to the central bank’s notice, the CBDC will work alongside paper ...

The South Korean crypto frenzy among the banking industry remains on fire, as another major bank is treading waters to offer banking services for crypto exchanges. The BNK Busan Bank launched a program that consists of visiting competitors’ banks that already offer it. BNK Busan Is Visting Its Competitors to Conduct the Research According to the Busan.com news outlet , the bank researches how these financial institutions deal with the crypto exchanges amid the forthcoming regulation. As the banks provide fiat services to the crypto businesses, the legislation set to promulgate on Friday will force them to use the Information Security Management System (ISMS) certification. That’s the reason why the Digital Strategy Department and the Money Laundering Prevention Department of BNK Busan Bank are making an in-depth investigation on how such a system works and then offering it in the future. Domestic crypto exchanges will be required to gather real names and social security numbers f...

National and foreign buyers acquired a “tokenized” apartment in Spain with ethereum, which involved a domestic crypto exchange and a real estate investment firm. The city of Sevilla was the scenario for the crypto deal between the parties. Transaction Was Worth Over $64,000 According to El Correo Web , the Spanish crypto exchange Criptan and the investment firm Rental IT arranged the transaction of the property, tokenized by the real estate company. The media outlet specified the tokenization — split into several tokens and digitalized through a blockchain — was done to target 32 investors from Spain, Argentina, and Mexico. With the acquisition, the buyers that disbursed their funds paying with ethereum ( ETH ) participated in the investment starting from 100 euros ($117). Afterward, Rental IT exchanged the cryptos into fiat (euros) and then purchased the property from the owner. The transaction was reportedly worth 54,773 euros ($64,430), said El Correo Web. Jorge Soriano, the co...

To capitalize on the growing popularity of blockchain trends like decentralized finance (defi), Zeitgeist will be rolling out a new native prediction platform for Polkadot to expand the scope of opportunities available for retail crypto investors. New Network to Build on Substrate and Launch Exclusively on Kusama Long before Satoshi Nakamoto unveiled the Bitcoin whitepaper that led to a flood of blockchain innovation, prediction markets were available in the form of organized betting, often on political outcomes. For centuries these markets existed, helping corral crowd-based wisdom in the form of betting odds, which remain popular to this day. The blockchain iteration of these prediction markets promotes the same idea: determining the probability of informational outcomes based on speculation. Unlike cryptocurrency trading, these markets are binary, meaning either a positive or negative outcome results from a contract between two parties. Predictions made using these systems ar...

PRESS RELEASE. AscendEX , formerly BitMax, an industry-leading digital asset trading platform built by Wall Street quant trading veterans, has announced the listing of Taraxa tokens (TARA) under the pair USDT/TARA on Mar 2 3 at 9:00 a.m. EDT. Taraxa is a public ledger platform purpose-built for audit logging of informal transactions. Taraxa provides decentralized infrastructure to track informal transactional agreements and data to help minimize the cost and risk of confusion while eliminating disputes. The Taraxa token (TARA) is used for gas, staking, and governance on the Taraxa network. The vast majority of the world’s transactions are informal, uncaptured, and unverifiable, often leading to costly confusion and unintended disputes. Taraxa leverages inline capturing and audit logging to make these transaction data more trusted and seamless. Before blockchain technology emerged, it was next to impossible to make this informal data trustworthy. Taraxa has targeted and is in th...

The iconic contemporary street artist, Shepard Fairey is getting into the non-fungible token (NFT) ecosystem with an NFT sale on the marketplace Superrare. The NFT mural called “Obey Ideal Power” created by Fairey will be auctioned on March 29, alongside a number of other artists selling NFTs like Neïl Beloufa and Petra Cortright. Street Artist and Activist Shepard Fairey Joins the NFT Ecosystem Shepard Fairey is a well known street artist, illustrator, and activist who made a name for himself with his infamous “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” stickers. Fairey also created the iconic Obey images and the company as well that leverages the same name. Back in 2008, Fairey’s art went viral when he created his Barack Obama “Hope” poster. Now the legendary artist who was featured in a film with the notorious Banksy is getting into the non-fungible token (NFT) collectibles industry. Fairey has teamed up with Verisart and the NFT marketplace Superrare in order to join a star-studded list o...

Although having a diverse workforce makes a company more profitable, the number of women in the tech industry is still increasing at a slow pace. Girls tend to opt out of the STEM career track at an early age, and women often leave the field early for any number of reasons including a lack of … Continued The post UBRI Panel: Increasing the Number of Women in Blockchain appeared first on Ripple. http://dlvr.it/RwN5Gz

Microsoft President Brad Smith says that “The world is best served when currencies are issued, backed by and regulated by governments.” He further emphasized that he is not a fan of encouraging the private sector to issue digital currencies. Microsoft’s President Says Currency Issuance Should Be Left to Governments Brad Smith, President of Microsoft Corp., talked about digital currencies on Wednesday at an online conference hosted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). He was asked, “can tech firms be trusted to issue money?” and whether it is something Microsoft would do. The executive replied, “It is not a place where we have gone and I don’t think it’s a place we will go.” He pointed out that when the social media giant Facebook proposed the cryptocurrency Libra , which is now called Diem, “We were not part of that.” Smith continued: “I think that the first question that the world needs to ask is is the world served best when private companies issue their own currency...

On Wednesday, the digital entrepreneur Kim Dotcom took to Twitter and talked an awful lot about the stark differences between bitcoin fees and bitcoin cash fees. While tagging Tesla’s Elon Musk in the thread, Dotcom explained that more than half the payments in the world are under $10 and the Bitcoin Cash network is “serving the mass market, [and] not just the 1%.” Kim Dotcom: Bitcoin Cash Serves the Mass Market On March 24, the cryptocurrency community was ecstatic to hear about Tesla accepting bitcoin ( BTC ) for payments. Following the announcement from Tesla’s Elon Musk, the founder of the now-defunct file hosting service Megaupload, Kim Dotcom took to Twitter to discuss the situation. Dotcom has recently been promoting bitcoin cash ( BCH ) a great deal, as he believes the crypto asset offers a sustainable peer-to-peer electronic cash system . Bitcoin.com’s newsdesk interviewed Dotcom in mid-January and he told us his plans to “accelerate” BCH adoption. After the interview,...

Fidelity has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). The ETF will track the price of bitcoin as measured by the performance of the Fidelity Bitcoin Index. Fidelity Seeks SEC’s Approval Launch a Bitcoin ETF FD Funds Management, a subsidiary of Fidelity, has revealed that it plans to provide financial backing for a bitcoin ETF called the Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust, CNBC reported. On Wednesday, the company filed a Form S-1, a preliminary registration statement for the fund, with the SEC. The filing explains that the Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust “is an exchange-traded fund that issues common shares” that will trade on a stock exchange, which has yet to be named, adding: The Trust’s investment objective is to seek to track the performance of bitcoin, as measured by the performance of the Fidelity Bitcoin Index PR … adjusted for the Trust’s expenses and other liabilities. The sponsor of the ETF is FD Funds Management w...

PRESS RELEASE. The Foundation for Interwallet Operability (FIO) celebrates the first year anniversary since the community launched the mainnet of the open-source FIO protocol. With over one-hundred and fifty thousand users and some of the industry’s leading service providers such as ShapeShift, Coinomi, AscendEX (formerly Bitmax), Liquid.com and Edge integrating the FIO protocol, the team are on course to ensure cryptocurrency transactions are simple, private, secure and joyful. The FIO Protocol was designed to ensure the cryptocurrency user experience is uncomplicated and lays the foundation for cryptocurrency mass adoption. Long complex addresses have been replaced with user-customized FIO Addresses such as “user@fio” that enable decentralized sending, receiving and payment requests (invoices, order carts, etc.), as well as, cross-chain end-to-end encrypted metadata (the information for those invoices, order carts, etc.) that can work across all blockchains. Luke Stokes, Mana...

Roughly 28 months ago, the decentralized exchange (dex) Uniswap version one (v1) was released and then in May 2020, version two was launched with new features. The dex is by far the largest decentralized trading platform among its competitors, as the exchange swapped $7.1 billion during the last seven days. On March 23, Uniswap launched version three, which features new elements like concentrated liquidity, advanced oracles, and multiple fee tiers. Developers Reveal Uniswap v3 When the cryptocurrency space was still young back in the early days, decentralized trading platforms were merely a vision. When a few did arrive many dex platforms struggled with the problem of providing enough liquidity. All of that has changed since the introduction of Uniswap , the decentralized finance (defi) protocol that provides users with automated onchain transactions between multiple parties. Uniswap has been the largest dex and automated market maker (AMM) for quite some time in terms of trade volu...