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Brave and Binance Partner to Bring Cryptocurrency Trading Directly Into the Browser
Binance widget integrated into the Brave browser puts
cryptocurrency management and trading at users’ fingertips
in first exchange-browser integration of its kind
San Francisco – March 24, 2020 – Brave Software, makers of the innovative Brave browser which combines privacy with a blockchain-based digital advertising platform, and Binance, the global blockchain company behind the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume and users, today announced a partnership that enables Brave browser users to seamlessly trade cryptocurrency assets through Binance.
https://brave.com/binance/
Cool...
Interesting. Payments is not currently a feature of the Brave browser or search engine. That would be a new project?
Tendermint Launches $20M Venture Fund to Boost Development Across Cosmos
Tendermint says the fund will be the largest investment vehicle for the Cosmos ecosystem.
https://www.coindesk.com/tendermint-launches-20m-venture-fund-to-boost-development-across-cosmos
Introduction to Cosmos Network and Its ATOM Token
The guide provides an explanation of the Cosmos network that aims to solve the typical scalability issues, provide a marketplace for the outstanding number of networks in the space, and lay down a more beneficial protocol for the community with a unique and scalable network for blockchains.
Cosmos (ATOM) is a multi-asset distributed ledger. It could be best described as a network of many blockchains, each working independently with the Tendermint Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) algorithm.
The Cosmos whitepaper dates back to 2016, but the protocol was first developed in 2014, when Tendermint, a core contributor to the network was founded. Since then, the main objective of Cosmos is to create solutions for problems such as scalability, usability, and sovereignty in the DeFi space. The ultimate goal of the protocol is to develop an Internet of Blockchains, a network of blockchains able to communicate with each other in a decentralized way.
Read a lot more:
https://www.coinspeaker.com/guides/introduction-cosmos-network-atom-token/
Cosmos Investors Vote to Approve Inter-Blockchain Communication
The long-awaited vision of the Cosmos blockchain has now been realized, as holders of the ATOM token have voted through inter-blockchain communication (IBC), enabling assets to transfer easily between blockchains.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cosmos-investors-vote-approve-inter-084835755.html
The Internet of Blockchains Is Now Live on Cosmos
https://cryptobriefing.com/the-internet-blockchains-is-now-live-cosmos/
NFT developers say cryptocurrencies must tackle their carbon emissions
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have risen in popularity in recent weeks as a way to sell artwork using blockchains, the technology behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Now, two of the developers behind the NFTs at the root of the current digital art boom have warned that they are is damaging to the environment and that a change in direction is needed.
An NFT is a cryptographic claim of ownership, similar to the deed to a house, that is encoded into a blockchain, meaning that it cannot be altered.
William Entriken, one of the authors of the NFT protocol for Ethereum, a popular alternative to bitcoin, says NFTs aren’t inherently bad, but that rapacious speculation is pushing them and cryptocurrencies down a destructive path as their carbon footprints rise.
Most cryptocurrencies rely on “proof of work” to secure their networks, meaning that computers must perform huge numbers of calculations to “mine” new currency and verify transactions on the blockchain. This uses large amounts of electricity – bitcoin’s annual power consumption is comparable to that of Finland.[/b]
Investing money into cryptocurrencies – either through simple speculation or by purchasing expensive artwork – boosts demand and therefore prices, says Entriken. That makes mining that cryptocurrency more profitable, but also more difficult, increasing carbon emissions.
Entriken contrasts cryptocurrencies with carbon offsetting, in which people pay to have carbon emissions removed from the atmosphere. “Bitcoin is the opposite of that. When you purchase bitcoin you’re purchasing carbon creation credits,” says Entriken. “When you purchase the $50,000 [of bitcoin] somebody else is directly putting that much carbon into the atmosphere. Ethereum is the same.”
He has called for Ethereum to switch from a proof of work (PoW) approach to a proof of stake (PoS) approach, which would remove the need for intense calculations by allowing the owners of existing coins to control the network, rather than the owners of the computing power. It is estimated this could cut the total energy demands of Ethereum by 99 per cent. “You have to switch to proof of stake. Proof of work should be illegal,” says Entriken.
Ethereum developers have been working to make the switch for some time, but no single person or organization is in charge of the open source project, meaning progress has been sporadic, says Entriken. “It’s always been three months away. These things don’t just happen immediately.”
“The carbon footprint of proof of work blockchains deserves all of the criticism it gets and more,” says Dieter Shirley, who also worked on the Ethereum NFT protocol. “But NFTs are not the problem here. Now that we have electric cars, we can say that cars aren’t the problem, gasoline is the problem. Same with proof of stake: now that we have PoS blockchains, we can say that NFTs aren’t the problem, PoW chains are.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2272687-nft-developers-say-cryptocurrencies-must-tackle-their-carbon-emissions/
I particularly find bitcoin a [img]dinosaur of digital commodities.
"The Bitcoin universe has expanded far beyond the cypherpunk world, mainly because it has become more of a speculative asset than a medium of exchange."
It's the first digital asset (not the best) that's been improved upon many times over with other actually useful cryptocurrency. It's speculation will fade as investors become familiar with crypto currencies and their true usefulness. The bitcoin glamour will fade away with knowledge based investing versus "celebrity popular" investing.
Basic Attention Token Responds To A Problem Of The Future
There is nothing wrong with advertising as such. Where the problem lies is when Web giants come to monitor and analyze user behavior to deliver increasingly targeted and intrusive ads.
Is there a solution to this problem that is of increasing concern to more and more users? Yes, it is named Brave Browser, a new browser launched by Brendan Eich, the father of the JavaScript programming language, and its Basic Attention Token (BAT).
Behind the creation of the Basic Attention Token model, Brendan Eich wanted to highlight the following points:
Use of a web browser to control your ads.
Fair distribution of advertising revenues among advertisers, publishers and users.
Creation of a transparent and efficient digital advertising market.
Move from a quantitative to a qualitative advertising model: fewer ads but better quality ads.
Advertisers receive better data on their highlighted products.
A Blockchain-based payment system with the Basic Attention Token (BAT) at the centre of the system.
Prevention of the manipulation of the number of clicks by robots.
Avoid the misuse of users’ personal and mobile data by trackers when displaying advertisements.
I loaded some more BAT this morning. In a few years, this'll definitely will be Google's replacement. Faster browser, no pop-up ads, privacy, and with a search engine. All of Googles features are being replicated without the monitoring and selling of user's history. No more tech tyranny and censorship.
Brave has undergone extraordinary growth after the monthly active users have surged by over 450% since 2018.
Taking a look at the data from TokenInsight above we can see that the monthly active users have grown month on month, starting from 1 million per month in January 2018 and had recently reached a total of 5.5 million active users in January 2019. Adding further to this statistic, in March 2019 the Brave browser had reached over 20 million downloads on the Google Play store.
What we already knew:
Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google Search and Google Chrome on both mobile and desktop
Brave Search is coming just as millions are migrating from Big Tech platforms to more private and secure solutions
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brave-acquires-search-engine-to-offer-the-first-private-alternative-to-google-search-and-google-chrome-on-both-mobile-and-desktop-301239565.html
"...Chainlink is one of DeFi tokens that continues to attract interest from investors, and according to the latest news, Grayscale, the world’s largest crypto investment platform, recently added Chainlink to its large-cap assets. The Grayscale investment Trust has become a major investment hub for institutional investors, while Grayscale LINK Trust will be available for investors on the platform.
This makes Chainlink the first DeFi token to be listed on Grayscale, and it is important to mention that Grayscale currently has $43 billion in assets under management..."
https://invezz.com/news/2021/03/26/up-or-down-chainlink-link-price-prediction-for-april/
Good buy at this price..Good luck.
DeFi and the Future of Finance
(Actually published by Harvard Law School....believe it or no)
DeFi and the Future of Finance
Banks, Blockchain, Capital formation, Cryptocurrency, Equity offerings, Financial institutions, Financial regulation, Financial technology
More from: Ashwin Ramachandran, Campbell Harvey, Joey Santoro
Campbell R. Harvey is Professor of Finance at Duke University Fuqua School of Business; Ashwin Ramachandran is an independent researcher; and Joey Santoro is founder of Fei Protocol. This post is based on their recent paper.
While the popular media focuses on Bitcoin reaching record highs, there is something else happening in the crypto space that is largely under the radar screen. It is called DeFi or Decentralized Finance, and we examine its structure, opportunities and risks in our recent paper, DeFi and the Future of Finance.
Consider the state of our financial system. Around the world, 1.7 billion are unbanked. Small businesses, even those with a banking relationship, often must rely on high-cost financing, such as credit cards, because traditional banking excludes them. High costs also impact retailers who lose 3% on every credit card sales transaction. These total costs for small businesses are enormous by any metric. The result is less investment and decreased economic growth.
Decentralized finance, or DeFi, poses a challenge to the current system and offers a number of potential solutions to the problems inherent in the traditional financial infrastructure. While there are many fintech initiatives, we argue that the ones that embrace the current banking infrastructure are likely to be fleeting. We argue those initiatives that use decentralized methods—in particular blockchain technology—have the best chance to define the future of finance.
Decentralized finance is a peer to peer system that is not controlled by any centralized institution, like a bank. There is no bricks and mortar, no charge backs and no loan interviews. You deal with your peers algorithmically in a secure environment enabled with blockchain technology. Cutting out the centralized institutions greatly reduces costs making loans more affordable and increasing deposit rates. Transactions are instant and secure. Further, everyone is treated the same essentially democratizing finance and reducing the inequality of opportunity that plagues current systems.
Indeed, we have come full circle. The earliest form of market exchange was peer to peer, also known as barter. Barter was highly inefficient because supply and demand had to be exactly matched between peers. To solve the matching problem, money was introduced as a medium of exchange and store of value. Initial types of money were not centralized. Agents accepted any number of items such as stones or shells in exchange for goods. Eventually, specie money emerged, a form in which the currency had tangible value. Today, we have non-collateralized (fiat) currency controlled by central banks. Whereas the form of money has changed over time, the basic infrastructure of financial institutions has not changed.
If loan rates are high because of legacy costs, high-quality investment projects may be foregone. An entrepreneur’s high-quality idea may target a 20% rate of return and this is precisely the type of project that accelerates economic growth. If the bank tells the entrepreneur to borrow money on her credit card at 24% per year, this profitable project may never be pursued.
These legacy problems perpetuate and/or exacerbate inequality. Most (across the political spectrum) agree there should be equality of opportunity: a project should be financed based on the quality of the idea and the soundness of the execution plan, and not by other factors. Importantly, inequality also limits growth when good ideas are not financed.
These implications are far-reaching and, by any calculus, there is a long list of serious problems that are endemic to our current system of centralized finance. While we are in the digital era, our financial infrastructure has failed to respond. Have you tried to send a wire transfer recently? The technology is no different from 20-years ago.
DeFi offers solution to five key problems—centralized control, limited access, inefficiency, lack of interoperability, and opacity—that arise from the current system of centralized finance. Decentralized finance offers new opportunities. The technology is nascent but the upside is promising.
DeFi seeks to build and combine open-source financial building blocks into sophisticated products with minimized friction and maximized value to users. Because it costs no more at an organization level to provide services to a customer with $100 or $100 million in assets, DeFi proponents believe that all meaningful financial infrastructure will be replaced by smart contracts that can provide more value to a larger group of users.
Our research focuses of the building blocks of decentralized finance. We introduce new concepts such as flash loans, flash swaps, automated market makers, decentralized exchanges, decentralized governance, and initial DeFi offerings. We explore the emerging initiatives in this space and take deep dives on: Uniswap, MakerDAO, Compound, Aave, Yield protocol, dYdX, and Synthetix.
We are careful to balance the opportunities with the risks. Our research explores the major risk factors that DeFi will face over the next few years. We conclude by looking to the future and attempt to identify the winners and losers.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/01/14/defi-and-the-future-of-finance/
The complete paper is available for download here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3711777
Correct. Many who only have experience trading stocks, who don't understand blockchain and cryptos, will fade away. No doubt.
They need to understand how DeFi is going to replace banks, financial borrowing/loans, contracts, payments between businesses, insurance, real estate mortgages, funds transfer domestic and globally, etc.
This is too much change for some legacy trained individuals that wasted their time in college majoring in legacy finance instead of understanding blockchain and cryptocurrency. That's the colleges that are behind and waste tuition fees on legacy teaching.
For anybody today, investors and those that want to understand the future of finance for their own sake, need to know what DeFi is. It's as necessary as understanding, in the past, of what a bank does and how to write a check.
I feel sorry for those that think they don't have to learn about Defi. They'll be taken advantage of as the rest of us move around them at high speed.
Chainlink Integration Connects Filecoin to Smart Contract-Enabled Blockchains
The integration will enable connection between Filecoin and Ethereum and other smart contract-enabled blockchains.
https://www.coindesk.com/filecoin-chainlink-integration-smart-contract-enabled-blockchains
This is your Federal Reserve "leader".
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is about a decade behind the rest of us. He hasn't heard of defi (smart contracts) replacing centralized financial contracts yet. Nor has he heard of blockchain payments, loans, etc. (Typical of the government .....always attracting the uninformed).
Powell calls cryptocurrencies ‘not really useful stores of value’ and says Fed will move slowly
I would venture to say the Federal Reserve Chairman is the "not very useful".
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/22/cryptocurrencies-are-not-useful-stores-of-value-says-feds-powell.html
This why all the cryptos are retracting:
BITCOIN DROPS AFTER POWELL POURS COLD WATER ON INFLATION EXPECTATIONS
https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-drops-after-powell-pours-cold-water-on-inflation-expectations/
This why all the cryptos are retracting:
BITCOIN DROPS AFTER POWELL POURS COLD WATER ON INFLATION EXPECTATIONS
https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-drops-after-powell-pours-cold-water-on-inflation-expectations/
Proving Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is about a decade behind the rest of us. He hasn't heard of defi replacing financial contracts? (Typical of the government .....always attracting the uninformed).
Powell calls cryptocurrencies ‘not really useful stores of value’ and says Fed will move slowly
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/22/cryptocurrencies-are-not-useful-stores-of-value-says-feds-powell.html
Yes...the entire crypto market is down....I've been taking advantage of the sale....
Awesome article...thanks.
Sourcing Chainlink price data for more reliable payment collateralization
Announcing Flexa’s adoption of Chainlink Price Feeds, to make digital asset payments even more trustworthy and secure.
https://medium.com/flexa/sourcing-chainlink-price-data-for-more-reliable-payment-collateralization-ec035e29c45a
Chainlink Reserves on Crypto Exchanges Drop to 14.6% of Total Supply
- Chainlink reserves on crypto exchanges have dropped to 14.6% of the total supply
- Chainlink’s network has continued to grow for a third straight month
$29 continues to act as a strong support for Chainlink
- However, an unstable Bitcoin might throw cold water on the fact that Grayscale opened a LINK trust
https://en.ethereumworldnews.com/chainlink-reserves-on-crypto-exchanges-drop-to-14-6-of-total-supply/
Basic Attention Token (BAT) — Milestones and Achievements
IN BRIEF
The native Basic Attention Token (BAT) of the Brave Browser has reached a new all-time high.
Brave introduced BAT to compensate users for looking at ads, and to reward content creators.
A series of integrations has positioned Brave to be the standard internet browser for a new generation of crypto "hodlers."
https://beincrypto.com/basic-attention-token-bat-milestones-and-achievements/
They will. It'll take a while for Brave to get better known. When it does, it'll rule. It's faster, private, no pop up ads or 3rd party cookies.
There's not even a competition. Brave is better hands down.
What Is Brave Search?
" ... Brave Search is an upcoming search engine provided by Brave Software Inc, the Brave web browser developers. This new venture is expected to launch in 2021 and is based upon an open-source engine called Tailcat, developed by the team behind the privacy-centric browser, Cliqz. According to the company, Brave Search will be the default provider on its browser and available to all internet users across any browser.
Like the Brave browser, Brave Search will be a privacy-focused alternative to Google search or Microsoft's Bing. The company has the ambition to create a multi-platform private browser and privacy-focused search alternative to the Big Tech providers. Despite the dominance of social media sites and apps, most people still primarily interact with the internet through search, so this development adds to Brave's overall ecosystem of services...."
https://www.makeuseof.com/brave-search-what-to-expect/