Category: TRENDS IN CRYPTOS

After legalizing Bitcoin as legal tender last September, El Salvador, under self-described “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele, has become an experiment in  Bitcoin’s power to play a role in national economics, perhaps opening new venues for borrowing and using profits from Bitcoin mining to fund new social spending. Bukele’s government has spent $180 million setting...

CANADA AND U.S. CRACKDOWNS DRAWING CRYPTO RESPONSE. Government attempts in Canada to strangle fundraising for the trucker’s Freedom Convoy has caught the attention of the crypto world, along with anyone holding money in banks. It’s now a fact of life in the faux democracies of the West that governments will smear virtually any protest or...

Blockchains need to work together in order for end users to have the kinds of utility that take the sector to the next step. If a crypto asset or Non-Fungible Token can’t be easily and cost effectively routed or transferred to exploit desired services, that’s a problem. Developers are working on expanding the interoperability of...

NY BITLICENSE IS DRIVING CRYPTO INNOVATION AWAY. It’s no secret that New York currently has the worst regulatory atmosphere for cryptos of any state in the union. This past week influential investor Bill Ackman took to Twitter to implore NYC Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul to try to do something about it. Ackman...

Binance, the international crypto exchange, plans to invest $200 million in Forbes  as the century-old business magazine lays plans to go public through a deal with Magnum Opus Acquisition Ltd., a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC). Forbes is seeking $400 million in a private placement as part of its entry into the stock market, which is...

In a Congressional hearing on 9 Wednesday, Rostin Behnam, chair of the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), asked Congress to grant his agency the authority to regulate cash markets in cryptocurrencies. The CFTC already regulates derivatives markets. “My responsibility is to assume that [crypto] will continue to take root and emerge and wind itself...

Private equity firms Silver Lake and Lightspeed Venture Partners led a recent $200-million funding round for a company called Alchemy that makes software for crypto developers. Alchemy is now valued at $10.2 billion, the company said on 8 February. A day earlier, the Indian company Polygon, which creates software that makes   Ethereum transactions easier,...

Non-Fungible Tokens can establish an immutable record of ownership of any digital asset, and even real-world assets. The issued token can then be utilized as an authenticator for any process concerning that asset. A previous Trends Journal article (“THE CRYPTO ‘AGE OF UTILITY’ HAS JUST BEGUN,” 12 Oct 2021) detailed how an NFT powered music...

WHAT DEFINES WEB3? The current “Web2.0” internet is dominated by a few large corporations that control largely separate or “siloed” ecosystems.  Online commerce? That would be Amazon. Web advertising and creative content monetization? Google and its Youtube platform remain unrivaled.  Social communication? Twitter and Facebook (now Meta), and for younger demographics, apps like instagram (owned...

Will the Metaverse compound problems that have already come with spending so much of social life and even school and work in a virtual landscape? Some psychologists are warning of just that likelihood.  Studies have already shown detrimental consequences of social media on the psyches of children and teenagers, though some of the named problems...