Wing, a lending protocol built on the Ontology blockchain, currently has $180 million in crypto assets staked on its platform — not a meager amount, even by Ethereum (ETH) standards. Erick Pinos, Ontology’s ecosystem lead for the Americas and an advisor to Wing, told Cointelegraph that he believes two features make this DeFi project unique: cross-chain interoperability with Ethereum and the fact that lending is credit-based, allowing for loans to be under-collateralized. The system's OScore analyzes each user’s on-chain behavior to generate a credit score. This then determines the amount of collateral the user needs to post for a given …
Following the collapse of initial coin offerings, venture capital became the primary funding source for cryptocurrency projects. A slew of crypto-native funds opened their doors, one of them being Framework Ventures, a fund primarily investing in decentralized finance that was co-founded by Michael Anderson and Vance Spencer. Cointelegraph previously reported on Anderson’s philosophy of network capital, a change in investing mindset that is almost necessary in a space where decentralized protocols take the place of traditional companies and equity structures. Framework Ventures has made several investments, notably into Chainlink’s LINK token and Synthetix’s SNX token. But the fund is not …
Rounding up the last decade, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revisited his predictions made over the years, showcasing a knack for being right about abstract ideas than on-production software development issues. Buterin started the Twitter thread by addressing his article dated Jul. 23, 2013 in which he highlighted Bitcoin's (BTC) key benefits — internationality and censorship resistance. Buterin foresaw Bitcoin’s potential in protecting the citizens’ buying power in countries such as Iran, Argentina, China and Africa. However, Buterin also noticed a rise in stablecoin adoption as he saw Argentinian businesses operating in Tether (USDT). He backed up his decade-old ideas around …
The U.S. Department of the Treasury released a study on the high-value art market, highlighting the potential in the nonfungible tokens (NFT) space to conduct illicit money laundering or terror financing operations. The treasury’s “Study of the facilitation of money laundering and terror finance through the trade in works of art” suggested that the increasing use of art as an investment or financial asset could make the high-value art trades vulnerable to money laundering: “The emerging online art market may present new risks, depending on the structure and incentives of certain activity in this sector of the market (i.e., the …
Macro investor Raoul Pal is convinced that the current crypto bear market will end only once the Fed eases its hawkish monetary policy by halting interest rate hikes. That could happen in the next couple of months, according to Pal's predictions. “The Fed are unlikely to raise rates as far and as fast as people expect. My guess is they probably stop raising rates sometime in the summer and that will be it,” he said in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph. Pal sees the combination of high interest rates and fear of an upcoming recession as the main macro factors …