Governments are tasked with bringing fair and efficient services to the public. Unfortunately, providing transparency and accountability often results in a reduction in efficiency and effectiveness or vice versa. Governments are usually forced to choose to improve one at the cost of the other. On rare occasions, technology comes along that enables governments to improve fairness and efficiency. The move from paper-based record keeping to computer databases was one such technology. The internet was another. Blockchain is the next. Like the internet before it, blockchain will not only improve how the public interacts with government services, it will have broad …
There is an old saying in China: “Building the road is the first step to becoming rich.” Asian countries use infrastructure to boost the economy, and China is probably the most aggressive one — its annual average infrastructure spending is one of the highest at 8.3% of its gross domestic product from 2010 to 2015, according to data from Statista. In the last two decades, China has built the most highways and high-speed railways, and it has now decided to extend the infrastructure development to a digital dimension. China’s “new infrastructure” plan includes blockchain technology, 5G, artificial intelligence and cloud …
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is transforming blockchain companies, and its impact is not always negative for the blockchain industry. Amid the latest coronavirus crisis-fueled changes, China is taking another step toward blockchain adoption to officially recognize industry jobs. China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, or MOHRSS, is the ministry responsible for national labor policies and regulations. Recently, they have added blockchain-related jobs to a list of officially recognized jobs. New occupation types are officially introduced to promote employment amid COVID-19 According to a May 11 statement by the MOHRSS, blockchain-focused professions, like tech developers, engineers, and analysts, are …
Hester Peirce, commissioner for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, explained during an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph that decentralized finance, also known as DeFi, has created new challenges for the SEC. Peirce, nicknamed “Crypto Mom” for her interest in digital-asset innovation, mentioned that the quickly rising DeFi sector has resulted in a number of unresolved legal issues: "DeFi has posed a challenge for the SEC in a similar way that the ICO boom did in 2017. What is different here is that the pace of DeFi has actually been much faster. I also think that the legal issues are …
Government-issued electronic currency seems to be an idea whose time has come. “More than half of the world’s central banks are now developing digital currencies or running concrete experiments on them,” reported the Bank for International Settlements, or BIS, in early May — something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. The BIS also found that nine out of ten central banks were exploring central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, in some form or other, according to its survey of 81 central banks conducted last autumn but just published. Many were taken aback by the progress. “It …