Decentralization: It’s a word that holds so much power and promise. But over the years, it’s become painfully clear that this concept isn’t being given the respect it deserves — and the consequences can be downright dangerous. We live in a world where DAOs aren’t DAOs, where independent validators aren’t independent, and where PR departments breezily gloss over the fact that some blockchain projects are far more centralized than they may seem. Emotionally and financially, countless crypto enthusiasts have bought into decentralized projects — full of belief that these platforms will bring about change and hopeful that they could make …

Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, were heavily hit by October’s decentralized finance downtrend, with the total value of assets managed by DAOs crashing by 40% from 30 days ago. According to data from DeepDAO, the combined assets under management controlled by DAOs was more than $290 million as of early October. By the second week of November, the AUM of DAOs had fallen more than 50% to tag $140 million. As of this writing, DAOs currently manage $172.7 million in assets, with the total having increased by20% alongside the partial recovery posted by many top DeFi tokens over the past …

Aragon co-founder Luis Cuende told Cointelegraph that the decentralized technology his company has been developing could find its perfect use case on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In recent months, content moderation practices employed by global social media platforms have been criticized by people across the political spectrum. Libertarian-leaning constituencies tend to criticize them for essentially instituting politically correct censorship while the liberals contend that they are not doing enough to filter offensive content. To this point, yesterday, the FBI charged six individuals with a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. It has since been …

The growth of active decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) is accelerating, increasing from 10 last year to around 76 today, according to DeepDao founder and CEO Eyal Eithcowich. DeepDAO provides insights and analysis into decentralized autonomous organizations, with the platform recently launching a new interface allowing users to better probe the health and wealth of DAOs. The platform’s data shows that a large assets under management (AUM) figure does not necessarily indicate the health and good governance of a DAO. For example, mStable is the top-ranking project by assets under management and capital flows, however, it ranks poorly by membership and …

There are some decentralized finance projects that make flash loans; Yam Finance (YAM) was a DeFi project that made a flash appearance. YAM, which initially described itself as a “minimally viable monetary experiment,” launched on August 11 amid some fanfare, and in less than two days, its market value soared from zero to $57 million. But on late Wednesday, the company announced that it found a bug in its rebasing contract and by Thursday, its market capitalization crashed back to zero. To no avail, the DeFi community rallied to save the project, whose rebase function turned it into a kind …

Cryptocurrency pornography startup PornVisory is moving to a decentralized governance structure based on the (decentralized flexible organization) DFO standard. According to PornVisory, DFO governance will enable token holders to propose changes and vote on governance aspects that will be subject to community voting. Platform users will need to stack the platform’s PVY Ethereum-based tokens to access the governance system. The announcement comes shortly before the first airdrop of the firm’s PVY token scheduled for the end of the month. DFOs are on-chain organizations that closely resemble decentralized autonomous organizations that further emphasize the community’s ability to shape the services. PornVisory's …

A network that describes itself as “the heartbeat of cross-chain composability” launched a decentralized autonomous organization on July 31. The pNetwork DAO is community-driven and will be run by a transparent governance process where anyone can contribute. Its launch has been heralded as “the first major step towards decentralizing the pTokens system” — removing any exclusive governance powers from the main development team. Vowing to build infrastructure that sets itself apart from the competition, a blog post about the DAO added: “We believe all DeFi projects should avoid making networks which are decentralized on paper, yet retain centralized planning and …

The story of PlusToken, one of the largest scams in the cryptocurrency industry, takes another twist as dozens of major suspects have been arrested. As many as 27 core PlusToken team members have been arrested by Chinese police, according to a July 30 report by local industry publication ChainNews. According to the report, the total amount of investor losses in the PlusToken scam is estimated at 40 billion Chinese yuan or $5.7 billion. The report also mentions that investigators have also arrested another 82 core members of the scheme. Dovey Wan, founding partner of blockchain-based investment company Primitive Ventures, tweeted …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity pools continue to surge in popularity, with the Curve Finance decentralized exchange (DEX) consistently hosting more than $60 million in daily volume for the first time this past week, according to Dune Analytics. With daily volume closer to $1 million at the start of June, the explosive hype surrounding yield farming propelled an increase in trade activity of more than 50 times in just two months. Curve daily trade volume: Dune Analytics Curve’s growth has seen the platform emerge as the second-largest decentralized exchange by trade volume, with Dune Analytics estimating that Curve represents 28% of …

Cryptocurrencies may render some outdated regulations obsolete, according to crypto-anarchist and white hat hacker Pavol Luptak. According to Luptak, “cryptocurrencies or crypto markets may undermine government laws and regulations that are obsolete for the 21st digital century.” He said, “I can say the Space Age technology will help us to escape from the Bronze Age rulership. Despite the fact that rulers will not like it.” “Although we spend a significant part of our lives in an unlimited borderless virtual online world, we are still trying to enforce the territorial laws valid for the physical world. I don't think it makes …

A proposal for the creation of a specialized decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, has garnered debate within the Ethereum (ETH) community. The focus of this DAO would be to refund users who have mistakenly sent their funds to a wrong address, provided that the address contains less than three incorrect characters. The proposal gathered steam in response to a user requesting help from the r/Ethfinance community on Reddit after claiming to have lost 40 Ether as a result of a single mistaken alphanumeric character entered into the receiving wallet’s address. ETH user sends 40 Ether to wrong address On May …

MakerDAO hopes to fill the multi-million dollar gap in the collateral backing its DAI stablecoin following last week’s Ethereum market volatility, as Cointelegraph reported. Today the organization successfully launched its first debt auction to that end. The first lot became available at 10:38 EST on March 19, and just over one hour into the auction, a further nine of the 100 expected total lots had been released. The reverse auction format Sales at this auction take a reverse-auction format, with a fixed bidding amount of 50,000 DAI placed for an initial lot of 250 MKR tokens. Bidders can then lower …