Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance (DeFi) newsletter. In a week where Rari Capital achieved the $1billion TVL milestone, read on to discover why OlympusDAO is yielding four-figure sums on its most popular protocol. What you’re about to read is a shorter, more succinct version of the newsletter. For a comprehensive summary of DeFi’s developments over the last week, subscribe below. Celsius Network raises $400M to expand institutional service Cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network announced a $400 million equity fundraise this week led by Canadian pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and equity …

American financial service provider Square will soon begin investigating technical requirements for building an open-source Bitcoin (BTC) mining system, according to CEO Jack Dorsey. Dorsey shared a series of tweets explaining his intent to follow a collaborative approach in further decentralizing Bitcoin mining. He said: “Square is considering building a Bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and businesses worldwide. The more decentralized this is, the more resilient the Bitcoin network becomes.” Dorsey believes that further decentralizing the Bitcoin network will be critical for securely settling the transactions “well after the last bitcoin is mined.” …

The regulators are closing in. It’s one thing to unbundle market functions to their parts ― custody, aggregators and Prime Brokerage ― to satisfy institutional compliance departments. It’s another to keep regulators happy. From the Financial Action Task Force pushing forward with its guidance for Travel Rule compliance to the still-evolving European Markets in Crypto-Assets regulatory framework, and the somewhat clumsily-handed U.S. infrastructure bill, the regulators are slowly tightening their noose, and I fear this may be the start of a multi-year staring match ― with the decentralized finance (DeFi) market now firmly in their sights, too. Related: DeFi: Who, …

The gaming industry, which has always been synonymous with fun, has grown massively in recent times, and a lot of money is now being mentioned when gaming comes up. Since the introduction of Web 3.0, there has been immense growth in the industry. At the end of 2019, the global gaming market was reportedly worth $152 billion. This growth has meant that, since the introduction of Web 3.0, there has been a consistent rate at which Web 3.0 games are growing and garnering increased adoption. A lot of money is being made, and this has, in turn, attracted a lot …

Smart cities are steadily garnering attention worldwide as they become points of aspiration for many jurisdictions. There is a very clear relationship in these urban utopias between the citizens for whom they are built and the systems, networks and devices that enable their safe, secure and efficient operation. Most importantly, they will be built on entirely new financial technology infrastructure that supports the flow of micropayments over financial “plumbing,” in a similar way that other essential utilities (water, energy, data, etc.) flow over pipes, cables and fiber. The principal aim of a smart city is to optimize city functions and …

As September ended, the cryptocurrency markets recovered from the so-called “September curse” handsomely to hit a market capitalization of $2.32 trillion. The decentralized finance (DeFi) market has been an integral part of this growth. The total value locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols grew more than 20%, from $113.5 billion on Sept. 28 to hit $137 billion on Oct. 6, as per data from Dappradar. Even the Bank of America (BoA) — a global banking giant — has revealed its bullish outlook on DeFi and nonfungible tokens (NFTs). In an Oct. 4 report by BofA Securities — a subsidiary of BoA …

Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance, or DeFi, newsletter. Blogging platform Mirror expanded to the public market this week. Read on to discover the impact of this move for Ethereum wallet holders. What you’re about to read is a more succinct version of the newsletter. For a comprehensive summary of DeFi’s developments over the last week, subscribe below. Mirror expands blockchain blogging to the public This week, Mirror, a decentralized publishing protocol focused on fostering data ownership and free expression, expanded its platform to the public market for the first time. In the previous version, a weekly …

As the decentralized finance (DeFi) market continues to pique the interest of investors across the globe, a few incidents have shone a major spotlight on the vulnerabilities various platforms operating within this space are continually exposed to. For example, it has recently been unveiled that due to a buggy system upgrade, prominent DeFi money market Compound had put approximately $150 million worth of the native COMP tokens at risk of a third-party hack. Even though the error was recognized fairly early as Compound’s developers submitted a fix for the protocol’s bug soon after, it’s worth noting that the upgrade is …

Crypto data provider CoinMarketCap continues expanding its reach by integrating its crypto price data into Presearch, a major decentralized search engine. CoinMarketCap has partnered with Presearch to provide its data feeds to the search engine, allowing users to see CoinMarketCap price data directly on Presearch, according to a Tuesday announcement shared with Cointelegraph. With the partnership, Presearch’s 2.4 million registered users will instantly see a CoinMarketCap-provided overview for any crypto-related term on the engine, including prices, daily volumes, a market capitalization, circulating supply and total supply. “The function will roll out immediately tomorrow and will be available wherever users use …

Facebook’s conglomerate of social applications, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and its virtual reality headset Oculus, all suffered a major power outage on Monday, switching the platforms offline for a total of six hours to the effect of billions of users and businesses across the world. The incident was first reported at approximately 3:16 pm UTC on Monday when a surge of complaints emerged from users worldwide claiming that they were unable to access their favorite social networking platforms. A Cloudflare post-analysis of the crisis concluded that Facebook “had stopped announcing the routes to their DNS prefixes,” which meant that the …

Major social media and communication platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline Monday as the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies surged. As data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro shows, Bitcoin (BTC) price moved above $49,000 after falling to a daily low of $47,166, an increase of roughly 4.5% in less than two hours. Similarly, the price of Ether (ETH) rose 3.5% over the same period to reach $3,411 at the time of publication. The sudden price volatility comes as major social media platform Facebook, photo and video sharing app Instagram, and messenger app WhatsApp — both owned by Facebook — …

The dramatic short squeeze of the stock of video game retailer GameStop this January was the moment when r/WallStreetBets finally transformed from a humble Reddit forum into a financial force that can no longer be ignored. But lost among the memes, trading app drama and hand-wringing over the sanctity of the stock market was one surprising outcome: GameStop’s share price didn’t just rise — the company actually listened to its many new retail investors and aggressively ramped up its strategy to focus on e-commerce. Rather than just a one-off market glitch, the investments made by r/WallStreetBets users resulted in the …