Ether (ETH) price is down on Dec. 16 and the pre-FOMC rally to $1,350 was obliterated after Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell issued hawkish statements following a 0.50% hike in interest rates. The Ether sell-off follows a market-wide decline that has sent Ethereum network fees plummeting by 39.90% in the past 30-days. The total value locked in Ethereum-based smart contracts also decreased by decentralized finance by 4.49% in 24-hours. Following the FTX exchange scandal, regulators are attempting to fast-track new regulations on the cryptocurrency sector. While some analysts believe Ethereum still possesses multiple bullish catalysts that warrant investing in the …

Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has cautioned the crypto community about self-custody, suggesting that 99% of people choosing to self-custody their crypto will likely lose it one way or another. CZ has been been a supporter of self-custody for years, referring to its as a “fundamental human right” but has always urged users to “do it right.” He published a “CZ’s Tips” on self-storing crypto in Feb. 2020. During a recent Binance-run Twitter Spaces on Dec. 14, the Binance CEO continued to urge caution for those using self-custody wallets — suggesting that more often than not, security keys are not …

In May 2022, at the tail of the crypto bull market, economist Eswar Prasad wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times arguing that DeFi’s promise as a means of democratizing finance was a long way from being realized. In his words, “For all its promise in democratizing finance and broadening financial access, the emerging reality suggests a concentration of economic power, while the risks fall largely on those investors least able to handle them.” Prasad is right that early DeFi projects catered almost exclusively to crypto natives, often called “degens” in Twitter parlance. However, he didn’t acknowledge that this is …

Cryptocurrency mixing services are a divisive subject in the industry. Some advocate for the privacy-enabling features of these protocols while others maintain that they are mainly used for illicit means. For platforms like Tornado Cash, the mainstream verdict is “guilty as charged.” The infamous decentralized mixing protocol was sanctioned by the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in August 2022, essentially making it illegal for anyone to make use of the service. Tornado Cash continues to be a contentious topic and one of its developers, Alexey Pertsev, controversially remains in detention in the Netherlands while investigators look to …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Trader Joe has announced its very first expansion from Avalanche and onto the Ethereum ecosystem, as part of its plans to access new markets and drive up user activity. The decentralized trading platform announced its “multi-chain” expansion into Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum One on Dec. 1 and follows around a month after it stated its intention to expand to additional markets and ink new partnerships amid falling TVL and user activity in the third quarter. We're extremely excited to announce that @traderjoe_xyz has expanded into the Ethereum ecosystem with Arbitrum One as its destination! ‍ …

The price of GMX rallied to its second-highest level in history on Dec. 1 as traders assessed the decentralized exchange's ability to evolve as a serious competitor to its top rival Uniswap (UNI). GMX established an intraday high of $54.50 in a recovery that started on Nov. 29 from $40.50. Its rally's beginning coincided with crypto research firm Delphi Digital's tweet on the GMX decentralized exchange, as shown below. GMX beats Uniswap in fees for the first time Notably, GMX had earned about $1.15 million in daily trading fees on Nov. 28, which surpassed Uniswap's $1.06 million trading fees on …

Telegram is set to build a set of decentralized tools, including noncustodial wallets and decentralized exchanges, according to founder Pavel Durov via his Telegram channel on Nov. 30. The initiative is a response to the recent FTX collapse, said Durov, as the industry ended up being concentrated in the "hands of a few to abuse their power. As a result, a lot of people lost their money when FTX, one of the largest exchanges, went bankrupt." This announcement comes weeks after the launch of Fragment, a decentralized auction platform for unique usernames based on The Open Network, or TON, a …

The collapse of the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX has raised many concerns over unregulated centralized platforms. Investors are now coming to question how safe it is to keep one’s funds on these exchanges and have voiced grave concerns about centralized decision-making without any checks. FTX held one billion in a customer’s fund and was found to be using the customer-deposited crypto assets to mitigate its own business losses. Furthermore, a recent report suggests that the downfall of numerous crypto exchanges over the last decade has permanently taken 1.2 million Bitcoin (BTC) — almost 6% of all Bitcoin — out of …

The rising popularity of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) reflects the growing tendency toward the creation of community-focused projects within the Web3 ecosystem. At its core, a DAO is an organizational structure that allows decentralized decision-making within a community. Currently, there are over 4,000 of these projects in existence, according to the registration data of DeepDAO. With new tools available to make DAOs easier than ever, quantity can easily overtake quality within these communities and it begs the question of what will eventually make these projects relevant in the long run. A basic ingredient The basic structure for decentralized organizations seems …

Exchange aggregator 1inch released a new tool called “Rabbithole” on Nov. 25, which the company says will protect traders against malicious “sandwich attacks.” The team announced the launch of the tool in a press release that has been made available to Cointelegraph. Rabbithole works by allowing users to submit transactions directly to Ethereum nodes, bypassing the mempool. In order to use it, users need to change the remote procedure call (RPC) endpoint in their crypto wallet. After that, each swap initiated via 1inch will be analyzed by the private tx routing algorithm developed by the 1inch team and then sent …

Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis has compared the fall of Mt. Gox to FTX to determine how FTX’s bankruptcy will impact the ecosystem. It concluded that FTX was a relatively smaller part of the crypto industry than Mt. Gox was at the time and that the industry should bounce back stronger than ever. In a Nov. 23 Twitter thread, Chainalysis’ research lead Eric Jardine began his comparison by first looking at the market share of the two firms, finding that Mt. Gox averaged 46% of all exchange inflows in the year leading up to its collapse in 2014, compared to FTX’s …

Decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap's recently updated privacy policy appears to have attracted the ire of some members of the community, with concerns that collecting and storing user data works against crypto's core values. In recent responses to a November blog post regarding its updated privacy policy, some vocal members of the community suggested it i uncharacteristic for a decentralized entity to collect and store information about its users. In the Nov. 11 post from Uniswap Labs, released around the time of FTX’s collapse, the decentralized exchange released its privacy policy to explain how it collected and stored user data. “With …