Crypto exchange Blockchain.com has partnered with Visa to launch a crypto card, available to only U.S. residents initially, which allows users to pay using their crypto or cash balance wherever Visa debit cards are accepted. In an Oct. 26 announcement, Blockchain.com revealed that there would be no sign-up or annual fees, no transaction fees, and users would earn 1% of all purchases back in crypto. In a Yahoo Finance interview, Blockchain.com CEO Peter Smith said the card already had 50,000 signed onto a waiting list, noting: “There’s still a lot of demand for crypto products, but you’re seeing that demand …

Bear markets are a good time to reflect — and a question that isn't asked often enough is this: Why do crypto projects have such a high failure rate… and how can they scale to boost their chances of success? That's a topic we're going to dive into during Cointelegraph's latest ask-me-anything session on YouTube, where we'll be joined by Qonetum Finance. CEO and CTO Yoda Regev will be with our very own Rachel Wolfson to discuss the challenges facing fledgling projects that are trying to get off the ground. While CoinMarketCap data shows that thousands of token projects have …

Crypto staking platform Freeway pointed at the failure of one of its trading strategies, along with market conditions as the leading reason for halting user withdrawals earlier this week. The crypto yield platform on Oct. 23 announced it was halting various transactions relating to its high-yield “Supercharger” product, citing “unprecedented volatility” at the time, without giving any more details at the time, which saw its token price plummet. In a 22-part Twitter thread on Oct. 25, Freeway shed more light on the situation, revealing that it was “one of Freeway’s trading strategies” that “appears to have failed” and has “dramatically …

Decentralized lending protocol Compound has paused the supply of four tokens as lending collateral on its platform, aiming to protect users against potential attacks involving price manipulation, similar to the recent $117 million exploit from Mango Market's, according to a proposal on Compound's governance forum. With the pause, users will not be able to deposit yearn finance (YFI), 0x (ZRX), basic attention token (BAT) and maker (MKR) tokens as collateral to take loans. The proposal passed on Oct. 25 with 99% of all voters in favor. It stated: "An oracle manipulation-based attack analogous to the one that cost Mango Markets …

Institutional prime broker platform for crypto assets Coinbase Prime announced on Oct 24th that it had entered into a partnership with MakerDAO — the largest single holder of USDC — to become a custodian of $1.6 billion worth of the stablecoin. The MakerDAO community voted to approve this custodianship which will allow its community to earn a 1.5% reward on its USDC while holding funds with a leading institutional custodian. The program described the following yield schedule for the USDC onboarded by @MakerDAO: • 1% APY on the first 100 million USDC. • 0.1% more APY on each 100 million …

Governance tokens are a type of cryptocurrency that allow tokenholders to vote on the direction of a blockchain project. The primary purpose of governance tokens is to decentralize decision-making and to give holders a say in how the project is run. Governance tokenholders are usually more invested in the project’s success as they stand to gain or lose more, depending on the outcome. Community members can use tokens to influence the direction and features of a blockchain protocol directly. As such, it is possible to implement changes related to the user interface, vote on fees and reward distribution, or even …

The global Web3 boom is expected to add $1.1 trillion to the Indian economy over the next decade, supporting the investment-based momentum driven by over 450 in-house startups, including CoinDCX, Polygon and CoinSwitch. A recent study from the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), an Indian non-governmental trade association and advocacy group, highlighted India’s position as a leading global player in the Web3 market owing to several factors spanning a large talent pool, high adoption rate and product development for international markets. The US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) estimated that “Web3 can add $1.1 trillion of new economic …

Modern decentralized exchanges (DEXs) mainly rely on liquidity providers (LP) to provide the tokens that are being traded. These liquidity providers are rewarded by receiving a portion of the trading fees generated on the DEX. Unfortunately, while liquidity providers earn an income via fees, they’re exposed to impermanent loss if the price of their deposited assets changes. Directional liquidity pooling is a new method that is different from the traditional system used by DEXs and aims to reduce the risk of impermanent loss for liquidity providers. What is directional liquidity pooling? Directional liquidity pooling is a system developed by Maverick …

Delving into the world of cryptocurrencies can be extremely intimidating for beginners. On day one, you're confronted with thousands of different coins — and each claims to have their own specific use case. Understanding how blockchain technology works is an incredibly steep learning curve too, and all of that comes before you've even made a purchase. Now, one website has the ambition of becoming a lighthouse in stormy seas for newcomers to the crypto market — giving them the information they need to explore the space with confidence. ClearCryptos offers a plethora of curated educational content — covering everything from …

Welcome readers, and thanks for subscribing! The Altcoin Roundup newsletter is now authored by Cointelegraph’s resident newsletter writer Big Smokey. In the next few weeks, this newsletter will be renamed Crypto Market Musings, a weekly newsletter that provides ahead-of-the-curve analysis and tracks emerging trends in the crypto market. The publication date of the newsletter will remain the same, and the content will still place a heavy emphasis on the technical and fundamental analysis of cryptocurrencies from a more macro perspective in order to identify key shifts in investor sentiment and market structure. We hope you enjoy it! DeFi has a …

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week. The last week’s headline was dominated by some of the biggest hacks in DeFi. This week is redemption time for many DeFi protocols that either averted an attempted hack or got a significant chunk of their stolen funds back. The BitBTC bridge reportedly had a bug that would essentially allow an attacker to mint fake tokens on one side of the bridge and swap them for real ones. However, one Twitter user was able …

A cross-chain bridge between BitBTC and the Ethereum layer-2 network Optimism has been able to avoid a potentially costly exploit thanks to the work of an eagle-eyed Twitter user. The custom cross-chain bridge offers a ramp for users to send assets between Optimism’s network and BitAnt's decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, which includes yield services, NFTs, swaps and the BitBTC token, in which 1 million BitBTC represents 1 Bitcoin (BTC). The BitBTC bridge bug was highlighted by L2 network Abirtrum tech lead Lee Bousfield in an Oct. 18 Twitter post, warning that “BitBTC's Optimism bridge is trivially vulnerable.” Bousfield said he …