APR vs. APY: Which is better? The APY provides a clear idea of an account’s earning potential. The APR shows what will be owed. Both are calculated over a single year, which provides a more accurate picture than calculating the interest rate alone. Because the APR is calculated at an annual rate, it can be more advantageous for borrowers seeking the best rates, instead of investing in crypto assets and hoping for a return. However, because the APY is based on an annualized rate that includes compounding earnings, it's more beneficial for investing crypto assets—it provides a more accurate representation …

Maple Finance co-founder and CEO Sid Powell says that transparency has been the saving grace of decentralized finance (DeFi) amid the prolonged crypto market slump. Speaking to Cointelegraph on the sidelines of Converge22 conference in San Francisco, Powell noted that throughout the crypto winter, DeFi has continued to operate as intended while centralized finance (CeFi) has become “pretty inactive.” Powell suggested that during the market crash, CeFi lenders hadn't properly "battle-tested" and weren’t “prepared to liquidate clients," wanting to maintain client relationships. “As the price of Bitcoin was tumbling, they didn’t want to be sending out margin call letters or …

As more countries make progress in terms of developing and implementing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), Ghana’s central bank aims to keep up and complete its research on CBDCs with the goal of financial inclusion according to Kwame Oppong, the head of fintech and innovation at the Bank of Ghana. In an interview with Cointelegraph’s Elisha Owusu Akyaw at the Africa Money & DeFi Summit, Oppong laid out the reason behind the West African country’s venture into CBDCs. According to the government official, their main goal at the moment is to finish testing and eventually give their citizens the opportunity …

An Ethereum arbitrage trading bot managed to hit the jackpot and lose it all on the same day in an ironic turn of events in decentralized finance (DeFi). In a Twitter thread, Robert Miller, who works at the research firm Flashbots, shared how a Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot with the prefix 0xbadc0de was able to earn 800 Ether (ETH), around $1 million, through arbitrage trades. According to Miller, the bot took advantage of a huge arbitrage opportunity that came when a trader attempted to sell $1.8 million in cUSDC through the decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap v2 and only got …

Crypto exchange FTX, led by crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), is reportedly considering bailing out Celsius Network by bidding on the bankrupt lender’s assets. Coincidently, the information came out the same day Alex Mashinsky resigned as the CEO of Celsius. “I regret that my continued role as CEO has become an increasing distraction, and I am very sorry about the difficult financial circumstances members of our community are facing,” said Mashinsky while explaining his decision. For FTX, acquiring the assets of Celsius would imply the exchange’s intent to save the lending firm, similar to what FTX US did for Voyager …

United States Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has spoken out about the expansion of decentralized finance (DeFi) and its impact on the traditional finance ecosystem, calling for appropriate regulation. During an event titled the “Opportunities and challenges of the tokenisation of finance” hosted by the Banque de France on Sept. 27, Jerome Powell said there were “very significant structural issues around the lack of transparency” in the DeFi ecosystem. The comments followed those by Bank for International Settlements (BIS) general manager Agustín Carstens who expressed concern over the contrast between DeFi and traditional finance. Carstens added that the “huge challenge” …

Pantera CEO Dan Morehead highlighted the potential growth and value of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Web3 functionality, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and Metaverse applications in his opening keynote speech at Token2049 in Singapore. Thousands of attendees converged on Wednesday at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Center for the start of the two-day conference which features prominent speakers from the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem. Pantera, a blockchain-focused investment fund with $4.5 billion of assets under management, said it continues to see value in emerging crypto use cases. Morehead drew parallels to the early 2000s when emerging technology companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google …

Blockchain security firm BlockSec has debunked a conspiracy theory alleging the $160 million Wintermute hack was an inside job, noting that the evidence used for allegations is “not convincing enough." Earlier this week cyber sleuth James Edwards published a report alleging that the Wintermute smart contract exploit was likely conducted by someone with inside knowledge of the firm, questioning activity relating to the compromised smart contract and two stablecoin transactions in particular. BlockSec has since gone over the claims in a Wednesday post on Medium, suggesting that the “accusation of the Wintermute project is not as solid as the author …

A fresh new crypto conspiracy theory is afoot — this time in relation to last week's $160 million hack on algorithmic market maker Wintermute — which one crypto sleuth alleges was an "inside job." Cointelegraph reported on Sept. 20 that a hacker had exploited a bug in a Wintermute smart contract which enabled them to swipe over 70 different tokens including $61.4 million in USD Coin (USDC), $29.5 million in Tether (USDT) and 671 Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), worth roughly $13 million at the time. In an analysis of the hack posted via Medium on Sept. 26, the author known as …

According to DeFi Llama, UwU Lend, a decentralized finance, or DeFi, protocol that acts as a money market on the Ethereum blockchain, has surpassed $50 million in total value locked (TVL). The non-custodial protocol was created by Michael Patryn, known by the pseudonym "Sifu," who was the co-founder of defunct cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX. UwU Lend allows users to earn interest on deposits and pay interest to borrow funds on its platform. Outstanding loans on UwU lend are overcollateralized, with more collateral backing them than debt. A small amount of fees from each transaction goes into the UwU treasury. Borrowers do …

After several delays and some setbacks, Cardano’s long-awaited Vasil upgrade finally went live on Sept. 22. From the outside looking in, the hard fork is designed to help improve the ecosystem’s scalability and general transaction throughput capacity as well as advance Cardano’s decentralized applications (DApps) development capacity. To commemorate the event, an announcement was made by blockchain firm Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) — which currently oversees the design, building and maintenance of the Cardano platform — just minutes after the development. To obtain a more holistic overview of what the upgrade represents and its potential impact on Cardano (as …

Hacks and exploits continue to plague the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector as another vanity wallet address joins the roster of DeFi victims that collectively lost more than $1.6 billion in 2022. In an alert published by blockchain security firm PeckShield, a hacker was detected after stealing 732 Ether (ETH), around $950,000, from an address created at the Ethereum vanity wallet address generator called Profanity. After draining the wallet, the exploiters have sent the crypto to the recently sanctioned crypto mixer Tornado Cash. #PeckShieldAlert Seems like $950k worth of crypto has been stolen by 0x9731F from Ethereum “vanity address” generated with …