Google has hired a former PayPal executive to help bolster Google Pay, with plans to expand into the crypto space. Arnold Goldberg has been given the task of running Google’s payments division as part of a company-wide push into financial services, including crypto. Google’s president of commerce Bill Ready told Bloomberg that: “Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to [...] As user demand and merchant demand evolves, we’ll evolve with it.” Google Pay is an online payment system developed by Google to allow in-app, online and contactless purchases on mobile devices including Android phones, tablets and watches. …

In a speech entitled “Digital currencies and the soul of money,” Agustín Carstens, the general manager of the Bank of International Settlements,’ criticized private stablecoins and decentralized finance (DeFi), touting central bank-led financial innovation as the best possible path to the future of money. Carstens, who served as governor of the Bank of Mexico between 2010 and 2017, delivered his remarks at the conference on "Data, Digitalization, the New Finance and Central Bank Digital Currencies: The Future of Banking and Money" at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. The economist’s argument revolved around the institutional foundations of money and how, even …

Seba Bank, a Swiss-based digital assets banking platform regulated by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, announced on Wednesday that it had completed a successful Series C funding round of 110 million Swiss franc, or $119 million U.S. dollars. Notable investors in the round included cryptocurrency exchange FTX, quantitative digital currency trading firm Alameda Research, decentralized finance asset management firm DeFi Technologies, and venture capital entities such as Altive, Ordway Selections and Summer Capital. The bank said it plans to use the funds to fuel international growth and drive demand from institutional investors in the digital assets industry. Seba has …

The sad reality is that most decentralized finance (DeFi) wallets and protocols are complicated to use, especially for beginners. Although rich in functionality, these products are often designed by technologists and not for the everyday user who needs more guidance to get started. With consumers used to the simple interface on apps like Tinder, the “swipe left, swipe right mentality” has since transcended into all other consumer-facing products, finance included. The result is that while cryptocurrency assets and DeFi grow, so has the breadth of their functionality, and therefore, their complexity, as features become split across multiple chains and applications. …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) was one of the breakout sectors of the cryptocurrency market in 2021 and stands poised to continue to facilitate the mass adoption of cryptocurre in 2022. This comes as institutional and retail investors embrace the emergence of Finance 2.0. One DeFi project that has kicked off the year with a bullish start is Ribbon Finance (RBN), a protocol that utilizes financial engineering to create structured products such as automated options strategies. These are designed to provide users with sustainable yields over time. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since trading at a low of …

Inflation is increasing, and alongside them are growing interest rates. That is, on everything but your savings held in the bank. The sad reality is in 2021, the average American savings account is only paying 0.06% interest annually, with neighboring countries, including Canada offering little more. Since banks don’t want users’ money, those who have their life earnings in a savings account have little hope to grow their wealth. For this reason, traditional finance is quickly being beaten out by decentralized finance (DeFi), a concept that eliminates the middleman, thereby reducing fees, and opens the door to many in need …

Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s most-valued cryptocurrency, has replaced gold as an inflation hedge for young investors, according to Wharton’s finance professor. Gold’s performance was “disappointing” in 2021, Wharton School’s finance professor Jeremy Siegel said in a CNBC Squawk Box last Friday. On the other hand, BTC has been increasingly emerging as an inflation hedge among younger investors, Siegel argued: “Let’s face the fact, I think Bitcoin as an inflation hedge in the minds of many of the younger investors has replaced gold. Digital coins are the new gold for the millennials. I think that the story of gold is a …

Consumer prices are now rising faster than they have in years, a concept known as inflation. Today, prices have already climbed more than 6% in the last year, an increase that is so great, numbers like this haven’t been noted since 1990. Over the last ten years, inflation has typically stayed under 2% per year. However, recent data has shown that this year the number is closer to 5%, with the population noting increases in what they have been paying for energy, shelter, used vehicles and food. The federal government operates to keep this growth stable, only now letting everyone …

The total value locked, or TVL, in decentralized finance (DeFi) has soared to over $250 billion as 2021 closes out, according to DeFi Llama, with most activity on Ethereum. The budding DeFi industry only became mainstream during summer 2021. While TVL valuations underscore the rapid growth of the industry, Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson has warned about the challenges facing DeFi. In a YouTube video entitled "DApps and Cardano DeFi Alliance," Hoskinson talked about DeFi's potential as well as Cardano's small role within the industry. According to Hoskinson, who has been on a decade-long quest to transform traditional finance, there …

Staking and farming platform Bent Finance joins the list to become the sixth crypto establishment to get hacked in December. The acknowledgment of the attack was followed by requesting investors to withdraw their pool funds and disabling the reward claims on the compromised platform. Bent Finance first realized the exploit on Monday at roughly 8:55 PM EST, a timeline when the company reported no loss of funds. However, the community suspected a rug-pull event when blockchain investigator PeckShield allegedly located the source of the hack transactions. We have located the hack tx, which interestingly is sent from the Bent Finance: …

As 2021 draws to a close, the premier lineup in the DeFi landscape largely consists of synthetic asset platforms (SAPs). An SAP is any platform that enables users to mint synthetics, which are derivatives whose values are pegged to existing assets in real time. As long as oracles can supply a reliable price feed, synthetics can represent any asset in the world and take on its price — be it a stock, commodity or crypto asset. As such, SAPs finally bridge the gap between emergent DeFi platforms and legacy finance, allowing investors to place their bets on any asset anywhere, …

The state of banking and finance today presents a complex labyrinth that even seasoned bankers struggle to navigate. Despite appearances, there is a method to this madness. As Nobel Prize winners like Muhammad Yunus and Joseph Stiglitz have cautioned in the past: central banking, in particular, has morphed to keep the status quo in check. Or, in the words of Mike Maloney, an expert on monetary history and economics: It is “the biggest scam in the history of mankind.” Maloney reasons that giving a small group of unelected individuals the keys to the monetary printing press will undoubtedly rot away …