Decentralized finance project Paradigm Labs — backed by veteran crypto investors Polychain Capital, Dragonfly Capital, and Chapter One Ventures — is shutting down. In an announcement yesterday, March 10, CEO and co-founder Liam Kovatch said the closure was due to Paradigm’s “failure to carve a viable niche in the DEX [decentralized exchange] marketplace” and to factors both “within and outside” of the team’s control. Out of step with a fast-evolving DeFi landscape Founded in 2018, Paradigm Labs raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding for the development of a product dubbed Kosu — a liquidity aggregation protocol for DEXs. In …

Ethereum-based synthetic asset issuance platform Synthetix is adding new features, which includes derivatives trading. In a March 10 blog post, Synthetix announced plans for trading in binary options in the third quarter of this year. Binary options are a type of derivative financial product where the buyer either receives a payout or loses their investment. “Synthetic binary options will likely generate significant trading volume as they will be able to leverage the liquidity of the debt pool, allowing a trader to take a large position almost immediately without needing to find a counterparty.” In addition, the non-custodial crypto exchange listed …

Blockchain startup Vega has launched the testnet for its protocol, which allows parties to build trading products on a decentralized network. Over the last two years, Vega has been “working on building a protocol that allows people to deploy and run networks that can trade decentralized derivatives effectively,” Vega co-founder Barney Mannerings told Cointelegraph in an interview. Vega received over $5 million during its 2019 funding round, seeing investments from players such as Pantera Capital and Ripple’s Xpring. Vega opens its test network Vega has launched a testnet for this software, offering partners and investors the opportunity for involvement before …

A Taiwanese venture studio just became the new lead investor for a Hong Kong-based crypto custodian following a multimillion dollar investment this week. Nogle announced yesterday they had given $3 million to First Digital Trust (FDT), the digital asset arm of Legacy Trust. The investment is intended for the financial custodian to develop its own crypto asset platform for the Asia market. FDT’s Rapid Settlement and Clearing Network trading platform for digital assets is set to be launched in May. The platform may provide an alternative solution for Asia markets to the Silvergate Exchange Network. The initial services will be …

Anti-money laundering regulations on cryptocurrency and blockchain transactions may be having a positive outcome in East Asia. According to an article released by the Japanese newspaper Nikkei on Mar. 3, the National Police Agency of Japan brought criminal charges in 537 cases against financial institutions involving money laundering or other illegal transactions. These cases come from a total of 440,492 such suspicious transactions reported to the police in 2019. Data from 300,786 transactions out of the 440,492 were determined to have grounds for investigations. Among all companies that were reported, depository institutions such as banks accounted for 80% of all …

A blockchain trade finance platform developed by eight major banks, among them HSBC, BNP Paribas, and Citi, is now ready for commercial launch in Singapore in Q2 2020. Named Contour, the launch follows a successful trial of the platform involving over $30 million in letter-of-credit transactions last year, South China Morning Post reported on March 5. Letter-of-credit transactions are a payment mechanism widely used in international trade, in which a bank provides a seller with an economic guarantee for a buyer’s payment. As the coronavirus continues to shake global markets, a regional executive told reporters that the platform can ensure …

Digital payment platform Uphold has announced a new debit card, allowing users to pay with converted crypto, commodities and cash. Uphold’s new multi-asset debit card allows United States-based participants to spend assets held in their Uphold accounts at any Mastercard compatible location, a representative from Uphold told Cointelegraph in an interview. “Anywhere globally where Mastercard is accepted, they will be able to use this debit card,” she said. United States-based customers can now join a waitlist to get the card, which touts compatibility for 24 crypto assets, 27 fiat currencies, and four metals including Bitcoin (BTC), Basic Attention Token (BAT), …

Andre Cronje, the one-man development team behind decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol iEarn, has quit the project. Cronje cites a thankless experience with the DeFi community as the catalyst for his decision to leave. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Cronje states that his time with iEarn was “equally the best time, and the worst.” After experiencing “absolute euphoria” during the nascent stages of the project, the developer states that the pressures began to mount once platform became successful: “It drew the ire of a new anti-dev movement happening in defi, where devs are responsible, and even liable for user actions. The accusations, the …

As the United States continues to actively embrace blockchain, more new blockchain-powered products supported by national organizations continue to mature. CULedger, a major fintech firm coordinated by an American national trade association, has commercially launched its blockchain identity platform. Formerly known as MyCUID, CULedger’s blockchain-based identity verification solution MemberPass is now commercially available after a successful pilot in late 2019, CULedger announced on Feb. 21. Credit union members can use safe blockchain-based ecosystem to protect their privacy As a major credit union service organization (CUSO), CULedger aims to provide a trusted peer-to-peer services network of verifiable exchange for financial cooperatives. …

Christopher Giancarlo, the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) believes it's time for the Federal Reserve to issue a fully digital currency on Feb. 21. Giancarlo told Yahoo Finance’s On the Move program that the Federal Reserve must issue a digital currency in order to compete with China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC). The former CFTC chairman highlighted that online shopping would benefit from the U.S. offering a digital payment option as there won’t be any intermediary fees involved like with the traditional debit and credit cards. Giancarlo also added: “When we talk about a digital dollar …

Earlier this week, the decentralized lending protocol bZx was exploited in back-to-back “flash loan” attacks. While the two exploits were distinct, the end results remained the same. In total, $954,000 was gleaned from the platform. But what exactly happened? Was it an exploit, a simple case of arbitrage or a malicious attack? And where does decentralized finance go from here? It hasn’t been a good PR week for the DeFi sector. For some, the movement promising an alternative to the legacy financial system is starting to look like a failed experiment. For others, the attacks amounted to little more than …

In an earnings call held on Tuesday, Feb. 18, an HSBC executive revealed the bank plans to cut 35,000 jobs by the end of 2022 and invest more in digital systems. The plan for HSBC in the next three years is to cut down on staff and branches and simplify the operation by investing in technology. Noel Quinn, group chief executive added in the earnings call that: “In Retail Banking, we will expand our products offering and increase our investment in digital. We'll refocus our Retail Banking presence to serve globally mobile clients, reducing our branch network in the US …