Birgit Rodolphe, executive director at Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin), has called for innovative and uniform regulation of the decentralized finance (DeFi) space throughout the European Union. BaFin is Germany’s financial regulatory body responsible for regulating banks, insurance firms and financial institutions including cryptocurrency companies. BaFin is the issuer of “crypto custody licenses,” a permit required for firms wanting to offer cryptocurrency services within Germany. In an article on BaFin’s website, Rodolphe warned of the risks to consumers of the unregulated DeFi space and called for standardized regulatory considerations across EU member countries: “One thing is clear: the clock …

Central bank governors and finance ministers from the Group of Seven, or G7, are reportedly planning to discuss the regulation of cryptocurrencies. According to a Tuesday report from Reuters, Bank of France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau said representatives from the United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom will likely speak on issues related to a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies at a meeting in Germany's cities of Bonn and Königswinter starting on Wednesday. Villeroy reportedly said that the recent crypto market volatility — likely referring to some stablecoins depegging from the U.S. dollar and prices of …

Banking giants Goldman Sachs and the United Kingdom’s Barclays have joined a $70 million Series A funding round for the institutional crypto trading platform Elwood Technologies, founded by billionaire British hedge fund manager Alan Howard. Joining the round was crypto-friendly German bank Commerzbank, crypto investment manager Galaxy Digital and Dawn Capital, as reported by the Financial Times on Sunday. The fundraising round valued the company at around $500 million, according to the report. Despite the recent fall in crypto markets, Elwood said it’s betting that traditional financial institutions such as hedge funds and banks will still be interested in investing …

The VeChain Foundation has released its financial report for Q1 2022, showing that the project amassed an impressive $1.2 billion war chest but only spent about $4.1 million in the quarter. VeChain is a layer-1 blockchain project designed to enhance supply chain management, and that supports decentralized apps (Dapp), decentralized finance (DeFi), and nonfungible tokens (NFT). The Foundation’s Tuesday financial report for Q1 2022 outlines its balance sheet as of March 31and how it spent funds through the quarter. Although the treasury opened the year with $1.37 billion in assets between stablecoins, Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and VeChain (VET), it …

Security breaches and hacks often highlight the risks of storing Bitcoin (BTC) on centralized exchanges. One analyst has even claimed that keeping BTC on exchanges is also a factor for price dips. Rufas Kamau, research and markets analyst at Scope Markets Kenya, explained his thoughts on why keeping BTC on an exchange lowers the coin’s price. Kamau believes that buying BTC on exchanges only amounts to buying an “I owe you,” or IOU, which he describes as “paper Bitcoin.” If you buy Bitcoin at the exchange, you are buying paper Bitcoin, an IOU from your exchange that's settled the moment …

The crypto community and Wall Street converged last week in Nassau, Bahamas, to discuss the future of digital assets during SALT’s Crypto Bahamas conference. The SkyBridge Alternatives Conference (SALT) was also co-hosted this year by FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange. Anthony Scaramucci, founder of the hedge fund SkyBridge Capital, kicked off Crypto Bahamas with a press conference explaining that the goal behind the event was to merge the traditional financial world with the crypto community: “Crypto Bahamas combines the crypto native FTX audience with the SkyBridge asset management firm audience. We are bringing these two worlds together to create a …

Analysts from the European Commission showed an unexpected understanding of how decentralized finance (DeFi) actually functions, having defined it as something different from the traditional financial system and acknowledging that it would require rethinking the approach to regulation. On Monday, May 2, crypto venture advisor at Presight Capital and a long-term expert on European regulation Patrick Hansen shared some important details from the EU Commission's “European Financial Stability and Integration Review 2022.” T report, dated April 7, contains a 12-page chapter on DeFi, in which the authors demonstrate a sensible approach to the topic. 1/ In case you missed it, …

Avalanche (AVAX) price is down more than 30% in April, but despite the negative price move, the smart contract platform remains a top contender for decentralized applications due to its scalability, low-cost transactions and its large footprint in the decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape. The network is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and unique in that it does not face the same operational bottlenecks of high transaction fees and network congestion. Avalanche was able to amass over $9 billion in total value locked (TVL) by offering a proof-of-stake (PoS) layer-1 scaling solution. This indicator is extremely relevant because it …

The concept of lending and borrowing is as old as time itself. Regarding finances, while some individuals have more than enough for themselves, others barely have enough to get by. As long as there is this imbalance in finance distribution, there will always be a need to borrow and a desire to lend. Lending involves giving out a resource on credit with the condition of it being returned upon an agreed period of time. In this case, such resources would be money or any financial asset. The lender could be an individual, a financial institution, a firm or even a …

Loans based on cryptocurrencies have become a mainstay of the decentralized finance (DeFi) universe ever since the smart contract-based lending/borrowing platforms began offering the service to crypto users. The Ethereum network, the first blockchain that scaled the smart contract functionality, sees most of the total value locked (TVL) on DeFi protocols dominated by cryptocurrency lending platforms. According to data from DeFi Pulse, the top 4 of 10 DeFi protocols are lending protocols that account for $37.04 billion in TVL, just 49% of TVL of the entire DeFi market on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum leads in terms of being the most …

Motivations for buying Bitcoin (BTC) are numerous: hedging against inflation, financial independence or even hopes for a Lamborghini and life in the sun. For “Mr. ERB,” a blogger and Bitcoin enthusiast, it’s all about retiring early. ERB keeps a detailed account of his finances on his “Early Retirement by Bitcoin” blog and spoke to Cointelegraph about his retirement plan. He told Cointelegraph that he first “got interested in Bitcoin in summer 2017” when a coworker briefly brought up the decentralized peer-to-peer currency. However, in a familiar story for Bitcoiners when they first enter the space, “The price was about 2,000 …

Russia's Federal Tax Service (FTS) has joined the debate around crypto regulation in Russia with an unexpectedly blunt proposition — to let Russian companies use digital currencies as a payment method when transacting internationally. On Wednesday, local newspaper Izvestia reported that the FTS left its official feedback on the draft of the crypto bill prepared by the Ministry of Finance. In its remarks, the fiscal agency proposed to let Russian companies use crypto for certain operations: “To let corporate entities pay for goods and services according to foreign trade contracts and to receive revenue from foreign entities in digital currency.” …