The wish of owning cryptocurrencies this Christmas came true for a 12-year-old schoolkid with an intelligence quotient (IQ) higher than Albert Einstein. Barnaby Swinburn, a resident of Bristol, England had asked for two Christmas presents, a Mensa test for testing his IQ and a cryptocurrency portfolio. According to BristolLive, Swinburn scored the highest possible score of 162 on the test, beating Einstien’s IQ of 160. As a result, the schoolboy became a member of the high-IQ society, which intakes the top 2% of the highest Mensa scorers. Speaking about cryptocurrencies, Swinburn’s mother Ghislaine said: “He’s been watching the markets. He’ll be getting an envelope with money in it for Christmas which he’ll turn into cryptocurrency.” However, the Swinburn family is yet to reveal the ...
This year, new research showed that there’s still a long way to go before there is gender parity in the crypto and blockchain space. WEF’s April Global Gender Gap Report 2021 found that it will take close to 135.6 years to close the gender gap due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, that hasn’t stopped these women who used blockchain technology and cryptocurrency to tackle a whole range of social issues ranging from girls’ education in developing countries to the wealth gap in black communities in the United States. In no particular order, these 10 women are changing the world using crypto one block at a time. Tavonia Evans Tavonia Evans is the founder and lead engineer of GUAP Coin, which she created to help close the wealth gap and support black-owned businesses in the United States. Desp...
Tristan is the core contributor to Zeta Markets, an under-collateralized DeFi derivatives platform, providing liquid derivatives trading to individuals and institutions alike. “We’ve seen a Cambrian explosion in the DeFi ecosystem in 2021, with peak TVL approaching $300 billion vs the 2020 peak of $21 billion. This sounds like the growth surely has to slow. Yet, DeFi still represents just a fraction of CeFi trading volumes. At Zeta, we see a clear opportunity for more and more CeFi infrastructure to be built on-chain in a permissionless manner. This will unlock innovative products that have previously been impossible to implement. The following has already started to happen: Composability trumps the siloed products of CeFi, which has created really powerful network effe...
The Dogecoin Foundation, a non-profit organization behind the meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin (DOGE), is working on a staking mechanism in collaboration with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. The Foundation on Thursday released its Dogecoin Trailmap or a “dog-walk” that the Dogecoin Foundation is committed to exploring and which it believes would contribute to Dogecoin’s success. As part of the trailmap, the Dogecoin Foundation is working with Buterin on building a “uniquely Doge proposal” for a “community staking” version of proof-of-stake (PoS). Such a version would allow all Dogecoin users to stake their DOGE and get extra tokens for supporting the network, the Dogecoin Foundation said: “[The PoS version] will allow everyone, not just the big players to participate in a way t...
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has reportedly confirmed the completion of a crypto law draft that will soon be shared with the Parliament for mainstream implementation in the country. In an effort to counter the falling value of the Turkish lira, President Erdoğan shared plans to implement a new economic model while speaking at a press conference in Istanbul. As reported by local media NTV, Erdoğan said that the cryptocurrency bill is ready, adding: “We will take steps on this issue by sending it to Parliament without delay.” Acknowledging the country’s recent inflationary episode, Erdoğan said that the currency event is not related to mathematics but a matter of process — implying a possibility and potential of lira’s value growth: “With this understanding, we intend to cha...
Public blockchain network Terra has confirmed an ongoing scam attack via an official governance poll on Mirror, an in-house synthetic assets protocol. According to Mirror, the attacker launched a public poll on Mirror’s official website, which proposes a freeze on the community pool in case of a scam. NEW MIRROR POLL! ALERT: Poll 211 is SCAM — sending 25,000,000 MIR to itself … #vote on 212: https://t.co/FH6RqTbJ2j $MIR $LUNA #terra — Mirror Polls (@mirror_polls) December 25, 2021 According to Poll ID: 211, named “Freeze the community pool in case of scam”, the scammer proposes an upgrade of safer community governance rules in case of a hack. If the hacker manages to get a positive majority on the poll, 25 million MIR tokens (worth $24.1 million at the time of writing) wi...
In his monthly crypto tech column, Israeli serial entrepreneur Ariel Shapira covers emerging technologies within the crypto, decentralized finance (DeFi) and blockchain space, as well as their roles in shaping the economy of the 21st century. When trying to examine the nonfungible token (NFT) economy as it has been shaping in recent months, two main trends can be discerned. On the one hand, a completely new market that allows various artists to join a new creator economy — the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, various types of pixel art creators and creative flickers such as the creator of long-necked women’s paintings, the sale of which brought the artist, only 12 years old, close to 1,394 Ether (ETH), equal at the time of writing $6 million. But the truth is that an NFT is much mor...
Polygon (MATIC), a layer-two network designed for scaling and application infrastructure development on Ethereum (ETH), has been making the rounds among blockchain enthusiasts as of late. From its $1 billion investment into zero-knowledge technology to co-launching a $200 million Web 3.0 social media initiative up to integrating with Opera’s web browser to make its decentralized apps accessible to 80 million Android mobile users, the network’s momentum is going strong. But partnerships and business aside, the technological capacities of the network, especially when compared to Ethereum, are also attracting the attention of many blockchain developers. In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal talked about the extent of the n...
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the Twittersphere Not a troll was stirring, not even a financier; The crypto was HODLed in cold storage with care, In hopes that Satoshi would soon reappear; The newbies avoided FUD and slept in their beds, While visions of lambos danc’d in their heads. And Pomp being occupied, and Schiff spewing crap, Weren’t calling attention to traders stacking sats. When in the trends came mentions of Nakamoto, I had to be sure it wasn’t just FOMO. Away to my portfolio my fingers did fly, And checked on the prices — man, were they high! Then, for a moment, I thought I was wrong. But no — a huge bull run, and eight altcoins going along. Who could have done this? Who answered my prayer? I knew in an instant the answer: Michael Saylo...
2021 was a breakout year for the cryptocurrency market in many respects and most investors are absolutely thrilled that Bitcoin (BTC) price established a new all-time high of $68,789. In the same timeframe, Ether (ETH) went on a parabolic rally which saw its price gain 565% from Jan. 1 to hit a record high at $4,859 on Nov. 10. While it was a banner year for large cap cryptocurrencies, some of the biggest gains and most impactful developments came from the altcoin market where decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) rallied by thousands of percent and helped to usher in a new level of awareness and adoption for blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Here’s a look at five altcoin projects that made significant contributions to the cryptocurrency ecosystem in 2021. Un...
Bitcoin (BTC) bounced back above the psychological level at $50,000 and the S&P 500 hit a new all-time closing high on Dec. 23, suggesting that the panic selling caused due to the omicron variant is subsiding and the much-awaited “Santa rally” may have started. Data from on-chain analytics firm Glassnode shows that about 100,000 Bitcoin are going from “liquid” to “illiquid” state every month, which means that the coins are being sent to addresses “with little history of spending.” This suggests accumulation by investors. Daily cryptocurrency market performance. Source: Coin360 In another sign that investors are not dumping their coins on small corrections, data from CryptoRank shows that the total Bitcoin on crypto exchanges has dropped from 9.5% of the total Bitcoin supply in October ...