Bitcoin’s closing price for October was its second highest ever monthly close November 3, 2020 By any measure, last week was a pretty special one for Bitcoin. Let’s take a look at the main highlights. On Tuesday (October 27), the plans of Singapore’s DBS Bank, the largest bank (by assets) in South East Asia, to launch its own crypto exchange (“DBS Digital Exchange”) got leaked when the landing page for [...]
Connecting DeFi with real world assets: the next horizon October 30, 2020 Decentralised Finance (DeFi) is a term used to refer to innovations in capital markets that rely on blockchains, and enable capital market activities across an open network, where trust is automated in the software. Instead of using conventional financial rails such as banks or credit transfer APIs, DeFi based projects work entirely on blockchains without [...]
What grassroots use of Bitcoin could mean for liquidity October 29, 2020 The road to the recent announcement from PayPal goes back 10 years. 2010 famously saw the first recorded commercial transaction of Bitcoin when a user spent 10,000 BTC on pizza. Pizza is delicious, but we would all be kicking ourselves for exchanging what is currently worth $130 million on 2 pizzas. This is now celebrated [...]
Crypto AM shines its Spotlight on INX October 28, 2020 Trailblazers In Unchartered Territory: INX, The First SEC-Registered Token IPO INX Limited is enabling the future of finance by creating a new asset class; with higher flexibility and innovative functionality for asset listings, trading and governance. We are witnessing change across all industries in this post-pandemic world, and capital markets are no exception. Security tokens [...]
DeFi Hacks: A Cybersecurity Perspective October 28, 2020 The decentralized finance market (DeFi) has been one of the most explosive trends in the crypto industry since the ICO boom of 2017. Crypto-assets locked away in DeFi protocols over 2020 have increased by a staggering 1,740%, from $676 million to a peak of $12.44 billion – according to figures from Defipulse. This dramatic rise [...]
Decentralised exchanges: Solving the scaling problem October 27, 2020 Cryptocurrency, at its core, was designed as the ultimate financial disruption – requiring no centralised authority. And yet, there is a kind of paradox in the majority of crypto trading volume occuring on exchanges that are centralised. However, we are now seeing the beginnings of a shift towards decentralised exchanges (DEXs) such as Uniswap, Balancer, [...]
Infrastructure in Deep Tech October 27, 2020 Lex Sokolin’s Fintech Blueprint newsletter last week set out the challenges for the financial services sector in 2020. He summarised the argument saying “(1) the shift from physical to digital communities is being accelerated by the COVID environment, and (2) this has led to the acceleration in adoption of virtual worlds, events, and economic activities [...]