What has been happening around Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrencies this week? The most relevant local and international developments as well as appealing background reports in a pointed and compact weekly review.
Selected articles of the week:
The field of decentralized financial applications has grown considerably since its beginnings in 2020. Although the area has again lost considerable ground since the highs reached, there are still around $55 billion in digital assets deposited in various DeFi protocols. In addition to staking and lending platforms, the liquidity pools of decentralized exchanges also continue to have appealing liquidity. Moreover, blockchain-based infrastructure has proven to be extremely robust, even during periods marked by notable price declines. Thanks to its reliable, transparent and irrevocable architecture, the area offers interesting starting points for the traditional financial infrastructure. Under the name “Project Guardian”, several large banks are currently testing the feasibility of applications on public DeFi platforms with the supervision of the Singapore financial regulator. The focus is on foreign currency tokenization applications. Another indication of the often-cited merger of the two areas.
As part of a joint financial industry project (“Guardian”), banking giant JP Morgan is conducting the first real DeFi transaction.
The Swiss central bank SNB has also been exploring the efficiency opportunities arising from the blockchain space for quite some time. Currently, the institution is researching “automated market maker protocols (AMM)” for the cross-border exchange of digital central bank currencies (CBDCs) with other monetary authorities. With the continuation of the two Helvetia and Jura projects, the settlement of foreign exchange transactions between financial institutions in Swiss francs, euros and Singapore dollars is to be examined.ura.
The “Mariana” project of the SNB and partner central banks is investigating cross-border trading of CBDCs via DeFi protocols.
Fintech giant Revolut is doubling down on cryptocurrencies. After already allowing the purchase and transfer of digital assets, the company is now integrating further possibilities, which among other things should allow for direct cryptocurrency payments.
Global financial app Revolut is newly introducing card payments with cryptocurrencies in Switzerland and the UK.
The NFT sector is driving a steady influx of new users in the blockchain sector. An increasing number of corporations are using the possibilities offered by the technology to bind their customers more closely to the company. Social media platform Reddit also began introducing so-called avatar NFTs in 2021.The platform has an estimated 50 million daily active users and reportedly earned more than $350 million last year. After a relatively subdued introduction, the company is now expanding its first NFT collection on a broader conceptual level.
Social news site Reddit continues to expand into the crypto space with platform-owned NFT profile images.
In addition: For three years, more than 350 developers, including the brains behind Meta’s Libra/Diem project, created the Aptos blockchain. According to its creators, the blockchain is supposed to stand out with its features of scalability, security and reliability. To enable mass adoption in the Web3 era, the blockchain network is expected to go the way of cloud infrastructure, guaranteeing cost-effective deployment of widespread applications. For the time being, however, the network has not yet been able to live up to the promises of technical performance after its launch.
The new layer-1 blockchain Aptos aims to provide infrastructure for the Web3 with 100,000 transactions per second (TPS).
