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Showing posts with the label opinion

Pay-to-use blockchains will never achieve mass adoption

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Blockchain projects should learn from Google and Facebook by monetizing their users without directly asking for their money. Pay-to-use blockchains are done. Not for us, of course — the nerdy crypto crowd. We’re perfectly happy to open wallets, engrave seed phrases on steel cards we bury in the ground, find exchanges we haven’t been blocked from yet, wrap some assets to leverage yield, and become OpSec professionals while we pray to the blockchain gods that the North Koreans aren’t online right now. We’re fine with this. Years of experience have dulled the pain. But the mass adoption we all hoped for? It relies on the 99% of people who have zero appetite for such trauma. Related: An ETF will bring a revolution for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies If permissionless blockchains are to become the backbone of our online experiences, three major changes need to happen: They need to become free. They need to become frictionless. They need to become familiar. “Free” means free for the us...

Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade made it easier to detect criminals

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Staking rewards following Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade have made it easier for investigators to spot counterintuitive behavior by ETH holders. With its historic Merge event in September, Ethereum has become a proof-of-stake blockchain. The mechanism now used to confirm transactions relies on validators staking their Ether (ETH). Ethereum’s March upgrade, codenamed Shanghai, finally enabled stakers to withdraw their locked Ether.  The Ethereum ecosystem’s “investment themes” have included a) decentralized finance (DeFi) b) stablecoins c) Bitcoin (via wrapped versions of BTC) and d) non-fungible tokens (NFTs). With the upgrade , the network also began providing fixed-income assets. There are currently several ways people make money on or using Ethereum. Broadly, they can be grouped into “investment themes,” including: a) decentralized finance (DeFi); b) stablecoins; c) Bitcoin (BTC) (via wrapped versions of BTC); and d) nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Following Shanghai, the network began to ...