Autor Cointelegraph By Brayden Lindrea

Don't trust your coins to anyone, Ledger CEO warns

Don't trust your coins to anyone, Ledger CEO warns

Uverejnil používateľ | aug 26, 2022 |

The rise of decentralized services and hardware security wallets means that we no longer need to rely on intermediaries to manage our financial assets and data, according to CEO Pascal Gauthier of hardware wallet Ledger, who has urged people to take on more responsibility.Speaking to Cointelegraph at Surfin’ Bitcoin 2022 on Aug. 25, Gauthier said that the recent collapse of centralized exchanges has showcased why investors shouldn’t rely on intermediaries to manage their digital assets.While most actors are well intended, Gauthier said “the [crypto] industry is too young”, the current state of the economy is “under stress” and if necessary, intermediaries will continue to prevent investors from accessing their holdings in times of need, citing the now bankrupt Celsius as a textbook example: “Don’t trust your coins and your private keys to anyone because you don’t know what they’re going to do with it.”Gauthier admitted the bad news added “fuel to [their] business,” but reinforced that people need to “move their coins before it’s too late.” Though Gauthier unfortunately noted that people in crypto often need to “get burned a little bit” before learning the hard way. But Gauthier also believes that the transition from Web2 to Web3 is taking its time because today’s internet users are content with the speed and efficiency of Web2 services:“A lot of people are still in Web2 […] because they want to stay in the matrix where they’re being controlled because it’s easier, it’s you know just click yes yes yes and then someone else is going to deal with your problems. It’s all good and well but actually I don’t think this is how you [become] free […] taking responsibility is how you become free.”Gauthier added that most people in today’s society see crypto as just another way to make easy money. However, they fail to understand that it can “give them control on their assets” and provide them “financial freedom.”Related: Ledger reportedly seeking additional $100 million in fundingLedger was founded in 2014, and is a leader in security hardware wallet infrastructure through the use of their built in ‘Secure Element and a proprietary operating system’, which is designed to protect digital assets. As of Jun. 2021, Ledger had sold over 3 million hardware wallets.In addition to Ledger’s security products, Gauthier said the company has also taken an educative approach to help everyday people understand what Web3 is trying to do:“We spend a lot […] of our money […] on building content and education [to try] educate people, legislators, regulators […] for people to understand what all of this means, why it’s an opportunity, why freedom is being challenged today […] in the current society [and] why [this] technology needs to evolve in order […] to make people more free than what they are today.”Moving forward, Gauthier said he’s excited to see how blockchain tech unfolds and what crypto applications will bring in mass adoption. Taking a 20 year horizon, Gauthier added that “what we are going to see in 20 years are somethings that we can’t really imagine yet.”

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Nvidia cites limited visibility into crypto mining's impact on Q2 results

Nvidia cites limited visibility into crypto mining's impact on Q2 results

Uverejnil používateľ | aug 25, 2022 |

Graphics card giant Nvidia CFO Colette Kress says the company has been unable to estimate reduced crypto mining demand impacted its Q2 results, which fell short of analyst expectations on Wednesday. The chip giant released its financial results for the three months ended Jul. 31y, which revealed a 19% quarter-on-quarter drop in revenue to $6.5 billion, while net income fell 59% to $656 million. Revenue for its gaming division, which includes sales of its high-end GPUs, fell 44% in revenue from the previous quarter to $2.04 billion, which Nvidia attributed to “challenging market conditions.” Kress, who also serves as executive vice president of the company, said Nvidia has limited visibility on how the crypto market affects the demand for their gaming products:”Our GPUs are capable of cryptocurrency mining, though we have limited visibility into how much this impacts our overall GPU demand.”“We are unable to accurately quantify the extent to which reduced cryptocurrency mining contributed to the decline in Gaming demand,” she added.While the chip giant’s graphic processing units (GPUs) were designed for gaming purposes, high demand for crypto mining activities over the past few years has contributed to a 320% increase in the company’s share price over the last five years.Kress said, however, that falling crypto prices and changes in consensus mechanism have in the past impacted demand for its products and the ability to estimate it. “Volatility in the cryptocurrency market – such as declines in cryptocurrency prices or changes in method of verifying transactions, including proof of work or proof of stake — has in the past impacted, and can in the future impact, demand for our products and our ability to accurately estimate it.”With the Ethereum Merge scheduled for Sep. 15, the network’s consensus change to proof-of-stake (PoS) could further drive down the demand for crypto mining hardware. This could spell trouble for cryptocurrency mining products such as Nvidia’s CMP170 HX which currently costs around $4,695.Related: Nvidia to pay $5.5M as part of SEC case concerning ‘inadequate disclosures’ around crypto miningThat being said, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, and Dogecoin are among the networks still operating on proof-of-work consensus mechanisms with no observable plans to transition in the future.Nvidia’s share price has also dropped 5.89% over the last 5 days on the NASDAQ.

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It's a go! Uniswap Foundation becomes reality after 86M votes in favor

It's a go! Uniswap Foundation becomes reality after 86M votes in favor

Uverejnil používateľ | aug 25, 2022 |

The $74 million plan by two former Uniswap Lab executives for a new Uniswap Foundation has just become reality after their proposal received over 99% of the votes from UNI token holders.According to the initial proposal, the foundation aims to streamline Uniswap’s Grant Program (UPG) and reduce friction in the protocol’s governance system. Former Uniswap Labs executive Devin Walsh, now serving as executive director of UF shared the results in a tweet on Aug. 24, noting that the proposal to create the foundation “passed its final vote!” Last night our proposal to create the Uniswap Foundation passed its final vote!https://t.co/B2VOAeg5is— Devin Walsh (@devinawalsh) August 24, 2022According to the Uniswap website, the foundation saw more than 86 million, or 99% of total votes in favor of the proposal, with only 770 votes against it. The votes in favor come despite the initial proposal seeing mixed community reaction when it was first announced on Aug. 5.The voting period started on Aug. 17, and was cut off at 2:19 pm GMT +10 deadline on Aug. 24. The votes were conducted on Uniswap’s app, with voters needing to hold the UNI token in order to vote. For the vote to pass, a threshold of 40 million votes was needed to be cast in favor of the UF. Walsh said that the UF has already “hit the ground running” on its top priorities, including interviewing “talented, values-aligned candidates” to join the team, scaling up the UPG and “reinvigorating governance.”According to the Uniswap Foundation’s job board, employees they’re looking to hire include Community Lead, Partnerships Lead, Governance Lead, Grants Analyst and Leads, Communications and Finance Leads, and Developer Relations and Protocol Leads. Decentralized or not? But despite the votes being cast heavily in favor of the UF, some on Twitter have questioned how much control the community actually has on Uniswap decisions. Chainlink Community Ambassador “ChainLinkGod,” who has 150,200 followers on Twitter, stated that Uniswap’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) should “determine how funds raised are used” rather than a centralized foundation.The Uniswap DAO is also a joke in regards to decentralization theater, doesn’t exactly help your argument here, but at least they control $3.6B in UNI (largest DAO by AUM)Typically it is the role of a DAO determine how funds raised are used, not a centralized foundation— ChainLinkGod.eth (@ChainLinkGod) August 20, 2022

Another community member suggested that the voting outcome was “whale run”, with the top 20 addresses voting with 81.57 million, or 99.7% of tokens used to vote in the proposal. Uniswap has a history of passing fairly unanimous proposals. Today the community voted to accept a US$ 74mn expense to create the Uniswap Foundation (UF).But….US$ 74mn is a lot of money…and was it really the community that voted this in?https://t.co/BeavvElVK3— Ishita Srivastava (@ishita7077) August 24, 2022

Walsh, along with now Head of Operations Ken Ng plans on building out a team of 12 and have requested $74 million from the Uniswap decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) treasury, which currently holds over $3 billion worth of UNI tokens. Of the $74 million, the UF plans on distributing $60 million to the Uniswap Grant Program (UGP) and the remaining $14 million to cover the operating budget.Uniswap is the world’s largest decentralized exchange (DEX) by trading volume. Since Uniswap’s inception in Nov. 2018, the protocol has supported more than $1 trillion in cumulative volume, with its daily volume often competing with that of centralized exchange Coinbase.

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New fix for curse of Impermanent Loss proposed on Avalanche

New fix for curse of Impermanent Loss proposed on Avalanche

Uverejnil používateľ | aug 24, 2022 |

Avalanche-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Trader Joe claims it may have found a way to mitigate one of DeFi’s biggest weaknesses — impermanent loss. In a newly released whitepaper on Aug. 23 called the JOE v2 Liquidity Book, authored by Quant developers and researchers Adam Sturges, “TraderWaWa”, “Hanzo” and software engineer “Louis MeMyself”, the developers outlined the use of Liquidity Book (LB) with an additional variable fee swap feature to “provide traders with zero or low slippage trades.”/4 Impermanent LossOne of the most critical issues of Uniswap V3 is that impermanent loss often exceeds swap fees.A study effectuated by the @Bancor team showed that 50% of Uniswap V3 LPs lose money. Liquidity Book solves this problem by introducing variable swap fees.— The DeFi Investor (@TheDeFinvestor) August 23, 2022Trader Joe said the new strategy will mitigate impermanent loss “suffered by so many liquidity providers (LPs) on other DEXs during market turbulence.” Impermanent loss, which has been seen as one of DeFi’s greatest weaknesses, happens when the price of token changes after one deposits it in a liquidity pool-based automated market maker as part of yield farming — a type of investment in which one lends tokens to earn rewards (not the same as staking).It’s also one of the reasons that institutional investors have been treading with caution in the DeFi space, according to digital-asset management firm IDEG’s chief investment officer Markus Theilen. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Theilen said that his firm and other institutional investors “have been less engaged with automated market makers (AMMs) as the risk of impermanent loss is too high,” adding:“I must admit that Trader Joe’s v2 whitepaper offers a novel idea and liquidity providers have generated 30bps for facilitating trades, which is an attractive return when future growth is uncertain for the industry. We want to see how much liquidity v2 is now attracting and how Trader Joe’s TVL will improve.”Theilen added that in order to get a competitive edge in the digital asset sector, investors need to look for alternative investments with good fundamentals, rather than just relying on blue-chip assets: “As a crypto fund, we can’t just rely on ETH and BTC, we want other layer ones and alt coins to thrive, so we applaud the Trader Joe team for keeping developing and other AMM on their toes.”According to the paper, Trader Joe’s Liquidity Book (LB) is a type of liquidity pool (LP) that arranges liquidity of an asset pair into price bins, which are exchanged at a constant price. The LB introduces a new variable swap fee, which is designed to protect traders from impermanent loss by compensating LPs in the event of extreme market volatility, so that the liquidity can be more efficiently managed in response to sudden price movements. Trader Joe’s LB will also offer zero to low slippage trades, which will serve to offer traders better buying rates. If properly executed, this may represent a significant breakthrough in DeFi, as a recent study showed that over 50% of Uniswap V3 LPs lose money in times of market turbulence because impermanent loss exceeded the swap fees.The wait is finally over….Introducing: Liquidity Book A next gen AMM protocol that is highly efficient, flexible and built for #DeFihttps://t.co/6l2FoaJ0xo— Trader Joe | New AMM Soon (@traderjoe_xyz) August 22, 2022

Thorchain is another DeFi protocol providing impermanent loss protection for LP deposits after the first 100 days (with partial protection before that point). The Trader Joe protocol dubs itself as a “one-stop decentralized trading platform” that is built on smart contract platform Avalanche. Related: Trader Joe (JOE) makes a 110% V-shaped recovery after Rocket Joe launchThe protocol is currently the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) on Avalanche, with $191 million total value locked (TVL) on the protocol.The DeFi protocol allows users to trade, farm, lend and stake among other things. Trader Joe’s token, JOE, saw its price briefly spike following the whitepaper release, and is trading at $0.28 at the time of writing, though its still down 94.5% from its all-time-high, according to Coingecko.

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64% of US blockchain-versed parents want crypto taught in schools: Survey

64% of US blockchain-versed parents want crypto taught in schools: Survey

Uverejnil používateľ | aug 24, 2022 |

Over two-thirds of U.S. parents and college graduates with an understanding or involvement in crypto believe that crypto should be taught in schools in order for students to “learn about the future of our economy,” a new study has found. In a newly released survey from the online educational platform Study.com, the firm found that 64% of the parents 67% of the college graduates surveyed believed that cryptocurrencies should be part of mandatory education. Both groups had a slightly different view when it came to the blockchain, the Metaverse, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) however, with only around 40% believing those subjects should be included in the curriculum as well.In order to take part in the survey, the parents and college grads were screened to ensure the subjects had a sufficient level of understanding of blockchain tech, crypto, NFTs, and the Metaverse and disqualified anyone that didn’t understand the topics from participation. The survey included 884 American parents and 210 American college graduates The results come amid the increasing awareness and adoption of cryptocurrencies in the United States. According to data research center Pew, around 88% of Americans have at least heard of cryptocurrencies, while 16% of U.S. residents have invested or traded cryptocurrencies at some point in their lives. The survey found that both parents and college graduates who had invested in crypto are likely to contribute money to crypto education, with three-quarters of crypto-hodling parents contributing an average of $766 to their children’s crypto education, while over three-quarters of crypto-invested graduates were spending an average of $1,086 on education.The University of Connecticut and Arizona State University are among U.S.-based colleges that have introduced introductory courses on blockchain tech and crypto applications. According to Connecticut professor Marianne Lewis, her university’s 14-week optional class is designed to help students “learn how to manage cryptocurrencies and how such digital assets impact our economy.”Prestigious universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University have also begun offering similar courses.The survey also found that both groups agreed that learning about “the future of our economy” was most important, as well as a means to “diversify investments”, “to create opportunities” and “develop an investing mind.”Related: Top universities have added crypto to the curriculumIn an interview with Cointelegraph in May, CEO of TZ APAC Colin Miles suggests that crypto could be incorporated into secondary and tertiary schools curriculums within three to five years, stating: “Overall, this trend will become a mainstay because a large number of exciting new jobs will come from the Web3 environment. It is, therefore, incumbent on educational institutions to help gear their student cohorts up for this important shift.”New York City mayor Eric Adams also said in an interview last year that local schools should embrace blockchain technology and digital assets:“We must open our schools to teach [blockchain] technology, to teach this new way of thinking.”

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