Agoric, a JavaScript-native smart contract platform, announced the launch of its public chain, which comes a month after the company completed a $32 million private token sale.

Agoric says its proof-of-stake chain with JavaScript smart contracts offers developers a secure and reliable cross-chain ecosystem for building and deploying decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. The development environment provides reusable governance, lending and trading components.

The first phase of Agoric’s launch introduces the BLD (build) staking token and the Agoric chain built using the Cosmos software development kit (SDK). BLD supports staking, governance and decentralization. The token is backed by Kepir, a browser extension wallet for the inter-blockchain ecosystem, which will also provide governance and staking services for the Agoric blockchain.

“Today, the DeFi development environment is failing to reach its full potential. By bringing DeFi to the overlooked JavaScript community, Agoric is blasting open the DeFi economy to over 10 million innovative and curious developers, enterprises, and institutions to create the dapps of tomorrow,” said Agoric co-founder and CEO Dean Tribble in the press release.

Tribble previously worked as a principal architect at Microsoft. Agoric Chief Scientist Mark Miller was a Google Research Scientist and wrote Agoric Open Systems Papers back in 1988. The papers provided an early outline of software creating and participating in markets.

Token sale

The private sale saw participation from early investors including MetaStable, Polychain, Rockaway and Gumi Ventures. Additional backers included Placeholder, DAO Maker and Figment, among others. The sale will help fuel Agoric’s next stage of growth, including scaling the ecosystem and developer programs, the company said.

“Smart contracts on open data layers create the foundation for a system reboot of finance, technology and digital life. Led by a team of esteemed pioneers in smart contract technology, Agoric is building a protocol that will bring the JavaScript developer community – the world’s largest developer community – into the fold of the metaverse movement,” said Placeholder co-founder and Partner Chris Burniske in the release.

Phased rollout

Agoric’s public mainnet went live on Nov. 1, kicking off the multipart mainnet rollout. Phase 0 involves governance setup and building out the community of BLD token holders. Phase 1 will include launching the JavaScript platform and the RUN protocol and token, a local stablecoin pegged to the USD. Tribble told CoinDesk that Phase 1 is expected to roll out at the end of the year or early 2022.

Phase 3 will follow and add permissionless smart contracts where any developer can deploy onto the Agoric public chain without pre approval.

The cryptocurrency world is full of jargon. You’ve got your non-fungible tokens (NFT), your Ethereum, your Solana, your know-your-customer (KYC), your altcoins, your stablecoins – not to mention where it all started: bitcoin.

If all this jargon had a home, it would be the metaverse, or the parallel digital world in which cryptocurrency and NFTs are transactable. And the metaverse would not be possible without blockchain, the system of decentralized databases upon which all interactions are coded and stored into perpetuity.

This article originally appeared in Crypto for Advisors, CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter defining crypto, digital assets and the future of finance. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

In the proverbial chicken-or-egg debate, cryptocurrency and blockchain happened simultaneously, says Robert Konsdorf, the CEO of Facings, a Michigan-based company that creates user-friendly blockchain publishing tools. Bitcoin was both the first publicly debuted blockchain and the first cryptocurrency. Some 12 years ago, its inventor, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, authored a famous document known simply as the Bitcoin white paper describing the concept for the world.

Today, there are reportedly hundreds of blockchains floating around the metaverse, all with varying degrees of functionality and relevance. “You can take the code for any blockchain and make a new one out of it,” Konsdorf tells CoinDesk. “So there’s a lot of goofy or dead ones that don’t have real investment or operations.”

But however goofy blockchain may appear – or be – the technology is here to stay. So if you or your clients have questions, we’ve got a few answers to help you out.

Explaining the appeal of blockchain

Simply put, a blockchain is a particular kind of digital database that’s distributed among computers or groups of computers called nodes. Nodes are hubs through which all the electronic information inside a respective network gets generated, sent and received. Blockchain is the ledger that collects and stores this data in groups, or “blocks.” Hence its name.

Blockchain technology is still in its early days. “I always tell people blockchains are really slow, really expensive and really public databases,” says Konsdorf.

But the databases are immutable, says Ashok Ranadive, director of professional services at the enterprise blockchain company, CasperLabs—which is a game changer.

“The history is recorded in a clean manner,” Ranadive tells CoinDesk, unlike the countless number of messy records used to maintain most of our institutions currently. This suggests the potential for unprecedented financial transparency. Once you make a transaction on blockchain it can’t ever be deleted, only modified. The ledger is composed of an ongoing series of additive records that erase nothing and preserve everything.

Last, blockchains are decentralized. They aren’t regulated by a government, a bureau, a corporation, a bank or any third-party body of any kind. Through what are known as “smart contracts,” each transaction on blockchain contains instructions in the form of code.

“The way the money is controlled is actually just what is written in the software,” explains Phillip Gara, director of strategy for the Render Network, a company that uses blockchain to process high-quality graphics. Arguably, you might say a form of auto-regulation occurs within the code’s instructions, and that this theoretically eliminates the need for enforced compliance to any kind of governing body.

The limitless potential of blockchain

Once blockchain becomes universally adopted, the average person probably won’t need to know how exactly it works so much as how to actually use it. Consider the internet. How many of us know what IP addresses are, what routers are doing behind the scenes and how a transport control protocol works? We just need to know how to log on, input our password and go to the websites we want to visit.

According to Konsdorf, blockchain will likely become a place where “humanity can put public records that mean the most to society.” For instance, smart contracts could be written to document monetary exchanges, voting records, deeds and proofs of authenticity.

“These are all constructs that can benefit from having a high degree of public data integrity,” Konsdorf says.

The potential of blockchain as an infrastructure is seemingly limitless, with recent happenings on Wall Street indicating a growing confidence from investors in crypto and the technology.

Getting started

To get your clients started with blockchain, talk them through opening their first crypto wallet. The most beginner-friendly way to start learning about crypto and blockchain is with a centralized exchange like Coinbase, which monitors transactions and uses standard KYC protocol to validate users’ identities.

As with most sensitive information, encourage your clients to use good data hygiene, such as storing their public and private wallet keys in a secure location (not somewhere that can be easily hacked like Evernote or Google Docs).

And if your clients aren’t interested in cryptocurrency, there will be opportunities to invest in more passive blockchain-related securities in the future. The companies creating this software are ramping up fast, and eventually blockchain tech and VC firms will go public and trade on all major exchanges. While the enthusiasm surrounding crypto and NFTs can easily create FOMO [fear of missing out], it’s good to remind clients that we’re just at the beginning, and staying abreast of the latest blockchain news is a good stepping stone for someone who’s still unsure of how they want to get in on the action.

Every time the zeal for digital assets from crypto enthusiasts crescendos, so does the derision from crypto critics.

Recently, as bitcoin futures exchange-traded funds made their debuts in the U.S. and the price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value leaped above $65,000, a world-renowned economist and a star bond fund manager took to social media and the airwaves to voice their concerns about digital assets.

This article originally appeared in Crypto for Advisors, CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter defining crypto, digital assets and the future of finance. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

In the first case, economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb likened the rise of bitcoin to the 17th-century Dutch tulip bubble. For those unfamiliar with that, in the 1600s, the Dutch went wild for unusual and rare variants of the tulip, paying exorbitant prices for some varieties before the bubble popped and the market collapsed. Taleb is implying the same thing may happen to the cryptocurrency.

In the second, Scott Minerd, chief investment officer at Guggenheim Global, declared most cryptocurrencies as “garbage” and said that most digital tokens will fade away or end disastrously, like the dot-com sector did when the bubble of the 1990s finally burst at the end of the decade.

To me, both of those criticisms seem to amount to the same argument, with two different outcomes: Cryptocurrencies are in a bubble. Taleb believes that a crash is imminent and that tokens won’t be able to recover their value, while Minerd believes that most tokens will end up in the dustbin of history, but that some coins – bitcoin in particular – will survive.

Time will tell whether either pundit is right, but it’s hard for me to imagine a multitrillion dollar asset class and the influential technology behind it just disappearing if and when a valuation bubble pops.

Enthusiasts and skeptics take sides

Since the advent of bitcoin, crypto skeptics and enthusiasts have lined up to voice their opinions about the long-term prospects for the digital assets market.

The enthusiast side includes people like billionaire Galaxy Digital founder Mike Novogratz and the Winklevoss twins, founders of the Gemini Exchange, but those people obviously have skin in the game. More interesting is the enthusiasm that comes from people such as noted financial advisor Ric Edelman and Tesla founder Elon Musk, as they aren’t crypto “natives” and they bring energy and attention to digital assets from other industries.

Meanwhile, skeptics include Berkshire Hathaway’s legendary tandem of Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger, economist Paul Krugman, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, as well as financial advisor icons Peter Mallouk and Michael Kitces. And another skeptic, speaking of financial icons, is Carl Icahn.

Even more interesting is the recent string of crypto converts – people who started out as skeptics but have changed their minds on digital assets. These include economic historian Niall Ferguson, journalist Kevin Roose and a host of Wall Street legends such as Ray Dalio, Stanley Druckenmiller and Paul Tudor Jones.

What the skeptics, including Taleb and Minerd, believe is that one, the public zeal for digital assets will at some point drop, and two, that the volatility of assets like bitcoin will help accelerate their undoing.

That may be a myopic viewpoint, because it focuses on the utility of digital assets as investments alone. It’s like looking at a stock market as merely a mechanism for registering public opinion on the names and tickers of the companies themselves, completely agnostic to the underlying earnings, cash flow and growth.

Beyond digital assets as investments alone

Steve Larsen – founder of both PlannerDao, a source of digital assets information and infrastructure for financial advisors, and the Certified Digital Assets Advisor (CDAA) designation – argues that many advisors are missing the point when it comes to viewing and understanding digital assets. Larsen is a former Edward Jones advisor and an accountant who founded the CDAA as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Unlike the CFP Board (Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards) and the Investments and Wealth Institute, which are both central governing bodies that manage certifications, the CDAA is governed by advisors who vote on requirements and policies as a community.

“Digital assets will revolutionize not just investing, but the economy, as well,” said Larsen. “Step one is understanding cryptocurrencies and other digital asset as an asset class and how they fit into a portfolio. Step two, which is coming much faster than most people realize, is that cryptocurrency is also a delivery system that will on some level forever change how we access financial products and services.”

The first place that has come to light is the advent of decentralized savings and payments platforms, and it will spread to investment accounts and the financial and technological infrastructure that advisors rely on to work on behalf of their clients, Larsen said.

Changing technology and public discourse

The first wave of change from blockchain technology has targeted banks, and one of the next waves will target traditional broker-dealers and custodians. Because digital assets are designed to be assets investors can hold themselves, Larsen argues that the underlying technology could one day render broker-dealers and custodians obsolete, replaced by algorithms operating at little or no cost to the advisor or end investor.

“Advice is a product that never goes out of style; it’s a service that’s always needed, but the product distribution system we are traditionally forced to deal with is going away,” he said. “Digital assets will cut out many of the layers of middlemen that it has traditionally taken to invest client money, and that’s who is really going to miss out, not the planner on the front end.”

Until that shift happens, though, the public discourse on cryptocurrencies will continue to be over their utility as an investible asset class, Larsen said, which means we will have to live with the push and pull between skeptics and enthusiasts, bulls and bears.

“There’s a reason we’re all trying to get over and through any intermediate time frame, because that’s what it is going to take before people can clearly see the utility digital assets will bring to their day-to-day lives,” Larsen said.

“It is like the internet. Conceptually, it all made sense, but it didn’t really come together until people saw the difference in their lives. That’s holding digital assets back from the true explosion a lot of us are waiting for, and part of that explosion can’t happen until independent advisors feel like they can bring their clients to crypto in a safe and legal way.”

Hut 8′s third quarter revenue was C$50.3 million ($40 million), rising about 767% from last year and beating the average analyst estimate of C$43.7 million ($34.8 million).

• Hut 8 also reported adjusted earnings of C$0.15 ($0.12) per share for the third quarter, beating the average analyst estimate of C$0.13 ($0.10) per share, according to FactSet data.
• Hut 8 deposited all of the self-mined bitcoin into custody during the third quarter and held 4,729 bitcoin for a market value of C$263.8 million ($342.1 million) as of Sept. 30, the company said in a statement.
• Additionally, the company said its bitcoin balance as of November 10, 2021, including 2,000 bitcoin loaned as part of the “fiat yield strategy,” is about 5,053 Bitcoin, for a market value of about C$430 million ($342 million).
• “We are thrilled to have reported our third consecutive record-breaking quarterly results and to have already surpassed our goal of 5,000 Bitcoin held in reserve,” the company said in its statement.
• The company also highlighted that all of its high-performance Nvidia chips have been received at Hut 8′s site in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and 91% of the servers have been installed and powered up, with full deployment expected in the next week.
• The shares of the miner were up 7.2% in early U.S. trading on Wednesday, outperforming most of the crypto miners, while bitcoin was flat.
• The miner is holding a conference call to discuss its earnings at 10 a.m. ET (15:00 UTC).

FTX.US’s average daily volumes skyrocketed 512% in its third quarter versus the second quarter and hit a peak of $807 million during a 24-hour period on Sept. 7, the crypto derivatives exchange said Thursday.

• FTX.US recorded an average daily volume of $360 million for the quarter, the company said in a press release.
• The company said its platform user count rose 52% in the quarter versus Q2.
• The exchange added that it held about 4.5% of the U.S. crypto spot market volume at the end of the third quarter, up from about 2% at beginning the quarter.
• On the closing of its LedgerX acquisition, FTX.US said the deal would allow the company to “provide licensed crypto futures and options to our retail and institutional customers, and has placed us in the unique position to reshape the U.S. derivatives market.”
• FTX.US also plans to be in “constant communication with regulatory agencies and are hoping to play a central role in defining crypto regulatory policy in the U.S.,” FTX.US President Brett Harrison said in the statement.

Quick Take

• In this weekly series, we dive into some of the most interesting data and developments across the Layer 1 blockchain landscape, from DeFi and bridges to network activity and funding
• Total value locked in L1 ecosystems has continued to rise as significant amounts of native protocol tokens remain staked in the largest DeFi protocols
• This week, we take a look at Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Terra, and Cosmos

This research piece is available to
members of The Block Genesis.
You can continue reading
this Genesis research on The Block.

Binance co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao has said that he hopes to obtain digital asset service provider status in France in 2022. The exchange is a leading player in the market globally, accounting for 70% of crypto exchange transactions. 

Following Binance’s $116 million initiative with nonprofit French Fintech to build a research hub and accelerator in France, the company now appears to be looking to settle down in the country. This is despite telling Reuters last month that Ireland was a part of its HQ plans. 

“France will be a natural choice for a regional, and even perhaps global, head office,” said Zhao in an interview with Les Echoes.

It has been far from plain sailing for the world’s biggest crypto exchange lately — with regulators from all corners of the globe clamping down on it. In the United Kingdom and Japan, financial regulators have warned the company against operating without approval. In Germany, Binance’s proposed stock tokens drew the ire of regulators in the country. 

Despite its tough regulatory reception, Zhao claims to welcome regulation and believes that its 600 strong compliance team will allow Binance to weather the storm. The company added 150 employees responsible for compliance and relations with regulators in 2021, meaning that more than 15% of its total 3500 employees are now dedicated to soothing its regulatory nerves.   

“We want to be regulated,” he said. “At this stage of our development, this will allow us to grow faster. 5% of the world’s population — 400 million people — have already adopted crypto, they are pioneers. We now want to convince the remaining 95%.” 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Muslims are forbidden from using crypto, Indonesia’s council of religious leaders has declared, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

• Crypto is forbidden due to the elements of uncertainty and wagering, Indonesia’s authority on Shariah compliance, the National Ulema Council (MUI), announced following a hearing.
• Asrorun Niam Soleh, head of religious decrees, added that a crypto could be traded as a commodity if it abides by Shariah law and demonstrates a clear benefit.
• Indonesia has one of the world’s largest Muslim populations with around 237 million, roughly 12.7% of the world’s total.
• It was reported earlier this year that Indonesia was planning to tax profits on crypto trading to bolster revenue amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
• While the country’s central bank declared crypto “not a legitimate instrument of payment” in January 2018, trading has been permitted.
• According to Indonesia’s commodity futures trading regulator Bappebti, there were around 4.45 million crypto investors in the country as of May.

Read more: Indonesia’s Pintu Exchange Raises $35M in Extended Series A Led by Lightspeed Venture

Microtransactions are a staple of many modern games, to the point many have just accepted them. However, new models are emerging, thanks to blockchain technology, that stand to disrupt the norm. Play-to-earn games are growing in popularity, and new services are lowering the cost of entry. These innovations are set to become the catalyst to create a true vision of the coming metaverse.

A new play-to-earn structure

Modern video games are rife with microtransactions. Whether simple things like costumes or accessories, or more elaborate offerings like characters and weapons, these in-game purchases have largely divided the gaming community. When done right, they can offer new content at a fair price, but when abused, they lead to “loot crates” and a general “pay-to-win” mentality. This creates artificial pay barriers to success for those who can’t simply throw money at a game they’ve already bought. Furthermore, any money sunk into a specific title is lost entirely when the player moves on.

However, with the rise of blockchain gaming and NFTs, this is all changing. A new gaming model is emerging based around real asset ownership and a new “play-to-earn” structure. A prime example is Axie Infinity, a play-to-earn NFT-based online game which has galvanized user interest worldwide, becoming the No. 1 decentralized app (dapp) in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Built on top of the existing blockchain systems, this new revolution is being called “GameFi.” GameFi encompasses the ideals that gamers shouldn’t just throw money away on in-game content, but instead invest their resources into assets that can appreciate in value and be resold on secondary markets.

NFT technology makes this possible, and the underlying blockchains also provide the means for gamers to earn currencies that have real world value. This has led to a new, all-digital economy, one that not only rewards users for their engagement, but offers financial services that make gaming a potentially lucrative avenue for generating income.

A new type of paywall

Of course, it often takes money to make money. Many of these games, while offering real avenues for value creation, also have some form of “buy-in” price, an initial payment for either an in-game NFT item or tokens, crucial to the play-to-earn mechanism. Unfortunately, not all newcomers to this space have deep pockets to get involved, leading to a similar situation as the “pay-to-win” model. For example, one of the more popular products is Axie Infinity. This Pokemon-style game has players battling their “Axies” for a chance to win actual rewards. However, to begin, users need at least three of these virtual creatures. Unfortunately, they aren’t cheap, as each one costs a current minimum of $70 on the Axie marketplace, resulting in a grand total of $210 for newcomers to get started. This isn’t accessible to a great many who would like to get involved.

Fortunately, there are innovative approaches being developed to foster greater involvement. For example, new gaming guilds, such as Yield Guild Games, in the Philippines, loan assets like Axies to new gamers in exchange for a cut of their profits. This means those with lesser means can get involved immediately, and those with more means can earn a passive income. This is a great example of the ways that this new virtual economy can benefit players at multiple levels, and inclusivity is going to be essential for building what is becoming known as the metaverse.

Blockchain gaming and the metaverse

If you aren’t familiar, the metaverse is basically the name for the collection of digital services and worlds that are becoming increasingly interconnected and interoperable. While an ambitious vision, currently many traditional platforms struggle to offer true compatibility, meaning various grafted-on solutions must be leveraged.

Fortunately, blockchain makes this issue far more trivial. NFTs and other decentralized assets can be transferred seamlessly across multiple platforms as long as they connect to a blockchain. Furthermore, the digital currencies being used stand to become ubiquitous forms of virtual cash that can plausibly be used on virtually any future service. This then stands to build a fully functioning economy that essentially lives in cyberspace, revolutionizing the way gamers interact with their favorite titles, each other, and the larger economy.

To that end, this new ecosystem stands to have very real benefits to users worldwide. The ability to earn income, and explore an immense world of entertainment will all come from one, admittedly vast, access point. This will undo many existing paradigms for how value is created and transferred, but the basic infrastructure is being built right now.

There’s still work to do

As both empowering and lucrative as this may sound, there is definitely still work to be done. For one, developers must still balance things like the types of items that are available for purchase, how they may enhance the experience for players, and how they interact with other games and markets. If unchecked, there could still be a pay-to-win issue present, as blockchain doesn’t fundamentally affect this.

What could address this is making it so that certain items are only equipable after reaching certain levels, or other qualifications. For example, metadata baked into an NFT could define an item of clothing or a weapon as usable only when the owner has met specific progression requirements. This means gamers would still be free to buy and trade any item, but a newcomer with deep pockets couldn’t just purchase their way up the ranks. This is just one example, but highlights that this is not an insurmountable issue at all.

Another possible stumbling block is the fact that many existing blockchains simply aren’t ready for the type of transaction volume that the proposed system would require. Gamers aren’t going to want to wait around for transfers to complete over several minutes or more. Transfers need to be resolved on-chain in seconds.

This of course could be mitigated by choosing the correct underlying network to build upon. For example, the Polygon Network acts as a second-layer solution for Ethereum and offers incredibly cheap transactions that take only seconds to complete. This is why Polygon has five times more gaming and NFT dapps than any other chain outside of Ethereum and is already working with a majority of today’s blockchain-based web 3.0 games and NFT platforms, such as Decentraland, OpenSea and The Sandbox.

Ultimately, it is clear that not only are gamers expecting a new model, but also that blockchain and NFT-powered gaming offers such a model. Progress has been a bit slow, but more and more developers are beginning to take note, and it won’t be long before the first “killer app” is released. Companies that fail to act soon may find themselves playing catch up before they even know it.

Good morning, Here’s what’s happening this morning:

• Market moves: Bitcoin soared past $69K before dropping below $65K.
• Technician’s take: Intraday charts are showing initial signs of upside exhaustion.

Catch the latest episodes of CoinDesk TV for insightful interviews with crypto industry leaders and analysis.

Prices

• Bitcoin (BTC): $64,626
• Ether (ETH): $4,613

Market moves

Bitcoin faced a pullback below $65,000 in the past 24 hours, a more than 4% decline, after it surpassed $69,000 for the first time in its history during U.S. trading hours on Wednesday. Ether fell to about $4,600, a roughly 3% drop.

The sharp dip came after news that China Evergrande Group failed to pay at least some of its international investors interest payments on bonds the real estate giant issued, raising more concerns about a potential default of the company.

The market perceived the new record price above $69,000 as a reaction to the newly published U.S. Consumer Price Index, which jumped to its highest level in three decades.

Data collected by CoinDesk also shows Wednesday’s rally was not supported by strong trading volume. It was lower on Wednesday than it was on Monday and Tuesday across major centralized exchanges.

As CoinDesk’s David Morris wrote, the deeply indebted Chinese real estate developer has been an important factor to the much broader financial market, crypto included. With its roots in China and worries about Tether’s holdings of Chinese debt, investors may want to watch how Asia’s crypto markets react on Thursday.

Technician’s take

Bitcoin Pulls Back From All-Time High, Support Between $63K-$65K

Bitcoin was slightly lower, trading around $65,000 at the time of publication, although buyers could hold support above $63,000-$65,000 into Asian trading hours.

Intraday charts are showing initial signs of upside exhaustion, which typically lead to a brief pullback in BTC’s price. For example, the relative strength index (RSI) on the four-hour chart continues to hover near short-term overbought levels.

Still, upside momentum signals are improving on the daily price chart for the first time since Oct. 1, which preceded a price rally from $44,000. This suggests that buyers could remain active on pullbacks.

Two consecutive daily closes above an all-time price high would yield further upside targets, initially toward $86,000.

Important events

Australian Housing Industry Association new home sales (October)

8:30 a.m. Hong Kong/Singapore (12:30 a.m. UTC): Australian unemployment rate (October)

3:00 p.m. Hong Kong/Singapore (7 a.m. UTC): UK manufacturing production

On CoinDesk TV

In case you missed it, here are the most recent episodes of “First Mover” on CoinDesk TV:

MakerDAO Is Now Fully Decentralized, Foundry Announces Digital Assets Staking Business and Range of Services for Institutions

“First Mover” hosts spoke with crypto OG and the founder of MakerDAO – a decentralized credit platform on Ethereum that supports the Dai stablecoin – Rune Christensen. He shared his thoughts on the Biden administration’s stablecoin report and the latest decentralization within his organization. Oanda Senior Market Analyst Edward Moya provided markets analysis as bitcoin retreated from an all-time high. Plus, Foundry announced a digital assets staking business and range of services for Institutions supporting 20 blockchains and counting. Foundry CEO Mike Colyer shared details of this launch.

Latest headlines

Huobi Global to Expel Singapore Users, Citing Local Regulations

Circle Establishing Singapore Hub Amid Global Expansion

Bitcoin Jumps to New All-Time High as Inflation Spikes to 6.2% in October

Kazakhstan Won’t Restrict Electricity to Lawful Crypto Miners, Minister Says

Polkadot DeFi Darling Acala Has Gathered Over $600M and Counting

Longer reads

Not Everything Needs to Be ‘on the Blockchain’

Missed the ENS Airdrop? Here Are the Crypto Projects Rumored to ‘Decentralize’ Next