The crypto market witnessed the DeFi summer of 2020, where decentralized finance applications like Compound and Uniswap turned Ether (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC) into yield-bearing assets via yield farming and liquidity mining rewards. The price of Ether nearly doubled to $490 as the total liquidity across DeFi protocols quickly surged to $10 billion. Toward the end of 2020 and early 2021, the COVID-19-induced quantitative easing across global markets was in full effect, causing a mega-bull run that lasted almost a year. During this time, Ether’s price increased nearly ten times to a peak above $4,800. After the euphoric bullish phase ended, a painful cool-down journey was exacerbated by the UST-LUNA crash which began in early 2022. This took Ether’s price down to $800. A ray of hope eventually...
According to a discussion at the 151st Ethereum Core Developers Meeting on Dec. 8, core programmers have set a tentative deadline of March 2023 for Ethereum’s Shanghai hard fork. In addition, developers will aim for May or June 2023 to launch the Ethereum Improvement Protocol (EIP) 4844 upgrade that will introduce proto-danksharding to the network. Although the much-anticipated proof-of-stake Merge upgrade was completed on Sept. 15, staked Ether (stETH) is currently locked on the Ethereum Beacon Chain. The token is created by decentralized finance protocol Lido, with close to 3.5 million stETH ($4.48 billion) in circulation. After the Shanghai upgrade, stETH users can withdraw their funds along with any applicable staking rewards for validating network transactions. The Ethereu...
China’s biggest city Shanghai officially intends to boost the development of innovations such as blockchain, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), metaverse and Web3 in general during its next five-year plan. On July 13, Shanghai’s Municipal Government published the draft of its “14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Shanghai’s Digital Economy”. A document sets the mission of “promoting the deep integration of digital technology and the real economy,” with “scientists judging technology prospects” and “entrepreneurs discovering market demand”. The plan suggests supporting the enterprises that plan to construct the NFT trading platforms and “research and promote the digitization of NFT and other assets.” A separat...
The city of Shanghai has been in a month-long mandated quarantine, which confines its 25 million residents to their homes. Initially, the latest COVID-19 outbreak began in March of this year and developed into the worst infection zone since the beginning of the pandemic. As the virus infected hundreds of thousands of people, the extremely restrictive lockdown prevented residents from leaving their homes for weeks on end. In addition to the spike in infections, the lockdown prevented people from obtaining food and medical treatment, and introduced other austerities. This led to frustrated citizens taking to the internet for solidarity and venting. However, government authorities have been reportedly censoring videos that surfaced on the internet showing scenes of confinement within Sh...
China’s Ant Group Co Ltd is planning to refashion itself as a financial holding company under the supervision of China’s central bank in the face of regulatory pressure, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has submitted an outline of a restructuring plan, which could be finalised before China goes into the week-long lunar new year holiday in mid-February, the Wall Street Journal said, citing sources. Chinese regulators had asked Ant to consider folding up most of its financial businesses into a holding company that would be subject to more stringent capital requirements, two sources told Reuters in December. The country’s central bank, People’s Bank of China, has said Ant controls a range of financial institutions, including sec...
U.S. warns Pacific islands about Chinese bid for undersea cable project
The United States has warned Pacific island nations about security threats posed by a Chinese company’s cut-price bid to build an undersea internet cable, two sources told Reuters, part of an international development project in the region. Huawei Marine, which was recently divested from Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and is now majority-owned by another Chinese firm, submitted bids along with French-headquartered Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), part of Finland’s Nokia, and Japan’s NEC, for the $72.6 million project backed by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB), the sources with direct knowledge of the project details said. The project is designed to improve communications to the island nations of Nauru, Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and Kiribati. Washington sent a diploma...