Smart Contracts Financial News

The world of decentralized finance (DeFi) opened a vast array of new opportunities with its explosion in 2020, but it also brought new challenges and profound risks to crypto users. Due to its decentralized nature and short history, the industry is difficult to regulate and can hardly provide a secure environment for its players.

Over $2.5 billion was stolen in cross-chain crypto bridge hacks from 2021 to 2022, according to a report by Token Terminal. But, despite several attempts by developers to improve bridge security, a debate from December 2022 to January 2023 on the Uniswap DAO forums has laid bare security weaknesses that continue to exist in blockchain bridges.

Cardano is a proof-of-stake (PoS) platform launched in September 2017 by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. In September 2021, Cardano added support for smart contracts, which paved the way for developing decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) applications. NFTs landed on Cardano’s blockchain in 2022, with Cardano’s native cryptocurrency ADA (ADA) utilized to buy and sell them.

Real Vision CEO and co-founder Raoul Pal believes nonfungible tokens (NFTs) will act similar to “high-end property” in the traditional economy, outperforming Ether (ETH) during crypto market boom cycles.

A recently introduced Illinois Senate Bill has been ridiculed by the crypto community over its "unworkable" plans to force blockchain miners and validators to do "impossible things" — such as reversing transactions if ordered to do so by a state court.

The $8m Platypus flash loan attack was made possible because of code that was in the wrong order, according to a post mortem report from Platypus auditor Omniscia. The auditing company claims the problematic code didn’t exist in the version they saw.

Blockchain technology has been around for over a decade and has transformed many industries, from finance to supply-chain management to digital identity. It has the potential to revolutionize the way we live, work and transact in the near future. However, adoption is still far from the global scale that Web3 enthusiasts envision.

smart contracts, via, blockchains like Ethereum, and others, have brought a new twist into that logic.Smart contracts: DefinedAlthough the term has always been considered coined by and a part of blockchain technology, the term Smart Contracts was coined, some 20 years ago, by a cryptographer named Nick Szabo. The purpose of coinage was to introduce “highly evolved” practices of contract law and related business practices in, and in conjunction with the design of electronic commerce protocols between strangers on the Internet. In blockchain technology however, a Smart Contract is essentially a computer protocol that can self-execute, self-enforce, self-verify, and self-constraint during the performance of an automated contract. Though rapidly evolving, classic smart contract implementation examples include the ICOs and Crypto Kitties. Aside from its legal impact and perhaps a replacement with legal contracts, smart contracts can certainly lessen the burden and the complexity of writing a new contract. Instead one can include these as terms of a smart contract between two parties automatically.

The parts that make up the cryptocurrency ecosystem are not all equal, United States Federal Reserve Board governor Christopher Waller told a conference audience on Feb. 10. He had clear preferences among the three elements of the ecosystem that he identified.

105-year-old German bank DekaBank is planning to launch a blockchain-based tokenization platform in collaboration with the digital asset firm Metaco.

Payment company Visa is seeking to build a "muscle memory" to settlements, aiming to allow customers to convert digital assets to fiat currencies on its platform, according to the company's head of crypto division Cuy Sheffield at the StarkWare Sessions 2023.

Following the global regulatory race, Australia opened the public consultation on its own taxonomy of crypto assets. The national regulators propose to distinguish four major types of products related to the crypto industry. 

Blockchain technology has revolutionized the way we think about data storage and transactions, but it can also be a complex field for developers to navigate. One tool that can help simplify the process is ChatGPT, a large language model created by OpenAI.

China’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) — the digital yuan, or eCNY — has received upgrades giving it smart contract functionality alongside a series of newly unveiled use cases.

Flare, a new layer-1 Ethereum Virtual Machine blockchain platform, has gone live with the launch of two core protocols aimed at powering decentralized interoperability applications.

A follow-up on Web3 Antivirus release, dwelling on how to avoid expensive errors while looking for opportunities.

With the many possibilities opened by ChatGPT, executives within the Web3 space predicted how the artificial intelligence (AI) tool developed by OpenAI would make its impact on the industry. 

After a spectacular run in 2021, almost everyone at least superficially knows what nonfungible tokens (NFTs) are. Although not many people are aware that NFTs constantly get new entrancing functionality and use cases.

The metaverse platform Decentranland announced a new platform feature which allows its users who own virtual LAND to essentially become landlords. Owners can now officially rent out their property to other users on the platform for predefined periods of time.

In an announcement sent to Cointelegraph, the firm stated that it has partnered with Alteon LaunchPad to let beginners in Web3 or the NFT space easily mint NFTs. With the integration, users will be able to access a feature that lets them drag and drop media files into the browser, which writes a smart contract and uploads the file into a blockchain, turning the files into NFTs.

Ether (ETH), which is the second largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, is popular among cryptocurrency investors because of its native ETH token. However, its native Solidity programming language and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) are instrumental in the adulation it receives from the developer community. In fact, the Ethereum blockchain continues to attract decentralized application (DApp) developers due to its flexibility, the vast range of developer tools available and the platform’s large user base.