Payments company American Express has launched blockchain-based stamps for customers as a digital keepsake of their travels. Each travel stamp will be stored as an ERC-721 non-fungible token on the Ethereum layer-2 Base to preserve their travel history and their favorite overseas memories, according to the company’s website. “Part of the magic of travel is reminiscing about…

The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) launched a blockchain-based infrastructure platform for private funds, making it the first major global stock exchange to use such a system. The platform, called Digital Markets Infrastructure (DMI), supports the full lifecycle of digital assets, from issuance and tokenization to post-trade settlement. It was developed with Microsoft and runs…

Calling crypto “Web 3.0”, the third layer of the internet that enables permissionless asset ownership on the Web, “undermines” crypto’s true significance, which is a complete overhaul of the capitalist system, according to Mert Mumtaz, CEO of remote procedure call (RPC) node provider Helius. Mumtaz said that crypto supercharges all the necessary ingredients for capitalism to function…

Pakistan has opened the door to international crypto businesses, inviting leading exchanges and virtual asset service providers (VASPs) to apply for licenses under a new federal regime. On Saturday, the Pakistan Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (PVARA) called on major crypto firms to submit Expressions of Interest (EoIs) to enter the country’s digital asset market, according to a…

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has warned against crypto projects using artificial intelligence for their governance process, as malicious actors could exploit the technology. “If you use an AI to allocate funding for contributions, people WILL put a jailbreak plus ‘gimme all the money’ in as many places as they can,” Buterin said in a Saturday X post….

Fabian Dori, the chief investment officer at digital asset bank Sygnum, says that banks offering crypto-backed loans prefer crypto collateral in the form of onchain assets rather than exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and using onchain collateral can benefit borrowers. Dori said that onchain assets are more liquid, allowing lenders to execute margin calls for crypto-backed loans on demand…

Dollar-pegged stablecoins will eventually lose their price tickers, as exchanges abstract away the differently denominated stable tokens on the backend, presenting only a “USD” option to the user, according to Mert Mumtaz, CEO of remote procedure call (RPC) node provider Helius. The bidding war for the Hyperliquid USD stablecoin (USDH), and proposals from several firms promising to…

Opinion by: Jason Jiang, chief business officer of CertiK Since its inception, the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem has been defined by innovation, from decentralized exchanges (DEXs) to lending and borrowing protocols, stablecoins and more. The latest innovation is DeFAI, or DeFi powered by artificial intelligence. Within DeFAI, autonomous bots trained on large data sets can…

Asset manager WisdomTree launched its Private Credit and Alternative Income Digital Fund (CRDT), a tokenized private credit vehicle, amid an uptick in firms expanding into the tokenized private credit niche and other tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). The fund will include credit extended to private corporations, loans made to real estate investment trusts (REITs), which are funds…

The SEC lawsuit threatens XRP In December 2020, XRP  was under existential threat. But what almost killed it now appears to be its greatest strategic advantage. A US Securities and Exchange Commission bombshell on Dec. 22, 2020, caused XRP to crash 62%. It led to mass delistings and put the cryptocurrency in a legal grey…