Sygnum's High 5: Discover the top news in crypto for the week!
More governments are introducing bills to regulate digital assets while experts urge for Bitcoin standards in Africa. At the same time, tokenization reaches the art world powered by Sygnum and Artemundi, Ethereum is close to its next hard fork while Decentralized Finance (DeFi) reaches record adoption. Read more about the top crypto news of this week.
Tokenization reaches the art world, powered by Sygnum and Artemundi.
Tokenization is reshaping ownership rights in the art market while democratizing access for investors.
At Sygnum, we're partnering with leading investment player, Artemundi, to tokenize for the first time a historical Picasso Painting, Fillette au béret, valued at CHF 4 million.
Institutional investors will have access to a regulated Art Security Token (AST), recognized by Swiss law, while secondary trading for ASTs will be available in our digital assets marketplace, SygnEx.
DeFi reaches record volumes.
The Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space continues to evolve with many developments to integrate multiple Blockchains in the same solution while making DeFi accessible to a mainstream audience.
In the past quarter, decentralized exchanges (DEXes) reached record volumes with over $400 billion traded while Uniswap V3 became the dominant DEX. The Q2 review by Messari also highlights the rise of stablecoins, with USDC taking the lead while decentralized stablecoins are booming in interest.
At Sygnum, we currently offer high-security solutions for institutional investors to buy and store leading DeFi tokens as UNI and stablecoins as USDC.
Bitcoin and green energy can propel Ethiopia’s economy.
Ethiopia is a success in improving the quality of life for its citizens in the last decades while having one of the most diverse economies in Africa.
At the same time, experts are urging Ethiopia’s government to adopt crypto measures amid more local inflation and high USD dependency on its reserves.
Ethiopia’s high concentration of green-powered electricity makes it a great location for crypto mining, which could be the first step into the broader adoption of digital assets in the country.
A push for CBDCs continues while the digital euro moves forward.
The Bank of International Settlements, the International Monetary fund, and the World Bank released a new report highlighting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).
The main use-cases for CBDCs are their faster transaction times, cheaper costs, and higher transparency when conducting cross-border payments.
At the same time, the European Central Bank announced it is advancing into the “exploration phase” of the digital euro, consulting with private and public parties while designing Europe’s CBDC.
Ethereum to go through the London hard fork.
Ethereum faces congestions and high gas fees in periods of high activity, recently seen during the emergence of DeFi, given its reliance on the Ethereum network.
The upcoming London hard fork will change mining compensation dynamics amid other Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) tackling other issues in the network.
These updates are part of Ethereum’s transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol under ETH 2.0. The final upgrade will be the Shanghai hard fork, set to happen in October 2021.
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