“EIP for Phase 0 of Serenity (eth2) major upgrade of Ethereum’s consensus mechanism from Pow to a sharded PoS.”

“A leaked version of rules to be issued later this month by the European Commission proposes an all-encompassing set of regulations covering the trading or issuance of digital assets across the 27-nation bloc.

The takeaway is that Europe intends to treat crypto the same as any other regulated financial instrument, which will doubtless provide legal clarity. The unknown is whether that may stifle this nascent and fast-moving space.

There is a particular focus on stablecoins in Europe, which are defined as either asset-referenced tokens or e-money tokens.

Those stablecoins that rely on a basket of currencies or are based by reference to other assets, whether that’s another crypto or other kinds of assets, they will be classed as asset-reference tokens. Essentially, the subgroup that behaves like e-money will be sucked into the existing e-money framework, while those that are asset-referenced have a load of extra rules on top of the base rules. So clearly, this is targeting stablecoins and particularly global stablecoins.

Among the many regulatory obligations that will be imposed on crypto-asset issuers and service providers in the European Union (EU) is the need to be incorporated as a legal entity and for service providers to have their registered office in a Member State.

There can be little doubt MiCA will present significant challenges for those involved in DeFi projects. I would probably say from the draft that it will favor the banks and traditional investment firms.

The 168-page set of draft rules, which Brussels said would come out in September, will not likely be transitioned into EU law until 2022 at the earliest.”

“We would expect to offer a host of new products as we get established. Those will range from things like qualified custody for institutions, digital-asset debit cards and savings accounts all the way to new types of asset classes.

SPDI banks can hold digital assets but will never have legal ownership over those assets. This means that even if a SPDI bank goes bankrupt, those assets have to be returned to customers. SPDIs are not allowed to lend, and each bank has to hold 100% of its assets in reserve.

As a state-chartered bank, Kraken now has a regulatory passport into other states without having to deal with a patchwork state-by-state compliance plan.”

“Federal Reserve officials said Wednesday they would hold U.S. interest rates at close to zero and work to push inflation above 2% “for some time.”

The central bank will increase holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities ‘at least at the current pace to sustain smooth market functioning and help foster accommodative financial conditions.’

Projection materials released with the statement show officials, on average, expect rates to remain close to zero through 2023. On average, officials don’t expect 2% inflation until 2023.”

“Touting the tagline “Off-peg bad. On-peg good,” Pickle Finance offers more rewards to below-peg stablecoin pools and fewer rewards to above-peg stablecoin pools. The aim is to get people to sell above-peg stablecoins and buy below-peg stablecoins.

It’s unclear whether it was Pickle or something else, but DAI is now trading at $1.02, from as high as $1.05 yesterday.

Too many farming projects don’t actually do anything for the community.

As is all but required for new DeFi projects, PICKLE token holders can vote in a governance process. Pickle is innovating in this area by using quadratic voting to prevent whales from having too much influence.

Pickle Finance saw $53M in 24-hour volume this weekend as its native governance token, PICKLE, traded as high as $85.”

See Also: Yam Finance readies for less-disastrous relaunch

“That will make it probably the first CBDC to launch anywhere in the world. The Sand Dollar is backed 1:1 to the Bahamian dollar (BSD) which, in turn, is pegged to the U.S. dollar.

The central bank will mint more Sand Dollars as demanded, at the same time removing physical BSD out of circulation to prevent inflating the monetary supply.

The CBDC had been designed to provide people and businesses in some of the archipelago’s far-flung islands with better access to financial services.”

“Polimec, the token issuance and transfer framework for Polkadot, is being launched by the team behind blockchain identity protocol KILT.

The KILT mainnet, which is slated to go live in around 11 months, will be the first project to mint tokens using Polimec. KILT uses blockchain-based identity and verifiable credentials across various industries including areas like IoT (internet of things). The startup is part of a government scheme in Germany, GAIA-X, exploring blockchain use cases.

If you look at what ERC-20 actually did to the Ethereum ecosystem, then you can imagine what will possibly happen with Polimec.”

Recommended read.

“The next 10 years will witness the systematic manipulation of human life at a scale unrivaled in history. For all the recent controversies over privacy and surveillance, the real threat is ahead of us.

Unless new approaches to online identity and data management take hold, both governments and private actors will move inexorably from knowing you to shaping you. Blockchain-enabled decentralization will develop as the only viable response to the iron logic of data centralization.

Big data and artificial intelligence, pitched as freeing us from human frailties, are becoming powerful tools for social control. This is occurring along two parallel tracks: surveillance authoritarianism and surveillance capitalism. Through massive data collection and aggregation, China’s social credit system envisions an airtight regime of perfect compliance with legal and social obligations. Many other governments, including liberal democracies, are adopting similar techniques. The potential for catching terrorists, child predators and tax evaders is simply too appealing – whether it’s the real objective or a cover story.

Decentralized blockchain systems will reach critical mass not out of hope but out of necessity. Powerful actors and mainstream users will adopt blockchain as a counterbalance to digital behavior-shaping by governments and private platforms.

What we need is a technology that allows for sharing without giving up control. Fortunately, it exists. Blockchain allows participants to trust the results they see without necessarily trusting any actor to verify them. No database can provide a trusted view of information across an entire transactional network without empowering a central intermediary. Blockchain can.

Blockchain offers a solution. It will be widely adopted because, behind the scenes, the current data economy is reaching its breaking point. Outrage over abuses is building throughout the world. The immensely valuable online advertising economy attracts so much fraud that the accuracy of its numbers is coming into question. Communities are looking for new ways to collaborate. Governments are realizing the current system is an impediment to effective service delivery.

Once people have identities that belong to them, not to banks or social media services, they will use them as the basis for other interactions. Imagine a world where you never need to give a third-party unnecessary data to log into a website, apply for a job, refinance a mortgage or link your bank account to a mobile payment app. Where you can keep your personal and professional profiles completely separate if you choose. Where you can be confident in the reputation of a car mechanic or an Airbnb or a product made in China without intermediaries warping ratings for their own gain.

We will gradually come to view access to our personal information as an episodic, focused interaction, rather than fatalistically accepting an open season based on preliminary formal consent.

The problem blockchain addresses – gaining trust without giving up control – is becoming ever more critical. The world runs on trust. Blockchain offers hope for recasting trust in the networked digital era.”

“A senior military thinker I used to work for described the four phases of history thus: “boom, bust, protectionism, war” with an option to go from bust back to boom by radical economic reorganization. But even this cycle is running out of room: the weapons grow ever more devastating, and we’re losing climatic stability, and that means eventually running short of food.

We have to get consumption down and efficiency up. First World lifestyles are producing around twice the sustainable level of carbon dioxide.

We need solutions to multiple problems simultaneously. We need an elegant economy of action before impotent regulators and short-sighted markets ruin our world permanently.

My theory of change is to take the database state seriously and do what it is good at. Solving the climate crisis and mitigating the ill effects of the state means making everything in the material world transparent.

Blockchain is the missing technology in the transition to treating our matter as respectfully as our money. We have to build a more free society while being more data-driven and efficient than ever. So, we need to make sure that we own our own data, and that cryptography veils it in transit and at work.

The creativity of the market economy works, but instead of mere “price signaling” we need high-quality, multidimensional data so we can run a multidimensional market: money, carbon, other forms of impact, all inside of a single global budget, with infinite room for human creativity to prove we met our targets and live as well as we are able.

Ecological sanity is compatible with human freedom, but only if we deploy cryptography to manage the resource allocation.”

“The network is at its second stage of integrating more public chains. This time it will include Algorand, ShareRing and Solana. Earlier last month, the network said it already onboarded Ethereum, EOSIO, Tezos, Neo, Nervos, and IrisNet.

The public chains the network selects to integrate are the ones offering unique capabilities, focusing on building ecosystems and having strong user cases to solve real-world problems.”

“The $1 million was lost after a group of anonymous Chinese DeFi users sent the funds to a contract address associated with Swerve Finance.

After Tether’s support team confirmed that the original tokens could not be retrieved from the Swerve Finance contract, Tether “froze” that address, revoking the ability for Tethers to be sent or received from it and ensuring the lost tokens can’t re-enter circulation.”