Adam Back, a Bitcoin development veteran and CEO of blockchain technology company Blockstream, which is working in partnership with El Salvador’s government on its Bitcoin-backed bond plan. says the solution lies in layer-2 networks. 

Layer-2 is a secondary protocol built on top of a blockchain such as the Bitcoin network or Ethereum. Mirroring the protocol evolution of the internet, layer-2 technology such as Bitcoin’s Lightning and Liquid networks tackle scalability issues by moving processes off the main chain.

“While it's difficult for (all) potential users of Bitcoin to directly hold it on-chain, there are different use cases that can use it in different ways,” Back told Forkast.News in a video interview. “[Layer-2] provides a different kind of section of transactional capacity-optimized for use cases.”

“You can onboard more users and there's less data hitting the main chain ... it has some trade-offs, but it provides similar kinds of assurances to the main Bitcoin chain.” Back said, “It's difficult to have a single protocol that's optimal for everything.”

Taproot — the last major upgrade of the Bitcoin network, which went live last November —  came four years after the SegWit soft fork, the only other big change to the network, implemented in 2017. Given the slow and irregular pace of upgrades, most Bitcoin network innovations take place on layer-2.

“If you look at the internet and the base layer of the internet being TCP/IP … the TCP/IP protocol essentially hasn't changed in decades, yet there's an enormous amount of innovation on the internet. But it's happening in the layer above, or in the application layer,” Back said. “And that's considered, in engineering terms, a good way to do it, because you want the best technology to be robust.”

Watch Back’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about layer-2 solutions, the “block war” between layer-2 providers, the Bitcoin Taproot upgrade and BTC’s mainstream adoption.

“It’s interesting that in the short run, when prices fall, as they have in the last few weeks, people start to get a little antsy and start to question these long-term trends and fundamentals,” Yusko told Forkast.News in a video interview. “Price is a liar.”

In terms of Bitcoin’s actual value, the truth lies in gold, Yusko said, asserting that fiat currencies can conceal changes in real value. 

“If you look at U.S. stocks, we’re having new all-time highs,” he said. “That’s because we denominate in a depreciating asset — the dollar.”

The S&P 500 has soared more than 98% over the past five years. However, last month, it took just 2.57 ounces of gold to buy the index, the same as it did more than 16 years earlier, in October 2005. That price was unchanged from June 1997, 24 years ago. In contrast, Bitcoin, currently trading at a value worth around 26.97 ounces of gold, has skyrocketed more than 60-fold in the five years to date. 

By the end of November, U.S. Consumer Price Index inflation was running at  6.8%, the highest level since 1982. The inflation rate across the 19-member eurozone had reached 4.9%. Bitcoin — often touted as a safe-haven asset and a hedge against inflationary pressures — had slumped to below US$50,000 for the first time since early October. 

Yusko attributes Bitcoin’s slide to the launch of a series of U.S. exchange-traded funds (ETFs) based on Bitcoin futures. 

“[What a Bitcoin futures ETF] does is allow me to create a paper version of Bitcoin, which is completely independent of the 21 million supply … And that contract then allows someone to go short on the other side,” Yusko said. “This time, within days of (Bitcoin’s) peak at US$68,000 …  (came) the issuance of (ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF) BITO. And I believe a bunch of banks and others have gotten short on the other side, and they’re pushing the price down a little bit.”

Watch Yusko’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the secular and cyclical dynamics of Bitcoin, the impact of Bitcoin futures ETFs on the market, how investors should distribute wealth in the crypto space, and upcoming opportunities in 2022.

ConstitutionDAO’s audacious campaign, which raised the money for its auction bid within a week, catapulted not only itself but also the entire DAO phenomenon into the public consciousness. 

A DAO is like a virtual flash mob — a leaderless group of like-minded people working together toward a common interest. Governance is achieved through the use of smart contracts and votes among members who use tokens instead of ballot papers. 

If this novel fusion of a leaderless organizational structure with decentralized technology can work to get auction bids up and running, who’s to say it can’t be applied in the finance arena? 

Not Marcello Mari, the CEO of SingularityDAO — which is using SingularityNET’s artificial intelligence technology to handle the complex tasks of data processing and crypto asset management in decentralized finance. 

“Imagine an AI that can do price prediction for you, analyze the different market trends, and make suggestions for you on your crypto investments,” Mari told Forkast.News in a video interview. “People can just invest in this basket of tokens in these portfolios, and then the AI will do everything else for them.

Yet even in an organizational structure that appears as democratized as a DAOs, the issue of power concentration persists: the democratic principle of “one person, one vote” is critically compromised by the fact that those who hold large proportions of issued tokens command a commensurately large share of votes. 

“My vision is to have DAOs that are actually managed by artificial intelligence delegates,” Mari said. “What we want to see in the future is AIs that are able to make decisions based on the community vote.”

Despite this decentralized ideal, Mari’s position as a DAO chief remains a contradiction in terms. So SingularityDAO has its sights set on complete decentralization over the next five years to phase the leadership role out as its users become accustomed to its artificial design. 

“If this happens in five years’ time, I’m done. I’m out. I don’t need to be the CEO of the DAO anymore,” Mari said. 

Watch Mari’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about how DAOs work, how AI will shape DAOs and DeFi and where ConstitutionDAO went wrong.

That latest blow to the logistics industry comes as the Covid pandemic appears to have gained renewed momentum, propelling a surge in demand for products as consumers around the world stay at home.

Adding to the bottleneck is an increase in U.S. manufacturing output to levels not seen since March 2019, which will likely be augmented by the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden recently signed into law.

“There’s a lot happening in terms of supply, as we know — unprecedented volumes going on with demand currently,” Dennis Delgado, the co-founder and chief product officer of supply chain-focused blockchain firm SyncFab, told Forkast.News. “There’s a huge backlog in the industry.”

The use of blockchain to facilitate logistics processes is one of the technology’s less-talked-about success stories, in which it incorporates layers of trust through which enterprises in the supply chain network can share data and digitize paper-shuffling manual operations.

Yet the logistics business has proved somewhat resistant to the allure of blockchain technology, a reluctance attributable largely to regulatory concerns and a lack of knowledge. 

“You’d be surprised at the number of companies and vendors we work with that are still hesitant to adopt new technologies,” Delgado said. “When you get into some of the larger organizations that have been around for decades, they have entrenched systems in place that can vary from department to department.”

A talent crunch in the logistics sector has deepened supply chain problems across a range of industries. Consulting firm Deloitte argues that the evolving complexity of supply chain management requires not only a larger workforce but also new skills. 

According to Delgado, SyncFab and partner firm Smart MFG can make manufacturing “cool again” by adding incentive layers in which MFG tokens are used to reward supply chain processes that may otherwise go unnoticed, such as quoting for work. 

“Areas like that, where we normally don’t think would necessarily be paid or rewarded, we disagree,” Delgado said. “We think there are a lot of opportunities there that these blockchain tokenomics can bring, and with the added layer of getting a newer generation interested in manufacturing again.”

Watch Delgado’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the current supply chain crisis, how NFTs can be used in manufacturing, and how blockchain can help digitize legacy industries. 

“[DeFi] will be difficult to tackle because our current frameworks for financial services are built in the construct of having a financial intermediary in every single financial service provision, and that’s been the access point for the regulators and supervisors,” said Iota Nassr, an economist and policy analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs, in a video interview with Forkast.News. “In DeFi, of course, this is non-existent, and this is becoming a big puzzle for us.”

The new paradigm is perplexing not only for policymakers and regulators, but also for many investors, despite its much-lauded attributes of transparency, pseudonymity, and claims to represent a democratization of finance. Nassr points out that the very complexity of DeFi protocols requires esoteric knowledge that remains out of reach for ordinary investors, and which puts better resourced — and, by implication, larger — market participants at a strategic advantage when it comes to benefiting from all that this new industry has to offer.

“We have this paradox where we have absolute transparency, but at the same time, we have the need for some technical, engineering, software development or coding skills which the average user does not have,” Nassr said. She added that this produced a level of opacity that — when coupled with the lack of the customary investor protections found in traditional, regulated financial products — could expose many investors to miscalculations of risk and financial losses.

DeFi’s ability to foster financial democratization — with its inherent promise of inclusion in a finance sector long dominated by Wall Street and institutional players — was not a given, she said, amid the preponderance of those same institutions, alongside family offices and professional investors, in the space. 

“We need to be really cautious when arguing for DeFi for financial inclusion, at least at this stage of development,” Nassr said. “For the moment, DeFi activity is concentrated on institutions, and we see a lot of family offices participating in this market to enjoy the leverage opportunities that are available there.”

In Q2 this year, transactions worth US$10 million or more accounted for 60% of all DeFi deals, and Nassr said that if smaller institutional and professional investors were included in that calculus, it would show that almost 95% of total transaction volume in the sector involved non-retail investors.

“Retail users who wish to execute very small-value transactions may be faced with disproportionately high fees, and this is effectively pricing them out,” she said. “This is not to say that there is no potential, but we don’t see this practically happening today.”

A new OECD report entitled “DeFi: Activities, Risks and Why it Matters” is due out in January. Watch Nassr’s full interview with Forkast.News for a sneak preview of its contents.

Some 17% of the region’s unbanked population had gained access to the system by autumn last year as, within a matter of months, pandemic-related subsidies made financial inclusion a necessity. 

Nevertheless, in Brazil, 34 million adults — almost one in six Brazilians — remain unbanked, according to São Paulo-based research firm Instituto Locomotiva. Those without access to basic financial services like savings accounts, credit and loans are disproportionately women. 

“Many of the wallets and the banking records are in the name of the husband,” Taynaah Reis, chief executive of blockchain-powered neobank Moeda Seeds, told Forkast.News in a video interview. “This becomes a problem when [women] look for credit.”

Fortunately for Reis — who says that even she had limited access to information and credit, despite the benefits of privilege and a private school education — she was able to raise capital for Moeda Seeds through a US$20 million initial coin offering.

Being in blockchain has given Reis the opportunity to see the technology’s promise to democratize access to capital. But the sector has attracted its fair share of criticism, from worries over the speculation rife in crypto to concerns about the carbon footprint of such an energy-intensive industry. 

Yet Reis says there are also ways for the industry to promote and foster environmental and social sustainability.

“Now, we have the COP26 (United Nations Climate Change Conference), and many discussions on climate change to hold every country accountable and every individual accountable, as well,” she said. “We see opportunities to create different economic models and assets that are sustainable over time.”

Moeda Seeds has itself created one such model, entering into a partnership with Brazilian forestry manager 3Agro on a non-fungible token project. The scheme allows buyers of the tokens not only to support the planting of açaí trees in the Amazon region through their investment, but also to gain exposure to revenue generated by the sale of the berries from the trees that are grown as a result.

With this kind of creative thinking, Reis says, blockchain-based finance can unleash forces for increased prosperity, social inclusion, environmental responsibility and the greater good.

“Blockchain, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are no longer some young, innovative technology,” Blockdata co-founder and managing director Jonathon Knegtel said in a video interview with Forkast.News. “It’s almost a teenager.” 

Moves by traditional finance sector players such as banks to integrate crypto with their existing products and services are giving the digital asset industry the momentum it needs to achieve critical mass in the mainstream, Knegtel explained.

“[Mastercard and Bakkt’s partnership is] making it a lot easier for people to actually enter the ecosystem and partake,” he said. “Because more users are coming in, the value goes up, and then the value gets circulated inside, and people start funding each other. And that's the stage we're at now.” 

Amid all this, crypto banks are emerging to further disrupt the banking system. These crypto banks — and digital asset businesses — resemble “challenger” banks such as PayPal and Revolut, providing crypto-focused financial services such as borrowing, lending and saving. If the previous wave of finance industry disruption was brought on by challenger banks, crypto banks appear to represent the next one. 

“Challenger banks definitely introduced the concept, but that means it's a lower jump for them to then jump to the next point and be exposed to crypto,” Knegtel said.

The crypto space has seen major growth in 2021. In the third quarter, blockchain companies raised US$6.5 billion, a 30% increase from the previous quarter, according to Blockdata. Half of the 20 biggest venture capital firms now have exposure to crypto exchanges, and institutional decentralized finance is expected to become a US$1 trillion industry.

The growth in the capital involved comes as blockchain companies reach critical mass and require larger fundraising rounds, which Knegtel believes is a sign that the crypto space is reaching maturity, although he also points out that the growth of the DeFi space remains minuscule compared to traditional finance.

“US$1 trillion is just 1% of the assets under management of the top 100 banks in the world,” he said. “One percent as a part of an asset diversification strategy in 2021 is not that much. And that alone would bring another US$1 trillion.”

Watch Knegtel’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about crypto banks’ disruptive effects on the banking system, how regulation can propel the crypto space into maturity, how DeFi may challenge centralized crypto banks, and the risks behind the burgeoning market for non-fungible tokens.

The world’s original cryptocurrency remains the subject of debate, concern and criticism, but for a number of crypto watchers, 2021 marked the beginning of the end of traditional finance, with Bitcoin poised finally to transform the space. 

“A few hundred years ago, we were still in a world that was ruled by emperors — shahs, sultans, kings, czars... Within a span of 80 years that all disappeared,” Ben Caselin, the head of research at crypto exchange AAX, told Forkast.News in a video interview. “Things change.”

As things have changed, Bitcoin has also changed. The peer-to-peer payment network described in mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakomoto’s original white paper has evolved into an asset class held by a wide range of investors — from retail traders to traditional finance sector businesses to governments. Caselin insists that in order to navigate a crypto space that has grown well beyond Bitcoin, it is critical to recognize Bitcoin’s core principles, which extend beyond its technology.

“Bitcoin is not just a technology. It’s not just an asset,” Caselin said. “It’s also a set of principles, and it is also a very unique entity now in this world, just like the internet … Bitcoin is the awakening of humanity to its own sovereign capacities.”

Amid the rise of new blockchains with more powerful functions and faster transactions, concerns have grown that Bitcoin is being outmoded. With thousands of cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications appearing, many investors have diversified their crypto portfolios. 

“There's a lot of experimentation going on,” Caselin said. “If you really want to stick to the Bitcoin network, you could almost say that things that really succeed in the altcoin space perhaps will eventually graduate to Bitcoin.”

Bitcoin broke its own price record this month to trade at US$66,930, and Caselin believes that institutional adoption will be the deciding factor in whether it rises further. 

“For Bitcoin to keep rising, more capital needs to come in, and that cannot just be small money,” Caselin said. “It makes sense in the bigger scheme of things that now it's the time for institutions. But they also have to kind of go through … cultural transformations.”

Watch Caselin’s full interview with 

Forkast.News

 Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about why Bitcoin is still the next big thing.

The Covid-19 pandemic has taken a significant toll on the luxury sector, which shrunk by as much as 22% in 2020, setting its growth back five years. The Big Four fashion weeks, for instance, saw Paris, Milan, London and New York welcome only a handful of their usual stylista guests or put their shows online as much of the runway set stayed away. 

Out of the crisis, however, other opportunities are rising as blockchain beguiles brands in the luxury business that were wondering how to navigate the new landscape.

“The big brands are beginning to see that there are new channels, new markets that they can be marketing and selling into,” Zilliqa co-founder Max Kantelia told Forkast.News in a video interview. Zilliqa is a layer-1 blockchain with smart-contract capability.

A collector himself, Kantelia says blockchain will bring two major changes to the luxury industry: proof of provenance and the tokenization of physical collectibles.

As the NFT sector has gained momentum this year, major luxury brands have begun to embrace it. Such storied fashion houses as Louis Vuitton and Burberry have been exploring NFTs in gaming, and Gucci released a four-minute NFT film created for its 100th birthday that was snapped up at a Christie’s auction. 

Yet the virtual-world fashion experience remains difficult and somewhat inelegant for an industry that prides itself on its sleek appeal. The process of setting up Ethereum wallets and the like can be a turnoff for even the most ardent luxury lover.

Kantelia says luxury brands need appropriate venues, and suggests the next step is to create digital assets that complement, not replace, real-world ones, bridging the gap between the physical and digital universes. 

Listen to Kantelia’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about what he sees as the digital future for luxury goods, arts and gaming, the regulatory environment in which it will operate, and why blockchain interoperability will underpin the development of the emerging ecosystem. 

Much like the internet, which started out as small sets of nodes in universities before expanding globally to form an interconnected and far more useful World Wide Web, blockchain nodes — now distributed across the globe — are in need of greater interoperability. 

“At the end of the day, the primary catalyst for blockchain is really its connectivity [and] it’s about decentralization,'' said John DeVadoss, the co-founder of InterWork Alliance (IWA), in a video interview with Forkast.News. 

The IWA, a non-profit organization working on the adoption of tokens for day-to-day operations, recently announced its merger with the Global Blockchain Business Council. One of the IWA’s major projects to connect the blockchain space is building a Token Taxonomy Framework (TTF), which defines a common language, behaviors and properties for tokens. The TTF allows its users to choose what and how much they would use the framework.

Blockchain standards and national, unified infrastructure such as China’s Blockchain Services Network enhance the connections across global blockchain ecosystems. But mainstream adoption of the technology is still slowed down by other factors. DeVadoss believes that one of the main factors that is stagnating a global blockchain explosion is the misconception of the distributed ledger. 

“Much of the mainstream enterprise IT world still thinks of blockchain as database because they are unable to see beyond the technology,” DeVadoss said. “There has never been a stack like a blockchain stack because none of them had economic protocols baked inside intrinsically.”

Despite what DeVadoss characterizes as a popular misconception of blockchain as a “trust machine,” he still sees the technology as beneficial, with adoption likely to continue exploding in the coming years. 

“I have seen tremendous amount of uptake through the InterWork Alliance and — of course — now with the GBBC,” DeVadoss said. “There’s tremendous amount of latent interest and I think it’s going to explode over the next 18 months.”

Watch DeVadoss’ full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the IWA’s efforts to connect the blockchain space, how the blockchain is changing the business logic, and why data stored on the blockchain can't necessarily be trusted.

Michael B. Greenwald, the first US Treasury attaché to Qatar and Kuwait, and now the director of Tiedemann Advisors, sees El Salvador’s venture as Bitcoin’s great inflection point as the world keeps a close eye on Bitcoin’s first national testbed. 

“Countries like El Salvador, they're not going to have huge impacts on what the U.S. does or others do, but it definitely does bring the issue to the table and it raises alarm bells,” Greenwald told Forkast.News in a video interview. “Ultimately, it's going to be the large central banks and what it means for them as they create a new digital asset framework.”

In Asia, China’s e-CNY experiments are expanding to more cities and sectors. The digital yuan may be China’s effort to counteract what Greenwald calls the “weaponization of the dollar”. 

“But let's remember there's a divide of the Fed right now,” Greenwald said. “You've got Randy Quarles and Lael Brainard, where one is pushing a stablecoin approach and one is pushing a central bank digital currency.” 

Such divisions will likely spur debates for years to come and may ultimately lead to U.S. policy paralysis, Greenwald predicts, “without any real action.” 

In the meantime, the digital yuan is already being used widely in what is already essentially a soft rollout across China, from public transport to the country’s futures market, which Greenwald sees as an alarming challenge to the dollar’s future international dominance.

Could there also be a scenario where these rival currencies will one day coexist in the same digital wallet? According to Greenwald, a future digital dollar and the digital yuan will unlikely cozy up to each other, especially not in the near future. 

“But I do see a digital dollar in the same wallet as a digital yen or a digital euro or a digital pound,” Greenwald said. “The cross-border issue in a future digital wallet, that’s definitely one of the issues the Fed is looking to tackle in the coming months to years.”

Watch Michael Greenwald’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the internal divisions within the U.S. over a CBDC, the future of Bitcoin as a currency outside El Salvador, how the central banks of the art world are leading the NFT revolution and more. 

But the unregulated Wild West of DeFi recently received some significant noise complaints from the Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, who told the Wall Street Journal that DeFi projects are not exempt from regulations. 

“We will see over the next few months to years, some form of a crackdown,” said Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of Cardano developer Input Output Hong Kong, in a video interview with Forkast.News. “[That] means that the next generation of DeFi is up for grabs.”

Hoskinson compares what might be an upcoming surge in DeFi regulations to the initial coin offering (ICO) upheavals of 2017, in which global crackdowns on questionable crypto projects and outright scams shut down waves of companies but also led to the creation of new financing models that gave birth to a new generation of projects like  ICP and Solana. 

“The winners of the future in the DeFi space are going to have liquidity and interoperability, the ability to move multi-chain,” Hoskinson said. “And finally, cost predictability is such an important thing… It’s so bizarre how we just tolerate massive swings in the price of doing business.”

Cardano did not make it to the first wave of DeFi, which generated superstars such as Uniswap, MakerDAO and many more. Even so, despite calling DeFi’s current state a “bubble,” Hoskinson remains bullish on DeFi in the longer term. Cardano, its founder says, has had its eyes on the so-called “second wave of DeFi” all along. 

“We need governance, we need certification, we need insurance, we need regulation on these things, metadata identity… at the same time, you need to decentralize,” Hoskinson said. “The next wave of [DeFi] will do that with a straight face and will be significantly harder to regulate in a traditional sense. The way we constructed Cardano was for that second wave.”

Watch Hoskinson’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about Cardano’s plans for its new smart contracts ecosystem, how a regulatory compliant DeFi community might take shape, the promises and pitfalls of non-fungible tokens (NFT), what he sees as the top five uses for smart contracts, and more. 

• Binance’s user agreement: “So in their user agreement, when you sign up, you are not permitted to sue them in any jurisdiction around the world. The only place that you are allowed to sue Binance when you sign up to that agreement is the Hong Kong International Arbitration Center… The other interesting thing is, Binance obviously doesn’t want to be subject to local jurisdictions because they don’t want to be regulated, which is a very smart thing to do if you’re in their shoes.”
• The “ski lift ticket” rule: “In every jurisdiction in the world, there is some iteration of what I call the ski lift ticket rule, which is that when you go skiing and you buy a lift ticket, you sign the lift ticket. And when you sign the lift ticket, you say that even if somebody that works for the mountain pushes you off the chairlift and you fall and get hurt, that you cannot sue the mountain. The reality is, even if you just fall off the chairlift and get hurt, you can sue the mountain. Why? Because in click through, one way, non-negotiated contracts, especially with large financial players, there are certain rights that you simply cannot give up.”
• The international rule of law: “Generally, because these companies are regulated, consumer fights happen locally. They happen in your country pursuant to jurisdiction. They do not happen under international law. Because when you’re regulated as a company, you are required to show up in that country’s court system to have the fight. So this is very unique. For a lot of reasons, but most interestingly to me is because consumer arbitration as a world, as a group, as a community, this is really one of the first times that the question has not been consumers of this jurisdiction or consumers of that jurisdiction, but the consumers of the world and a community.”
• Demarcation of corporate assets: “Bitcoin, Ethereum, those are community assets. I think those should be minimally regulated. The corporations that utilize community assets to make profit from consumers, those are corporations trying to make a profit. And right now, they’re doing a good job of wrapping themselves in the cloak of community assets, but they are not community assets. The internet is a community asset. Amazon is not. The blockchain is a community asset. Binance is not. And so I think that that is the line of demarcation that we need to have.”

• SCMP’s foray into NFTs: “ARTIFACT is our attempt to create a new standard for historical NFTs. For us, anything that is as an account of a historical moment, so new stories, or potentially a historic artifact itself, recreated or sometimes created for the very first time as a digital asset. So we do actually think that this is a very different world to the NFT world that has exploded over the course of really the last six months.”
• Preserving history on the blockchain: “One of the areas where we believe NFT can truly benefit an entire industry, actually, not even industry should across industries, is in recording history, recording historical accounts and historical assets, which together we are referring to as ARTIFACT. So our project is to set a standard, and by standard, I mean a specific smart contract with a specific metadata structure that will allow anyone eventually to be able to mint NFTs that are historical and be able to sell and trade them on a very specific market, that we are going to be building a marketplace platform that serves both the issuer world and the collectors world.”
• Blockchain brings context to history: “Any single story never lives by itself. It lives within a timeline of events. It lives within a historical context of the moment. It lives within contemporaneous analysis and insight. And it’s really, really hard to be able to showcase all of that complexity through a single news story, even in a newspaper, not to mention a single article digitally. But blockchain allows us to create that context and have that context be fully transparent, the process of how a story came to be fully transparent.”
• Time travel through a metaverse: “Sandboxes are really, really exciting new canvas. So much of understanding Hong Kong, understanding greater China requires experience. Like the scale of the Forbidden City. You can describe it in words. But until you walk into the Forbidden City for the very first time, it’s really hard for any human being to truly understand how incredibly, not only massive, but like what that moment in time would have been like when the court was filled. And Hong Kong is the same way for people who have not experienced Hong Kong…. Our hope is that The Sandbox will allow us to actually be able to tell that story properly for the first time.”

• Facebook’s foray into the metaverse: “Facebook is now saying they are transitioning into becoming a metaverse company, away from being a social media company. But this isn’t anything new. They’ve been undergoing this transition for a long time, of course, with their acquisitions in VR and Oculus. But of course, they’re also trying to launch [Diem], which is their own cryptocurrency. That’s no coincidence. They understand that there will be this economic system that is woven throughout the metaverse.”
• Fortnite’s venture to the open metaverse: “Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games — who also has a duopoly on gaming engines with the Unreal Gaming Engine — he himself has stated that he believes the metaverse needs to be open for all the reasons he’s a sci-fi nerd, as you would expect as well, that we saw with Ready Player One. He fears that when he’s gone, Epic Games could be an evil corporation and it could have power beyond the wildest imagination. And it will try to seize control of the metaverse. So he’s already talking about the open metaverse. He’s just raised over US$1 billion to make Unreal and Epic Games more open.”
• Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are now the economic layer of the metaverse: “But if we kind of focus on NFTs, because I think that’s more generally how people will invest in the metaverse, these effectively are collectibles in different media types and different forms. But ultimately what they do is they restore the idea that you can have something that is digital and scarce, which is ultimately the web broke collecting. It made anything that was digital close to free, or at least people expected it to be free.”
• Why metaverses need interoperability: “Let’s say they get bored with the game and people always eventually get bored with the game. You can’t perpetually keep people locked in and entertained by a game. That could last for a decade. It could last for a year. It could last for a month. But ultimately they’ll get bored. And when they get bored, then what? Ultimately, in this case, all the value and time that they put into it is lost. They can’t transfer that out of that system.”

• Separating money from the government: “A good way to frame this is like, as most people understand, that back in the 1500s, 1600s, this concept of separating church and state. It was a struggle — a fight. Ultimately, I think people realized that it was important that something as crucial and personal to people’s lives as religion is not controlled by the government. Money is even more personal and important to people’s lives. In that regard, trying to separate money and state is really the entire ethos of what cryptocurrency is.”
• Is Voorhees putting himself out of a job? “I want to be clear that I won’t be out of a job. I won’t have a W-2 paycheck anymore, but my job, my passion, the project I work on when I wake up remains — and will remain — ShapeShift. But there’s just no pay stub from an employer. It’s just a different model. The vision here really is to build a multi-chain, self-custody crypto platform that the whole world can use. There’s not really any of that today. It’s kind of a niche that doesn’t exist. It’s hard engineering because we’re working with multiple blockchains, whereas most DeFi projects exist only on one, primarily Ethereum.”
• How decentralized decisions get made: “There are forums and ideas get discussed, and so in that situation, there’s lots of noise. If there’s an idea that people start taking seriously in which there seems to be support for it, and there’s a formal governance process in which a proposal is ultimately made, which details what’s going to be done, what money is going where and those kind of things. Ultimately, a vote happens. The vote is a smart contract that looks at the FOX balance of each person voting at a certain block height in Ethereum and you can vote yay or nay on a proposal. And ultimately, based on the rules that we’ve set up, a simple majority will win that. And then if that occurs, funds will actually move on chains from the DAO to the address specified in the proposal.”
• Who gets the last laugh: “When we were at that conference, Money 20/20 in Vegas in 2012, yeah, we were right next to this huge PayPal booth. I remember the sneers and snickers of the people manning that booth. A couple of them had maybe heard of Bitcoin and they thought it was a joke. We’re just sitting in there. No one was coming up to talk to us. There was no one at that conference interested in Bitcoin or in BitInstant. We just stood there looking silly while all the professional money people of the world gathered and made their deals. And it’s just amazing to see that none of those companies are relevant in the future of decentralized finance. All of them will have to adapt to crypto or they will go the way of Polaroid. And I think a lot of the banks are going to get really caught off guard by this. The fintech companies move a little faster and I think a lot of them will adapt. PayPal accepts Bitcoin now and cryptocurrency, but the banks are too entrenched.”

• Polygon’s early struggles: “We all know that Ethereum is very decentralized, secure but has scalability issues. So what Polygon started to do is that we wanted to provide this entire Ethereum development capability on this layer-2, basically. So that’s where we started. And we also were very much focused on building something that gets used and all that. There were a lot of nuances in between. Like it took us a lot of time. We were not from Silicon Valley. We did not have fancy big [venture capitalists] supporting us.”
• High gas fees directed users to Polygon: “Ethereum was seeing the second or third wave of these high gas prices. The first time it happened and then it dipped, people were like, “Okay, it was a one-time phenomenon.” But then it happened the second time, the third time, and people realized something needs to be done. By that time, because of this bottom-up approach, we were fully production-ready. And if you ask me what is the reason for Polygon’s success, because we are production-ready.”
• The case for zero-knowledge technology: “As an enterprise, you really need to derive some value out of these blockchain solutions. It has to be on a public blockchain. Now, you need privacy. You need scalability. Yes, we all are building on it. So I feel in 18 to 24 months, there will be fewer enterprises which will have actual value generating use cases on these blockchains. And most of them then would probably be funded by or kind of being run on some sort of zero-knowledge technology. That’s why we at Polygon also, we have invested so much of our time, energy and resources in the last six months in the zero-knowledge space, and then now we are in a stage where in two to three months you will see Polygon will emerge as the powerhouse of zero-knowledge in the whole industry.”
• India’s crypto brain drain: “Soon, the Indian government has to realize that the brain drain in the blockchain space is so big because you are not building for your local users … I would never want to live out of India. I want to go back to India, work from there to the ecosystem there. But then due to this uncertainty, and I’m not saying there’s anything positive or negative, this uncertainty, nobody knows.”
• India’s crypto ban rumors: “I think most of that is media sensationalism, actually. I’m from India and generally, I would say 95% of any team that is building out of India either know me or I know them and I know what they are doing to reach out to me for the investments and all that. And I’ve not found even a single team which is trying to build some technology-related solution being haggled by the government. Nobody has been touched upon by the government. The government is only trying to curb or kind of trying to figure out how to stop this, speculation or kind of gambling, which nobody can deny that a lot of retail loses their money in this.”

“Actually, when we first applied for a Bitcoin ETF back in January, right after VanEck, we had a timeline of about two to three years that we thought the application would be,” Valkyrie CEO Leah Wald told Forkast.News in a video interview. “We moved our timeline up when it seemed as if there was a lot more interest.”

A Bitcoin ETF is a financial instrument that reflects Bitcoin’s price and is traded on traditional exchanges, giving investors with minimal crypto knowledge exposure to the asset without purchasing it directly. 

As Bitcoin ETF applications pile up for the SEC’s review — with Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest also recently adding to their number — some say the products should have been approved long ago. One of those voices is that of SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who said that if the SEC’s standards for other products had been applied equally to Bitcoin ETFs, “one or more of them” would already have been approved. 

Wald, however, recalled precedents that certain products take longer to obtain SEC approval. 

“Even gold took a while,” she said. “Especially esoteric securities that are still being figured out from the rest of the agencies.” 

Wald said excessive market volatility could be a concern for the SEC. Not the direct volatility relating to the prices and public sentiment trailing the crypto industry, but the ability of the industry’s infrastructure to handle that volatility. 

“I think that the SEC has been pretty clear from the onset of all the Bitcoin ETF applications, even back in 2017, about concerns around custody,” Wald said. “Now, we finally do have true institutional-grade custodians, but there are still stress tests happening in the market.”

Watch Wald’s interview with 

Forkast.News

 Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the benefits of a Bitcoin ETF compared to over-the-counter trusts and mutual funds, the increasingly crowded field of Bitcoin ETF applicants, Wald’s positive outlook on Bitcoin and its technology, and more. 

Alexander Höptner, who became CEO of 100x Group — the holding group for crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX’s owner HDR Global Trading Limited — after BitMEX co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed were charged with violating the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act, says that the reason behind the regulatory action is because crypto derivatives are “the next big thing.”

“Most of the regulators are currently working on regulatory regimes on spot trading, brokerage and custody,” Höptner told Forkast.News in a video interview. “The next thing that's coming now is defining and designing a regulatory regime for derivatives.”

Höptner hails from a traditional finance (TradFi) background, having led Germany’s second largest stock exchange Börse Stuttgart to launch one of the European Union’s first regulated digital assets exchange. He also held executive committee roles with the operator of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Deutsche Börse AG.  

Unlike Höptner, who has embraced the increasingly digitizing finance industry, other prominent players in the traditional finance space are more skeptical of crypto. “Big Short” investor Michael Burry recently raised hackles by calling the crypto market an overleveraged “bubble.”  

But to Höptner, such concerns are overblown.

“When you look at [our] leveraged products, yes, we have 100x, but the majority of the leverage clients are using single-digit,” Höptner said. “When you look at the classical financial markets, yes, the leverage is lower, but the usage of that one is much higher.”

In a recent JPMorgan survey, 49% of investors from across 1,500 institutions shared legendary investor Warren Buffet’s sentiment on Bitcoin, calling it “rat poison” or a temporary fad. The other 51%? They believe that Bitcoin will “become an important asset” and is “here to stay.”

For Bitcoin and crypto to reach new heights and continue to achieve further institutional and professional adoption, some exchanges such as FTX have adopted licensing strategies. But according to Höptner, exchanges will need to pick and choose primary locations to comply with local regulations before global expansion.

“You cannot be in every country in the world, fully regulated. It’s impossible,” Höptner said. “First thing’s first — start with the first fully licensed jurisdictions and then we tackle the next one, and probably the first one is not the U.S.”

Watch Höptner’s full interview with  Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about which countries are wooing derivatives exchanges, why crypto is not so different from the traditional finance world, and how to assess the current digital assets market from a long-term perspective.

Those who really understood Bitcoin — and blockchain technology’s digital trail of crumbs that led to the crypto’s recovery — were gobsmacked. What could those cybercriminals possibly have been thinking?

Pioneering blockchain lawyer Marta Belcher — general counsel at Protocol Labs and special counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group — , says many people still do not realize that Bitcoin is not anonymous — it is pseudonymous.

“You're having a public key recorded permanently on a ledger forever. And anyone can see that,” Belcher explained, in a video interview with Forkast.News. “The authorities can see that. In some ways, it's a shortcut for law enforcement.”

Instead of something very traceable by the government, Belcher says having a truly decentralized device for finance is essential to privacy and civil liberties.

“I like to think about this photo that I saw from the Hong Kong protests. There are these photos where there are these long lines at the subway stations because the protesters wanted to buy their train tickets using cash because they didn't want their electronic purchases to place them at the scene of the protest,” Belcher said. “That really underscores that a cashless society is a surveillance society and the importance of certain technologies that can enable anonymous transactions.”

Belcher told Forkast.News that this is how anonymity can enhance civil liberties, and also why privacy coins — fully private and anonymous — matter.

Nevertheless, the U.S. government and governments around the world are applying similar levels of surveillance to cryptocurrencies as they do to the traditional financial system. The U.S. Department of Justice has named privacy coins “anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrencies” and insists that they are potentially criminal — this fends off the possibility of people making anonymous transactions through cryptocurrencies.

Belcher views the central bank digital currency movement in the same way — as a type of government surveillance that could potentially threaten civil liberties. Hypothetically, when CBDCs are given to people as their only financial tool, every action can be traced by the government.

“People really need to understand that financial transactions are a window deep into someone's life, deep into their politics, deep into what they're doing, their location. And that these types of transactions are incredibly sensitive,” Belcher said. “I'm very concerned about the idea of all money being digitally administered by a government.”.

India’s divisions, differences in opinion and all-out tug-of-war over the legality of crypto have been on full display in recent years. First there was a central bank ban on banks doing business with crypto firms. Then the Indian Supreme Court overturned that banking ban. Earlier this year, India’s Parliament upped the ante by drafting a bill that would ban crypto outright.

That crypto ban bill hasn’t gone anywhere — yet. But with that threat in the shadows, what are India’s crypto holders and companies to do?

As India’s crypto community awaits official clarification, many companies are now taking matters into their own hands through a voluntary and self-imposed code of conduct that would make them compliant with reasonable regulations, said Nishcal Shetty, founder of WazirX, in an interview with Forkast.News.

WazirX, which launched just three weeks before the Reserve Bank of India’s issued its ban on crypto banking in 2018 and has since grown into one of the nation's biggest crypto exchanges, recently joined a new collaboration between India's Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council and India's Internet and Mobile Association to develop guidelines for self-regulation among India’s crypto exchanges.

“The idea as an industry was, should we really just wait till the law comes in and just have anyone operate according to their own wishes? Or can we sort of try to build a template and sort of show the government that even on our own, we're still responsible and it's not the Wild West out here,” Shetty said. “I think with that objective, we decided we should all come together, exchanges in the country and adhere to some set of guidelines which we will all follow.”

An entrepreneur at heart, Shetty took a hard look at India’s lagging position in the blockchain and cryptocurrency global ecosystem and realized that creating access was the first step to foster technological innovation and growth in the nation of 1.4 billion. Throughout his journey in the space, Shetty has discovered that among the oscillating government positions, that there are nuances in even hardline stances and a willingness by government officials to learn and understand the disruptive new technology. Shetty also believes the crypto industry can help the hundreds of millions of citizens who do not have access to mainstream financial services, such as having a bank savings account.

“If you look at the whole equity space in India, we have probably 70 million people into it, that's about 4% and that's an industry that has existed for many, many years,” Shetty said. “Now, here you have an industry which sort of in India — I think it's been only four or five years since crypto really became a popular term — if you look at it in isolation, yes, it seems like just 1%. But if you think about it, it's already 25% of the whole equity space in a very short period of time. So that growth trajectory is something which is very, very visible.”

Chiu, the founder and CEO of Enya.ai, says scalability in Ethereum is already making headway while the world waits for the next level Ethereum — a project already infamous for its many delays.

“Ethereum has a rather limited capacity for computation and this has been a known problem for several years,” Chiu told Forkast.News in a video interview.

“What happened more recently is, Vitalik and many other Ethereum researchers have come up with an alternative solution rather than trying to do everything in ETH 2.0, scaling both computation and data.”

An approach to scaling is called rollups, which moves transactions off the main Ethereum chain before recording on the main chain. The off-chain transactions can also be executed in layer 2 chains before moving back to layer 1 to store proofs. The aim is to move transactions off-chain for faster throughput of transactions, and potentially reduce transaction fees.

Chiu expressed excitement for the up-and-coming layer 2 developments as examples such as Polygon have been gaining traction while even showing immunity to the recent crypto crash. Enya.ai and OMG Network have also launched the public testnet of OMGX — a layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution which allows off-chain computations.

“By implementing computations on layer 2, moving them off the main chain, we are freeing up the precious blocks on the main chain so that in aggregate we can — as an ecosystem — handle a lot more transactions,” Chiu said. According to Chiu, the layer 2 solutions like rollups will provide lower transaction fees and increase capacity for more transactions without having to wait for ETH 2.0.

While the industry eagerly waits for the final form of ETH 2.0 for better scaling and less network congestion leading to slow and expensive user experience, various layer 2 projects are looking to solve Ethereum’s network clogs.

The Ethereum development team has also scheduled network upgrade EIP-1559 in July, as part of the London hard fork, which looks to further improve the issues related to high transaction fees by introducing and burning a base transaction fee to discourage miners from manipulating gas.

“So, over the next several months, there'll be several layer 2 solutions that will be moving into mainnet and it will be an exciting time,” Chiu said. “We'll see how that changes to gas fees that people have to pay to use these DeFi projects.”

Watch Alan Chiu’s full interview with Forkast.News to learn more about Ethereum scalability, the scalability trilemma, ESG in blockchain, privacy, and more.

On May 19, a day when tweets and headlines criticized Bitcoin’s environmental impact, the crypto market crashed. Bitcoin prices tumbled from euphoric highs of over US$55,000 to under US$40,000 that day, and in the days since continued to plummet, to bottom out at around US$30,800, according to CoinMarketCap data.

But despite that volatility, crypto’s underlying fundamentals and the factors that affect long-term prices have not changed, according to FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

“I don’t think there is anything really fundamental that changed from [May 19] to today,” Bankman-Fried said in an interview with Forkast.News. “I don’t think it’s really caused by economic fundamentals. I think it was 10% of that and 90% was just liquidations.”

As Bankman-Fried suggests, US$7.56 billion worth of Bitcoin long positions were liquidated on the fateful day with FTX contributing US$110 million, according to bybt data.

While crypto still remains a disruptive technology that can revolutionize the finance industry, trading behavior in the blockchain world and the traditional equities has become analogous as a result of prominent figures that now have a platform to — directly or indirectly — impact markets.

“It’s not like both crypto and stocks have their own charismatic guy who when they tweet, the thing goes up — it’s the same guy. Elon Musk in both cases,” Bankman-Fried said.

In the equity market, an asset that has its values driven by social media sentiment rather than company performance is coined “meme stocks”, as popularized by the now-famous GameStop phenomenon.

“All of a sudden for the first time, you had 15 million day traders get together and talk to each other… all of a sudden they each have a thousand dollars to trade. Now they have US$15 billion between them,” Bankman-Fried said.

As the event sparked questions on collusion in meme trading events among retail investors, Bankman-Fried argues that the definition of collusion was never all that clear.

“For instance, it’s totally fine for a bunch of people to get together and have a factual debate about a bunch of companies and just say a lot of true statements with the goal of figuring out the truth,” Bankman-Fried said. “It’s not exactly collusion, that wasn’t the goal of it, but it is an activity that correlates their behavior.”

While social media has been an important contributor to the price fluctuations of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the past, Musk’s ability to send the price of Dogecoin to the moon was a spectacle unto itself.

But the United States Federal Reserve has yet to commit to the launch of a digital dollar, widening the gap between the US and other central banks — including China — in CBDC developments.

Beijing, having already launched numerous pilot projects in various forms for its CBDC, now officially known as the e-CNY, has a seven-year lead against the US in the global CBDC race.

“I would push aside the race analogy, but I would say there’s a contest,” former Commodities Futures Trading Commission chair and founder of the Digital Dollar Foundation, J. Christopher Giancarlo, told Forkast.News in a video interview. “The winner of the contest is the nation that successfully incorporates into a digital currency their societal values.”

Fed chair Jerome Powell also brushes aside the race analogy, voicing the importance of getting a digital dollar “right” rather than “first.” But U.S. dollar dominance is dwindling.

A recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report found that global reserves of the U.S. dollar sunk to a 25-year low of 59%, numbers not seen since 1995. But Giancarlo says that a digital dollar carrying the values of a democratic society could strengthen the dollar’s position as world reserve currency.

“We may see a world in which you’ve got a digital dollar, hopefully — and if we get it right carrying those [democratic] values — competing against currencies of non-democracies that carry different values with them, values of state, surveillance of government, control of financial markets [and] of social credit systems,” Giancarlo said. “The dollar could reemerge once again as — well, it is today, the reserve currency — but even more so because of those democratic values built-in compared to the alternatives.”

Accenture’s senior managing director David Treat discussed some aspects of how the Digital Dollar Project will explore some of these democratic values including benefits distribution. This being a controversial topic in the current U.S. financial structure, highlighted by a perceived lag in issuance of stimulus checks during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Part of what we’re going to explore [are] the various options against a backdrop of not having a national ID system, which is also part of our core societal values,” Treat said. “That ability to actually pair a stablecoin that can embed that business logic into it and to be able to guide what is spent and what is not spent on, paired with a central bank digital currency, we see as a powerful combination and one that's certainly worth exploring.”

As for the current state of the Digital Dollar Project and its five pilots in the coming year, Treat revealed the project is currently selecting appropriate players in the industry to lead the initiatives.

“We’re in the midst of picking the captains for each one of the pilots,” Treat said. “Very intentionally, when you think about the financial inclusion, the unbanked and underbanked, there may be some maybe some really, really important small local players that we announce.”

In an exclusive interview with Forkast.News, Neeraj Khandelwal, co-founder of Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX, explained that local investors took this as a sign the bill may never pass, and actually laid the groundwork for further – much welcomed – regulation. As a result, the Indian retail and institutional market has been booming in the month since.

Today, most applications on public chains such as Ethereum are centered around the economic layers of cryptocurrencies, such as decentralized finance (DeFi). But for a country like China, where public chain applications may not always be aligned with local regulations, permissioned chains are presenting corporations an alternative as well as greater protection from the volatility of cryptocurrency prices.

“If we ran an application on a public chain, the revenue must be in cryptocurrency. Then, the cost is in cryptocurrency, the revenue is in cryptocurrency — that makes no sense,” Yifan He, the CEO of Red Date Technology — the company behind state-backed Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) in China — told Forkast.News in a video interview. “Next year, the cost could be more than your revenue.”

“On the blockchain side and the crypto side, I believe they're a leading player globally. They don't probably get as much recognition for all the work that's happening in the ecosystem,” said Amit Ghosh, head of APAC for R3, the blockchain software firm, in an interview with Forkast.News. “But from our experience, they are one of the leading countries — globally, in fact.”

“The number of institutional investors that have gone public with their investments in crypto is actually only a fraction of the conversations we're still having,” said Justin Chow, global head of business development and relationship management at Cumberland DRW, in a video interview with Forkast.News.

HashKey Group COO Angelina Kwan, a former regulator who helped write the laws that crypto firms are subjected to now, explains all.

Justin Sun, 30, is part of this new generation. After narrowly missing out on buying digital artist Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” non-fungible-token (NFT) collage in a recent US$69 million Christie’s auction, the CEO of TRON and BitTorrent got a consolation prize: a different Beeple NFT artwork — “Ocean Front” — for US$6 million.

Bitcoin Cash is currently the 13th most popular cryptocurrency in the world, with a US$9.6 billion market capitalization that is just a fraction of Bitcoin’s US$1 trillion. But the transaction volume on the Bitcoin Cash network is outpacing transactions on the Bitcoin network at a 10:1 ratio, according to blockchain analytics engine Blockchair.

For over five years, JPMorgan Chase & Co. has been advancing blockchain technology in the banking sector. Its JPM Coin — a wholesale payment stablecoin that is pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar — is now transacting billions of dollars every day. JPMorgan’s open information sharing network Liink — formerly known as Interbank Information Network — now has over 400 banks. Just last October, after JPMorgan sold Quorum, its blockchain protocol to the Brooklyn-based blockchain software firm ConsenSys, the banking giant established Onyx, its new blockchain unit.

The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s (FinCEN) proposed “crypto wallet rule,” which had been championed by former treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, is currently on hold so the agency can gather more public comments. But the blockchain, crypto and digital asset industry’s sentiments are already clear.

Casper network is an enterprise-focused layer-1 proof-of-stake blockchain protocol aiming to solve the issues of scalability, security and decentralization that have plagued other smart contract blockchains such as Ethereum. Although Ethereum has launched Ethereum 2.0 in hopes of solving some of these problems, users still complain about Ethereum’s high transaction fees — also known as “gas fees.” Ethereum’s gas fee issues could worsen with the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), most of which continue to rely on Ethereum.

Eugene Ng of Gemini, the Winklevoss-backed exchange that recently expanded into Singapore, explains why the Lion City is emerging as the crypto capital of Asia.

“People watch Netflix all the time,” said CasperLabs CEO Mrinal Manohar in a video interview with Forkast.News. “Almost the entire infrastructure is on AWS [and] you’re using AWS even if you don’t know about it.”

blockchainDefiDecentralizedartificial intelligenceKYCAMLCryptoTokensDigital assetes

Listen to the full interview with d'Haussy and Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau as they discuss use cases for CBDCs in China, the value of programmable money, the growing demand for DeFi and more.

Editor's note: Forkast misstated 'food security' with 'food safety' in the FDA segment starting at 12:00. The FDA has recently launched a blueprint for food safety that includes blockchain.

Listen to the full interview with Tapscott and Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau as they explore how regulations could impact blockchain innovation in Europe as well as the development of DeFi and the challenges as well as opportunities it creates business.

Listen to the full interview with Fleury and Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau as they discuss DeFi's challenges and opportunities, yields for investors and more.

Find out more about the changing world of DeFi and how China aims to expand its role in the field by watching the full video interview with Finxflo CEO James Gillingham and Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau.

Listen to Conflux global managing director Eden Dhaliwal as he shares the details on Conflux's new Open DeFi consortium.

Listen to ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin explain to Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau how ConsenSys’ acquisition of JPMorgan’s Quorum will affect the blockchain ecosystem, his expectations of Ethereum 2.0 and the rise of DeFi.

Ethereum 2.0 is meant to address a number of issues that the current system has. It is billed as improving scaling, security, and other issues in order to create an environment that bolsters decentralized applications (DApps) as well as smart contracts. Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down with Buterin to find out more about how Ethereum 2.0 will change the industry.

Forkast.News gets a more nuanced view on those remarks from Michael Amar, co-host of Paris Blockchain Week Summit and a serial entrepreneur that leads Chain Accelerator, a blockchain hub incubating blockchain talent in France. Amar shares why Le Maire’s remarks is only the beginning of a more negotiated journey for Libra acceptance in Europe, the U.S., and around the world.

Isabelle Corbett, R3 Head of Regulatory Affairs and Public Sector Partnerships, says she’s assessing the “tone” of regulators at OECD to understand what is being viewed positively, and what is being viewed with caution, but is not discouraged by Le Maire’s remarks.
Corbett says gov tech is a way governments are applying tokenization from land registries to vehicle registrations.

But what exactly has been going on with PBoC’s cryptocurrency — and other blockchain projects, for that matter — throughout their research period? In order to find out, our Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sat down with Professor He Zhiguo from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business to unpack this issue from the inside.

Tomaz Levak, Co-Founder of OriginTrail, thinks that enterprises need a bit of both for one simple reason: interoperability.

Michael Every, experienced economist and Head of Financial Markets Research Asia-Pacific at Rabobank, would beg to differ. As a long-time expert on Asian markets, Every does not anticipate that the crucial, closed-off Chinese economy would adhere to the libertarian principles behind blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Since 18 months ago, Popa’s team of economists and blockchain developers sought out to create an index named the monetary measurement unit (MMU) to peg the Anchor currency to. The index itself, according to Popa, is a culmination of 190+ countries’ average GDP over the last 25 years, FX indicators, and other factors.

As stablecoins are designed to minimize the volatility of a cryptocurrency price, Popa argues that pegging his cryptocurrency to the global economy growth would not only bypass inflation, but also bypass the upcoming recession by preserving the currency’s value or purchasing power over the volatile period.

At the end of the day, Popa believes that all investors are seeking a safe harbor, whether it is to hedge their current assets or to invest in an unexplored asset class. As governments and crypto-enthusiasts alike are becoming more aware of this class of cryptocurrency, and that this can potentially bring short-term viability to fiat currencies, Popa is hopeful that this is the year of stablecoins.

“There is, from an enterprise standpoint, a desire to engage in this new technology and in this ability to move money globally without any barriers at a very efficient cost basis. Speed is what the market is looking for, particularly as we move towards a global organization. Governments are still trying to regulate their own little boundaries and limit the transfer of money, of intellectual property, of trade. And I think that's the barrier that all of us are trying to break down.”
“I think innovation is happening on two folds. One is the consumerization of innovation and the other is the depths of innovation in terms of technology, in terms of the ability to provide the technology in a “non-custodial fashion.” I can either build innovation around custody or around non-custodial services. And blockchain has enabled non-custodial - what does that mean? That basically means the control is in me, the user, and the responsibility lies with me as the individual. Innovation on a non-custodial basis is very hard to attack and diffuse.”
“The value is not in intellectual property, it's in the ecosystem that I have developed that is contributing to the overall blockchain, or Bitcoin.cash, or whatever the underlying algorithm is.”

Jason Hsu is known in Taiwan as the Crypto Congressman (yes, check his business card, it is officially his title). He sees blockchain and cryptocurrency as an opportunity for this small island nation to become a technology force that can drive innovation -- incubate projects in Taiwan, and position the 23-million person nation globally.

Hsu believes China gave Taiwan that opportunity the day it banned ICOs on September 4, 2017. Question is, how will Taiwan position itself to seize it? Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau sits down in this candid conversation with Congressman Jason Hsu in Taipei.

Edith sits down with Editor-in-Chief, Angie Lau, in this value-rich conversation on the role of China, the impact of technology, and why there may be coordinated focus on blockchain by President Xi Jinping.

This self-proclaimed “economist-history nerd” and former Deutsche Bank banker, who joined then lost his job at Citi as head trader of Asian ETFs, says that BitMEX as a crypto exchange actually protects investors by limiting the loss to only the amount put into the market. This is different, he says, than the traditional regulated system where investors can lose their entire net worth.

But why crypto?

Hayes says it’s history in the making. Cryptocurrency is permissionless — and that means everyone can use it. It may not be better, but “at least you have a choice.”

It’s a glimpse into why people are “opting out” who created an industry with a market cap of $350 billion. For a man who lost his job at Citibank in 2013, what he and his co-founders built at BitMEX since then has turned this out-of-work banker into a self-made crypto-preneur heading up the biggest crypto margin-trading platform in the world.