In the United States, blockchain is used to fight against COVID-19

Paypal officially launches its cryptoasset payment service in the United States. Using the Paypal wallet, customers will have the choice to pay any merchant accepting it either in traditional currencies or in cryptoactives, the latter being automatically converted into dollars. Merchants will not receive cryptoassets but the final currency directly.

Go further >

Visa has announced the deployment of a solution on the Ethereum blockchain to settle payments made in USDC.
As part of this, some of Visa’s partners will use USDC as a payment method.
This means that the Visa network and its 1,500 transactions per second can be used as an Ethereum overlay network and the Ethereum blockchain will be used to finalize these transactions in an aggregated, transparent and secure manner.

Go further >

After Morgan Stanley, it’s Goldman Sachs’ turn to open up the Bitcoin route to its clients.
The US bank has sought approval from the regulator to gain exposure to the ARK Innovation ETF, an ETF capable of investing in Bitcoin as well as other crypto assets.

Go further >

Uniswap has announced its long awaited v3. Among the enhancements, the platform will allow liquidity providers to define, by asset pair, a price range over which their deposit will be effective. This will significantly improve liquidity over a given price range. As a reminder, Uniswap plans to deploy on the L2 Optimism solution shortly after its mainnet launch on May 4.
Finally, governance will be able to activate mechanisms for redistributing value to the UNI token.

Go further >

The Sushi Protocol team has just released two new products: Bentobox and Kashi.
Bentobox is a portal to deposit funds and use a set of Sushi products, like an “App Store”.
Kashi is the first product available on Bentobox, and offers a deposit and loan system.

Go further >

The mainnet of Layer2’s solution, Optimism, which was scheduled to launch this week, has been pushed back to July. The reason given is that the ecosystem is not yet ready for the launch, and the project team wants to work with different DeFi projects, and other players in the Ethereum ecosystem, to make the launch successful.
So the pressure on the Ethereum network commissions should remain high for the time being.

Go further >

Cardano’s mining, after several years, will finally be “decentralized”.
In its architecture, Cardano relied until now on genesis nodes, controlled by the foundation, which validated the blocks.
From the end of March, all validation will be done by external operators.

Go further >

Elon musk, after his many Bitcoin-related tweets and a massive $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin from his company Tesla, tweeted for the first time about DeFi.
His tweet, “Don’t defy DeFi,” shows that the entrepreneur, regardless of his level of knowledge, has a keen interest in the emergence of decentralized finance

Go further >

Blockchain is being used to help in the fight against COVID-19. New York State is launching a blockchain-based vaccine passport, which will allow its residents to prove that they have been vaccinated and will also contain their test results. The goal is, of course, to be able to return to normal business operations as quickly as possiblele.

Go further >

Microsoft chooses the Bitcoin blockchain to launch a decentralized identity service.
Called ION, this project is the result of 4 years of work and aims to “develop and advance decentralized identity”.
The company announces that it has in mind a real decentralized web project of which ION is the first brick. ION is entirely open-source

Go further >

Hop Protocol is a new dApp aiming to facilitate liquidity transfers between different L2 and Ethereum, but also to some compatible sidechains. For the moment, the protocol is still in test phase, and offers only a few tokens, but the official release of the project is announced for April, and will cover Ethereum, xDai, Optimism, Polygon and Arbitrum channels.

Go further >

Natto is a new exchange for NFTs based on Sushi. The protocol allows users to add their collections of NFTs and put them up for sale, and will allow users who have deposited funds on Uniswap v3 (whose deposit will be represented via an NFT) to easily sell their position. All fees collected by the protocol are redistributed to the owners of the xSushi token.

Go further >

Figures of the week

New record for DeFi

DeFi is breaking records, with over $79 billion within the various protocols, with great growth in liquidity on the Binance Smart Chain protocols.

A nice statistic about Uniswap

The Uniswap platform exceeds Bitcoin in commissions generated in a day.

A major sale of an NFT

A New York Times article was sold as an NFT for 350 ETH (~$560,000 at the time of sale). Proceeds from the sale will be donated to charity.

Cristiano Ronaldo is worth 150 ETH on Sorare!

A unique card of soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo sold for 150 ETH, or $289,000 on Sorare, a game based on NFTs and soccer.