U.S. Federal Reserve Board member Lael Brainard said the country should be at the forefront of developing a government cryptocurrency to strengthen the U.S. dollar's role as a global reserve currency. 

Lael Brainard said this week that leading state cryptocurrency projects could have a "significant impact" on the global financial system. She believes the U.S. should take a leading role in the system.

She said the U.S. Federal Reserve is "sharpening its focus" on four key areas of public cryptocurrency development: the growing role of digital private money, the transition to digital payments, plans to use foreign public cryptocurrencies in international payments and the problems associated with inaccessible financial services." 

Brainard de

The decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has been one of the driving forces of the cryptocurrency market this year, with projects like Yearn.finance (YFI), Aave (AAVE) and Uniswap (UNI) quickly rising to "blue chip" status

But the old saying goes, "markets go up like an escalator and fly down like an elevator," and given the volatile nature of the cryptocurrency market, the elevator seems to be in free fall. DeFi-sector tokens are down at least 60% on average from their recent record highs, and the cryptocurrency market itself has lost more than $1.2 trillion in less than two weeks.

The pullback caused the value of blocked assets (TVL) on all DeFi-platforms to fall from a record high of $164.2 billion as of May 10 to the current value of $93.34 b

Todd Morley, co-founder and former top executive at investment firm Guggenheim Partners, believes that the practical value of Etherium is significantly greater than that of Bitcoin. 

Morley noted the extremely rapid growth of the Etherium ecosystem. For example, the number of developers working with this blockchain has increased 20-fold annually for six consecutive years. That "far exceeds Moore's Law, which is where the development is going," according to the former top executive at Guggenheim Partners. 

That said, Morley believes that the practical value of Etherium is still not fully revealed. He stressed that the second cryptocurrency should become a leader in practical use, thanks to the transition to the Proof-of-Stake consensus and the de

At the Consensus conference, Web3 Foundation CTO Joe Petrowski talked about how the Polkadot project will evolve in 2021. Decentralization is a trade-off, he said. For example, Polkadot was designed with a higher transaction load than Etherium. However, the operation of Polkadot's interconnected parachains comes with its own set of challenges. 

The decentralized finance (DeFi) boom has increased the need for cheaper alternatives to Etherium. Petrowski recognizes that the next stage of building a system in which applications can interact between chains and transaction processing occurs in parallel is a step into the unknown. 

Etherium can be seen as a "single-threaded blockchain," which is convenient in terms of changing states. However, this mea

Billionaire and Bridgewater Associates hedge fund manager Ray Dalio said he bought "some" BTC because he thinks bitcoin is a good store of value. 

Dalio said that he owns a certain amount of bitcoin, but never disclosed the exact amount of his investment. The billionaire explained that the U.S. dollar is on the verge of a devaluation that was last seen in 1971. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that because of the Chinese yuan dollar may lose its status as the world's reserve currency.  

In such an environment, bitcoin looks increasingly attractive as a savings instrument. The billionaire suggested that many states may outlaw bitcoin when it becomes a serious competitor to traditional financial instruments. Governments would be forced to