Tulum’s exquisite beauty is everywhere – from its clear, crystal blue sea water to its cleansing and transcendent cenotes, it is a magical place with extraordinary energy and pull. This shiny gem on the Mayan Riviera has always been a place of great importance and energy. The ancient Mayan name for Tulum is Zama, meaning City of Dawn. Zama was an important trading hub, where the Mayans built a beautiful temple.

Tulum has always been a cultural center. Digital nomads, technologists, crypto enthusiasts, and eco-warriors from all over the world (author included) have flocked to Tulum since realizing that WFH (work from home) could in fact mean WFB (work from the beach).

Tulum Crypto Fest (TCF), May 13-15, plans to shine a spotlight on this “barefoot luxury” lifestyle. Tulum has become a portal to a life of business mixed with pleasure, while surrounded by nature.

The festival theme “Where nature meets technology” unites the two worlds through an IRL techno-luxury experience connecting with the brightest minds in Defi, planet freethinkers, and eco-conscious builders, along with excellent content and networking. TCF is a non-traditional festival that features renowned international speakers, unique interactive experiences and a spotlight on the boho-chic decentralized way of life that has become a magnet for the world.

TCF has partnered with NFT Boutique in Tulum to provide an “NFT Boutique at the Beach” experience through holographic NFT displays in the Papaya Playa Project courtyard, where the festival will be centered.

NFT Boutique is also excited to present a special daily happy hour during the fest from 5-8pm featuring Crypto Art and Culture exhibit by Aaron Koenig.

The festival itself takes place in the beautiful beachside eco-hotel, Papaya Playa Project (PPP), a hotel that is emblematic of Tulum’s boho chic. TCF will be an immersive experience featuring 5-star service and unique experiences accessible only to attendees. These include a private cenote event, healing and wellness, and evening activities including top DJs. Attendees can truly have a taste the barefoot luxury lifestyle Tulum offers.

For tickets to Tulum Crypto Fest, use this link and code NFTBoutique for a discount! See you at the beach!

The post Is Tulum the Cultural Center of Web3? appeared first on Grit Daily News.

NetBlocks, which tracks internet disruption, reported that the country had been “largely offline” for almost 24 hours. Access Now, which tracks internet freedom issues, tweeted that authorities in Belarus had blocked access to dozens of websites and some Virtual Private Network services (VPNs). VPNs are typically used to circumvent internet blocks.

In 2016, a report from the Human Rights Council of the United Nations General Assembly declared that access to the internet is a basic human right, and important to giving everyone the ability to “exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

The internet blackout in Belarus is one of many such examples worldwide. Internet blocks are widespread. In Africa last year, Ivory Coast, DR Congo, Chad, Cameroon, Sudan, Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone restricted access to the internet. In Eritrea, internet access is government-controlled and less than one percent of the population reportedly go online. And North Korea only allows the political elite access to the web.

The internet was always designed to give open access to information and communication. To educate. To inform. To bring people together. To warn. To organize and mobilize.

The implications of a government-led internet block are many and varied. I spoke – via VPNs and other apps – with a few people from the tech ecosystem in Minsk to better understand the situation. All names have been changed to protect their identity.

“Prior to the election, the tech community created a chat bot for Telegram called Voice2020, which showed that opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhonovskaya was projected to win with 80 percent of the votes, Ana told me. “It shows incredible disrespect to tell the people of Belarus, with that pre-election data, that the current leader will remain president of the country. We feel like our voices has been erased.”

“Internet has become one of the basic human rights, being a logical extension of the right for the freedom of opinion and expression,” Ivan said. “In a country with a high Internet penetration rate (~70 percent), blocking Internet access seriously damages everyday life – all for the sake of hiding government lies. What is particularly outrageous, is the fact that we’ve been building an image of an investor-friendly country, a shining paradise for software development – and now it’s ruined. Offices of the international companies that believed that image are now barely functioning, struggling to find some ways to work from within the country or just sending core teams to other countries. Investor-friendliness? Tell that to an angel investor who was detained yesterday just for walking outside to meet his friend.”

So why is this possible? Simply put, the way the internet is constructed makes it easy to limit access. There are three commonly used techniques that block access to Internet sites – DNS tampering, IP blocking, and URL blocking using a proxy. In addition to these techniques, governments can force search results to be removed, and if they have the jurisdiction to do so (or are a dictatorship), they can simply take down web content providers.

What can be done?

There are moves to change the way we access the internet, and one of the more promising methods is the creation of a peer-to-peer internet solution. P2P would stop governments having control over the internet at large, and deliver truly democratized access.

One such P2P internet provider is ThreeFold, which has created the world’s largest decentralized internet and cloud system.

“In today’s world, access to the internet is an important human right – the right to communicate, the right to be informed, the right to be connected to others, especially during times of uncertainty and unrest,” Kristof de Spiegeleer, CEO and founder at ThreeFold told me. “Unfortunately, what we’re seeing lately is an alarming shift toward internet shutdown policies that allow large corporations and governments to limit access, sometimes prohibiting it altogether. We at ThreeFold believe that the internet is too vital to be controlled by any single entity and instead should collectively be owned, managed, and decided upon. A truly decentralized grid is a step toward that reality.”

Decentralized internet is a viable alternative to the existing infrastructure, which is largely controlled by a small number of huge corporations – another potential risk to freedom of expression, information, and knowledge. While it is too late to help the citizens of Belarus stay informed and safe right now, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, we’ll have a new internet that can deliver on the promise of it being a basic human right.

The post Belarus: why is it so easy for governments to control the internet, and what can be done? appeared first on Grit Daily News.

The U.S. government’s response to current economic conditions has put significant pressure on fixed income instruments. Low Interest rates contribute to a decrease in yields and the Fed is not in a hurry to raise them. 

While traditional fixed income vehicles do not appear attractive any longer, the soaring DeFi space offers blockchain-based alternatives. Still, these tools are rather sophisticated and need to be treated with caution.

The problem with fixed income

Although the stock market has quickly rebounded from its devastating March lows, the U.S. economy doesn’t appear to be completely out of the woods. It makes sense that in such circumstances people favor saving up liquid cash for possible emergencies.

The personal savings rate and savings deposits in commercial banks are shooting through the roof. However, the yields have shrunk substantially. The top-10 online banks’ savings accounts provide an average annual percentage yield (APY) of 1.26%, a far cry from the rates observed in 2019.

4-week T-Bills’ yield took a strong hit as well. The discount went from 1.57% in February to 0.13%, over a 90% decrease.

The beauty of fixed income instruments is that they enable people to keep their savings liquid, as opposed to less liquid stocks and bonds while still earning interest. However, the Fed’s monetary measures put constraints on what  traditional instruments can offer.

What if there was no pressure on the interest rates?

Enter DeFi

Decentralized Finance, or DeFi, is an ecosystem of financial instruments running on top of various blockchain platforms. Smart contracts have provided the necessary infrastructure for  fully automated alternatives to traditional lending and trading platforms.

At the beginning stages, DeFi platforms are usually stewarded by their creators. However, later, governance is passed to the community and maintained through voting among token holders. Hence, changing how interest rates are calculated depends on the community and algorithms, not a centralized party.

DeFi sector started to pick up from the latter half of 2019 and except for a short-term decline in Spring 2020 is full steam-on. To date, the total value locked in DeFi exceeds $2 billion. The major driving forces of this surge are attractive interest rates and yield farming.

“DeFi is an evolution of a parallel economy where novel incentive mechanisms dictate everything”, says Rosh Singh, CEO at Quadency—a professional cryptocurrency trading platform. 

Not-So-Passive Income

DeFi instruments have much less friction than their traditional counterparts. Hence, moving funds back and forth various platforms can multiply the baseline interest rates. As a result, with compounding and bonuses, annualized yields may exceed 100%, a stellar difference with keeping money in a bank.

At the moment, DeFi development is largely concentrated on Ethereum. The most popular platforms include Maker, Compound, Synthetix, Kyber Network, and Uniswap. The combination of all of the platforms creates a mesh of different services enabling swapping tokens and borrowing/lending them in a matter of minutes.

The gold-rush of DeFi is referred to as ‘yield farming’. Farmers utilize exotic strategies such as multi-step transactions and flash loans to take short-term advantage of how algorithms work. A flash loan is a loan taken and repaid almost instantly, which sometimes enables borrowers to get loans without providing collateral because of the speed at which smart-contracts function.. 

As DeFi’s popularity grows, the interfaces of the tools used for farming will become more user-friendly for average users, driving even more people into the ecosystem. For instance, with Furucombo it takes only a few clicks to generate a transaction that shoots instantly across multiple platforms. A user specifies how they want to execute a transaction in a convenient UI, and the platform generates a multi-step transaction that previously required significant programming skills.

Increasing ease of access, flexibility, and hefty yields keep driving more people to tap into DeFi space. What do newcomers see?

Compounding With COMP

Compound is a great example of an algorithmic platform focused on lending and borrowing crypto assets. Its major advantage compared to the traditional instruments is that its interest rates are a function of the supply and demand, they are not bound by any external forces.

From a lender’s perspective, Compound works like a Certificate of Deposit (CD), except that a contract’s maturity is only about 15 seconds. Compound looks similar to very short-term vehicles such as Money Market Accounts and 4-week T-Bills.

Currently, the yields on assets on Compound are significantly more attractive than what is  offered in the traditional space. There here is far less friction to start lending  the minimum deposit amount and undergo KYC.

Compound’s decentralized nature and reliance on algorithms creates potential threats for the platform’s users. Interest rates are attractive but carry smart contract risks that vary based on market conditions. 

Higher reward = higher risk, BAT example

Basic Attention Token (BAT) recently had the highest APY on Compound, roughly 13%, 10 times the average APY of top-10 savings accounts. There are a few caveats that result from such an outperformance.

For starters,, BAT is less liquid than cash and it has substantial volatility. Hence, it’s not very suitable for savings purposes. Moreover, given the maximum draw down of more than 60% each year, lending BAT for a longer time frame is not reasonable.

Second, there has to be  sustainable demand for BAT to keep the equilibrium in interest rates high. Speculative activity does not support the yields for long.

Third, BAT was used as a proxy for earning COMP. COMP is Compound’s protocol token that represents ownership and enables governance participation. It has recently soared to over $200, making it a lucrative target for speculators. 

The key to earning the highest possible amount of COMP is to participate in a pool with the highest liquidity. Hence, speculators were playing with the BAT market as long as they could make money off COMP. However, after the change in COMP distribution rules the speculators left and the interest rate plummeted. 

Besides systematic risks, DeFi instruments carry technological ones. Smart-contracts are complicated and the classic approach of building fast and breaking things doesn’t apply because of the amounts of value they process. Smart-contracts need to undergo both internal and external audits  before going into production. Investors should verify that companies have publicly published proof of a professional third-party audit of all smart contracts and protocols.  

“For institutions to have meaningful participation in the decentralized financial infrastructure using a centralized overlay service may be unavoidable. Assuming the US and EU financial ground rules remain unchanged, issues such as regulatory compliance and volatility protection are likely to require some level of a centralized layer to satisfy institutional concerns.” says Nuke Goldstein, CTO of Celsius—a crypto lending company. 

Every tool has its use

DeFi is young and complex. Through platforms like Compound, users have opportunities to earn interest on savings even in the context of low-interest rates.

Making use of DeFi tools requires understanding how they work, lest interacting with them may lead to losses. Overleveraging and volatility creates moving parts that increase risk in an environment solely controlled by algorithms. Hence, any instruments with high yields should be scrutinized before making any investment decisions.

The post DeFi — The rising parallel version of finance, but on a blockchain appeared first on Grit Daily News.

The agenda at Money 20/20 was long and varied. Several people talked about extending banking to the legal cannabis industry. There were discussions about reaching people in developing markets and extending payment systems to e-commerce and social media platforms around the world.

The themes covered at the event ranged from commerce and payments innovation to alternative lending channels, regulation, and the consumer experience. The blockchain was mentioned too, though only by a few vendors. The event took what it described as a “deep dive into each facet of this disruptive technology” but made clear that it didn’t expect consensus.

At the same time, at the Cosmopolitan Hotel down the road, it was Vegas Blockchain Week. Speakers talked about crypto investing, the pros and cons of decentralized and enterprise blockchains, dApps, and the role of the blockchain in industries like healthcare and gaming.

Money 20/20 had all the big names and the biggest companies. But it was Vegas Blockchain Week that had all the big ideas.

You must obey

The people who spoke at Money 20/20 were talking about finding new ways to do old things. They were representatives of giant financial corporations that determine how much money flows through the economy and under which conditions. Those companies set the rules and they determine the prices for obeying those rules. As long as they’re in control, they can dip into those financial flows and take out funds as freely as they want.

It’s no wonder that businesses like banks and credit card companies are so keen to look for ways to hold onto their positions. They know the world is changing and they know they have to change too. They don’t want it to change without them. What they don’t realize is that the world no longer needs them.

The future of money

That’s because the future of money was at the other conference down the road. That’s where people were building a new financial system, one that’s decentralized and democratic. Blockchain-based finance isn’t dependent on some large entity that sets interest rates or that can decide how much a currency is worth. It’s transparent and clear. Everyone can see exactly how the system works, and they can see what they’re paying for.

When a seller pays a fee for their transaction to be collected into a block, they know who’s receiving their money and they can understand the service they’re buying. That’s never been clear of the much higher fees charged in the banking industry.

They can also participate in this new financial system because anyone can, but no one can control it. Once the rules for a cryptocurrency have been set, they need consensus to change—and if people don’t like the change, they can simply switch to using a different coin. Cryptocurrencies offer a new way to move value, one that has no need of traditional bankers’ gatekeepers and toll booths.

It’s also built for the way the world does business today. The traditional banking and financial system really doesn’t manage international borders well. Try to send money overseas, in any direction, and the fees suddenly spiral. That’s a problem as businesses in places like China and India continue to sell around a connected world and complete more and more global transactions.

The businesses at Money 20/20 were looking for Band-Aids to put on an old system that’s no longer needed and no longer appropriate. The future of money is in the other Vegas, in blockchain crypto and digital assets.

The post The Future of Money is Not Money 20/20 appeared first on Grit Daily News.