Bitcoin Guru

The Waves Association announced on Wednesday a new grant program for cross-chain interoperability development. The pool consists of 1 million Waves tokens, worth approximately $3 million as of press time. Projects will be eligible for grants of up to 300,000 Waves to develop solutions for interoperability and cross-chain communication. There will be three separate types of grants: open grants, grants distributed through hackathons and Waves-focused grants. Sten Laureyssens, strategic advisor at the Waves Association, explained to Cointelegraph that open grants will have a wide scope: "For the open grant category, the grants are open to a wide variety of interoperability projects, that don't necessarily have to be connected to Waves. We're looking for creative solutions to connect existing blockchains and dApps." The latter two types of grants will have to adhere to certain requirements, which makes it likely that the Waves blockchain will be involved in some form. Nev...

The Swiss central bank and the Bank for International Settlements have announced plans to jointly trial a central bank digital currency by the end of 2020, in the latest development in the global race to CBDCs. The plan was revealed by Benoit Coeure of the Bank for International Settlements earlier this week at a summit in Shanghai. According to local press reports, Coeure said the Swiss National Bank and the BIS would launch the currency in proof-of-concept before the end of this year. Head of the Innovation Hub at the BIS, tasked with researching CBDCs, Coeure said the Swiss proof of concept would be a precursor to experimenting with the currency in retail settings. The trial will also allow the banks to see how the technology syncs with existing payment systems, as well as providing more effective routes to monitoring compliance. Coeure said the Bank for International Settlements was already working with several other international central banks on similar projects, helping develop ...

Joint work will be focused on developing a broader DeFi ecosystem using the Gravity cross-chain communication protocol. We are excited to announce a collaboration between Waves and Fantom. Waves and Fantom are committed to building an open ecosystem between different chains, based on the Gravity protocol, which is essential to the DeFi industry's wider success. Under the collaboration deal, WAVES, the native utility token of the Waves ecosystem, will join Fantom's DeFi ecosystem as collateral for minting synthetic assets, including fUSD, Fantom's stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. WAVES holders will be able to use fMint to access fUSD and other synthetic assets, which can be used with other Fantom DeFi products. Specifically, fLend allows users to lend and borrow assets, while fTrade allows users to trade them. For instance, If you want to go long BTC (without losing exposure to your WAVES collateral), mint fUSD against your WAVES in fMint and use the fUSD to buy fBTC (syn...

Cross border payment remittance company Ripple has been part-granted a motion to dismiss some of the claims brought against it by investors, as the firm battles an ongoing class-action lawsuit over alleged securities fraud. Investors claim Ripple and the company's CEO Brad Garlinghouse failed to register XRP with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and then went on to make misleading statements about the token, leading to the eventual class action suit. In the U.S. District Court of Northern California last Friday, Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton granted two legs of Ripple's motion for dismissal, with 10 claims total outstanding against the firm. The judge said that plaintiff Bradley Sostack had provided insufficient evidence to support two of the claims, which relate in particular to purportedly false statements made by the firm back in 2017. However, for the most part, the judge refused to dismiss the claims against the company, including over misleading advertisemen...