While I'm looking all the logos of different persons in this forum. I'm  inspired. The time they invest, the mind blowing of how they think and the effort they give.... They are all deserving to all the titles that they had right now. So for all the newbie, cheer up. Let us invest time, effort and let us shake this forum by sharing our ideas. We can do more than what you think. We don't need to chase those logos, they will just come. So let us conquer laziness and contribute for growth.

Shalom, shalom.

Good content, the decentralised economy is sure been threatened by the traditional centralised internet but its nice to see thatnwe have a decentralised solution that will support blockchain nodes in the instances of outage either from the internet of power supply.

Thank you for the compliment mate. It is really a good news to us..

3 Banks That Have Big Plans for Blockchain and Cryptocurrency
All of these banks are creating payments systems and/or lending products that cater to institutional investors in the crypto space.
This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the “official” recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. We’re motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

Various cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum soared at the end of 2020 and into the new year, albeit with a lot of volatility, in typical crypto fashion. The huge burst of activity has highlighted several banks that are catering to crypto customers by leveraging blockchain technology to develop specialized payments systems and offer niche banking products. And many of these banks are being rewarded by shareholders for their innovation. Here are three banks that have big plans for blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.

1. Silvergate Capital
The top-performing bank stock of 2020, Silvergate Capital (NYSE:SI) went public toward the end of 2019, opening around $13 per share. Today, it trades for roughly $90. The bank, which has $5.6 billion in assets and is based in La Jolla, California, is most famous for the Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN), a digital payments network that can instantly clear transactions in U.S. dollars around the clock, 365 days a year, between two users in the network. This is ideal for institutional crypto traders and crypto exchanges because cryptocurrencies are always trading.

As one of the first banks to build this kind of network, Silvergate has a first-mover advantage. The bank has onboarded 76 crypto exchanges and 600 institutional investors onto the network, and the larger it gets the more attractive it becomes for other customers to join. In the fourth quarter of 2020, there were a record 90,000-plus transactions conducted on SEN for a total volume of $59 billion. That's a roughly 530% increase on transactions compared to the fourth quarter of 2019. Silvergate's chief strategy officer, Ben Reynolds, said on the bank's recent earnings call that the company also has 200 SEN prospects in its pipeline. New customers bring in lots of non-interest-bearing deposits for the bank, while transactions bring in fee income.

Silvergate is also building out other products related to crypto. The bank recently finished its pilot on a new lending product called SEN Leverage, which allows customers to obtain lines of credit in U.S. dollars that is collateralized by bitcoin. The product is off to a great start after exiting its pilot program at the end of the third quarter, growing total SEN loan volume from $35.5 million at the end of the third quarter to more than $82 million after the fourth quarter. Silvergate also launched a bitcoin custody solution in the quarter, and Reynolds said launching new products is a key piece of the bank's growth strategy.

2. Signature Bank
The nearly $74 billion asset Signature Bank (NASDAQ:SBNY), which is based in New York City, has also jumped into the world of cryptocurrency with its Signet digital payments system. Signet leverages blockchain architecture to create a real-time payments system, which, like Silvergate's SEN, also allows commercial clients on the network to instantaneously send and clear payments to one another. The platform has helped the bank bring in $10 billion in deposits, which is way more than Silvergate Capital, although Silvergate is a much smaller bank. Signature also has the top five crypto exchanges on Signet.

Signature CEO Joseph DePaolo said the network is "growing by leaps and bounds." He also said the bank is continuing to build the ecosystem using the platform, and that he sees the potential for other ecosystems beyond crypto to use Signet.

3. JPMorgan Chase
You might never know it by the way Jamie Dimon sometimes talks about bitcoin, but JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) is doing all sorts of innovative and interesting work with blockchain technology. In October, the bank launched its own digital coin, the JPM coin, in order to conduct global payments activity, in what seems similar to the payments offerings of Signature Bank and Silvergate Capital. JPMorgan also has its own digital currency division called Onyx with more than 100 employees.

Additionally, the bank has its own Blockchain Center of Excellence, which actively researches blockchain and its potential uses in order to develop its own technology and try out solutions across its various business divisions. When it launched the JPM coin, Takis Georgakopoulos, the bank's global head of wholesale payments, said he could see a ton of potential uses in the payments space for blockchain. For instance, he said it could help banks confirm that people inserted their account information correctly, helping to avoid rejections on payments. He also said digital currencies could remove a lot of expenses at banks such as the cost of processing paper checks.

Genesis: https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/01/27/3-banks-that-have-big-plans-for-blockchain-and-cry/

The perils of a decentralized web living in the centralized world
Whether we like it or not, the decentralized web is vulnerable to the internet’s worsening problems. Luckily, fixing this should be simple.

The perils of a decentralized web living in the centralized worldOPINION
On Jan. 26, the internet came to a screeching halt along much of the East Coast. Email services went down; YouTube videos flickered out midstream; millions were likely affected, if only temporarily. But the outage, attributed to a surge in traffic, underscores the metastasizing vulnerabilities surrounding the way most of the world conducts commerce, consumes entertainment and communicates.

The implications of such outages should be seen as particularly alarming for those in cryptoland: namely, for the ever-growing numbers of participants in an emerging decentralized ecosystem for transferring peer-to-peer value with Bitcoin (BTC) who build smart contracts on Ethereum or launch any number of platforms and tokens that perform untold numbers of functions and services.

Indeed, such outages highlight a serious challenge to building the hoped-for future of a decentralized web that is more secure, reliable and safer.

Every time Gmail or Telegram goes down because of such disruptions to the existing web, it’s a reminder of how exposed this emergent decentralized world is to centralized vulnerabilities. And it’s something of an Achilles heel that has yet to be satisfactorily addressed.

In short, the full blossoming of blockchain and other decentralized systems depends on the reliability of an existing web architecture that is not only highly centralized but also in need of a facelift.

Internet: The beauty and the beast
As beautiful as the original architecture of it — and, believe me, it is beautiful — the internet as we know it has become a tad clunky. It’s been decades since its creation, and it’s showing its proverbial age. The evidence of this is the rising number of outages that have disrupted major cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, along with business-critical messaging platforms like Slack. The resulting losses to corporations, as well as to everyday web users and crypto enthusiasts, could be in the billions.

Last year, for example, Cloudflare went down and the drop in Bitcoin transactions that resulted was palpable. It’s notable in that case that the Bitcoin network itself was not down. The peer-to-peer consensus-building infrastructure it’s built on was fully intact at all times, but the drop in completed transactions indicates a serious weakness in the system given that so many crypto users depend on centralized storage and exchange options. And many of those services were depending on, in turn, Cloudflare.

The above example highlights how, in many cases, the viability of those services boiled down to one single point of failure — utterly contrary to the raison d’être of Bitcoin and blockchains more generally.

It’s a problem that has grown far worse during the COVID-19 pandemic, unfortunately, notably because the web has become even more central to our work and personal lives. According to recent data published by ThousandEyes, a network intelligence company, global internet disruptions soared as the pandemic struck last year. Rising rates of usage were cited as a reason behind the outages that increased 63% in March when compared to the pre-pandemic period. By June, there were an estimated 44% more disruptions than that which occurred at the beginning of last year.

It’s safe to say that when taking into account that an astounding 25% of all Ethereum workloads in the world run on Amazon Web Services, there should be more than pause for concern. At this moment in time, every single blockchain-based application, whether it’s Bitcoin, Polkadot or Cosmos, is completely powerless without the help of a handful of centralized, internet-based services and infrastructure.

The solution exists
This isn’t to convey pessimism or hopelessness, however, because there are solutions to the problem that can be implemented relatively quickly and without radically overhauling what is already in use. One is to leverage the strength of the internet as it currently stands, enhancing the mechanics that underpin it by focusing on the abundance of nodes and redundancies in data that are already built into the system.

Think of a node as a conduit for channeling the data you rely on. And with a smarter, more dynamic routing protocol that could easily be layered on top of the existing internet, for example, we can more efficiently route transmissions around the nodes that are blocked or congested and, instead, retrieve data from the nodes through which such data can flow more freely.

In addition to this, there’s the issue of resolving underlying security issues. In particular, an examination of the internet’s default routing technology, known as the Border Gateway Protocol, or the BGP, reveals vulnerabilities that are currently being exploited by organized attackers with potentially broad-ranging effects on all forms of internet-based applications. Such attacks are not only increasing in frequency but they also threaten more costly outages and delays.

For example, in April 2018, criminal actors exploited weak points in core internet infrastructure to redirect users of an Ethereum wallet developer’s website to a phishing site. This compromised their account credentials and robbed them of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. It’s complicated, but during the attack, the internet’s authoritative routing servers were corrupted and told to direct traffic to IP addresses owned by the criminal actors instead of the intended IP destination that would normally have been specified by the BGP.

The weakness is rooted in the fact that the BGP was designed when there were far fewer internet users, meaning that its original architects didn’t foresee, understandably so, today’s need to secure the network against so many malicious actors. Thus, this routing protocol is easily manipulated for nefarious ends.

Blockchain is the answer
Blockchain technology, it should be noted, provides a potentially critical solution to this problem. Though IPs could still be hijacked at the lowest level, a blockchain-powered routing layer would allow enterprises to connect their devices and infrastructures via a private network without publishing their IP addresses — the ones bad actors could use to target their particular services. And within this layer, every connection between devices can be encrypted without using the centralized authorities that have been a key vulnerability in current architectures.

Indeed, by more efficiently routing internet data and harnessing the power of blockchain to bolster security, I’m hopeful for new synergies to emerge between the existing web and the nascent decentralized one. It’s only a matter of time, I believe. And when this happens, the sky is the limit for Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the incredible blockchain-based systems being built.

Genesis: https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-perils-of-a-decentralized-web-living-in-the-centralized-world

Israeli digital securities exchange gets preliminary green light from regulators
The Israel Securities Authority has approved a request from Simetria to operate a digital bulletin board for investors ahead of its digital securities exchange launch.

Israeli digital securities exchange gets preliminary green light from regulatorsNEWS
An Israeli start-up that aims to establish a digital ledger technology-based digital securities exchange in the country has received its first, encouraging go-ahead from the Israel Securities Authority.

In an application letter filed with the regulator on Feb. 14, Simetria had sought the ISA's approval to operate a digital bulletin board as a preliminary step in its roadmap for the eventual launch of its digital exchange. The letter noted the increasing integration of DLT technologies into market infrastructures globally, and the evolution of legislative frameworks to accommodate this innovation.

In the case of Israel, a Memorandum of Securities Law published by the ISA in 2020 proposed legislation that would facilitate the creation of smaller-scale, innovative digital exchanges:

“The Ministry of Finance wishes to promote securities trading activities on trading platforms that do not operate on the same scale as the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, and have unique features or designated purposes, such as trading platforms designated for sophisticated investors (such as insurance companies, pension funds, and banking corporations) or platforms that use novel technologies (such as blockchain technology).”
Simetria's letter thus asked the ISA to approve its operation of one of its products in the short-term: a "digital bulletin board" that will provide information about private firms that are raising capital in the primary market, as well as information about the securities of private firms being offered for sale by their owners (the secondary market). In the bulletin board, potential sellers and buyers would be able to publish sales and purchase indications of various kinds.

According to a report published by Israel newspaper The Globes on Feb. 17, the ISA has now swiftly approved Simetria's application request for operating the bulletin board. Simetria co-founder and CEO Ziv Keinan said that the approval brings Israel into step with those countries at the forefront of digital securities innovation globally:

“The ISA’s decision is a dramatic milestone towards the establishment of a digital securities exchange in Israel [...] Private companies will soon be able to offer digital securities to international institutional investors on Simetria's technology platform in a way that will allow them to raise capital and gain liquidity.”
Kienen's perspective has been echoed by Oded Spirer, CEO of the ISA, who has himself said that “digital securities markets are no longer in the distant future, but rather in the here and now.”

In other recent crypto regulatory developments in Israel, several lawmakers have proposed amending existing tax legislation so that digital currencies like Bitcoin (BTC) would not be subject to capital gains taxes, but be treated more like fiat currencies instead. The proposal would, if pursued, significantly lower Israel crypto investors' tax bills.

Genesis: https://cointelegraph.com/news/israeli-digital-securities-exchange-gets-preliminary-green-light-from-regulators

Data shows Polkadot's price action has been a bellwether for Bitcoin in the past few months.
Polkadot indicator? Data shows Bitcoin has been following DOT price for monthsMARKET ANALYSIS
Polkadot (DOT) is seeing an impressive 180% gain in 2021 so far, surpassing XRP for fourth place by market capitalization.
Polkadot is a multi-chain protocol that has several "parachains," similar to Ethereum Shards. DOT works on its proprietary technology called Substrate.
The platform is fully interoperable between different blockchains while maintaining the ability to process thousands of transactions per second. Substrate 3.0, which will bring Ethereum compatibility, is expected to launch in the first half of 2021.

Genesis: https://cointelegraph.com/news/polkadot-indicator-data-shows-bitcoin-has-been-following-dot-price-for-months

Bitcoin volatility lower than 2017 levels as price smashes $51K
Bitcoin volatility is not at the same level seen during the 2017 bull run but analysts still say lower price swings are necessary to maintain upward momentum.

Bitcoin volatility lower than 2017 levels as price smashes $51KNEWS
Bitcoin (BTC) has hit a new high above $51,300 in a continuation of its bullish advance that begun in October 2020.

According to Bloomberg, the current run is different from the 2017 bull rally that topped out below $20,000 in terms of volatility.

Indeed, data from Woobull Charts puts Bitcoin’s 60-day volatility at 14.25%, a significant decline from the over 32% recorded at the zenith of the 2017 bull run.


Bitcoin 60-day Volatility. Source: Woobull Charts
However, in terms of realized volatility, Bitcoin’s price swings are still orders of magnitude higher than gold. Data from crypto analytics provider Skew puts Bitcoin’s current three-month realized volatility at 90% — more than five times the actual price move for gold as reported by JP Morgan analysts.

In a note to investors, JP Morgan analysts argued that Bitcoin’s current price rally is unsustainable unless volatility decreases significantly. Part of this assessment likely comes from the rollercoaster January where BTC rallied 46% to almost reach $42,000 before declining over 30% to fall below the $30,000 price mark.

For Bloomberg strategist Mike McGlone, the current Bitcoin price swings are only temporary with the market expected to calm down. According to McGlone, the growing institutional BTC adoption will force Bitcoin’s volatility below even that of gold.

Tesla recently announced a $1.5 billion Bitcoin purchase while business intelligence firm MicroStrategy continues to expand its BTC ownership.

Earlier in February, U.S. crypto exchange Kraken issued a report predicting that Bitcoin’s continued upward advance will be accompanied by reduced volatility.

According to Peter Brandt, Bitcoin is in yet another parabolic advance with the largest crypto by market capitalization printing about 75% in year-to-date gains thus far.

Genesis: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-volatility-lower-than-2017-levels-as-price-smashes-51k

I have a lot of things to say but I will just share some.
1. Friendly forum.
2. Active officials and admin. They are reminding me and others about our mistakes and encouraging us to continue.
3. The design is also pretty cool, I observed that some avatar (picture) was changed. Pretty cool because they are really thinking what are the appropriate things to do.

Shalom, shalom.