NFT News by Thebittimes.Com

Bitcoin.com chairman Roger Ver has been named a duke of Joseon and has been awarded the position of minister of finance. Mark Karpelès, the former CEO of the defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox, has received the same title and will serve as the minister of technology. Joseon, a so-called ‘cyber nation-state,’ takes its name from a former Kingdom of Korea and claims to offer the opportunity to “run your business without archaic regulation.”  Besides inheriting the name, the ’empire’ of Joseon maintains the tradition of hereditary accession to the throne. The current ‘king’ is Andrew Lee who previously started a virtual private network provider called Private Internet Access. The last emperor died childless so Lee’s claim derives from the line of the brother of the last emperor.  Joseon, lacking the type of physical presence most nation-states rely on, has instead decided to use ‘denizenship’ instead of citizenship...

An internal conflict at the privacy-focused Secret Network has resulted in at least one validator throwing in the towel. A major validator for the privacy smart contract layer-1 blockchain Secret Network has announced that it will no longer provide nodes and support for the network. On Jan. 29, major validator Smart Stake announced that it would be shutting down its Secret Network validator nodes on Feb. 21. Smart Stake cited “complex/stressful validator operations, cost/effort of validator ops, and recent events,” as reasons for withdrawing its services. Smart Stake is a staking and validator service provider that supports several networks including Crypto.com, Polygon, Cosmos, and until recently Secret Network. PSA for @SecretNetwork delegates of Smart Stake: Smart Stake will be shutting down its Secret validator on 21st Feb. Please redelegate to another validator . Reasons: 1) Complex/stressful validator operations on $SCRT 2) Cost/effort of validator ops 3) recent events ...

This announcement comes months after the crypto exchange removed all trading fees for Bitcoin transactions. Binance US has announced that it has expanded its “zero fee price model” to Ether (ETH) effective immediately.  According to the announcement, users are now able to freely trade four Ether spot market pairs: ETH/USD, ETH/USDT, ETH/USDC and ETH/BUSD. Just in time for the holidays, the best #crypto platform for low fees just got even better.#BinanceUS is pleased to offer zero-fees when you buy #Ethereum or trade ETH/USD, ETH/USDT, ETH/BUSD & ETH/USDC, for all users with no trading volume requirements. — Binance.US (@BinanceUS) December 7, 2022 Effective immediately, the US exchange has also eliminated gas fees on all Ethereum transactions made through the “Buy & Sell” feature on its website.  In June, Binance US followed in the footsteps of Robinhood, which pioneered no-commission crypto trading in 2018, by removing all Bitcoin (BTC)spot market trading fees for ...

Bitcoin proponent and author Jeff Booth is convinced that the crypto ecosystem will eventually collapse as a consequence of its centralization — except Bitcoin, that is. The downfall of FTX and a number of other CeFi platforms in 2022 has reinforced a Bitcoin maximalist narrative, according to which most of the crypto ecosystem will eventually collapse due to its centralization.   Jeff Booth, Bitcoin proponent and author of "The Price of Tomorrow", believes centralized crypto platforms such as FTX and Celsius have ended up replicating the traditional financial system with all its inherent flaws. "All of crypto is trying to rebuild a financial system that we already have based on manipulation and centralization," said Booth, in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph. Even Defi platforms, which seek to provide a peer-to-peer, trustless alternative to traditional financial services, are bound to fail, according to Booth, since they are being built on protocols tha...