Hedera News - Week of April 5, 2024
Hello Hedera fam! Settle in, because we have a lot going on to cover. The Hedera ecosystem takes the show on the road over the next week or so. First up, you’ll find the following folks at Paris Blockchain Week next week.
📍Mona Lisa Stage | Wednesday, Apr 10 | 2:40PM CET |'Building the Future of TradFi'
Hedera board member Ian Putter joins Swirlds Labs COO Eric Piscini at Paris Blockchain Week for a fireside chat on building the future of traditional finance using Web3. 🌐 https://lnkd.in/e29VusEb
Worldpay Head of Crypto and Web3 Nabil Manji joins leading voices in fintech, traditional finance, and policy for a panel discussion on 'The Evolution of Digital Money: CBDCs, Commercial Bank Innovations, Stablecoins, and the Future of Monetary Policy' on the Master Stage on Thurs, Apr 11 at 10:40AM CET
🌐 https://lnkd.in/ewrPPSKV
🥂 Next Wednesday from 4-8PM CET, we invite you to unwind from Paris Blockchain Week with an evening free-flowing drinks, friendly conversation, and relaxation on the Seine alongside CertiK, TON Foundation, Ternoa, AngelHack and Hedera!
Register today ✍️ https://lu.ma/e4ra0h5z
And on Saturday, Hedera Co-Founder Leemon Baird joins the Harvard Blockchain Conference 2024 later this month to share his insight on the work being done on Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) and its importance to the global adoption of Web3. If you’ll be in the Boston area, grab your tickets at 🎟️ https://lnkd.in/gUKqfY2s
This week, Hedera was excited to became a member of Blockchain Australia, the peak body representing businesses and individuals enthusiastic about the potential for blockchain technology to improve our economy and society. Blockchain Australia aims to encourage the responsible adoption of blockchain technology by industry and governments across Australia as a means to drive innovation in service delivery across all sectors of the economy. Blockchain Australia aspires to see an Australia that leads the world in the adoption of blockchain technology that has transformed the economy and society to achieve significantly greater competitiveness, efficiency, service quality, social engagement and employment.
And in this week’s news, Forbes emphasizes the critical need to include digital assets in financial education initiatives, highlighting ongoing efforts in Washington to improve financial literacy, including those by Hedera. CoinDesk discusses the potential for mergers and acquisitions to streamline the crypto market, given the abundance of tokens currently in circulation, with comments from HBAR Foundation CEO Shayne Higdon. Hedera makes headlines by joining Blockchain Australia and powering innovative platforms like Xeni Travel, which leverages Hedera's technology to revolutionize travel booking with transparency and efficiency. Lastly, Techopedia examines historical Bitcoin crashes, sparking discussions about potential future market dynamics, with Elaine Song from The HBAR Foundation offering insights into the relationship between mainstream adoption and crypto market trends. Enjoy!
This piece by Forbes explores the longstanding prevalence of financial illiteracy in Amercia. The article presents a strong case for advancing education surrounding digital assets, adding that financial education should be considered incomplete if digital assets are omitted from initiatives, grants, and syllabi. With this goal in mind, there are a number of events being held in Washington this month to improve financial literacy in the U.S., including an agency meeting with the Financial Literacy and Education Commission, which is comprised of 24 agencies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFTB) and Commodites Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to name a few. Hedera will also be kicking off a regional Education Learning Briefing Series to focus on responsible innovation on Capitol Hill on the 30th April. The series will also host local forums in Columbus, Ohio; Anaheim, California; and Boston, Massachusetts.
This week, Aoyon Ashraf of CoinDesk debated whether there are too many tokens in the crypto ecosystem these days and discussed how mergers and acquisitions (M&A) could help clean up decentralized finance (DeFi), NFT projects, and even memecoins. With more than 13,000 tokens circulating the industry and accounting for an approximate $2.5 trillion USD market cap, the question must be asked — why are there so many tokens in the market when the utilization and adoption of technology is not even close to where it should be?
Shayne Higdon, Co-founder and CEO of The HBAR Foundations weighed in on the debate, questioning how M&A in crypto is expected to work in practice — “With crypto, where the ethos is open-sourced and decentralized, what are you actually buying or merging? Are you merging operations or just a token?” — while pointing out that even if M&A led to token appreciation in the short-term, it could still dilute the value of tokens in the long-run.
CryptoNewsZ - Hedera Officially Joins Blockchain Australia
This week, Hedera officially joined Blockchain Australia, the region’s leading industry network for businesses implementing or evaluating blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT). Hedera joins the industry body alongside Binance, Coinbase, Mastercard, and the Algorand Foundation. The article notes that Hedera is recognized for “powering the next generation of the Web” and that this collaboration marks an important step in increasing Hedera’s global reach.
Crypto News Flash - Hedera-powered Xeni Travel: Transforming Travel Booking with Blockchain
This week, Steve Msoh from Crypto News Flash highlighted how Xeni Travel, an online travel platform that operates on Hedera, is transforming travel booking with Hedera’s DLT. Xeni’s whitelabel travel solution aims to be the Shopify of the travel industry, enabling any travel reseller, influencer, or event organizer to launch their own booking engine. Since 2021, Hedera’s technology has helped Xeni automate critical functions and vastly improve the user experience through instant transactions and low fees. Moreover, by leveraging Hedera, Xeni enables its users to access every transaction and data, including payments made and debt owed. The article further explains that 40 percent of commissions in the travel industry are either unpaid or delayed, highlighting another way Hedera’s DLT has a real-world impact.
Sachin Narode, CEO and founder of Xeni, positions the travel platform as “The ultimate disruptor for online travel,” but notes that “it could only work on a network like Hedera” as it has introduced “unprecedented security and scalability” to Xeni’s mission.
This article by Iliana Mavrou of Techopedia centers around the five biggest BTC crashes in history, delving into how the token has crashed before, rose to an all-time high this year, and how it might potentially crash again after the bull run and upcoming halving event. Examining past Bitcoin crashes reveals valuable lessons about market dynamics.
Elaine Song, Vice President of Strategy at The HBAR Foundation, added value through her insights and experience detailing how the Bitcoin crash of 2018 was presaged by a bull run in 2017 that led to the “overvaluation of crypto tokens.” Elaine went on to explain the specific link between mainstream adoption and the wider crypto ecosystem adding how the failure to adopt Web3 technologies in the mainstream, "strengthened the linear impact of cryptocurrencies on the wider crypto ecosystem."