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The long-awaited Ethereum Merge finally shipped on September 15, 2022, fully turning Ethereum into a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain. It commenced at 6:43 a.m. UTC and attracted a live audience of over 41,000 people on YouTube that watched as the significant event unfolded. The mainnet and PoS Beacon Chain merged successfully without a hitch, but it was not a small task. “The metaphor that I use is this idea of switching out an engine from a running car,” Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, said describing the Ethereum Upgrade.

Whether in cybersecurity, supply chain management, new asset classes or insurance solutions, blockchain technology is increasingly being used in areas of the real economy. The boundaries between the classic banking world and blockchain banking are becoming more fluid.

The crypto markets have been in restructuring mode for the past few weeks. As time goes on, the market is trying to figure out, who has been owing money to whom. On the borrowing side, Singapore-based crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) seems to have many open credit relations – too many. The company has already filed for bankruptcy.

The blockchain industry has experienced significant growth in the last couple of years as one unicorn after another sprouts from the soil that grows crypto start-ups. In this new series of blog posts and webinars, we take a closer look at the technology and explore why it is so successful and why everybody is talking about it. We also look beyond the speculative aspect that blockchain is so frequently associated with and focus on the real-world problems that the technology is poised to solve.

The world of decentralised finance (DeFi) is having a rough time. Token values have dropped significantly, and one of its popular projects – Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin UST – completely imploded a few weeks back. Yet another incident that shed some bad light on DeFi recently happened in the Solana ecosystem. Through a governance vote on the Solana-based lending and borrowing protocol Solend, users voted to grant “special” parties the rights to liquidate a borrower’s assets. Although the vote was conducted on-chain, there was a quirky element to it. It was launched without announcement and one wallet paid $700,000 for additional voting power, ultimately making up 90% of votes.

Following the publication of yet another 40-year record CPI print of 8.6% in the US on June 10th, the crypto markets corrected heavily. And with prices coming down significantly, the current bear market took its next toll. New York-based crypto lending company Celsius Network saw its own token correct more than 50% in a few hours.