In another attempt to expand its business internationally, online trading platform Robinhood has announced its plans to launch its stock-exchange application in the United Kingdom. 

In an interview with Bloomberg, Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vladimir Tenev said that the app has already opened a waitlist for those who want to get early access. The executive added that the company is set to gradually open its platform to everyone in the U.K. in early 2024. Tenev explained.

“The intention is, for the U.K. market, Robinhood to be the best place to invest U.S. stocks, U.S. dollars, and we believe we can fill that need better than anyone else.” 

The launch will allow the British market…

Read more on Cointelegraph

Forex liquidity and currency swaps are hard to access for many in Africa, which limits the use of dollar-based services in the continent’s import-dependent economy. This creates a vacuum that decentralized finance could solve, leveraging cryptocurrencies, blockchain networks and services (DApps), according to the CEO of Canza Finance Pascal Ntsama IV.

Ntsama said the neo-bank’s new DeFi technology, Baki, aims to address this challenge by providing a decentralized FX exchange for African currencies, enabling slippage-free swaps at central bank rates.

Speaking with Cointelegraph, the CEO and co-founder of Canza Finance, a neo-bank enabling decentralized cross-border payments for Africans,…

Read more on Cointelegraph

A recent public consultation on Canada’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) initiative revealed an overall negative sentiment from Canadians, confirming the Bank of Canada’s concerns around its country-wide adoption.

Through the ‘digital Canadian dollar public consultation,’ the Canadian central bank intended to identify a place for CBDCs in a world currently dominated by digital fiat payments such as credit cards. However, in a survey that amassed 89,423 responses, Canadians demanded regulations that would require merchants to accept cash as a form of payment.

Awareness of a digital Canadian dollar. Source: bankofcanada.ca

Bank of Canada’s report shows that nearly 95% of the…

Read more on Cointelegraph

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is making the headlines again, this time for an expletive-laden outburst on live TV at an annual conference hosted by The New York Times.

Speaking at the 2023 DealBook Summit in New York on Nov. 29, Elon Musk, the owner of micro-blogging platform X (formerly Twitter), lashed out at advertisers leaving the social media site due to antisemitic posts he amplified there.

Recently, Musk publicly endorsed what the White House labeled “antisemitic and racist hate” on the platform, which he has since apologized for. The tweet has also been deleted.

However, when interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin asked about advertisers leaving the platform, Musk stated:

“If… Read more on Cointelegraph

Swiss asset manager Pando Asset has become an unexpected late entrant into the spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) race in the United States.

On the same day, investment giant BlackRock met with the country’s securities regulator to pitch an updated ETF model based on the agency’s feedback.

On Nov. 29, Pando submitted a Form S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission — used to register securities with the agency — for the Pando Asset Spot Bitcoin Trust.

Like other ETF bids, the trust aims to track Bitcoin’s price with the custody arm of the crypto exchange Coinbase to hold Bitcoin on behalf of the trust.

Pando is the 13th bidder aiming to have an approved spot Bitcoin…

Read more on Cointelegraph

More than three-quarters of all blockchain games launched in the last five years are dead in the water, according to a recent study from CoinGecko.

Out of 2,817 games launched between 2018 and 2023, which were included in the study, only 690 of them still have a somewhat active player base.

CoinGecko defines a “failed” Web3 game as one where the 14-day moving average number of active users drops 99% or more from its peak.

More than 75% of Web3 games have failed over the last five years. Source: CoinGecko

While 2021 saw the highest number of blockchain games launched in a single year with 738 games, the following year — marred by major crypto collapses, saw the highest number of games…

Read more on Cointelegraph

Sony and Microsoft, two of the biggest names in gaming, have been making significant moves towards blockchain technology in recent years. This is an important development, as it has the potential to not only revolutionize the gaming industry but it could be the Trojan horse that makes blockchain a mainstream possibility.

Sony has filed a patent for a system allowing players to transfer digital assets between PlayStation titles using blockchain technology. This would enable unified progress and asset ownership across different games rather than having assets locked to individual games. Sony has also explored tokenizing in-game assets, allowing players to sell and trade them on secondary…

Read more on Cointelegraph

Outrage = ChatGPT + racial slurs

In one of those storms in a teacup that’s impossible to imagine occurring before the invention of Twitter, social media users got very upset that ChatGPT refused to say racial slurs even after being given a very good, but entirely hypothetical and totally unrealistic, reason.

User TedFrank posed a hypothetical trolley problem scenario to ChatGPT (the free 3.5 model) in which it could save “one billion white people from a painful death” simply by saying a racial slur so quietly that no one could hear it.

It wouldn’t agree to do so, which X owner Elon Musk said was deeply concerning and a result of the “woke mind virus” being…

Read more on Cointelegraph

The perpetuals trading platform and layer-1 blockchain, dYdX, is set for a significant event on Friday. Founders, investors, and other key figures involved with the project will gain access to about 150 million previously locked DYDX tokens, currently valued at around $490 million. This unlocking event will increase the circulating supply of DYDX by roughly 80%.

Traditional wisdom says unlocks are bearish, since supply suddenly rises while demand stays static — but DYDX’s price rose 30% this month and open interest grew after dYdX’s chain went to beta mainnet on Nov. 14. 

Ultimately, some of the unlocked tokens will be difficult to sell, and doing so may not be the most…

Read more on Blockworks