Bitwise files to list bitcoin ETF on NYSE Arca | The Burden of Infura | Veil wants to make decentralized financial products frictionless for mainstream users
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“We believe in a decentralized web and that people should be able to use sophisticated financial products without giving up access to their money.” — Paul Fletcher-Hill, CEO Veil
The Big Block
Crypto asset manager Bitwise filed a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission to list its physically held bitcoin ETF on NYSE Arca, the company announced Thursday.
The bitcoin ETF has been a long-awaited darling of the cryptocurrency world, and a derivative some think could propel the market out of the doldrums and into bullish territory. Still, the SEC has pushed back on all bitcoin ETF applications thus far, citing concerns of manipulation in the underlying spot market.
Bitwise says its product will be based on an index that draws data from large, trustworthy, exchanges. It also will hold bitcoins for the product with a regulated custodian, the firm said. The firm says those qualifications would address the concerns regulators have had about other proposals.
“The SEC has asked thoughtful and relevant questions about the quality of the crypto trading ecosystem, the reliability of crypto pricing, the strength of the arbitrage function in crypto and the robustness of crypto custody,” Matt Hougan, Global Head of Research, who oversees the company’s indexing efforts said in a news release. “We have spent the past year researching these questions and look forward to discussing those findings with the SEC staff in connection with the filing and listing application.”
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The Burden of Infura
It’s difficult to be a viable decentralized network when a majority of your applications depend on centralized infrastructure services.
That’s the situation many in the community want Ethereum to grow away from, as the cost and requirements to sufficiently run a fully synced node have pushed developers and dapp teams to opt-out of maintaining their own local infrastructure, and instead defer to third-party centralized infrastructure service providers like ConsenSys-owned Infura. — More
Veil wants to make decentralized financial products frictionless for mainstream users
One of the major drawbacks preventing consumers from adopting decentralized products and apps is the friction-filled user experience. For a decentralized prediction market platform like Augur, users are often forced to go through a time-consuming multi-step process just to interact with its features.
Veil hopes to change that. Founded by Y Combinator Alumni Paul Fletcher-Hill, Graham Kaemmer, and Feridun Mert Celebi, Veil’s goal is to make Augur’s platform accessible to mainstream users. Augur enables users to create and trade prediction markets on a variety of topics from sports, to elections, to crypto prices. Every market is settled by a decentralized set of oracles — eliminating the need for centralized market makers. However, as previously mentioned, the process to access Augur is often too confusing and time-consuming for your average consumer. — More
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