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Yearn.finances native governance token YFI eclipsed Bitcoin (BTC) price as it soared to $16,600 on Aug. 20. The spiked to a new all-time high took place on Binance and was fueled by the growing demand for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) products and tokens associated with the sector.

It is important to note that there are a few cryptocurrencies which are currently priced even higher than YFI as units, but many of them have insignificant trading volume.

Meanwhile, a quick glance at the YFI order book on Binance shows significant trading volumes and demand for the token.

The sentiment around YFIs vertical rally since early August remains mixed. Some believe YFI is primed for a pullback. Others foresee more growth potential over the longer term.

The 4-hour chart of yearn.finance (YFI). Source: TradingView.com

Yearn.finance is a DeFi protocol that launched in July with no premine in a decentralized setting by developer Andre Cronje. It is the first protocol on Ethereum that claims to give token holders all the power to govern the network.

Blockchain analytics firm IntoTheBlock said`:

Just a month ago, the yearn.finance token was trading around the $1000 mark. #YFI is up more than 10x in one month, climbing to $10,551.25 yEarn Finance is the first project on Ethereum, whose governance is entirely in the hands of token holders.

Cryptocurrency researcher Hasu explains yearn.finance as a platform that allows users to execute various investment strategies. He says:

If you're not familiar with Yearn, you can think of it as a smart bank account that automatically allocates your assets to different low-risk investment strategies that execute on the Ethereum blockchain.

The price of YFI, the governance token of the protocol, increased naturally as the total value locked in yearn.finance surged. According to data from Defipulse, more than $670 million worth of capital is locked in yearn.finance.

Compared to other tokens, the price of YFI is high due to its unique monetary supply. Its supply is capped at 30,000, which is significantly lower than most digital assets.

While the price of YFI has surpassed $16,000, its market capitalization remains below $400 million. By market cap, it is the 45th biggest cryptocurrency in the global market.

As such, crypto startup investor Ian Lee explained that YFI surpassing Bitcoin is more of a psychological event than anything else. He explained:

YFI flipping BTC price is arbitrary & more psychologically than practically important. What is important is what yearn.finance is doing & Andre Cronje is building in DeFi.

If yearn.finance reaches a similar market cap of other top DeFi protocols, such as Aave and Maker, its price would be at around $30,000 due to its small supply cap. In other words, comparing the price of YFI to Bitcoin makes little sense since the latter has a market cap that is 568 times bigger than Yearn.

Some investors in the DeFi space say that YFI has the potential to grow as its supply has been nearly fully minted. Out of 30,000 YFI, 29,962 are circulating, based on data from CoinMarketCap.

Meanwhile, Yearn.finance also unveiled a new product called yinsure.finance to target the DeFi insurance market. Kang previously said that the sector has the potential to become a new billion-dollar market.

Andrew Kang, an investor at Mechanism Capital, said:

1 YFI will be more difficult to attain than owning 1 BTC. It's Math.

Excerpt from:
YFI Price Exceeds Bitcoin Price at $15K But Theres a Catch - Cointelegraph

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Rachel-Rose OLeary is a cryptocurrency writer and trainee C++ developer at PolyTech. Currently a contributor to CoinDesk and the Defiant newsletter, she has written about cryptocurrency since 2015. She holds an MA in digital art and philosophy.

These days I spend most of my time tweaking the code of a bitcoin wallet that runs in Terminal. Based on Libbitcoin, its built to work over Nym Technologies anonymizing mixnet. I call it the Dark Renaissance wallet.

Its mostly a learning exercise to hone my C++ skills, but the Dark Renaissance wallet is a harbinger for what is to come.

Working with a small, focused and ideological team, my comrades at PolyTech are upending some of the key assumptions on which the crypto industry has been built, and are plotting an all-out privacy offensive.

Our mission the Dark Renaissance is strategic and philosophical. At a personal level, it relates to a lifelong obsession with the philosophy of technology, and an intense awareness of the power of software.

It represents a desire to reconnect with bitcoins crypto-anarchist roots and fend off the forces of surveillance that creep into every aspect of our lives in 2020.

But first, it requires an understanding of the distant past.

Code as magic

Like the ancient Irish poets, the fil, programmers have the ability to alter reality with an utterance. Code is an incantation, an act of summoning ideas and inclinations into material reality. It is a conduit between the sphere of ideation and that of politics and sociality.

But technology isnt merely the product of ideas it actively shapes belief systems, reconfiguring the world in which it is applied.

Programmers know this: When a users behavior is influenced by code, its called opinionated software. When a user is manipulated for corporate interests, it is known as a dark pattern.

Software also has unintended consequences. Released into the wild, code propagates ideology in unpredictable and chaotic ways. Inevitably, it backfires, and innovation flows through human society, irrespective of, and indifferent to, political difference.

To what extent technology is informed by and produces belief systems has haunted me throughout my adult life.

It has caused me nightmares: dark conclusions on the nature of technology, prophecies of machine takeover and terrifying visions of the future of war.

It has also given me dreams. I believe it is within humanitys power to reshape the narrative by which technology is formed. In doing so, it becomes possible to take back the reins of runaway technological innovation and re-orientate human destiny.

Crypto is at the front line of this struggle.

Crypto philosophy

I came to crypto through encryption. I saw hash functions as a kind of abstract poetry that spoke of the secrecy of nature and the unknown.

Crypto was immersed in a romantic glow. In Ethereums early days, I believed I was witnessing the emergence of Skynet. It was the promise of Turing Complete, general computation and if artificial intelligence was going to emerge anywhere, it would be there, I believed at the time.

It was my doomer phase, and Ethereum was a source of dark fascination. Inspired by the Ethereum yellow paper, I wrote my masters thesis in 2016 on what I felt was a sadomasochistic dynamic between natural language and code. It included an erotic poem featuring a kind of vampire DAO (far before I had familiarized myself with the unicorns and rainbows that better represent the Ethereum community).

But while my approach was unconventional, the idea dates back to a problem as old as philosophy itself. To borrow a metaphor from computers, human experience consists of abstractions: mere interfaces that we interact with. Base reality occurs on a lower level, corresponding to hardware and raw machine code.

This hierarchization of reality of partitioning nature into the more and less real occurs across philosophy in different guises and names. For some philosophers, such a partition gets us no further in understanding the things-in-themselves. Humans are encased by a sphere of representation, wholly cut off from an inaccessible and inhuman outside.

At the time, I believed the reality hierarchy had a linguistic equivalent. At the bottom were operational languages such as computer programming. At the top were descriptive, natural languages.

With this philosophical backdrop, code acquires a profound metaphysical weight. It became a way to transmute the lowest level of reality into human experience.

The DAO hack was the first crack in this worldview.

Inhuman intelligence

Implicitly, I maintained at the time that natural language was somehow inferior to the perfect objectivity of code.

Not only that, but I believed the behavior of technology within capitalism its tendency toward monopolization, value-extraction and surveillance was technologys true nature revealing itself.

Martin Heidegger a philosopher known for supporting the Nazi party and for transforming Western philosophy calls this tendency Gestell, or enframing.

According to Heidegger, technology is a process of dismantling, quantifying and repackaging for export. In modernity, it has captured humanity, reducing people and everything else into a resource, a standing reserve to be exploited by the technological regime.

The DAO episode exposed many myths about blockchain, but this one stands out: Despite claims to the contrary, crypto contains an inextricably human element.

An equally controversial philosopher called Nick Land takes this process and gives it an agency.

According to Land, technology exposes an inhuman intelligence optimizing itself at the expense of the human. Stimulated by finance and a strange, contorting temporality, this inhuman intelligence is climbing its way up the reality hierarchy, threatening to replace the human as the worlds top predator.

It might sound like science fiction but crypto is full of this kind of rhetoric. Early efforts toward smart contracts promise nothing short of optimizing humans out of the equation. The blockchain is described as pure, trustless and incorruptible, turning all that it touches into glacial, inalterable code.

Ethereums infamous experiment in corporate governance, The DAO, echoed this language.

As Ethereum Classic fans will no doubt remember, The DAO was a high-profile fundraising campaign for a decentralized incubator. Its marketing spoke of the steadfast iron will of unstoppable code a phrase whose irony is hard to forget.

Due to a vulnerability discovered in Solidity smart contracts not long after its launch, The DAO was subject to a re-entrancy attack, in which a hacker exploited a function within the code to drain 3.6 million ether out of it.

Following a heated discussion that resulted in the birth of a new cryptocurrency, ethereum classic (ETC), Ethereum developers implemented a controversial upgrade to refund DAO investors.

The DAO episode exposed many myths about blockchain, but this one stands out: Despite claims to the contrary, crypto contains an inextricably human element.

Not quite Skynet

I spent the subsequent years following the ebb and flow of Ethereum software development as a reporter for CoinDesk.

For two years I attended every single Ethereum core developer call. I tracked decision-making on the platform like a jealous lover, refreshing Twitter handles, expanding sprawling GitHub discussions, quietly watching chat groups.

During this time, Ethereum faced the fallout of its DAO refund and dealt with the challenge of informal, decentralized governance. This challenge was intensified by a few simple facts: Ethereum has a leadership that is ideologically opposed to authority, and a vision that is inclusive to the point of being meandering.

Criticisms aside, Ethereum was in uncharted territory. And despite the odds, the platform managed to keep its course, even with pressure from monetary interest pulling it from each side.

Over time, I understood the mistakes I had made. Ethereum is not Skynet, and code has much more in common with natural languages than the raw mechanics of primary nature. I learned that sometimes, developers actually trade efficiency for readability; favoring clear, modular code over code which is fast.

The general effort toward compliance was not only enabling certain forms of oppression but at times actively supporting it.

I also learned power exists on all decentralized networks, but it is typically nameless and therefore unaccountable. Over time, power relations solidify. Networks become institutionalized and the rift between users and developers deepens.

Software, I decided, is a social good, like water and clean air. To maintain the balance of power, coders must elevate those around them. They must discourage passive user-ship, inspire users to become active network participants and train the next generation of coders to replace them.

Democratic modernity

Armed with a newly found focus, I left the Ethereum beat to join the Rojava revolution in North Syria.

Inspired by the writings of Kurdish ideologue Abdullah Ocalan, the Rojava revolution sprang up during the Syrian Civil War. Its supporters maintain that the nation-state is an abstraction badly suited to the Middle East. In its place, Rojava is pioneering new forms of decentralized social organization.

But it is not merely a social organization that binds Rojava together. Rather, Rojava is governed by a collective idea: the concept of democratic modernity.

In his five-book manifesto written from Turkish prison island mral, Ocalan essentially agrees with Heideggers Gestell there is a reductive, exploitative process at work within modernity.

But Ocalan does not identify this process with technology. According to him, it is the logic of capitalist civilization itself.

The task of democratic modernity is to decouple technology from globalization. In its place, new modernities can be built, based on a plurality of logics not merely Western-style reductionism that has come to dominate the world.

In Rojava, learning is paramount. People are encouraged to develop xwe zann, or self-knowledge, inspired by the Ancient Greek maxim know thyself. This is a project of remembering, of resurfacing histories worn away by globalization.

Here, I spent my time establishing technical academies. Inspired by the scientific centers of the ancient world, like Platos Academy and the House of Baghdad, our goal was to train a new generation of philosophical programmers.

But my time in Rojava was cut short.

During the nine months I spent there, the risk of a Turkish invasion weighed heavily. It cast a dark shadow across all of our work, like a storm cloud looming in the distance.

Finally, the storm came, and the sky rained bullets and bombs. Disguised as a man, I was among the last foreigners to cross the border to safety before the death count started to rise.

Bad trip

I found myself at the Devcon5 Ethereum conference in Osaka, Japan, one week after leaving Syria.

With friends on the front line, I found it hard to look people in the eye. Ethereums unicorn-punk aesthetic set against the backdrop of war was hard to stomach.

Sleeplessly refreshing the Syrian Civil War subreddit and Syria Live Map on my phone, I watched the war play out in total horror.

Airstrikes, bombings, body counts. On stage, well-meaning developers called for diversity and social justice, innocent to, or oblivious of, the blanket of physical safety that surrounded them.

By suppressing its crypto-anarchist roots and whitewashing its aims to appeal to bankers, crypto has cut itself off from its source of power.

It was overpriced and sparsely attended. At a panel on Ethereum-based mixers an audience member warned that facilitating bad guys through privacy-tech could alienate the average user a statement that was met with broad approval.

Maybe it was my state of mind, but it felt like the dissonance between cryptocurrencys stated aims and its material reality was reaching a fever pitch. The general effort toward compliance was not only enabling certain forms of oppression but at times actively supporting it.

At that moment, I decided that anonymity is where all philosophy of technology collides. In technical terms, it is synonymous with freedom. Practically, it can mean life or death.

The Dark Renaissance

Since then, I have set about orchestrating the Dark Renaissance.

The Dark Renaissance is a revolution within cryptocurrency. It is a rallying cry to all who still believe in cryptos true potential. It calls for a rebirth back to bitcoins original principles: to be autonomous, censorship-resistant and dark-by-design.

While crypto-anarchist in origin, bitcoin has lost its way. Rather than empowering black markets, it has allied with state and corporate interests traded its radical potential for mainstream adoption.

But by suppressing its crypto-anarchist roots and whitewashing its aims to appeal to bankers, crypto has cut itself off from its source of power. The Dark Renaissance seeks to resurface that power, to allow the truly disruptive potential of cryptocurrency to realize itself.

That truly disruptive potential lies in cryptocurrencys ability to extend the space of illegality outward: to increase the remit and power of unauthorized black market activity and strip resources away from the nation-state.

Our methods are part educational, part software production. We are setting up the PolyTech Academy, where technical skills are taught in tandem with a philosophy curriculum.

Through education, we want to elevate the culture of the cryptocurrency space, to create a community of active network participants and to inspire a new generation of programmers to succeed us.

In our code, we build tools to practically enforce our ideology. Advocating autonomy, anonymity and censorship-resistance, we will lead with the launch of several financial products, and iterate into a full-fledged dark financial system.

These tools will enable us to create a new economic paradigm. We are building financial networks to disintermediate local economies away from the state and large banks, and to usher in a more democratic alternative.

Rather than controlling people through mechanism design as much crypto-economics often intends to do, we are instead seeking to inspire people to create a vision of technology that empowers people from within.

We are in the midst of a turning point. Technologists today are faced with a choice: Either passively advance the interests of a system fated for destruction or undertake a psychic reversal.

Read more:
Bitcoin Has Lost Its Way: Heres How to Return to Cryptos Subversive Roots - CoinDesk - CoinDesk

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Two-time U.S. presidential candidate John McAfee has announced that he is leaving the ghost cryptocurrency project, claiming that it will fail without a doubt and his reputation has been damaged. His Ghost phone service, however, will be launched as planned, he emphasized, adding that there will be a new cryptocurrency for the Ghost ecosystem.

John McAfee, who has been building the Ghost ecosystem that includes the privacy-centric ghost cryptocurrency, an exchange, and phone service, has announced that he is no longer supporting the ghost cryptocurrency. He tweeted Wednesday: I am abandoning the Ghost project. Management is incapable of making a success of the project. It will, without a doubt fail. He then apologized to those he led astray.

The antivirus tycoon insisted that he really believed in the ghost cryptocurrency but Switch CEO Josh Case ruined everything. Josh controlled the project. He was killing it, McAfee told his Twitter followers. Josh is an idiot, he continued to tweet. I added Ghost to my Ghost ecosystem because I had his assurance that he would be 100% focused on ghost. He never fulfilled that promise. I could no longer support a project managed by someone working on Clearpoll, Ethershare etc.

To explain why his hands are tied, McAfee posted a private message he said he sent to Case. If you had told me, from the beginning, that making money for you, myself and everyone involved in Ghost, was of no interest to you and you merely wanted a piss around with worthless projects, like Ethershare, from your past that never made you, nor anyone else a dime, then I would never have given you legal control over ghost, the message reads, adding:

Now I have to find another coin for the Ghost ecosystem and you have damaged my reputation through your inability to focus exclusively on the task at hand.

The Ghost ecosystem also consists of the Ghost phone service which McAfee announced in July. It claims to help subscribers be invisible, noting that it will be the first 4G data service to make connections to the network untraceable. After meeting with the Ghost executive team, McAfee confirmed: Our Ghost phone service coming Sept. 30, is the foundation of our ecosystem and nothing will change with the service. We are, though, dropping GHOST as our privacy coin and will replace it.

The ghost cryptocurrency launched in June and the Bitcoin.com exchange listed the ESH token at the end of May prior to McAfee airdropping some ghost coins to ESH holders. In the same month, the Ghost team announced a partnership with the digital currency payment processor Ivendpay that allows 60 vending machines in Hong Kong to accept the ghost cryptocurrency for payments along with other cryptocurrencies, such as BTC, ETH, BCH, and BNB.

Responding to McAfees departure announcement, the Ghost by McAfee team clarified on Wednesday: We will be dropping the by John McAfee soon and will just be called Ghost John is in no way involved in any day to day operations, nor has he ever been involved with any of the tech or building of Ghost. The price of the ghost cryptocurrency has fallen about 63% from its Wednesday high to $0.266391 at the time of this writing.

What do you think about McAfees trouble with the ghost crypto? Let us know in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, John McAfee, Twitter

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

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John McAfee Ditches Ghost Crypto Project: He Says It Will Fail | News - Bitcoin News

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The U.S. state of Hawaii has authorized 12 cryptocurrency companies to start operating in the state without needing a money transmission license. No action will be taken against them for conducting unlicensed money transmission activities for two years.

Several cryptocurrency companies independently announced on Wednesday that they have been greenlighted to launch in the U.S. state of Hawaii. They have been admitted to the states Digital Currency Innovation Lab (DCIL), a program that allows digital currency issuers to do business in Hawaii without obtaining a state money transmitter license, the programs website reads. This regulatory sandbox is in partnership with the Hawaii Division of Financial Institutions (DFI).

The program, which runs from Aug. 19 to Dec. 31, 2022, accepted applications from cryptocurrency companies between March 17 and May 1. A total of 19 companies applied; 12 companies, including several crypto exchanges, fulfilled the conditions of the program and have been admitted. The website details:

The participating company will be given 2 years to engage in digital currency transactions. DFI has issued a no action message stating that no action will be taken against companies conducting what DFI would consider unlicensed money transmission activity, if they have been successfully admitted into the program.

The 12 companies admitted to the program are Apex Crypto, Bitflyer USA, Blockfi, Cex.io, Cloud Nalu, Coinme, Erisx, Flexa, Gemini Exchange, Novi Financial, River Financial, and Robinhood Crypto.

The DFI will monitor all cryptocurrency transactions taking place in the Digital Currency Innovation Lab. Participants will be required to provide updates, including the number and value of transactions. They are also required to provide information regarding the number of complaints received and any regulatory enforcement orders.

Participants that do not receive explicit approval to continue operations must conclude all cryptocurrency transactions when the two-year period is up. Per the participation agreement, companies must also execute on the wind-down plan and exit strategy. DFI will determine the appropriate licensing for the company to continue operations, if applicable, the website clarifies.

Hawaii previously had strict rules for crypto businesses, prompting a number of companies to exit the state. Coinbase, for example, ceased operations in Hawaii in early 2018 over requirements to hold fiat reserves.

What do you think about Hawaiis crypto program? Let us know in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

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12 Crypto Firms Authorized to Operate License-Free in Hawaii for Two Years | Regulation - Bitcoin News

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