The big story this week was around Binance, whose high-profile CEO, Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, will be stepping down from his post at the company as part of a sweeping plea agreement with U.S. prosecutors. The world's largest crypto exchange, Binance will pay over $7 billion in fines to the U.S. Treasury and Commodity Futures Trading Commission in "one of the largest penalties" the U.S. has ever obtained from a corporate defendant - money that could help the industry avoid yet another blockbuster criminal trial. Zhao has long been a controversial figure in the crypto space - owing largely to the opaque nature of his exchange giant, whose centralized command structure and shadowy inner workings fly in the face of core blockchain tech principles around transparency and decentralization.
A single millisecond can make or break a trade in the world of traditional finance, but decentralized finance apps tend to operate on a much slower timescale - with certain market data taking minutes or even hours to populate on-chain. The year 2023 has marked a breakout in the race to provide lower-latency pricing data to blockchains, with oracle firms like Chainlink and Pyth Network duking it out in a battle to make on-chain trading more hospitable to speculators and high-frequency traders.
[
add
]
[
|
|
...
]