DeFI News by Thebittimes.Com

An under-the-radar altcoin defied the wider crypto market slump and surged in price this week amid a new strategic investment. Vana (VANA) is a layer-1 network for user-owned data. The project aims to allow users to contribute, tokenize, and share their data to create next-generation artificial intelligence (AI)-focused applications. The project’s native asset, VANA, launched in December and is trading at $8.88 at time of writing. The 228th-ranked crypto asset by market cap is up nearly 3% in the past day and more than 37% in the past week. VANA’s gains largely materialized after YZi Labs, formerly known as Binance Labs, announced a new investment in the layer-1 project. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) also joined Vana as an advisor. Explains YZi Labs, “This marks YZi Labs’ first AI investment since its rebranding, reinforcing its expanded focus on transformative innovations beyond Web3, including AI and biotechnology. With CZ joining Vana...

Alongside the declining trading volumes, the number of Bitcoin Ordinals transactions dropped by 97% to just 20,571 in mid-August. DappRadar has pointed to an “alarming plunge” in Bitcoin Ordinals nonfungible token user activity, with trading volume s tanking around a whopping 98% since May. In an Aug. 17 report, DappRadar highlighted its data showing that the total Bitcoin Ordinals sales volume had decreased from peak levels of $452 million in May to roughly $3 million as of Aug. 14. In line with that drop, the number of transactions also declined by around 97% to 20,571 within that same time-frame. Ordinals trading volume and sales count. Source: DappRadar. DappRadar described it as a grim scenario for the Ordinals market, but did also emphasize that more time is required to determine whether this is a “temporary setback” or something that represents a “systemic problem of Bitcoin-based NFTs.” “This steep decline in both sales volume and count within such a short period is alarmi...

From insurance to telehealth, smart contracts are finding use cases across the healthcare industry. Smart contracts are self-executing lines of code that run atop blockchains and are triggered once a set of predetermined conditions are met. They are used to automate the execution of online agreements without the involvement of third parties. Today, they are used across many industries, including the healthcare industry. The healthcare sector stands to benefit a lot from the widespread implementation of these self-executing programs, especially when it comes to streamlining arduous manual processes, automating bureaucratic procedures and alleviating issues caused by human error. Today, many healthcare institutions rely on highly centralized conventional management systems to handle sensitive tasks such as record keeping, transactions and correspondences. While some traditional systems can undertake some of the tasks exceptionally well, many of them are prone to failure due to limited i...