El Salvador has leapt into the international spotlight by being the first country to establish a positive multi-layered bitcoin strategy. The meat of the emerging strategy gives bitcoin status as legal tender within El Salvador. The government is looking to make bitcoin easier to use throughout the country in a variety of financial contexts while simultaneously attracting international bitcoin capital to invest, spend, and maybe even take up residence in El Salvador due to more favorable tax treatment. While the update to bitcoin’s legal status in El Salvador is historic in and of itself, the Central American country also plans…

In the latest update of Edge we added support for Fantom (FTM), a young but maturing blockchain that uses a unique consensus mechanism and has a budding ecosystem of DeFi applications. We sat down with Michael Kong, CEO of the Fantom Foundation, and got some more details about who he is and what makes Fantom an interesting network.

Thanks for taking the time to give our users an overview of Fantom today, but before we get into it, could you give us a little background on yourself and how you ended up working to bring Fantom to the world?

I’m…

Widely scoffed at before, Bitcoin and the greater crypto ecosystem recently surpassed a market capitalization of two trillion dollars making up considerable fractions of the currency and precious metal markets. Even former skeptical traditional financiers and central bankers have conceded some of these points while offering their own critiques as the market has gotten to the point these assets can no longer be ignored.

Crypto has successfully sunk its young teeth into the precious metals and foreign exchange markets but the truth is, the usefulness of crypto-assets stretches past the market for currencies, commodity stores of value, and payments. Traditional…

At the end of our previous article about inflation, we briefly discussed Ray Dalio’s theory of the Long Term Debt Cycle (LTDC). In short, the LTDC is the monetary epoch and system underpinning the more regularly recurring short-term debt cycles also known as business cycles. The short-term debt cycles are the normal ups and downs experienced during a beginning phase of credit and business expansion followed by a contraction which in total typically lasts 8–12 years. The LTDC has many of these short-term cycles subsumed within it and typically lasts 60–80 years under a certain monetary regime and by the…

Discussions about inflation often get muddled by commentators who might look at one measure of inflation and say there is no inflation and other commentators that will focus on another and say we’re in the middle or on the cusp of hyperinflation. The truth is often balanced between the extremes. Most countries’ economies have a mix of inflationary and deflationary forces that counteract one another, with some extreme exceptions.

We can bracket inflation into three different categories: monetary inflation, asset inflation, and consumer inflation. In and of themselves these three types of inflation aren’t bad as long as there are…

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has been a minor heterodox economic school in academia for the last couple of decades. Its stature in public policy and academic circles has grown mostly through a very informal academic blogosphere that emerged in the late 1990s and 2000s outside of the academic institutions themselves. Inspiration for MMT can be traced back to the thinking of the economists George Friedrich Knapp, Hyman Minsky, and Wynne Godly who all advocate for an active government that would take decisive actions in financial markets and the economy to curb excesses and optimize output. The founders and most well-known…

With the continued proliferation and growth of blockchain-based networks, it has become pretty clear that technologists and investors who dominate the crypto market are creating a multi-chain world. This may cause tribalists of any particular chain considerable consternation but many chains have and will continue to attract capital, users, entrepreneurs, and developers despite anyone’s particular objections.

Many in the crypto community have dreamed of connecting these different chains in ways that end the era of insular, isolated networks we’ve been in and move us towards a highly interoperable techno-financial system. …

Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 has generated incredible excitement over the last few weeks throughout the Ethereum community. This EIP is a redesign of the Ethereum fee market, motivated by a desire to improve the user experience, which can be volatile and expensive due to rapid fluctuations in demand for block-space. These wild swings in demand make it extremely difficult for wallets like Edge to estimate the appropriate fee level for users, resulting in both needlessly high fees and dropped transactions.

However, the original purpose, improving the user experience, is not the source of most of the community’s excitement. As…