DefiLlama data showed that Aster topped daily perpetual trading volumes with $24.7 billion on Wednesday, surpassing competitors including Hyperliquid and edgeX. Aster, a decentralized perpetuals exchange on BNB Chain, saw open interest surge nearly 33,500% in less than a week, challenging that of its top rival, Hyperliquid. On Wednesday, CoinGlass data showed that Aster’s open interest jumped from $3.72 million on Friday to $1.25 billion at the time of writing. The spike in active contracts signaled that traders were piling into the platform, challenging its biggest competitor, Hyperliquid. Open interest refers to the total number of outstanding contracts that haven’t been settled. It’s used as a key metric to gauge liquidity and market conviction toward a project. Aster’s open interest surge showed that the traders are willing to deploy capital on the platform. Read more
Can stablecoins disrupt Visa and Mastercard? Explore how blockchain payments may capture billions in fees from US credit card networks. Stablecoins reduce settlement time, cross-border costs and enable programmable rewards. They outpace traditional credit card systems. US merchants pay over $100 billion in card fees yearly. In comparison, stablecoins offer much cheaper, faster payments. Ripple’s RLUSD, Gemini’s XRP Card and Moca’s Air Shop show stablecoins moving into mainstream commerce. Read more
EVERY year of my journalistic career of nearly half a century, I have known only a free and independent press in the United States. My professional start was in the 1970s. Those were years when Americans could see clearly how the press served democracy. With the publication of the Pentagon Papers, first by The New York Times, the American public learned of the failures its government had covered up during a long war in Vietnam that cost so many lives. Then there was Watergate, an investigation spearheaded by The Washington Post. US citizens learned how their president had weaponised the government against his political adversaries, abusing his powers and sabotaging the Constitution. In the decades since those revelations, I took for granted that my country would always enjoy press freedom — and that the First Amendment of our Constitution would guarantee it. We now live in a time when people are unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’; we cannot even agree on how to determine ‘a fact’ ...