The coronavirus pandemic is putting more pressure than ever before on the already structurally weakened European economic and political landscape. The European Union and the euro are part of the most ambitious political and economic experiment of the 21st century. The COVID-19 crisis, however, has exacerbated growing questions of political will and political legitimacy and led some to wonder if the eurozone can survive.  Tuomas Malinen is the CEO of GnS Economics, a macroeconomic advisory firm, and Adj. Professor of Economics at the University of Helsinki. In this interview, he and NLW discuss: Disclosure Read More The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an in...

The Kin Foundation is offering a peek under the hood. The group published a transparency report Thursday, laying out its structure and operations, in a partnership with Messari and its disclosure database.  According to the report, the Kin Foundation plans its budget a year in advance, with funds going to app developers, node incentives, user grants and marketing and operations. There are 1.45 trillion kin tokens currently circulating, out of 10 trillion created in all.  The foundation is currently run by a board of directors that consists of two members: Kik Interactive CEO Ted Livingston and William Mougayar, author of “The Business Blockchain” and one of the founders of the Token Summit annual conference. Kik created kin in 2017. “The Board of Directors is appointed annually by the memb...

Igor Mikhalev is an expert principal at BCG helping clients develop business models with blockchain technologies and digital currencies. Kaj Burchardi is a Managing Director with BCG and leads the blockchain practice of BCG/Platinion globally. Digital currencies hold a long-term promise to change the way nations, corporations, and people transact value. Some of them – combining both cryptocurrency benefits (disintermediation, high speed, and low cost of transactions) as well as qualities of traditional currencies (e.g. price stability and being able to act as legal tender) – challenge traditional financial systems at the core. While first-generation digital currencies deployed by consortia of industry players may only deliver incremental changes such as the reduction in money movement pric...

JK Rowling asked Twitter to explain bitcoin to her, and was bombarded by replies – including from Elon Musk. Rowling ultimately gave up engaging with the topic, a decision Musk supported. In the process, he took a swipe at conventional central banks, which he said had undermined their credibility and made even bitcoin “look solid by comparison.” Banks like the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank have pumped trillions of dollars into the global economy via quantitative easing programs. Many of these have been expanded in an attempt to mitigate the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories. Elon Musk intervened in a Twitter thread to attempt to explain bitcoin to J.K. Rowling, and ended up attacking cen...

Top Chinese political advisers have proposed a regional digital currency that would be backed by four major Asian currencies including the Japanese yen, Korean won, Hong Kong dollar and the yuan.  The proposal unveiled Thursday describes the currency as a “stablecoin,” a term for cryptocurrencies designed to hold their value and backed by a reserve currency, although it does not explicitly mention crypto or blockchains. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) would lead the proposed effort. The basket of underlying collateral would follow the special drawing rights (SDR) model of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where each country’s currency is assigned a different weight based on its economy. As such, the proposal resembles the original vision for libra, before that Facebook-spawned proj...