Ekin Genç
Ekin has background in public policy and consulting through stints in London, Brussels, and Washington. He has published on emerging technologies, politics, and economics in outlets such as Bloomberg Businessweek, EUobserver, and Vice. He is a graduate of the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. Disclosure: He owns less than 1 BTC and less than 1 ETH.
Stories by Ekin Genç
How Do You Stake Cryptocurrencies? Earning Passive Income With Crypto
While the Bitcoin network is secured by mining, many newer cryptocurrencies use an alternative consensus mechanism known as proof of stake (PoS). This involves users staking their cryptocurrency—pledging their crypto assets to the network to help the blockchain validate transactions. But staking isn’t just an altruistic act to benefit the network. In exchange for staking, you get rewards, often in the form of the cryptocurrency you have staked. Here we explain how you can get started as a crypto...
What Are Liquidity Pools and Why Do They Matter?
Liquidity pools are crowdsourced crypto locked in a smart contract, which supply crypto into DeFi markets. The world of finance runs on liquidity. Without available funds, financial systems grind to a halt. DeFi, or decentralized finance—a catch-all term for financial services and products on the blockchain—is no different. DeFi activities such as lending, borrowing, or token-swapping rely on smart contracts—pieces of self-executing codes. Users of DeFi protocols "lock" crypto assets into these...
What Are Liquidity Pools? The Funds That Keep DeFi Running
The world of finance runs on liquidity. Without available funds, financial systems grind to a halt. DeFi, or decentralized finance—a catch-all term for financial services and products on the blockchain—is no different. DeFi activities such as lending, borrowing, or token-swapping rely on smart contracts—pieces of self-executing codes. Users of DeFi protocols "lock" crypto assets into these contracts, called liquidity pools, so others can use them. Liquidity pools are an innovation of the crypto...
How to Mint an NFT on OpenSea
Minting an NFT—the fancy term for “creating on the blockchain”—is a seamless experience, if you follow these beginner-friendly steps. In this guide, we’ll focus on Ethereum, the most popular blockchain for NFTs, and OpenSea, the most popular NFT marketplace. Get a crypto exchange account The first step in minting your NFT—or doing anything in crypto—is getting a crypto exchange account like Coinbase or Kraken. Crypto exchanges are where you can easily buy and sell cryptocurrencies. You need a cr...
How to Buy an NFT
In this lesson, we’ll walk you through a few simple steps to get started with buying your first Ethereum NFT You need Ethereum to enter the world of NFTs because it’s the native currency of the eponymous blockchain network, and the majority of NFTs are built on Ethereum. Buy Ethereum To get Ethereum, you’ll need to head to a cryptocurrency exchange, such as Coinbase or Binance. Get a crypto wallet, like Metamask There are many Ethereum wallets out there. But by far the most popular is MetaMask....
Terra’s LUNA Declines 10% Amid UST Depegging Concern
Terra’s native token, LUNA, since yesterday has plummeted about 10% to $65.80 on fears that Terra’s stablecoin UST, propped up mainly by LUNA, may lose its peg. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies pegged to fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar on a 1:1 basis. Depegging refers to stablecoins going above $1 or, more commonly, below $1. UST fell as low as $0.985 on Saturday, and it’s now trading for $0.99. Although a 1% depeg from $1 isn’t unusual for stablecoins at times of intense market pressure...
YellowHeart is Transforming How Tickets Are Issued, Sold and Exchanged
If you’ve ever had to search for a gig ticket at the last minute, or had to sell your own one on, you know the drill: go to the gig’s Facebook event page and try to find a buyer or seller, or turn to the ticket issuer’s own resale platform. It’s a painful process; the ticketing industry is rife with gatekeeping companies and exorbitant commission fees, with fans treated as mere customers, devoid of any sense of community. As a result, people see tickets to a gig or a sports event as a transactio...
13 Biggest DeFi Hacks and Heists
Decentralized finance (DeFi) refers to blockchain applications that cut out middlemen from financial products and services like loans, savings, and swaps. While DeFi comes with high rewards, it also carries plenty of risks. Since just about anyone can spin up a DeFi protocol and write some smart contracts, flaws in the code are common. And in DeFi, there are many unscrupulous actors ready and able to exploit those flaws. When that happens, millions of dollars are put on the line, often with no...
9 Top Tips For Filing Your Crypto Taxes in 2022
Tax season is upon us—the filing deadline to submit 2021 tax returns and pay tax owed is April 18, 2022. The IRS now asks all Americans to declare whether they’ve had crypto dealings or not. “At any time during 2021, did you receive, sell, exchange, or otherwise dispose of any financial interest in any virtual currency?,” reads the question on top of Form 1040. Don’t let the wording confuse you. By virtual currency, the IRS means crypto, even though it doesn’t view crypto as a currency–-it’s con...
How Crypto Tax Software Can Simplify Your Taxes
This post is part of The Rollup, Decrypt's curated collection of stories presented in partnership with Koinly. If you currently hold cryptocurrency in your portfolio or you have traded crypto over the past year, it’s high time you started figuring out your crypto tax obligations. That can sound like a daunting prospect—even if you don’t owe anything in taxes. Browse through crypto social media, and you'll find that the main tax preparation advice given to newbie traders is to make a note of the...
Crypto Tax Guide: NFTs and DeFi
This post is part of The Rollup, Decrypt's curated collection of stories presented in partnership with Koinly. The cryptocurrency space has evolved rapidly over its short lifespan; in just a decade it's gone from a twinkle in Satoshi Nakamoto's eye to a thriving ecosystem encompassing dapps, DeFi and NFTs. With crypto developing at such a dizzying pace, it's unsurprising that tax authorities around the world have struggled to keep up at times; and for taxpayers, there are questions around how th...
Will Terra's LUNA Top $88 This Time Next Year? A $1M Bet Says It Will
Crypto trader Sensei Algod has been so adamant about his bearish take on Terra’s native token, LUNA, that he decided to put his $1 million where his mouth is. “Who wants to take a $1,000,000 bet that LUNA will be lower price [sic] in 1 year than now?” he tweeted yesterday. “Cool, I’m in,” replied CEO and founder of Terraform Labs, the firm behind Terra, Do Kwon, betting $1 million that the price of Terra’s LUNA token will be higher than $88 on March 14 next year. The duo agreed to appoint Cobie,...
YFI, FTM Tank After Andre Cronje, Anton Nell Claim They're Leaving Crypto
Prolific developer Andre Cronje has quit decentralized finance, according to an announcement today by his colleague Anton Nell, a senior solutions architect at the Fantom Foundation, who's joining him in that decision without citing a reason. Cryptocurrencies associated with Cronje’s projects, such as FTM and YFI, dove sharply after the surprise announcement—yearn.finance (YFI) plunged 13% from almost $20,000 to $17,000. Fantom (FTM) was down 15% over the past 24 hours, trading at $1.42 as of th...
15 Most Innovative NFT Artists of 2021
NFTs have been around for years. But in 2021, non-fungible tokens shot to prominence, as multi-million dollar NFT artwork sales made headlines around the world and the art establishment wrestled with the sudden emergence of a new artistic movement. At the forefront of this NFT revolution are the artists: the pioneers who've led the charge towards NFTs, and the innovators who've experimented with this new technology, pushing the boundaries of what it means to create art as blockchain-based assets...
Turkey President: Crypto Law Headed to Parliament
Turkey’s draft crypto bill is ready and will soon be sent to parliament, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Friday during a press conference in Istanbul. “We will take a step right away and send [the draft bill] to the parliament,” Erdoğan said. Although Erdoğan didn’t disclose much in the way of details this time, he said in September that the government “has absolutely no intention of embracing cryptocurrencies.” Erdoğan said at the time the country would "move forward with our own cu...
Justin Sun Steps Down From Tron to Join Grenada Government
Justin Sun will step down from his role as CEO of the Tron Foundation, the organization behind the blockchain network by the same name that he founded in 2017. But Sun isn’t retiring to a fishing village to enjoy a quiet life off of his crypto riches. Instead, he’s preparing to fly to Geneva, Switzerland. Sun will join the government of Grenada as its new full-time ambassador to the World Trade Organization, according to a press release from Tron shared with Decrypt. “It is a true honor to serv...
NFT Project Endorsed by Elijah Wood in Disarray Over Artist’s 'Racist' Drawings
NFT project Jungle Freaks fell into disarray yesterday after “racist” cartoons drawn by the project’s artist in the 1970s resurfaced, leading many high-profile investors to abandon the project—while others dismissed the controversy as a case of “cancel culture” gone wrong. Jungle Freaks is a father-and-son project that consists of 10,000 zombie NFTs drawn by George Trosley, a former cartoonist for Hustler. During his Hustler stint in the 1970s, Trosley published a series of racially provocative...
Beginner’s Guide to NFTs: How To Mint a Non-Fungible Token on Ethereum
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are blockchain-based tokens that prove ownership and provenance of digital items such as images, video files and even physical assets. They’ve shot to prominence in the last year, with multi-million dollar sales of NFT artwork grabbing headlines, while Twitter has been overrun by NFT avatars like Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks and Pudgy Penguins. Even big brands and celebrities have jumped on the NFT bandwagon—but how do you go about creating a non-fungible token...
Beginner’s Guide To NFTs: How To Buy An Ethereum NFT
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are blockchain-based tokens that prove ownership of digital items such as images, video files or (less commonly) physical assets. Over the course of 2021, NFTs have exploded into the mainstream, with big brands and celebrities creating and buying up NFTs, while trading volumes have exploded. Many of the NFT projects driving the craze, such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks and Pudgy Penguins, are ERC-721 tokens built on the Ethereum blockchain. And on Ethereum, N...
Gelato Network Raises $11M to Automate 'Dumb Contracts' on DeFi
DeFi automation protocol Gelato Network has raised $11 million in Series A funding. Founded in Berlin in 2019, Gelato is a protocol that automates tasks on decentralized finance, or DeFi, which is a wide network of non-custodial financial services built on smart contracts. Dragonfly Capital led the raise to help Gelato expand its automation offerings, with additional funding from ParaFi Capital, Nascent, IDEO CoLab Ventures, and Stani from Aave. Automation on DeFi sounds counterintuitive at fir...
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