Avalanche Blockchain’s December Upgrade Cut Usage Fees by 75% The upgrade was designed to make Avalanche cheaper. It worked.

How to Ensure Blockchains Are Really Decentralized Decentralization is fundamental to blockchain technology, offering resilience and resistance to censorship, but is the industry focused on the right incentives to drive decentralization? By Pablo Larguía

The Future Is AI-Centric, and Blockchains Need to Be as Well For successful AI-blockchain integrations to become a reality, the infrastructure underpinning them needs a complete overhaul.

Avalanche Blockchain’s Largest-Ever Upgrade, ‘Avalanche9000,’ Is Live The technical changes are designed to attract developers to the ecosystem and let them create their own customized blockchains, known as subnets.

Avalanche Blockchain’s Largest-Ever Upgrade Goes Live on Testnet Avalanche’s largest upgrade to date, Avalanche9000, went live on testnet Monday. The upgrade is designed to cut costs of sending transactions and operating validators, making it easier to build apps on the network.

BlackRock expands its tokenized money market fund to Polygon and other blockchains BlackRock launched the USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund on Ethereum earlier this year.

Espresso, Project for Composability Between Blockchains, Pushes Main Product Live According to the team, the confirmation layer will be a critical piece of infrastructure for composability among layer-2 rollups, allowing for two networks to read and trust each other’s blocks of transaction data.

Intense Competition — Not Technology — Will Fuel Blockchain’s Rise to Dominance Like the internet itself, decentralized networks aren’t always the most efficient tools for some tasks. However, the open, permissionless nature of these networks creates intense competition that often serves customers better than technical efficiency alone, says EY’s Paul Brody.

The Protocol: Elections, Schmections. Blockchain’s Got Work to Do The blockchain industry might get a boost as former U.S. President Donald Trump wins a second term, promising to keep his promises, including a long list of Bitcoin- and crypto-related pledges.

Opportunities for Blockchains and Digital Assets to Support and Enhance U.S. National Security With regulatory certainty, the national security benefits of digital assets and blockchain technology will grow exponentially, say four national security experts.

How Public Blockchains Will Catalyze Institutional DeFi Adoption Public blockchains — with their open architecture and unrestricted participation — are set to drive the next wave of financial innovation just as the internet did for communication and commerce, says Markus Infanger.

Ironblocks’ ‘Venn’ Network Aims to Keep Malicious Transactions From Ever Hitting Blockchains The Israeli firm’s Venn security network uses a network of operators to seek out and freeze suspect transactions before they execute.

U.S. Bill Proposes Outlawing Government Use of China-Made Blockchains and Tether’s USDT Government officials would no longer be able to use networks developed by China that power crypto transactions, according to a new bipartisan bill.

GROK Tokens, Inspired by Elon Musk’s ChatGPT Rival, Pop up on Blockchains While unrelated to the actual Grok service, the inspired tokens are quickly gaining a following among low-cap traders.

Tokenizing real-world assets on blockchains is for crypto lovers as well as crypto skeptics now The initial hype around tokenization on blockchains began with banks who hated bitcoin but loved its blockchain technology.

Lido’s Staked Ether Tokens Can Soon Be Used on Cosmos, IBC Blockchains Lido is the leading provider of liquid-staking solutions and its staking token, stETH, has a $13.8 billion market capitalization.

Swift, Chainlink Tokenization Experiment Successfully Transfers Value Across Multiple Blockchains Swift and Chainlink announced in June they were collaborating with dozens of financial institutions to test connecting blockchains.

Friend.Tech Hype Sees Base Surpass Rival Layer 2 Blockchains in Average Transactions per Second Base, the layer 2 blockchain backed by Coinbase (COIN), averaged a record high of 15.88 transactions per second (TPS) over the past 24-hours, beating Ethereum and rival layer 2 blockchains Arbitrum and Optimism

Coinbase Gets a Stake in Stablecoin Operator Circle and USDC Adds 6 New Blockchains The Centre Consortium, jointly managed by Circle and Coinbase, is being shut down and Circle is bringing issuance and governance of the USDC stablecoin in-house.

The Protocol: Blockchains Keep Launching, From Sei to Shibarium In this week’s issue, we cover Coinbase’s launch of “Base,” a layer-2 network atop Ethereum, along with the crypto community’s reaction to PayPal’s new stablecoin and the brouhaha over Matter Labs’ use of Polygon-crafted open-source software. The Protocol is CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter devoted to blockchain and crypto technology.