Deliberately insufficient policy responses by successive Lebanese governments combined with the self-serving agreements by politicians are largely to blame for the country’s economic crisis, a report by the World Bank has said. The report concludes that the country needs to seriously engage “in the macro-fiscal, financial, and sector reforms the World Bank has been stressing
Huge losses at SoftBank’s flagship Vision Funds will force the company to begin “dramatic” cost-cutting after plunging technology valuations and a weak yen drove Masayoshi Son’s embattled conglomerate into a record ¥3.1tn ($23bn) quarterly net loss. In a press conference that Son himself described as “depressing”, he admitted that his famously aggressive global investment strategy
When an international dispute has been rumbling on for decades, it can seem like a chronic condition that will never become terminal. The US and China were squaring off about Taiwan in the 1950s. I wrote a cover story for The Economist on the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995. So it is tempting to see
Cross-chain protocols and Web3 firms continue to be targeted by hacking groups as deBridge Finance unpacks a failed attack that bears the hallmarks of North Korea’s Lazarus Group hackers. deBridge Finance employees received what looked like another ordinary email from co-founder Alex Smirnov on a Friday afternoon. An attachment labeled ‘New Salary Adjustments’ was bound
The Brazilian Congress failed to address a proposed cryptocurrency bill this week. While the proposed public policy was indeed on the agenda, the deputy chamber focused on discussing bills that tend to other issues, including health and digital education problems. The digital currency bill is scheduled to be discussed again in September. Brazilian Congress Sidelines
The central bank of Portugal is now reviewing 12 requests from businesses that want to provide crypto-related services in the country. The applications are pending decision amid recent reports that some commercial banks are closing accounts of already approved operators. Binance Among Cryptocurrency Platforms Seeking Authorization in Portugal Portugal’s monetary authority is currently evaluating requests
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has argued that crypto payments will once again “make sense” as transaction costs will soon fall to fractions of a cent due to layer-2 rollups. The Cointelegraph team currently on the ground at Korea Blockchain Week (KBW) quoted Buterin as stating that the final hurdle to getting transactions down to fractions of
Much has been written about whether Big Tech has peaked. Meta recently announced its first sales drop, amid a fall in online advertising. Amazon, Netflix and others have cut back on hiring. Plenty of platforms have seen their stock prices crushed this year, which is typical as rates go up, and their growth slow. But
Messages from the archive of Rutherford Hall, critical communications strategist From: Rutherford@monkwellstrategy.com To: JamesW@LKandW.co.uk Hi James, No, I really don’t think now is the right moment to give money to Liz Truss. In general, we advise caution on political donations, but in any case you have left it far too late. While her team will
Zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup tech company StarkWare founder Eli Ben-Sasson says its new Recursive validity proofs could theoretically roll up as many as 60 million transactions into one on the Ethereum blockchain. The zkSTARK co-inventor made the comments to Cointelegraph during ETH Seoul on Aug. 7 after announcing the start of production of StarkWare’s new Recursive