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Tag: UST

  • UST, mistEO to develop climate risk management models for US insurance, banking clients  

    UST, mistEO to develop climate risk management models for US insurance, banking clients  

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    Digital transformation solutions company UST and climate fintech company mistEO have announced a partnership with a view to addressing pressing need for accurate, localised weather and climate risk data in insurance and banking sectors. With climate-related risks on the rise, insurers and banks face escalating costs due to the absence of reliable, hyper-localised projections. 

    mistEO provides climate change adaptation know-how and technologies to private enterprises (B2B) and governments (B2G). Its customers manage climate risks better using the company’s platform that orchestrates spatio-temporal Analytics, weather modelling, machine learning and blockchain and in-house expertise in climate economics and actuarial science.

    Weather, climate risks

    A UST spokesperson said mistEO will empower its insurance and banking clients in the US market with insights into weather and climate risks, specifically in the property, casualty and travel Insurance segments. Extreme weather events and evolving climate landscape have intensified challenges insurance and banking companies face in managing climate-related risks.

    Also Read | UST to deepen engagement in banking and financial services space 

    Lack of precise, localised weather data has led to underwriting uncertainty and inflated insurance premiums. mistEO’s weather analytics and climate modelling expertise is expected to help UST bridge the gap between critical data and insurance product development. UST will also be able to provide clients with accurate risk assessment models associated with climate events. 

    Immense potential

    Samuel John, Chief Executive Officer, mistEO, said the partnership marks an exciting juncture in weather insurance and climate financing. As climate risks continue to reshape business landscapes, there exists immense potential for innovation and adaptation. “We are thrilled to join UST to pioneer data-driven solutions that empower businesses to navigate these challenges effectively. Our efforts will redefine risk management and lay the groundwork for a more resilient and sustainable future.”  

    Also Read | UST, GGI to work on solutions to help enterprises fight climate change

    Disruptive technologies

    Maureen Doyle-Spare, General Manager-Financial Services, UST, said partnership with mistEO highlights commitment to leading with innovation. “With our combined expertise, we will harness the power of disruptive technologies to deliver value to banking, financial services, and insurance clients and provide climate decision intelligence to enhance investment management decisions, lending, and insurance underwriting as well as provide critical datapoints in assessing ESG strategy and risks.” 

    The partnership serves as a prominent example of the convergence of technological innovation and environmental consciousness., the UST spokesperson said. Together, the partner companies are poised to revolutionise insurance and banking sectors, offering reliable solutions to one of the most pressing challenges of our time, she added. 

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  • Beyond Crypto Custody: Fireblocks Unveils Web3 Engine To Support DeFi, Games And NFTs

    Beyond Crypto Custody: Fireblocks Unveils Web3 Engine To Support DeFi, Games And NFTs

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    Blockchain infrastructure provider Fireblocks has launched a suite of developer tools and a portal for customers to access cryptocurrency exchanges, NFT marketplaces and other decentralized applications across multiple networks.

    Revealed exclusively to Forbes, the features are part of the company’s new offering called Web3 engine, which also includes custody services, treasury management, risk mitigation tools and a tokenization mechanism for managing the whitelisting, minting, burning and transfer of NFTs. Additionally, it gives institutions access to platforms like OpenSea, Rarible, Uniswap and dYdX directly from the Fireblocks console.

    The company has already onboarded a few high-profile clients for the service. Among them are Animoca Brands, Stardust, MoonPay, Xternity Games, Griffin Gaming, Wirex, Celsius and Utopian Game Labs.

    “The goal is to essentially bring all the security arsenal and capabilities that we’ve built for empowering financial firms to operate with crypto to this new group of players,” says Michael Shaulov, Fireblocks’ CEO and cofounder.

    The New York-based startup is serving about 1,200 institutions including exchanges, banks, lending and trading desks and hedge funds helping them move, store and issue cryptocurrencies. Fireblocks claims it has secured the transfer of over $2.5 trillion in digital assets.

    But the scope of its services has been increasingly expanding beyond institutional-grade custody. Last month, the firm partnered with FIS, a publicly-traded $62 billion fintech company that offers everything from payments services to wealth management, to provide FIS’ 6,000+ capital markets clients access to a full suite of crypto trading and lending services.

    Around the same time, as part of its early access program to the Web3 engine, Fireblocks added support for decentralized finance applications (dapps) on the Terra blockchain. The network underpins the troubled stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) and its sister token LUNA, both of which collapsed to nearly $0 last week.

    According to Shaulov, in less than a month Fireblocks’ customers had transferred around $3 billion in volume across the platform interacting with Terra’s popular dapps such as lending protocol Anchor, staking platform Lido and peer-to-peer exchange Astroport. But once UST, designed to always be worth $1, lost its peg, Fireblocks saw mainly “transactional activity that was speculative in nature as people were trying to hedge or take advantage of the situation,” says Shaulov. He highlights that ultimately Terra is only one of the 35+ networks Fireblocks’ Web3 engine supports (others include popular networks like Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche): “the goal of this offering is to provide cross-blockchain support.”

    The engine is the latest product providing users with gateways to easily interact with the $90 billion DeFi industry. Yesterday, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase introduced a similar capability for its retail users, enabling them to access Ethereum-based applications directly from the Coinbase app. This includes buying NFTs on marketplaces like Coinbase NFT and OpenSea, trading on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and Sushiswap, and borrowing and lending through DeFi platforms like Curve and Compound.

    Editor’s note: the story was updated to reflect Utopian Game Labs as one of Fireblocks’ clients, not Utopian Labs as was previously stated in the press release.

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    Nina Bambysheva, Forbes Staff

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  • ‘Revival Plan’ Boosts ‘Essentially Zero’ Luna Price By 1,000% Amid Bitcoin, Ethereum And Crypto Crash

    ‘Revival Plan’ Boosts ‘Essentially Zero’ Luna Price By 1,000% Amid Bitcoin, Ethereum And Crypto Crash

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    Luna
    LUNA
    , the collapsed cryptocurrency that was designed to support the terraUSD (UST
    UST
    ) stablecoin, has rocketed higher over the last 24 hours despite falling to near zero this week—a dramatic collapse that shook the wider bitcoin and crypto market.

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    The luna price, which was trading as high as $100 per luna just last month, crashed to near zero this week—causing the algorithmic stablecoin UST to completely lose its peg to the U.S. dollar—amid a $1 trillion crypto crash that sent the bitcoin price down by over 20%.

    Now, the chief executive of UST and luna developer Terraform Labs, Do Kwon, has pitched a revival plan that could see ownership in the network distributed across UST and luna holders—causing the luna price to surge over 1,000% as traders bet the project could recover.

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    “While UST has been the central narrative of Terra’s growth story over the last year, the Terra ecosystem and its community is what is worth preserving,” Kwon wrote in a post on a Terra discussion forum, adding the Terra community “must reconstitute the chain to preserve the community and the developer ecosystem.”

    The reconstitute—effectively a restart of the terra blockchain—would create 1 billion tokens to be distributed among various community stakeholders, with 40% going to luna holders before the UST de-pegging, 40% to go to UST holders “pro-rata at the time of the new network upgrade,” 10% to luna holders before the chain halt, and 10% to the “Community Pool to fund future development.”

    The blockchain underpinning luna and UST was shut down multiple times this week to “prevent governance attacks” following “severe [luna] inflation.”

    Terraform Labs and the Luna Foundation Guard, tasked with supporting UST, this week printed several billion luna tokens—increasing the luna supply from 340 million last week to 6.5 trillion—in a failed attempt to maintain the UST peg to the dollar.

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    “Terra needs a community to continue to grow and make its blockspace valuable again—the only way to do this is to make sure that token holders before the attack commenced, the most loyal community members and builders, stick around to keep providing value,” Kwon wrote, adding, the ecosystem will not survive “in its current state.”

    In a follow-up tweet thread, Kwon said he’s “heartbroken” about the collapse of luna and UST but said he’s confident the “community will form consensus around the best path forward for itself and find a way to rise again.”

    Others in the crypto community have also suggested the project could still survive in some form with Binance chief executive Changpeng Zhao, often known simply as CZ, saying there has been “progress” made.

    “Luna blockchain resumed, no more minting,” CZ posted to Twitter. “And deposits, withdrawals and trading resumed. Trading is important for existing holders.”

    The luna and UST collapse this week came amid a bitcoin, ethereum and wider crypto market downturn that made UST vulnerable, with some speculating there may have been an orchestrated attack on the stablecoin.

    “The pullback in general markets created the conditions for an attack on UST, which was inherently fragile,” Cory Klippsten, the founder and CEO of bitcoin-buying app Swan Bitcoin, said in a Telegram message, adding, “the effects of the unwind are wide reaching, and the ultimate magnitude still unknowable.”

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    Billy Bambrough, Senior Contributor

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