The smart home company Insteon has vanished. The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users' cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. From a report: Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, "All Services Online." The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media. As Internet of Things reporter Stacey Higginbotham points out, high-ranking Insteon executives, including CEO Rob Lilleness, have scrubbed the company from their LinkedIn accounts. In the time it took to write this article, Lilleness also removed his name and picture from his LinkedIn profile. It seems like that is the most communication longtime Insteon customers are going to get. Insteon is (or, more likely, "was") a smart home company that produced a variety of Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors, and of course, the Insteon Hub. At the core of the company was Insteon's proprietary networking protocol, which was a competitor to more popular and licensable alternatives like Z-Wave and Zigbee. Insteon's "unique and patented dual-mesh technology" used both a 900 MHz wireless protocol and powerline networking, which the company said created a more reliable network than wireless alone. The Insteon Hub would bridge all your gear to the Internet and enable use of the Insteon app.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Netflix said inflation, the war in Ukraine and fierce competition contributed to a loss of subscribers for the first time in more than a decade and predicted more contraction ahead, marking an abrupt shift in fortune for a streaming company that thrived during the pandemic. Netflix's 26% tumble after the bell on Tuesday erased about $40 billion of its stock market value. Since it warned in January of weak subscriber growth, the company has lost nearly half of its value. The lagging subscriber growth prompted Netflix for the first time to say it might offer lower-priced version of the service with advertising. [...] In addition to advertising-supported plans, the company is also looking to generate additional revenue from customers who share their account with friends or family outside their home.

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Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically jumps past any page rendered with Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages framework and instead takes users straight to the original website. The Verge reports: "Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether," Brave said in a blog post. "And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP / Google code from being loaded and executed." Brave framed De-AMP as a privacy feature and didn't mince words about its stance toward Google's version of the web. "In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large," Brave's blog post said, before explaining that AMP gives Google even more knowledge of users' browsing habits, confuses users, and can often be slower than normal web pages. And it warned that the next version of AMP -- so far just called AMP 2.0 -- will be even worse. Brave's stance is a particularly strong one, but the tide has turned hard against AMP over the last couple of years. Google originally created the framework in order to simplify and speed up mobile websites, and AMP is now managed by a group of open-source contributors. It was controversial from the very beginning and smelled to some like Google trying to exert even more control over the web. Over time, more companies and users grew concerned about that control and chafed at the idea that Google would prioritize AMP pages in search results. Plus, the rest of the internet eventually figured out how to make good mobile sites, which made AMP -- and similar projects like Facebook Instant Articles -- less important.

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Shallow liquid water may be present on Jupiter's moon Europa, data based on the Greenland ice sheet suggests. The Independent reports: Europa is a prime candidate for life in the Solar System, and its deep saltwater ocean has captivated scientists for decades. The giant planet's moon has been visited by the Voyager and Galileo spacecrafts, and data collected on these missions, together with modeling, indicates the potential presence of a liquid water ocean beneath a 20-30km thick ice shell. While the thickness of the icy shell makes sampling it a daunting prospect, increasing evidence reveals the ice shell may be less of a barrier and more of a dynamic system -- and potentially good enough to support life in its own right. Observations that captured the formation of a double ridge feature in Greenland suggest the ice shell of Europa may have an abundance of water pockets beneath similar features that are common on the surface. Study senior author Dustin Schroeder, an associate professor of geophysics at Stanford University's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth), said: "Because it's closer to the surface, where you get interesting chemicals from space, other moons and the volcanoes of Io, there's a possibility that life has a shot if there are pockets of water in the shell. If the mechanism we see in Greenland is how these things happen on Europa, it suggests there's water everywhere." Double ridges on Europa appear as dramatic gashes across the moon's icy surface, with crests reaching nearly 1,000 feet. Study author Riley Culberg, a PhD student in electrical engineering at Stanford, said: "In Greenland, this double ridge formed in a place where water from surface lakes and streams frequently drains into the near-surface and refreezes. One way that similar shallow water pockets could form on Europa might be through water from the subsurface ocean being forced up into the ice shell through fractures -- and that would suggest there could be a reasonable amount of exchange happening inside of the ice shell." The researchers describe their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

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An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an opinion piece written by Elizabeth Spiers, former editor in chief of The New York Observer and the founding editor of Gawker: Among the many brilliant touches in the dystopian workplace thriller "Severance," on Apple TV+, are the perks offered by Lumon Industries, the cultlike, fluorescent-lit corporation where the series takes place: company-branded Chinese finger trap gag toys; cheery if mediocre caricature portraits; a baffling "waffle party"; the much-discussed "music dance experience"; and, more than once, a melon-ball buffet served on a rolling bar. It's hard not to see real-world analogues -- in the table tennis and kombucha taps of Silicon Valley, and especially in the post-pandemic flurry of office happy hours and gift card giveaways, as companies try to lure white-collar workers back to offices. At the high end, a real estate data company offered employees who returned to the office a daily chance to win $10,000, a trip to Barbados or a new Tesla; more common incentives are company swag, pop-up snack stands, Covid personal protection gift bags and stress balls. Companies aren't wrong to perceive a reluctance to return to offices among some workers. Even if bosses see the return as simply a resumption of the terms employees had agreed to, workers are increasingly aware of the ways that those terms have shortchanged them. After two years, those who were able to work from home have seen real benefits -- reclaiming time from commutes, flexibility for family responsibilities, freedom from perpetual distractions and restrictive dress codes -- and now they can't unsee them. Surveys taken last year indicated that two-thirds of workers would prefer to have continued remote work options and would sacrifice $30,000 in raises to keep them. Somewhat higher percentages of women and Black knowledge workers say they are reluctant to return to offices. But among executives and managers, there's still a strong perception that in-person work is the only real work. So as younger workers in particular resist company mandates to return to their desks in the overly air-conditioned offices where many had never felt comfortable, companies are trying to sweeten the deal. [...] I've come to think of these corporate toys and rewards as the work equivalent of the cheap prizes you win at a carnival after emptying your wallet to play the games. The difference is that the point of the carnival is to have fun, and the prizes are incidental. In the workplace, this is just a laughably terrible trade-off. Who wants to give up the two hours a day they gain by not commuting for a coffee mug? "Putting in long hours at the office is often conflated with a strong work ethic and more productivity, though it may not be indicative of either," adds Spiers. "To make employees feel this approach is reasonable, many employers blur the line between work and the rest of life, while offering little diversions here and there to approximate fun."

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Rolls-Royce is to start building parts for its small modular nuclear reactors in anticipation of receiving regulatory approval from the British government by 2024, one of its directors has said. The Guardian reports: Paul Stein, the chairman of Rolls-Royce SMR, a subsidiary of the FTSE 100 engineering company, said he hoped to be providing power to the UK's national grid by 2029. Speaking to Reuters in an interview conducted virtually, Stein said the regulatory "process has been kicked off, and will likely be complete in the middle of 2024. We are trying to work with the UK government, and others to get going now placing orders, so we can get power on grid by 2029." Small modular reactors (SMRs) are seen by their proponents as a way to build nuclear power plants in factories, a method that could be cheaper and quicker than traditional designs. The technology, based on the reactors used in nuclear submarines, is seen by Rolls-Royce as a potential earner far beyond any previous business such as jet engines or diesel motors. The government under Boris Johnson put nuclear power at the centre of its energy strategy announced earlier this month, in response to climate concerns and a desire to ditch Russian gas. SMRs are expected to play an important role in an expansion of nuclear to supply a quarter of the UK's energy needs. Lower costs would be crucial in justifying the nuclear push, given that onshore wind is seen as much cheaper and quicker to install.

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The Volla Phone 22, a new smartphone available for preorder via a Kickstarter campaign, is unlike any other smartphone on the market today in that it ships with a choice of the Android-based Volla OS or the Ubuntu Touch mobile Linux distribution. "It also supports multi-boot functionality, allowing you to install more than one operating system and choose which to run at startup," writes Liliputing's Brad Linder. Some of the hardware specs include a 6.3-inch FHD+ display, a MediaTek Helio G85 processor, 4GB of RAM, 128GB storage, 3.5mm audio jack and a microSD card reader. There's also a 48-megapixel main camera sensor and replaceable 4,500mAh battery. From the report: While Volla works with the folks at UBPorts to ensure its phones are compatible with Ubuntu Touch, the company develops the Android-based Volla OS in-house. It's based on Google's Android Open Source Project code, but includes a custom launcher, user interface, and set of apps with an emphasis on privacy. The Google Play Store is not included, as this is a phone aimed at folks who want to minimize tracking from big tech companies. Other Google apps and services like the Chrome web browser, Google Maps, Google Drive, and Gmail are also omitted. The upshot is that no user data is collected or stored by Volla, Google, or other companies unless you decide to install apps that track your data. Of course, that could make using the phone a little less convenient if you've come to rely on those apps, so the Volla Phone might not be the best choice for everyone. Volla OS also has a built-in user-customizable firewall, an App Locker feature for disabling and hiding apps, and optional support for using the Hide.me VPN for anonymous internet usage. The source code for Volla OS is also available for anyone that wants to inspect the code. The operating system also has a custom user interface including a Springboard that allows you to quickly launch frequently-used apps by pressing a red dot for a list, or by starting to type in a search box for automatic suggestions such as placing a phone call, sending a text message, or opening a web page. You can also create notes or calendar events from the Springboard or send an encrypted message with Signal. The phone is expected to ship in June at an early bird price of about $408.

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Lenovo has released security updates for more than 100 laptop models to fix critical vulnerabilities that make it possible for advanced hackers to surreptitiously install malicious firmware that can be next to impossible to remove or, in some cases, to detect. Ars Technica reports: Three vulnerabilities affecting more than 1 million laptops can give hackers the ability to modify a computer's UEFI. Short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the UEFI is the software that bridges a computer's device firmware with its operating system. As the first piece of software to run when virtually any modern machine is turned on, it's the initial link in the security chain. Because the UEFI resides in a flash chip on the motherboard, infections are difficult to detect and even harder to remove. Two of the vulnerabilities -- tracked as CVE-2021-3971 and CVE-2021-3972 -- reside in UEFI firmware drivers intended for use only during the manufacturing process of Lenovo consumer notebooks. Lenovo engineers inadvertently included the drivers in the production BIOS images without being properly deactivated. Hackers can exploit these buggy drivers to disable protections, including UEFI secure boot, BIOS control register bits, and protected range register, which are baked into the serial peripheral interface (SPI) and designed to prevent unauthorized changes to the firmware it runs. After discovering and analyzing the vulnerabilities, researchers from security firm ESET found a third vulnerability, CVE-2021-3970. It allows hackers to run malicious firmware when a machine is put into system management mode, a high-privilege operating mode typically used by hardware manufacturers for low-level system management. "All three of the Lenovo vulnerabilities discovered by ESET require local access, meaning that the attacker must already have control over the vulnerable machine with unfettered privileges," notes Ars Technica's Dan Goodin. "The bar for that kind of access is high and would likely require exploiting one or more critical other vulnerabilities elsewhere that would already put a user at considerable risk." Still, it's worth looking to see if you have an affected model and, if so, patch your computer as soon as possible.

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As Facebook/Meta faces rising pressure in west, it is investing in digital infrastructure elsewhere. From a report: When government officials in the southern Nigerian state of Edo set about radically improving poor internet access for its population of 4 million, they didn't have to look far for help. MainOne, a company responsible for laying a vast network of fibre-optic cables across west Africa, was an obvious partner. Another, perhaps less obvious one, was Facebook. A joint agreement was signed to install fibre-optic cables running across the state's capital, Benin City. Since 2019, 400km (250 miles) of cables have been laid in Edo, about a quarter via the partnership between the two companies and the government. "Obviously, Facebook isn't really a digital infrastructure company, but they invested in these cables," said Emmanuel Magnus Eweka, who worked as a senior government official for the Edo government until last September. In recent years, as Facebook has come under rising legislative pressure in the west, the company has increased its focus on Africa, particularly in countries where the regulatory and legislative environment tends to be much looser. The combination of weak and expensive internet coverage for most of Nigeria's fast-growing population of more than 200 million people has meant that companies hoping to tap into a potential goldmine of new users -- and their data -- have sought to invest in the business of helping those potential users get online in the first place. "To make internet data more affordable, Facebook needs to build infrastructures that are almost free," Eweka said. "In fact, I'd say Facebook actually loses in terms of making money out of those cables. But then they gain it back on the user data that they will generate, and obviously that has huge potential in a country like Nigeria."

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Bosses are hellbent on getting their staff back into the office. It's just that the rules don't necessarily apply to them. Bloomberg reports: While 35% of non-executive employees are in the office five days a week, only 19% of executives can say the same thing, according to a survey conducted by Future Forum, a research consortium supported by the Slack messaging channel. Of the percentage of employees who move to work, more than half say they would like to have at least some flexibility, and non-executive workers generally say that work-life balance is much worse than that of their bosses. Moreover, the disparity is increasing. In the fourth quarter of 2021, non-executive employees were approximately 1.3 times more likely than their bosses to be completely in the office. Now, the probability is almost twice as high, and the proportion of non-executives working from the office five days a week is the highest since the survey began in June 2020, according to the more than 10,000 administrative workers surveyed in the United States, Australia and France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. The gap points to a double standard in back-to-office messaging: executives, from Bank of America Corp. to Alphabet Inc.'s Google, urge their workers to return in part to increase face-to-face collaboration, but the bosses themselves are somewhat exempt. Companies are also trying to justify long-term office leases or state-of-the-art locations like Apple Park in Cupertino, California. [...] As the back-to-office policy debate evolves, Future Forum recommends flexible schedules and location to retain top talent, even if it means breaking cultural traditions and developing new workflows. "People being in the office gives the illusion of control, but it's just an illusion," [Brian Elliott, executive director of Future Forum] said. "It doesn't mean they're being productive."

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For 2022, OnePlus has announced the Nord N20 5G as its budget offering for the US and Canadian markets, free when you add a line or $282. Android Police reports: Compared to the previous models, this year's phone sure seems to be a mid-range device rather than a budget one. The phone features a 6.43-inch AMOLED display with an in-display fingerprint scanner, a Snapdragon 695 chip, 6GB RAM, and 128GB storage. There's a microSD card slot, too, so you can expand the storage by up to 512GB if needed. A 4,500mAh battery powers the device, coming with 33W fast charging support that's enough to top up the cell to 50% in just 30 minutes. The phone's rear houses a triple-camera setup consisting of a 64MP primary sensor, a 2MP macro, and a monochrome lens -- there's no ultra-wide sensor here. Judging from the specs, it is clear that the Nord N20 is a sister variant of the Nord CE 2 Lite with some minor downgrades. The latter is due to launch in India later this month. The Nord N20 runs the Android 11-based OxygenOS 11 and not Android 12. There's no word on when an update to Android 12 will arrive, either. Previous Nord phones in the US received only one OS update, so it is possible Android 12 could be the first and last OS update for the N20.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In most cases, the release of yet another classic console emulator for the Switch wouldn't be all that noteworthy. But experts tell Ars that a pair of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators for the Switch that leaked online Monday show signs of being official products of Nintendo's European Research & Development division (NERD). That has some industry watchers hopeful that Nintendo may be planning official support for some emulated classic portable games through the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service in the future. The two leaked emulators -- codenamed Hiroko for Game Boy and Sloop for Game Boy Advance -- first hit the Internet as fully compiled NSP files and encrypted NCA files linked from a 4chan thread posted to the Pokemon board Monday afternoon. Later in that thread, the original poster suggested that these emulators "are official in-house development versions of Game Boy Color/Advance emulators for Nintendo Switch Online, which have not been announced or released." In short order, dataminers examining the package found a .git folder in the ROM. That folder includes commit logs that reference supposed development work circa August 2020 from a NERD employee and, strangely enough, a developer at Panasonic Vietnam. NERD's history includes work on the software for the NES Classic and SNES Classic, as well as the GameCube emulation technology in last year's Super Mario All-Stars, so the division's supposed involvement wouldn't be out of the ordinary. Footage from the leaked Game Boy Advance emulator also includes a "(c) Nintendo" and "(c) 2019 -- 2020 Nintendo" at various points. While suggestive, none of this is exactly hard evidence of Nintendo's involvement in making these emulators. Some skepticism might be warranted, too, because there is some historical precedent for an emulator developer trying to get more attention by pretending their homebrew product is a "leaked" official Nintendo release. Some observers also pointed to other reasons to doubt that these leaks were an "official" Nintendo work product. ModernVintageGamer and others noted that the leaked GBA emulator includes an "export state to Flashcart" option designed "to confirm original behavior" on "original hardware," according to the GUI. That option is illustrated with a picture of an EZFlash third-party flash cartridge in the emulator interface, an odd choice given Nintendo's previous litigious attacks on such flashcart makers. A "savedata memory" option in the emulator also references the ability to "inter-operate with flashcarts, other emulators, [and] fan websites..." That's a list that would serve as a decent Johnny Carson "Carnac the Magnificent" setup for "things Nintendo wouldn't want to reference in an official product." A prominent video game historian that Ars consulted with said they were "99.9% sure [the emulators are] real" and that "personally I'm absolutely convinced of its legitimacy."

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Shares of Netflix cratered more than 20% on Tuesday after the company reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter. This is the first time the streamer has reported a subscriber loss in more than a decade. From a report: The company also said it expects to lose 2 million subscribers in the second quarter. A loss of 200,000 compared with 2.73 million adds expected, according to StreetAccount estimates. Netflix previously told shareholders it expected to add 2.5 million net subscribers during the first quarter. Analysts had predicted that number will be closer to 2.7 million. The company said that the suspension of its service in Russia and the winding-down of all Russian paid memberships resulted in a loss of 700,000 subscribers. Excluding this impact, Netflix would have seen 500,000 net additions during the most recent quarter.

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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched its Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics on Tuesday. The center aims to be like the "National Weather Service for infectious diseases," helping to guide decision-making at all levels. From a report: Data-driven weather forecasts help leaders know when to deploy resources to respond to hurricanes and individuals decide whether they need to bring an umbrella with them when they go out. Similarly, the CDC's new disease forecasting center aims to guide decisions about broad public health needs like developing vaccines or deploying antivirals, and helping individuals decide whether it's safe for them to go to the movie theater, Dylan George, epidemiologist and director of operations for the new center, said during a call with reporters. George and a small team of colleagues are faced with tackling a "critical need" to improve the government's "ability to forecast and model emerging health threats. In short, we need to use data more effectively to guide response efforts," he said. As the United States approaches a grim milestone of 1 million lives lost to Covid-19, recently appointed White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said "the failure to be prepared is really startling."

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Former eBay security director Jim Baugh will plead guilty to running a bizarre 2019 cyberstalking campaign against a couple who ran a website critical of the company, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the matter. From a report: Baugh had been scheduled to face trial in late May. In a court filing on Tuesday, his defense attorney, William Fick, asked a federal judge in Boston to allow Baugh to change his plea via videoconference. Five other former eBay employees have already admitted to roles in a cross-country campaign designed to intimidate Ina and David Steiner of Natick, Mass. Several were expected to testify against Baugh. Another eBay employee, former global resiliency director David Harville is scheduled to face trial in May. Ina Steiner's reporting about eBay on the couple's site eCommerce Bytes upset the company's then-Chief Executive Officer Devin Wenig, whose compensation package she revealed. "Take her down," Wenig texted his then-communications chief Steve Wymer, according to prosecutors.

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For nearly two years, netting a PS5, Xbox Series X, or AMD Radeon and Nvidia RTX graphics cards without paying a fortune has been a matter of luck (or a lot of skill). At its peak, scalpers were successfully charging double or even triple MSRP for a modern GPU. But it's looking like the great GPU shortage is nearly over. From a report: In January, sites including Tom's Hardware reported that prices were finally beginning to drop, and drop they did; they've now dropped an average of 30 percent in the three months since. On eBay, the most popular graphics cards are only commanding a street price of $200-$300 over MSRP. And while that might still seem like a lot, some have fallen further: used Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti or AMD RX 6900 XT are currently fetching less than their original asking price, a sure sign that sanity is returning to the marketplace. Just as importantly, some graphics cards are actually staying in stock at retailers when their prices are too high -- again, something that sounds perfectly normal but that we haven't seen in a while. For many months, boutiques like my local retailer Central Computers could only afford to sell you a GPU as part of a big PC bundle, but now it's making every card available on its own. GameStop is selling a Radeon RX 6600 for just $10 over MSRP, and it hasn't yet sold out. Newegg has also continually been offering an RTX 3080 Ti for just $10 over MSRP (after rebate, too) -- even if $1,200 still seems high for that card's level of performance.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Users of privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo have been unable to site search the domains of some well-known pirated media sites recently, as reported by TorrentFreak on Friday. This follows a News Punch article last month calling out DuckDuckGo for "purging" independent media sources from search results, and naming them "Google Lite." DuckDuckGo's CEO Gabriel Weinberg called the News Punch piece "completely made up" in a Twitter thread over the weekend to respond to the public and address both issues. To observers, it seemed as if DuckDuckGo had de-indexed searches for copyright-flouting media download sites like The Pirate Bay and Fmovies, and even a site search for the open-source tool youtube-dl came up empty. TorrentFreak later updated its report citing a company spokesperson blaming the issue on Bing search data, which DuckDuckGo relies upon. Weinberg insisted the company is not purging any results and said that site search results are not appearing due to the site operator error "Anyone can verify this by searching for an outlet and see it come up in results," Weinberg tweeted.

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The war in Ukraine is reviving concerns in Taiwan and some Asia-Pacific nations about the fragility of their internet connections because they rely on undersea cables that could be severed in a Chinese attack. From a report: Ukrainians have used the internet to rally resistance to Russia's invasion, counter Moscow's propaganda and win international support, including through President Volodymyr Zelensky's appeals for weapons. Ukraine has extensive internet connections across its land borders and most of the country has remained online despite Russian attacks on internet infrastructure. In contrast, Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing claims, receives and sends about 95% of its data-and-voice traffic via cables that lie on the seabed. Currently officials say about 14 cables -- bundles of fiber-optic lines about the thickness of a garden hose -- are in operation, and they reach land at four locations on Taiwan's coast. If the cables were to be cut at sea by submarines or divers, or if military strikes were to destroy the lightly protected landing stations, most of the island would be thrown offline. "We're very vulnerable," said Kenny Huang, chief executive of Taiwan Network Information Center, a government-affiliated cybersecurity and internet-domain-registration organization.

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A new breed of cryptocurrencies is seeking to replicate the stability of the dollar. But critics say they are a disaster waiting to happen. From a report: So-called "algorithmic stablecoins" have surged in popularity in recent months, spurring debate over whether they are good for the crypto industry. They are the edgy upstart sibling of conventional stablecoins -- digital currencies that seek to maintain a one-to-one relationship with a traditional currency, usually the dollar. Issuers of conventional stablecoins say they hold cash or bonds so each of their digital coins is backed by a dollar's worth of real assets. But algorithmic stablecoins aren't necessarily backed by any assets at all. Instead they rely on financial engineering to maintain their link to the dollar. Some have failed, saddling investors with losses. "It's a lot more dangerous than taking a T-bill and tokenizing it," said Charles Cascarilla, chief executive of Paxos, the issuer of Binance USD, a popular stablecoin that uses the asset-backed approach. "It's a recipe for something really bad to happen." Proponents say algorithmic stablecoins are better than the conventional kind because they aren't run by a single centralized entity. Instead they run autonomously on blockchain-based networks, relying on traders who could be anywhere in the world to keep them tied to the dollar. Such a design makes it more difficult for regulators to control algorithmic stablecoins, often seen as an advantage in crypto circles. U.S. regulators have stepped up their scrutiny of stablecoins in recent months but have largely focused on asset-backed coins. Algorithmic stablecoins are getting better at keeping their link to the dollar and could eventually overtake their conventional peers, said Sam Kazemian, creator of Frax, an algorithmic stablecoin partly backed by crypto assets.

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