DeFi 2.0 launches with DeFiGPT, smart contract antivirus, social profiles and new L2 chain
DeFi platform De.Fi has launched its highly anticipated De.Fi 2.0 suite of products and services aimed at enhancing security, usability, and interconnectivity…
DeFi platform De.Fi has launched its highly anticipated De.Fi 2.0 suite of products and services aimed at enhancing security, usability, and interconnectivity in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
De.Fi started in 2020 as a group of yield farmers and has grown to over 3 million users. The company says De.Fi 2.0 will help onboard the next billion crypto users by providing a comprehensive set of tools for developers, marketers, traders, and regular DeFi users.
The new ecosystem includes an antivirus tool that scans smart contracts for vulnerabilities, a dashboard for users to easily manage complex crypto portfolios across different blockchains, an aggregated yield farming platform to find the best staking opportunities, and social features to connect with other DeFi users.
Upcoming products on the De. Fi’s roadmap includes an AI chatbot to provide tailored guidance on DeFi investments, a layer 2 blockchain to improve scalability, and a DeFi-focused social network.
Promotional image of DeFiGPT by De.Fi
De. Fi says its antivirus has defused over 540,000 scam tokens to date, saving users from potentially billions in losses. The company is backed by venture capital firms HOF Capital and Shima Capital, which have invested early in innovative companies like Tesla and SpaceX.
The recent De.Fi 2.0 token sale sold out after raising $1 million worth of tokens in six hours. Investors include executives from major crypto exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, and OKX, attracted by De. Fi’s strong track record and ambitious roadmap.
De.Fi aims to “revolutionize Web3” by providing an all-in-one suite of tools that improves access, security, and connectivity in the fragmented DeFi space. The products are currently in various stages of development, with launch timelines to be announced.
De.Fi co-founder Michael Rosmer said,
“De.Fi 2.0 will enable the onboarding of the next billion users to Web3 with exponential user growth for the industry. We are thrilled to have the backing of visionary venture capitalists as we continue to lead innovation in decentralized finance.”
The company says its ultimate vision is to be the “gateway” to DeFi for mainstream users, with easy-to-use tools that minimize risk and maximize rewards when investing in decentralized protocols.
How much stress is too much? A psychiatrist explains the links between toxic stress and poor health − and how to get help
No one can escape stress, but sometimes it takes a physical and emotional toll that translates to disease and other health effects. The good news is that…
COVID-19 taught most people that the line between tolerable and toxic stress – defined as persistent demands that lead to disease – varies widely. But some people will age faster and die younger from toxic stressors than others.
So how much stress is too much, and what can you do about it?
I’m a psychiatrist specializing in psychosomatic medicine, which is the study and treatment of people who have physical and mental illnesses. My research is focused on people who have psychological conditions and medical illnesses as well as those whose stress exacerbates their health issues.
I’ve spent my career studying mind-body questions and training physicians to treat mental illness in primary care settings. My forthcoming book is titled “Toxic Stress: How Stress is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It.”
A 2023 study of stress and aging over the life span – one of the first studies to confirm this piece of common wisdom – found that four measures of stress all speed up the pace of biological aging in midlife. It also found that persistent high stress ages people in a comparable way to the effects of smoking and low socioeconomic status, two well-established risk factors for accelerated aging.
Children with alcoholic or drug-addicted parents have a greater risk of developing toxic stress.
The difference between good stress and the toxic kind
Good stress – a demand or challenge you readily cope with – is good for your health. In fact, the rhythm of these daily challenges, including feeding yourself, cleaning up messes, communicating with one another and carrying out your job, helps to regulate your stress response system and keep you fit.
Toxic stress, on the other hand, wears down your stress response system in ways that have lasting effects, as psychiatrist and trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk explains in his bestselling book “The Body Keeps the Score.”
The earliest effects of toxic stress are often persistent symptoms such as headache, fatigue or abdominal pain that interfere with overall functioning. After months of initial symptoms, a full-blown illness with a life of its own – such as migraine headaches, asthma, diabetes or ulcerative colitis – may surface.
When we are healthy, our stress response systems are like an orchestra of organs that miraculously tune themselves and play in unison without our conscious effort – a process called self-regulation. But when we are sick, some parts of this orchestra struggle to regulate themselves, which causes a cascade of stress-related dysregulation that contributes to other conditions.
For instance, in the case of diabetes, the hormonal system struggles to regulate sugar. With obesity, the metabolic system has a difficult time regulating energy intake and consumption. With depression, the central nervous system develops an imbalance in its circuits and neurotransmitters that makes it difficult to regulate mood, thoughts and behaviors.
‘Treating’ stress
Though stress neuroscience in recent years has given researchers like me new ways to measure and understand stress, you may have noticed that in your doctor’s office, the management of stress isn’t typically part of your treatment plan.
Most doctors don’t assess the contribution of stress to a patient’s common chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity, partly because stress is complicated to measure and partly because it is difficult to treat. In general, doctors don’t treat what they can’t measure.
Stress neuroscience and epidemiology have also taught researchers recently that the chances of developing serious mental and physical illnesses in midlife rise dramatically when people are exposed to trauma or adverse events, especially during vulnerable periods such as childhood.
Over the past 40 years in the U.S., the alarming rise in rates of diabetes, obesity, depression, PTSD, suicide and addictions points to one contributing factor that these different illnesses share: toxic stress.
Toxic stress increases the risk for the onset, progression, complications or early death from these illnesses.
Suffering from toxic stress
Because the definition of toxic stress varies from one person to another, it’s hard to know how many people struggle with it. One starting point is the fact that about 16% of adults report having been exposed to four or more adverse events in childhood. This is the threshold for higher risk for illnesses in adulthood.
Research dating back to before the COVID-19 pandemic also shows that about 19% of adults in the U.S. have four or more chronic illnesses. If you have even one chronic illness, you can imagine how stressful four must be.
And about 12% of the U.S. population lives in poverty, the epitome of a life in which demands exceed resources every day. For instance, if a person doesn’t know how they will get to work each day, or doesn’t have a way to fix a leaking water pipe or resolve a conflict with their partner, their stress response system can never rest. One or any combination of threats may keep them on high alert or shut them down in a way that prevents them from trying to cope at all.
Add to these overlapping groups all those who struggle with harassing relationships, homelessness, captivity, severe loneliness, living in high-crime neighborhoods or working in or around noise or air pollution. It seems conservative to estimate that about 20% of people in the U.S. live with the effects of toxic stress.
Exercise, meditation and a healthy diet help fight toxic stress.
Recognizing and managing stress and its associated conditions
The first step to managing stress is to recognize it and talk to your primary care clinician about it. The clinician may do an assessment involving a self-reported measure of stress.
The next step is treatment. Research shows that it is possible to retrain a dysregulated stress response system. This approach, called “lifestyle medicine,” focuses on improving health outcomes through changing high-risk health behaviors and adopting daily habits that help the stress response system self-regulate.
Adopting these lifestyle changes is not quick or easy, but it works.
There is now strong evidence that it is possible to treat toxic stress in ways that improve health outcomes for people with stress-related conditions. The next steps include finding ways to expand the recognition of toxic stress and, for those affected, to expand access to these new and effective approaches to treatment.
Lawson R. Wulsin received funding in 2010 from the Veterans Administration support a secondary analysis of data from the Framingham Heart Study, which was published and contributed in part to the substance of this article.
The manufacturing and consumer confidence weaknesses of the United States are deeply concerning, particularly considering that all those allegedly infallible Keynesian policies are being applied intensely.
Considering the insanity of deficit spending driven by entitlement programs, the decline in the headline University of Michigan consumer sentiment index in March—from 76.9 to 76.5—is even worse than expected. Let us remember that this index was at 101 in 2019 and has not recovered the brief bounce shown by the reopening effect in March 2021. Consumer confidence is still incredibly low, and a decline in the expectations index fully explains the most recent decline. Persistent inflation, high gas prices, and declining real wages may explain the poor expectations of the average citizen. Furthermore, this poor consumer confidence reading comes after poor control group retail sales last month.
No, this is not a strong economy. The consumer confidence index, labor participation, and unemployment-to-population ratios, as well as real wage growth, remain significantly below the pre-pandemic level, and this after $6.3 trillion in new public debt that will likely reach $8 trillion by the end of 2024.
The manufacturing weakness of the United States is also a problem because this should be a period of high growth, considering the opportunities generated all over the world. Industrial output bounced 0.8 percent in February, but the January figure was revised to a larger 1.1 percent slump. If we factor in the decline in the Empire State survey, to -20.9 in March, it looks like the manufacturing decline will persist.
The shape of the U.S. economy also reflects the impossibility of the soft-landing narrative. Inflation remains well above target, and bond yields are reflecting the reality of persistent inflation. Furthermore, money supply growth stopped declining months ago.
If the money supply rises and government spending continues to rise, the Federal Reserve will be unable to cut interest rates, and the impoverishment of citizens by a loss of purchasing power will continue.
This is the result of an insane fiscal policy that increases spending and taxes. Weak growth, manufacturing decline, and worsening consumer confidence.
Demand-side policies and Keynesian experiments are leaving a once-strong economy on the same path as the eurozone: stagflation. A warning sign should be the fact that the increase in public debt completely justifies the gross domestic product recovery.
This is the problem of extraordinary monetary and fiscal experiments. Governments embrace massive spending and debt monetization under the premise that they will implement control policies if the warning signs appear, but when they do, they never stop spending. Economists close to the government said that the administration would reconsider and adjust its budget if inflation rose, and alarm bells rang. Now we have heard all the alarm bells, and the administration continues as if nothing happened. The Inflation Reduction Act became the Inflation Perpetuation Act; the rise in government borrowing is now evident in the 10- and 30-year curve; and the private sector is in an obvious contraction.
Trusting governments to moderate spending after an expenditure binge is simply an extremely dangerous bet that always ends with worse conditions for citizens. Once they start, they cannot stop, and the inevitable end is higher taxes, weaker growth, lower real wages, and a decline in the purchasing power of the dollar. All the figures in the U.S. economy scream “buy gold” because the government will always prefer to destroy the currency than to moderate the budget deficit and government size in the economy.
In a new book, experts in a variety of fields explore nocebo effects – how negative expectations concerning health can make a person sick. It is the first time a book has been written on this subject.
“I think it’s the idea that words really matter. It’s fascinating that how we communicate can affect the outcome. Communication in health care is perhaps more important than the patient recognises,” says Charlotte Blease, who is a researcher at the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health at Uppsala University.
Along with colleagues at Brown University in the United States and the University of Zurich in Switzerland she has written the book “The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick”. Nocebo is sometimes called the placebo’s evil twin. A placebo effect occurs when a patient thinks they feel better because of receiving medicine and part of that perception is due not to the drug but to positive expectations. The concept of the nocebo effect means that harmful things can happen because a person expects it – unconsciously or consciously. This is the first time the phenomenon has been addressed in a scholarly book. Researchers in medicine, history, culture, psychology and philosophy have examined it, each in their own particular area.
Credit: Catherine Blease
In a new book, experts in a variety of fields explore nocebo effects – how negative expectations concerning health can make a person sick. It is the first time a book has been written on this subject.
“I think it’s the idea that words really matter. It’s fascinating that how we communicate can affect the outcome. Communication in health care is perhaps more important than the patient recognises,” says Charlotte Blease, who is a researcher at the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health at Uppsala University.
Along with colleagues at Brown University in the United States and the University of Zurich in Switzerland she has written the book “The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick”. Nocebo is sometimes called the placebo’s evil twin. A placebo effect occurs when a patient thinks they feel better because of receiving medicine and part of that perception is due not to the drug but to positive expectations. The concept of the nocebo effect means that harmful things can happen because a person expects it – unconsciously or consciously. This is the first time the phenomenon has been addressed in a scholarly book. Researchers in medicine, history, culture, psychology and philosophy have examined it, each in their own particular area.
“It’s a very new field, an emerging discipline. Even if the nocebo effect is documented far back in history, it perhaps became especially obvious during the coronavirus pandemic,” Blease says.
A previous study of patients during the pandemic (see below) shows that as many as three quarters of the reported side-effects of the coronavirus vaccine may be due to the nocebo effect. The study involved more than 45,000 participants, approximately half of whom were injected with a saline solution instead of the vaccine but despite this still experienced many side-effects such as nausea and headache. In the book, the authors highlight that one issue that disappeared in the discussion of side-effects during the coronavirus pandemic was that many of these were actually due to the nocebo effect.
“Whether this is due to expectations – the nocebo effect – remains to be understood. However, it is curious that so many participants reported side-effects after receiving no vaccine. Regardless, some people may have been put off by what they heard about side-effects,” Blease comments.
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