Bitcoin

The coronavirus pandemic has had a highly damaging effect on the capital markets, and eventually, the effect was felt in other asset classes like cryptocurrencies as well. While this did affect the world’s biggest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has made a remarkable recovery over the past 24 hours. BTC gained 10% in the last 24 hours, and

The outbreak of the coronavirus has had a significant impact on markets, and cryptocurrencies have not been spared either. Over the weekend, the US Federal Reserve was forced to slash interest rates to almost zero, but that didn’t help Bitcoin (BTC), which dropped below $5,000. Bitcoin (BTC) Drops Below $5,000 The largest crypto by market

On March 3, Bitcoin (BTC) price gained the most on speculation that the US Federal Reserve, as well as other central banks, will be supporting markets even as concerns of the coronavirus outbreak continue to grow. Bitcoin Jumps Over 4% After Last Week’s Plunge Bitcoin gained 4% to take its price to $8,895, having suffered

A lawsuit claiming Ripple violated securities laws will be allowed to move forward – though with a caveat favorable to the San Francisco-based payments firm. In a ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton, of the Northern District of California, allowed a putative class-action lawsuit by retail XRP (XRP) buyers to proceed. Hamilton said the

The crypto industry is taking aim at one of Wall Street’s oldest redoubts: investing in the $17 trillion market for U.S. Treasury bonds.  Arca Funds, a Los Angeles-based money manager specializing in cryptocurrencies, wants to create a fund to buy U.S. Treasury bonds and then use them to back a digital token created atop the

An Iranian general is reportedly calling for the use of cryptocurrency to evade sanctions. Saeed Muhammad, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ “Army of Guardians of the Islamic Revolution” (or Sepâh for short), a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, said in a speech Wednesday that Iran should look to cryptocurrencies to bolster international

The people who run the Steem blockchain executed a reversible soft fork Sunday, stopping one of the largest piles of tokens from voting. The move comes days after Justin Sun’s Tron Foundation acquired Steemit, the blockchain’s most prominent app. The protective measure is a striking one in the cryptocurrency space and illustrates some of the

Credits for LTB#428 – Decentralization Philosophy (Part 2) This episode of Let’s Talk Bitcoin! is sponsored by Brave.com and eToro.com. This episode featured Stephanie Murphy, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Jonathan Mohan and Adam B. Levine for a hot minute. Today’s episode was produced by Adam B. Levine, edited by Jonas with music provided by Jared Rubens, From Ether Music and general fuzz. Would you like

CoinDesk reporter Leigh Cuen is joined by Isaiah Jackson, author of “Bitcoin and Black America” and co-founder of KRBE Digital Assets Group, to talk about financial discrimination in the United States and the unique value bitcoin can offer minority communities. According to a survey of 5,126 Americans conducted by Coinbase and Qriously, “Twice as many

Sweden’s central bank will soon trial a blockchain-based digital currency – but it’s still in its very early stages, at best. Announced Thursday, Sveriges Riksbank’s e-krona pilot is the latest attempt at a central bank digital currency (CBDC) from an institution that for years fretted over basing any such project on distributed ledger technology (DLT).

The crypto space can be highly volatile for traders, and over the years, Bitcoin (BTC) has proven to be among the more volatile cryptocurrencies. Over the past few days, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency by market cap had managed to make a comeback of sorts, but the volatility returned once again today. Such volatility was last

Insurance works in crypto so far, though it hasn’t had many big tests yet. Not many people had insurance on assets locked up in bZx’s Fulcrum, but after a bug yielded an exploit of its smart contract, a couple of accounts that did were covered by Nexus Mutual, the London-based crypto insurance company. Nexus Mutual

The bitcoin payments startup OpenNode just gained access to Apple Pay, according to the startup’s head of marketing, Ryan Flowers. This could be a boon for the small subset of merchants who want to hold bitcoin, because it allows people to spend dollars through their regular fintech accounts yet still have those dollars exchanged to

The Internal Revenue Service has invited a number of undisclosed crypto startups to a summit on March 3 to discuss its existing approach to taxing cryptocurrencies as well as enforcement efforts, according to a copy of the invitation obtained by CoinDesk. The summit, to be held at IRS’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, will consist of four

The Australian entrepreneur who claims to be the inventor of bitcoin has suggested he might take legal action against the cryptocurrency’s developer team over claimed infringement of his intellectual property. In a blog post published last Thursday, Craig Wright said while forks of bitcoin would be allowed under the open-source MIT license under which bitcoin

Viktor Bunin is a protocol specialist at Bison Trails, a company that offers one-click access to various blockchain nodes. While the number of Bison Trails users is, according to Bunin, headed “up and to the right,” he addressed concerns with Libra and the recent drop-out of major banking and business players. In short? He’s not

Decentralized finance (DeFi) project bZx has suffered an attack in which a hacker successfully gamed multiple DeFi protocols to extract $350,000 from the platform, about 2 percent of the assets under management. In response, the company took down its lending and trading protocol Fulcrum at 7 AM UTC. The company was presenting at ETHDenver during

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is suing an alleged Ponzi scammer on claims he and his company raised half a million dollars for cryptocurrency investments, which instead went to personal uses. According to a press release, Breonna Clark, otherwise known as Eliot Clark or Alexander Pak, and his firm Venture Capital Investments Ltd.

Tensions with Iran may be behind U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s cryptocurrency compliance comments on Wednesday. The New York Times reported the Trump administration “has expressed growing concern” that this technology is being used to “evade American sanctions on countries like Iran.” Earlier this week, the Parliament of Iran Research Center published a report suggesting

Trustless insurance has arrived on decentralized finance (DeFi). At least on the Compound protocol, the collateralized lending platform that runs on ethereum.  The new product, from a company called Opyn, allows people to take out options on stablecoin deposits, allowing users to hedge against the risk of a catastrophic event wiping out Compound’s books. “You

Wasabi Wallet developer nopara73 and BTCPay lead developer Nicolas Dorier faced off in a digital boxing match at bitcoin developer conference Advancing Bitcoin in London. In a video game from bitcoin startup Zebedee, the two developers played digital versions of themselves kicking and punching each other on a screen in front of a crowd of

U.S. President Donald Trump’s $4.8 trillion budget proposal for FY 2021, released Monday, seeks to expand the Treasury Department’s cryptocurrency oversight by returning the United States Secret Service, now a division of the Department of Homeland Security, to its jurisdiction.  The reshuffling would “create new efficiencies” in the Secret Service’s investigation of criminal acts involving

Scammers have been impersonating CoinDesk reporters and editors in recent months, promising coverage of projects in exchange for a fee.  At least two different victims have paid hundreds of dollars in bitcoin and ether to these crooks and contacted us only after realizing something was wrong.  To be clear: CoinDesk does not, and will never

Harvard researcher Mutale Nkonde examines technology through the lens of whether it improves people’s lives. She is an expert on how technological systems impact communities of color and she’s helped craft bills on deep fakes, biometric surveillance and algorithmic bias that have been introduced to Congress. As part of our ongoing Election 2020 series, we

It was only December when the entire decentralized finance (DeFi) market was worth less than $700 million. Early this morning, it hit $1 billion, a figure that even the most fervent blockchain skeptics would have a tough time dismissing as meaningless. That figure is the measure of all the crypto held in projects that lend,

The burgeoning autonomous community of Catalonia has been struggling for political freedom from Spain for years. Now, according to Jordi Puigneró, Minister of Digital Policies and Public Administration, the group is also angling for digital independence. “Just as the Internet brought us universal connectivity, blockchain will bring us new universal governance. It will affect the