Author: Bloomberg
Binance Holdings Ltd., which has claimed to be a virtual company, has held discussions with regulators in the United Arab Emirates about a potential headquarters in the Gulf Arab nation, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Executives at the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume have been in talks with officials from special economic zones Abu Dhabi Global Market, Dubai International Financial Centre, and Dubai Multi Commodities Centre about a potential move, said the people, who requested anonymity as the talks are private. Binance has also tapped former senior officials at the economic zones — Mark…
Melania Trump will sell her first non-fungible token during this holiday season. The NFT, Melania’s Vision, uses watercolor art that “embodies Mrs. Trump’s cobalt blue eyes, providing the collector with an amulet to inspire,” according to emailed statement. Former first lady, seeking to benefit from growing demand for the cryptocurrency assets, will use the Solana blockchain protocol and will accept both the SOL cryptocurrency and credit card payments through MoonPay. Parler is powering the platform. NFTs became hot this year, with celebrities, sports teams and artists trying to get into the action, and the likes of Ripple and Paris Hilton backing efforts…
J. Christopher Giancarlo no longer runs a high-profile Wall Street regulator, but he found a way to keep some of the prestige of his old job: adopting the made-up title, “chairman emeritus.” The moniker has surprised former political appointees at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where Giancarlo was President Donald Trump’s first chairman. While some ex-officials see the move as a questionable Trumpian attempt at self promotion, others say it crosses ethical lines by suggesting he maintains ties to a powerful watchdog for digital coins and the $610 trillion derivatives market. That’s problematic, some ethics specialists said, because in…
Everyone seemed to become a trader, taking chances on outlandish ideas as excitement and fascination mixed with fear and greed. There was a huge merger in 2021: the combination of popular culture and modern finance. Tom Brady and Matt Damon were suddenly shilling for cryptocurrency exchanges. Digital tokens that started off as elaborate pranks represented tens of billions of dollars of paper wealth. And cartoon pictures of apes were selling for millions of dollars on something called the nonfungible token market, which almost no one had heard of in the long-ago days of 2020. This wasn’t always a friendly merger. Small individual investors…
Luxury investors worried about China have elsewhere to look nowadays for new pockets of growth: the U.S. Part of the outperformance of luxury stocks such as Hermes International this year is due to the strength of U.S. demand for pricey handbags, jewels and designer clothes. It’s not all about post Covid-19 pent-up demand though, according to Jefferies International Ltd. There’s a surge in asset values, from stocks to real estate and contemporary art, and even more importantly, there’s a significant impact from cryptocurrency wealth that could benefit luxury-goods makers, Jefferies analyst Flavio Cereda wrote in a note on Wednesday, detailing feedback from…
The finger-pointing has already started after data glitches resulted in the brief display of astronomical gains for many cryptocurrencies at CoinMarketCap.com and Coinbase Global Inc. late Tuesday. Crypto.com Chief Executive Officer Kris Marszalek blamed data provider CoinMarketCap.com’s price feed for the inflated prices displayed within the crypto exchange’s app. Trading activity wasn’t affected, he said in a tweet, but the company is “working on removing @CoinMarketCap’s unreliable price feed” from its product. While the exact cause of the glitches is still unclear, some industry members point to the possible role of API, or application programming interface. Websites use APIs to talk to…
Hedge funds offering a more diverse portfolio of cryptocurrencies got a leg up on Bitcoin last month after the world’s largest cryptocurrency started to fall from an all-time high, data show. Whereas Bitcoin ended November 6.5% lower, hedge funds focused on crypto showed a decline of roughly 2% over the same period, according to the Eurekahedge Crypto-Currency Hedge Fund Index. The outperformance adds to growing evidence altcoins might offer investors superior performance to Bitcoin, especially after the latter’s torrid rally to nearly $69,000 in early November. Comparing Bitcoin’s year-to-date performance to just Ether, the coin of the Ethereum blockchain,…
Digital-asset firm Securitize is launching two tokenized funds that will track crypto indexes from S&P Dow Jones Indices. The funds, which will track the Cryptocurrency Large Cap Ex-MegaCap Index as well as the Kensho New Economies Composite Index from S&P, are among the first such funds and will only be available to accredited investors. The large-cap one gives investors exposure to more than 30 different cryptocurrencies, while the latter is centered around fintech, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, among other things. Each fund will charge a management fee of 0.5%. “The new tokenized funds provide investors exposure to a diverse…
Not long ago, Google tried every internet trend. VR goggles, AR glasses, chat bots, social networks. The company practically invented the see-what-sticks approach to technological innovation. Today, if you trust most investors on Sand Hill Road, the internet’s future lies in web3, an umbrella term for services built around cryptocurrency tokens and blockchains. But on web3, Alphabet Inc.’s Google is remarkably quiet. It doesn’t have a crypto division, like Meta Platforms Inc., or a blockchain obsession, like Twitter Inc. Google doesn’t accept cryptocurrencies for ad buying, its payments service or its app store. Until recently, Google had banned several categories of crypto…
Iconic Digital Asset AG, a subsidiary of Iconic Funds GmbH (collectively branded as “Iconic Funds”) has expanded its offering of crypto-based Exchange Traded Products (“ETPs”) with the launch of a physically backed Ethereum ETP. The Iconic Physical Ethereum ETP tracks the spot price of Ethereum. The ETP is 100% collateralized by coins held in an institutional-grade custody solution with Coinbase Custody. Coinbase Custody offers the most trusted cold storage custody solution for institutions. State Street Bank, one of the world’s leading Fund Administrators groups and administrator of Iconic’s Bitcoin ETP announced earlier this year, will also serve as the Ethereum…