Author: Bloomberg
Why did Citadel founder Ken Griffin buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution last month for $43.2 million? His son told him to. “I was sitting at home in New York and my son calls me to say, ‘Dad, you have to buy the Constitution,’” Griffin said in an interview after a luncheon hosted by the Palm Beach Civic Association at the Florida city’s Four Seasons hotel. Griffin didn’t give his son’s specific reason for wanting his father to make the purchase. The hedge fund billionaire bought the copy of the Constitution in a competitive Sotheby’s auction, which gained attention when a group…
It didn’t take long for Democratic Representative Brad Sherman of California to become an inspiration for cryptocurrency token creators after he disparaged the coin-eat-coin world of digital assets. During a House Financial Services Committee hearing on crypto Wednesday, Sherman appeared to reference a story of an old woman who swallows bigger and bigger animals to catch the previously swallowed animal, while saying “the No. 1 threat to cryptocurrency is crypto.” He went on to say that Bitcoin could be unseated by Ether, which could be displaced by Doge, to only be replaced by Hamster Coin and then Cobra Coin, and…
Crypto platform Polygon is buying startup firm Predicate Labs, the developer of the Mir blockchain protocol, in a deal valued at about $500 million as part of a broader strategy to help expand Ethereum’s capacity and pave the way for broader adoption. While the Ethereum blockchain is one of the most-used in the world, challenges related to its capacity sometimes mean users pay high fees. Mir has a technology called zero-knowledge rollups that offloads data from Ethereum to reduce fees and to speed up transaction processing. “Polygon wants to offer a wide range of secure, fast, affordable, and energy-efficient Ethereum…
Coinbase Global Inc. launched its first yield product that allows users outside the U.S. to earn interest from their holdings in a stablecoin through a third-party decentralized finance platform. Earlier this year, regulators in the U.S. effectively killed Coinbase’s plans to debut another interest-generating product called Lend. In a company blog on Thursday, Coinbase said the new offering will let customers in over 70 countries to access the “attractive yields” of decentralized finance by depositing their Dai, a stablecoin designed to be pegged to the U.S. dollar, into Compound Finance, a DeFi protocol. The annual percentage yield for the program fluctuated between 2.83%…
Meme stocks and cryptocurrencies rivaled major sport and the fallout from the Taliban’s rise to power as the biggest search and news trends for Google in 2021. When searching for news, Google users were mostly interested in Afghanistan, according to the latest annual trending report of Alphabet Inc.’s search giant. The rest of the top places were dominated by Reddit stock favorites such as GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., together with popular cryptocoins Ethereum and Dogecoin. The three search terms which had the biggest spikes this year compared to 2020 were all for Indian cricket, including the country’s…
The Bitcoin network is close to a complete recovery from the drop prompted by China’s crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry earlier this year. The hash rate, which measures the computing power being put toward mining and processing transactions, peaked at around 180 million terahashes per second on May 14, according to data from Blockchain.com. It fell to 86 million as of July 4, as China — which had previously been by far the biggest source of mining power — basically banned the practice and miners were forced to pull up stakes. As of Wednesday, it was back up to 176…
We look back at our defining events of the year and the photos that captured them. If you had asked people at the beginning of the year what cartoons of apes and the U.S. Constitution had in common, the result would have probably been a lot of blank stares. The answer is now clear: crypto. Digital currencies have been around for a while, but 2021 was the year the wider crypto world made its mark. Its “memeification” and pop culture normalization happened at a pace that detractors found baffling and that true believers argued was still too slow. As it…
Visa Inc. Chief Financial Officer Vasant Prabhu vowed the payments giant won’t be picking winners and losers as part of its push into the world of cryptocurrencies. The firm debuted a crypto advisory practice on Wednesday as part of its sprawling consulting business. The unit will help banks develop a crypto offering, and assist retailers looking to get into the world of non-fungible tokens. https://youtu.be/FMyky6Iy-lE Visa CFO Vasant Prabhu vowed the payments giant won’t be picking winners and losers as part of its push into the world of cryptocurrencies. Source Bloomberg Visa said Wednesday it surveyed 6,000 consumers globally and found a whopping…
Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Philip Lowe said there was currently no strong need for a central-bank digital currency, but cautiously welcomed the possibility of one being created in the future. Lowe’s remarks come after Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the government was weighing plans for such a currency as part of a wide-ranging overhaul of the nation’s payments system. The central bank chief said Australia already had a fast and efficient electronic payments system in place. To date, “we have not seen a strong public policy case to move in this direction,” Lowe said in a speech at a payments summit on Thursday. “It…
It’s “obvious” the most attractive space to invest in Latin America is crypto, according to SoftBank’s Paulo Passoni. The managing director of SoftBank’s Latin America Fund said approximately 10% of one of the firm’s $5 billion funds is invested in crypto-related assets, which is a strategy he supports even if some tokens are overvalued. “Of course there’s some froth, of course not all tokens are worth what the market is saying,” he said at a webcast Wednesday hosted by Eurasia Group. But “I do believe it’s the most relevant thing going on around the globe right now.” The comments highlight…