Author: Bloomberg
Stablecoin regulation was front and center at a Congressional hearing on crypto Wednesday that was surprisingly cordial — likely due to the absence of a key and controversial industry player. The House Financial Services Committee hearing featured executives from exchanges FTX and Coinbase Global Inc., as well as stablecoin issuers Circle and Paxos, all of whom largely agreed with lawmakers that greater regulation of crypto is needed. The cordial tone was in sharp contrast to the combative hearing two years ago, when Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by the same committee over his company’s plan for…
Chief executives of major cryptocurrency firms stepped into the glare of congressional scrutiny for the first time on Wednesday, testifying at a hearing that could help further legitimize the burgeoning industry but showed the difficulties officials face in policing digital coins. Leaders of Circle Internet Financial Inc., the FTX derivatives exchange, Coinbase Global Inc. and other firms endured a battery of questions on how their businesses should be regulated, and the executives answered without getting into controversial arguments. Still, the clear partisan divisions that emerged between lawmakers showed that the prospects for passing legislation to regulate crypto are dim. The…
Figure Technologies Inc., the startup co-founded by Mike Cagney, created a platform to help private companies raise and trade equity using its blockchain technology. Figure Equity Solutions has already helped manage, raise and trade more than $4.7 billion in equity, the company said Wednesday in a statement. The business has done two secondaries now with a “relatively robust” amount of institutional participation, Cagney said in a phone interview. Cagney, who previously founded Social Finance Inc., has spent the last few years building Figure into a business with offerings such as home equity lines of credit and payment services. The company…
The Bank of France and the Swiss National Bank successfully tried foreign exchange transactions using digital currencies, saying the experiment provided them with “tremendous” insight into the novel technology. Project Jura, which involved the Bank for International Settlements, UBS Group AG, Credit Suisse, Natixis SA and others, also looked at issuing, transferring and redeeming tokenized French commercial paper valued at 200,000 euros ($226,090) between between French and Swiss financial institutions. Monetary authorities around the world are studying how the advent of digital money might change the way the financial system operates. The People’s Bank of China could be the first major central bank to issue a digital version…
Add a new name to the rapidly rising number of Bitcoin profiteers. Longtime hedge fund manager Rob Citrone, best known for his macro-trading prowess over two decades at Discovery Capital Management, sold his Bitcoin earlier this year when it surged to $45,000 from his initial investment at $15,000, he told investors at an event this week. He also said he jumped back in after Bitcoin fell to $30,000 in July, according to an investor who attended the event, who asked not to be named because the discussion was private. Citrone, who manages about $2.4 billion, declined to comment. Cryptocurrencies are gradually winning…
For more than a decade, Kickstarter PBC has convinced the public to pay people to follow through on their ideas to build a gadget, make a film or create a piece of art. It was, in some ways, a harbinger of today’s digital economy built around cryptocurrencies, decentralized organizations and NFT art. On Wednesday, Kickstarter plans to unveil a project that will merge the two worlds. It’s hatching a new company to build a crowdfunding platform much like Kickstarter’s but based on blockchain technology. When it’s ready, Kickstarter will switch its own website to the new system and will make the tools available for…
SushiSwap, the decentralized cryptocurrency exchange that started with a scandal, is facing a crossroads as infighting among developers has investors seeking to reorganize the supposed autonomous organization. Two large owners of Sushi tokens, which gives holders governance rights over how the protocol operates, submitted a proposal to restructure the project that may be considered for adoption as early as this week. The plan suggests establishing a more formalized entity to manage the effort, and checks and balances to ensure the proper spending of funds. SushiSwap was supposed to be “a community-built open-source ecosystem,” in which users could trade directly with each other, without…
The enduring debate in the cryptocurrency community is whether Bitcoin will outperform “altcoins,” which are generally defined as digital currencies other than Bitcoin, such as Ethereum, Solana, Cardano and Polkadot. The Bitcoin maximalists say that the only true store of value is Bitcoin, as it is perfectly decentralized and the number of coins that can be in existence is strictly limited. This is true. But the real question is whether crypto investors necessarily need a true store of value, or whether there is space for multiple blockchains that do different things. Consider that 2,000 years ago the financial system consisted…
Bitcoin snapped a three-day rally, dipping back below the $50,000 price level initially breached during this past weekend’s flash crash. The largest cryptocurrency by market value declined as much as 3.7% to $48,685. Ethereum, Solana, Cardano and Shiba Inu tokens also fell. The Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index slumped about 1.8%, declining for the fifth time in six trading sessions. Bloomberg Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies dove this weekend amid a greater risk-off sentiment that also encompassed selloffs in many areas of the U.S. stock market. It happened as spiking inflation is forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy, threatening to reduce…
In October, Brian Jung, a 24-year-old YouTube creator, posted his first video analyzing Shiba Inu, a canine-themed digital token, which was soaring in value. At first, Jung explained to his viewers, he’d been “a hater” of so called “memecoins,” favoring instead “fundamentally strong cryptocurrencies, with real backing and utility.” But even if the whole thing started as a joke, he explained, there was no denying Shiba Inu’s prowess. It was up more than 460 percent in the past month. “If you put a hundred dollars into this investment about a year ago, well, let’s just say you’d be a very rich person right…