Author: CNBC News
As Moscow’s war on Ukraine rages on and the Russian economy and currency spiral to new lows, Washington is reportedly trying out a new way to dial up the pressure on Putin: sanctions targeting cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum. The Department of Justice announced early Wednesday a new task force broadly designed to enforce sanctions. As part of that, it will target efforts to use cryptocurrency to evade U.S. sanctions, launder proceeds of foreign corruption or evade U.S. responses to Russian military aggression. Taking aim at Russia’s access to digital cash comes as the U.S. and its allies, including notoriously neutral Switzerland, levy heavy punitive measures against Moscow. The concern is that the…
A federal prosecutor said in court Monday that he and lawyers for a woman accused of trying to launder $4.5 billion in stolen bitcoin with her husband are discussing a possible “resolution” of her criminal case without going to trial. The disclosure strongly suggests that Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan, who only was arrested with her husband Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein on Feb. 8, could be offered a plea deal in a case that has already seen the Justice Department seize more than $3.6 billion in bitcoin that was part of the alleged scheme. It was the largest financial seize in the department’s history. Morgan, a 31-year-old…
The crypto market rose on Monday after the Treasury Department imposed new sanctions against Russia’s central bank. Bitcoin jumped 8.9% to above $41,000, while ether rose 7.5% to about $2,800. U.S. equities were down sharply earlier in the day before recovering a big chunk of their losses. The sanctions unveiled by the Biden administration would effectively prohibit Americans from doing business with the Russian central bank and freezes assets within the U.S. The moves highlight the role crypto can have in military conflict. The young asset class has never had the opportunity to show its potential significance in that type of…
The Denver Broncos are up for sale, and a group of crypto enthusiasts is aiming to raise more than $4 billion using a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, to make it their own. You can think of a DAO like a group of individuals acting in concert with no single leader. Unlike a normal pool of investors, DAOs rely on cryptocurrency technology to track and validate participation in the group, as well as to facilitate the inner-workings of how to raise and distribute large amounts of cash. This group includes an eclectic mix of attorneys, accountants, software developers, pro athletes, and…
Olayinka Odeniran founded the Black Women Blockchain Council (BWBC) in 2018 after attending the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami that year. There, just three of 88 speakers were women, with the rest being mostly white men. Its so-called “networking party” was held at a strip club, where several women felt uncomfortable and disappointed. After experiencing that, “women in the space basically said that they had enough,” Odeniran tells CNBC Make It. “Instead of complaining, we decided to band together and create our own community within each other.” Though it was incredibly exciting to build a support system of women in crypto, “I started to look…
The bitcoin narrative could be tested this week as investors monitor tense developments between Ukraine and Russia and weigh the possibility of the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates by 50 basis points, or 0.5 percentage points, in March. The largest cryptocurrency by market capital currency has long been regarded by early investors and enthusiasts as a safe haven asset — one that ideally could offset risk in investors’ portfolios and limit exposure to negative shocks. However, in recent months bitcoin has has been trading like equities, specifically like riskier growth-oriented stocks. It’s still recovering from a big drop from earlier in the year, when rising rates…
When Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh were sophomores at Texas A&M University, they decided to get into the business of mining bitcoin on the oil fields of East Texas. The year was 2019, and at the time, the idea of oil and gas companies joining forces with bitcoin miners was considered both avant-garde — and a major taboo. But Whitehead, an engineer hailing from a family with a long history in oil and gas production, and Lohstroh, a finance major with a bitcoin obsession, ignored the skeptics, and sunk all the cash they had earned from their high school side gigs in…
Crypto start-up Alchemy has nearly tripled its valuation in a matter of months, with the company saying Tuesday it’s now valued $10.2 billion after its latest funding round. The $200 million investment was led by Lightspeed and Silver Lake, and Alchemy’s previous financing round in late October valued the company at $3.5 billion. Earlier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue and Pantera also participated. It comes amid a flood of venture capital dollars into crypto. Tech investors are looking for winners in what some describe as the future of the internet, or “Web 3.” Blockchain funding soared 718% last year, topping $25.5…
As more than 100,000 Russian troops mass on the border with Ukraine — and global powers work to stave off all-out war between the two countries — new data shows that Ukrainians are crowdfunding bitcoin to fight back. Donations totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars have flooded into Ukrainian nongovernmental organizations and volunteer groups, according to a report from Elliptic, which sells blockchain analytics tools to banks and some of the world’s largest cryptocurrency platforms, including Binance and Circle. Activists have deployed the crypto for a variety of purposes, including equipping the Ukrainian army with military equipment, medical supplies and drones, as well as funding the development…
Sequoia Capital is playing catchup with arch-rival Andreessen Horowitz in the race to invest in what could be the future of the internet — so-called Web3. The Silicon Valley venture capital firm led a $450 million investment in Polygon, a blockchain network. Blockchains are the distributed logs of transactions that underpin many of the world’s major digital currencies. They are maintained by a network of computers, which have to reach consensus across the whole system to confirm transactions and mint new units of currency. Polygon serves as a support layer to Ethereum, the platform behind the ether cryptocurrency, helping it process transactions at…