Author: Coindesk
Citing a basketball star, the Dude and Star Trek: First Contact, a federal judge praised the cryptocurrency analytics tools that helped lead federal agents to yesterday’s multi-billion-dollar bitcoin trove. In an August 2021 opinion unsealed yesterday tied to a search warrant that would help nab nearly 100,000 stolen bitfinex bitcoins, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui cast blockchain tracing technology as a powerful tool to meet probable cause requirements. CoinDesk acquired a copy of the memorandum from a source familiar with the case. Faruqui’s memorandum opinion – summarizing the D.C. district court’s approval of a search warrant for email accounts – highlights the influential…
The stocks of crypto miners continued their rally from their 2022 lows after the price of bitcoin exceeded $44,000 on Monday. Crypto miners are the most exposed to the movements of the digital currencies they mine, since mining is their main source of revenue and most firms tend to hold on to the mined coins on their balance sheets. The publicly traded miners, both large and small, have rebounded in February as the price of bitcoin has started to rebound after hitting a 2022 low of around $33,000 in January. Marathon Digital (MARA), one of the largest miners, has risen…
Earlier in the week, MicroStrategy announced it purchased $25 million in bitcoin (BTC) in January. CEO Michael Saylor joined crypto podcast “UpOnly” to reveal the back story of his company’s move to accumulate 125,051 bitcoin in 2020 and 2021. Founded in the late 1980s by Saylor, MicroStrategy (MSTR) is a publicly traded business intelligence and software provider, but it is now better known for the $4.7 billion in bitcoin it holds on its balance sheet. Before buying all that bitcoin, it was already one of the largest independent, publicly traded companies in its industry. In 2020, its revenue was nearly $480 million…
January was a gloomy month for digital assets, but the crypto options market boomed. Deribit, the biggest crypto options exchange, wrote in a newsletter to investors on Thursday that the volume of option trades on its platform in ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, rose to a record 5.4 million in January, up 36% from the volume in December. For bitcoin (BTC) options, the volume rose 10% to 498,000 in January from December. The increase was partly due to trading strategies around the price drop in January. Despite the significant number of transactions, lower underlying price levels…
A bipartisan group of U.S. House representatives has reintroduced a bill that would exempt consumers from paying taxes on crypto payments of less than $200. The “Virtual Currency Tax Fairness Act,” an amendment to IRS tax code announced on Thursday by Reps. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), Darren Soto (D-Fla.) and Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), would simplify tax burdens on daily crypto users who must currently report even the smallest capital gains. “Virtual currency has evolved rapidly in the past few years with more opportunities to use it in our everyday lives,” DelBene said in the announcement. “The U.S. must stay on top of…
Long-term bitcoin holders were unfazed by the cryptocurrency’s drop in the last few months. Prices for bitcoin fell to as low as $33,100 in the last week of January amid a falling sentiment for risk assets in the market, after beginning the year around the $47,500 mark. One of the biggest price drops came towards the end of January with bitcoin prices falling by $10,000 from Jan. 20 to Jan. 22., trading data shows. Since then the crypto recovered to the $38,800 mark, where it then saw resistance and then fell to the $36,800 level at the time of writing.…
Russian Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov reiterated the ministry’s stance on regulating rather than banning crypto, and suggested legalizing cryptocurrency trading through banks, Russian newspaper Kommersant said, citing a letter Siluanov sent to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin on Wednesday. In contrast to the Bank of Russia, which advocates a ban on crypto, Siluanov suggests banks can be authorized to provide cryptocurrency exchange services and licensing rules will be introduced for other types of businesses as well. For companies that aren’t licensed, providing crypto services would be treated as a criminal offense. Both the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Russia agree that cryptocurrencies cannot be…
Large amounts of bitcoin stolen from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex six years ago were moved by hackers early on Tuesday. According to Twitter account Whale Alert, bad actors transferred 10,000 bitcoins worth more than $383 million to an unknown wallet during Asian hours. The number of bitcoin transferred amounted to 8% of the total 119,756 BTC drained from Bitfinex in 2016, one of the biggest bitcoin hacks to date. Hackers last moved the stolen bitcoin in April 2021, transferring over $700 million worth of coins to unknown wallets during the bull frenzy brought by crypto exchange Coinbase’s the-then impending listing…
The company formerly known as Facebook is joining the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a consortium of tech and crypto companies led by Jack Dorsey’s payments company, Block (the company formerly known as Square). Meta will join over two dozen other companies who, by joining COPA, have pledged not to enforce their “core cryptocurrency patents” – broadly defined by Max Sills, the general manager of COPA as any “technology that enables the creation, mining, storage, transmission, settlement, integrity, or security of cryptocurrencies.” The move comes as Meta winds down its Diem project, reportedly selling the project’s intellectual property to Silvergate Bank for…
Bitcoin’s long-term bullish outlook is in danger of being invalidated on technical charts as the cryptocurrency reels under selling pressure, stemming from adverse macro factors. The cryptocurrency’s monthly moving average convergence divergence (MACD) histogram has crossed below zero, a so-called “sell signal,” indicating a bullish-to-bearish trend change on the longer duration price chart. “There is an unconfirmed monthly MACD “sell” signal that would support a long-term bearish bias if confirmed alongside a breakdown [of support at $37,400],” Katie Stockton, founder and managing partner of Fairlead Strategies, said in the past week’s research note. Bitcoin traded under $37,400 at press time,…