Author: Coindesk
Florida’s Office of Financial Regulation (OFR) has issued a warning about decentralized finance (DeFi) based companies that offer lending, banking and investment services. The OFR is cautioning the public that before using any DeFi-based service, it is important to do the necessary due diligence and understand what DeFi is in order to avoid becoming the victim of a scam. The state regulatory body warns the DeFi investment market is still new, highly volatile and driven mostly by psychological factors rather than investment fundamentals. DeFi is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the crypto industry, with $92 billion worth of assets currently locked in…
ARK Investment Management, the firm led by star manager Cathie Wood, predicts that bitcoin’s price could exceed $1 million by 2030 as the cryptocurrency’s global usage is still only in its early days. “Bitcoin’s market capitalization still represents a fraction of global assets and is likely to scale as nation-states adopt [it] as legal tender,” wrote ARK analyst Yassine Elmandjra in the firm’s “Big Ideas 2022” outlook report, which was released on Tuesday. ARK added in its bitcoin outlook that the cryptocurrency is taking market share as a global settlement network. According to ARK’s research, bitcoin’s cumulative transfer volume increased…
Grayscale Investments, which manages the Grayscale DeFi Fund and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund, has added 25 digital assets, including tokens for a number of high-profile DeFi and metaverse protocols, to a list it keeps of potential investments, the company said in a Monday blog posting. Grayscale’s additions to its list of “Assets Under Consideration” includes cryptocurrencies for DeFi projects Algorand (ALGO) and Convex (CVX) and metaverse startups The Sandbox (SAND), Axie Infinity (AXS) and Yield Guild Games (YGG). Grayscale updates this list periodically as well as the assets it already holds. New York-based Grayscale is owned by Digital Currency Group, the…
As crypto traders suffered last week through the market’s worst stretch in months, investors in digital-asset funds appear to have bought the dip. Cryptocurrency funds brought in $14.4 million of new investor money during the seven days through Jan. 21, ending a streak of five straight weeks of outflows, according to a report Monday from the digital-asset manager CoinShares. The inflows came during the latter part of the week, “during a period of significant price weakness,” according to the report. “Investors, at current price levels, are seeing this as a buying opportunity.” Bitcoin’s (BTC) price tumbled 16% in the seven days…
Bitcoin is somewhat private – at least for users who know what they’re doing. But most people don’t. The network’s transaction data is fully public for anyone to view. Most people using Bitcoin might not realize that, because of the unique way Bitcoin works, their financial history is being recorded indelibly in a ledger that anyone in the world can pull up on their computer with ease. If Bitcoin users aren’t careful, their transaction history could potentially be exposed to the world. Not to mention, analytics companies like Chainalysis are dedicated to unearthing detailed information about where bitcoin is being sent and who owns which…
The relationship between bitcoin and the Nasdaq is there, but it isn’t as strong as some suggest Crypto prices were crushed this past week and when such events happen, many seek out a culprit. We’ve been noting that demand for bitcoin and ether was drying up (“Of course, this doesn’t mean muted markets can last forever, but in the coming days or weeks, one shouldn’t be surprised if prices drift south,” I warned in last week’s column). That answered the question “what?” but not “why?” One persistent, common myth about crypto may seem perfectly reasonable but doesn’t hold up when the…
“The Executive Board simultaneously engaged in negotiations to raise funds with a view to potentially continuing the business but were ultimately unsuccessful in raising the necessary capital,” LaCour said. “Ultimately, after significant discussion and consideration in consultation with outside counsel and other professional advisors, the executive board determined that, in view of all the circumstances, it is in the best interest of the company to wind up operations, liquidate our balance sheet and effectuate an orderly and fair and equitable distribution of our assets.” The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, or GBTC, is the world’s largest cryptocurrency fund, and it trades as…
A country distancing itself from its neighbors and hardening its borders – as the U.K. has done with Brexit – might sound like a perverse thing to do, especially from the perspective of those in the borderless, 24/7 world of cryptocurrency. However, some lawmakers see an interesting post-Brexit play for Great Britain amid crypto’s evolving patchwork of regulation. A recently convened group of U.K. parliamentarians, harking from across the political spectrum, may signify the first steps in a new direction. Lisa Cameron, a member of Parliament for the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the chair of the Crypto and Digital Assets…
The government of El Salvador plans to offer small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) $10 million in crypto-based loans as of the first quarter of 2022. Acumen, a Solana-based lending and borrowing platform, will provide U.S. dollar funding to El Salvador’s National Commission for Micro and Small Enterprises (Conamype), a government entity that plans to allocate financing to local informal entrepreneurs and self-employed workers, Conamype’s president Paul Steiner told CoinDesk. Acumen’s loans will have an annual interest rate of 6% to 7%, although it could reach up to 10%, Acumen’s project manager Andrea Gómez told CoinDesk. According to Steiner, 86% of…
Agoric, a startup dedicated to creating JavaScript-based smart contracts, announced on Thursday it had sold over $50 million of its native BLD tokens in under two hours using the CoinList platform. The public token sale, which took place on Dec. 29, 2021, added to a private sale that garnered some $32 million, announced at the time the Agoric proof-of-stake base layer went live in November 2021. Combined with an earlier seed round, the project has thus far raised over $85 million. The public sale of BLD staking tokens has also brought another 40,000 or so new account holders to the Agoric blockchain. Agoric started out…