Author: Coindesk

Mining difficulty on the Bitcoin network increased by 9.32% and hit an all-time high of 26.64 trillion on Jan. 21, at 3:07 UTC, beating the previous record set on May 13, 2021. The difficulty is automatically adjusted based the amount of computational power on the network, or hashrate, to keep the time it takes to mine a block roughly stable at 10 minutes. The higher the hashrate, the higher the difficulty, and vice versa. On May 13, 2021, bitcoin’s mining difficulty hit a record 25.04 trillion, as primarily Chinese and North American miners deployed their machines. The difficulty started dropping later…

Crypto-friendly UnionBank of the Philippines will be using cryptocurrency safekeeping technology from IBM and Swiss custody specialist Metaco, the companies said Thursday. Metaco has been providing the back-end crypto custody capabilities in Switzerland for banks like BBVA and GazpromBank since as far back as 2018. Since many of the world’s banks are already clients of IBM, the partnership with Metaco, announced in March of last year, makes for an even more compelling package, said Seamus Donoghue, Metaco’s VP of business development. “Think of all the tier-one banks in the market, they’re probably all IBM clients, many of them strategic clients,” said Donoghue in an interview.…

Alphabet’s Google has hired former PayPal executive Arnold Goldberg to run its payments division, Google confirmed to CoinDesk on Wednesday. The search giant had previously retreated from a push into banking, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news of the hire. Goldberg’s hire is part of a broader strategy for the company to incorporate a wider range of financial services, including cryptocurrencies, Google’s president of commerce, Bill Ready, told Bloomberg. Google has historically avoided offering crypto as part of its financial services. “Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to,” Ready told Bloomberg. “As user demand and merchant…

Autograph, a non-fungible token (NFT) platform co-founded by National Football League star Tom Brady, has closed a $170 million Series B funding round that was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Kleiner Perkins. Other participants in the round included Nicole Quinn, a general partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, and the new venture firm from a16z alum Katie Haun. As part of the investment, Haun, a16z general partners Arianna Simpson and Chris Dixon and Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman will join the Autograph board of directors. Founded in July, Autograph has launched NFT collections featuring Brady, Tiger Woods, Naomi Osaka, The Weeknd, Simone Biles, Tony…

Early-stage venture firm Inflection has launched a new $40 million Mercury Fund to invest in companies building the “open economy.” Inflection’s investment thesis is that “stakeholder-owned software networks will compose an alternative economy, which is vastly automated, transparent and accessible for everyone with an internet connection.” The firm calls this the “open economy.” Others in the VC space have called it the “ownership economy.” Whatever the name, the thesis dovetails nicely with the rising tide of Web 3, which has seen a flood of investment from venture capital firms new and old. Alexander Lange, general partner and founder of Inflection, told CoinDesk…

Ethereum’s dominance in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is shrinking because of congestion and high gas fees, JPMorgan said in an analyst report. The network’s market share of NFTs has dropped to around 80% from about 95% at the start of 2021, analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote in the note published last week. Since August, Solana has been capturing the most NFT volume share at the expense of Ethereum, the bank said, noting that was when the NFT market started a major expansion. Ethereum has also been losing market cap share to Solana in line with the declining NFT volume share. As NFT’s…

Damien Hirst’s first non-fungible token (NFT) collection is getting a dedicated price index courtesy of Chainlink, a crypto network and data provider. When Hirst – the British artist best known for wildly expensive works involving taxidermied sharks and diamond-studded skulls – released “The Currency” last year, the project took most of its cues from other popular NFT collections. Like CryptoPunks or the Bored Ape Yacht Club, “The Currency” consists of 10,000 images with slight variations. And as with those projects, it was valued partly according to its “floor,” or the lowest listed price for a single NFT in the collection. Now, a new price…

Brazil-based crypto asset manager Hashdex will launch an exchange-traded fund (ETF) following 12 decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens. The product will be listed on the Brazilian stock exchange B3 as of February, the company said, adding that reserve orders to purchase shares will be available beginning Tuesday. Developed in partnership with global crypto index provider CF Benchmarks, DEFI11 will mirror the CF DeFi Modified Composite Index, an index that features tokens of Uniswap (UNI), Aave (AAVE), Compound (COMP) and Maker (MKR) among others. According to Hashdex, 70% of the ETF will be composed of DeFi protocols, 15% of smart contracts platforms…

Day traders bored of bitcoin’s recent slumber may soon have to remain glued to their screens, as a large number of open futures positions signal renewed price turbulence ahead. “Futures markets remain a powder keg for short-term volatility with Perpetual Futures Open Interest at ~250,000 BTC- a historically elevated level,” blockchain analytics firm Glassnode said in a research note published on Monday. An above-250,000 BTC open interest has coincided with volatility spikes in the past. “Since April 2021, this has paired with large pivots in price action as the risk for a short or long squeeze increases, resolved in a market wide…

The $15 million in ether (4,600 ETH) stolen from Singapore-based Crypto.com is currently being laundered via Tornado Cash, an Ethereum Mixer, according to on-chain data. Tornado Cash is a ETH mixer protocol that promises to improve transaction privacy by obscuring the on-chain link between the source and recipient of ether. The protocol launched in early 2020. On-chain data first spotted by security consultancy Peck Shield suggests that the 4,600 ether is being sent through the mixer in batches of 100 ether. While some say that mixer protocols, or cryptocurrency tumblers, are used to protect the privacy of activists or other politically exposed individuals, they are often used…