Author: The Financial Times

NFTs pioneer Yuga Labs discussing financing with Silicon Valley investor that would value it at up to $5bn The start-up behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, the non-fungible token collection that counts celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Snoop Dogg as owners, is discussing a financing with Andreessen Horowitz that would value it at between $4bn and $5bn. According to people with knowledge of the discussions, NFTs pioneer Yuga Labs is seeking to sell a multimillion-dollar stake in a new funding round. These people said that among those in talks over an investment is Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s top…

Technology first developed for video games will one day shape much of Microsoft’s software and lie at the heart of the next big computing platform, said Satya Nadella, the US software company’s chief executive. Speaking in his first interview since Microsoft’s agreement last month to pay $75bn for games maker Activision Blizzard, Nadella sought to paint the world’s biggest-ever tech deal as central to the future of online interaction as people spend more time in what has become known as the metaverse. The Microsoft chief also claimed that boosting its game-building capabilities was close to the company’s original business of…

Galaxy Digital, the digital assets company owned by billionaire Michael Novogratz, has ramped up its use of renewable energy for crypto mining, after accepting that the industry is failing to convince investors of its green credentials. In an interview, Novogratz said Galaxy Digital — founded in 2018 with the ambition to become ‘the Goldman Sachs of crypto’ — had already exceeded its target set six months ago to derive 80 per cent of its crypto mining from renewable energy. It had originally planned to hit that point by 2025. The company is also launching a sustainability programme — thought to…

Thailand has scrapped plans to impose a 15 per cent withholding tax on crypto transactions after facing pushback from traders in one of south-east Asia’s biggest markets for digital currencies. Tax officials in the country said on Monday that people who earned income from cryptocurrency trading or mining could report these as capital gains on their income taxes. The new rules, outlined in a manual published by Thailand’s revenue department, will also allow traders to offset their annual losses against gains made in the same year, meeting demands from those in the nascent industry who had warned that excessive tax…

Sharp price swings in cryptocurrencies are causing “destabilising” capital flows in emerging markets, and the use of crypto in place of traditional currencies poses “immediate and acute risks”, according to a senior official at the IMF. “Crypto is being used to take money out of countries that are regarded as unstable [by some external investors],” said Tobias Adrian, the IMF’s financial counsellor and head of its monetary and capital markets department. “It is a big challenge for policymakers in some countries,” Adrian said in an interview with the Financial Times, noting that “cryptocurrency markets have lost about $1tn in value…

FT analysis shows how one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges blurs the division between market-maker and investor. In December, a cryptocurrency issued by the social networking start-up Decentralized Social soared in value after Coinbase allowed it to begin trading on the company’s exchange. The listing provided a jolt to the start-up’s fortunes, with its token price briefly doubling to a high of $187. It also boosted the fortunes of another key partner, Coinbase, which had backed the start-up as part of a $200m round of funding announced three months earlier. DESO, as the token is known, is one of…

Bitcoin has mirrored the sharp fluctuations in traditional markets this year, highlighting the tightening link between cryptocurrencies and mainstream financial assets as more professional traders enter the digital finance arena. The world’s biggest cryptocurrency is increasingly tracking the movements of assets that exert influence across other global markets. Correlations with US tech stocks, crude oil and government bonds have all risen significantly over the past two years, Goldman Sachs research shows. Bitcoin has often moved in near lock-step with Nasdaq 100 futures — derivatives that are considered a proxy for sentiment towards America’s tech giants — as markets have wobbled…

Not sure if you’ve heard, but things aren’t going so well in the land of crypto. No we don’t mean the Cryptoland otherwise known as the Fijian Fyre Festival of crypto, we mean the land on the internet where laser eyes and rocket emojis and Y chromosomes proliferate. As we write this, the “market cap” of crypto — a rather absurd metric as we have said many a time but the metric that is used nonetheless — is just half of what it was just two months ago, around the $1.5tn mark. A halvening, if you will, but not quite…

Erdogan plans crackdown as lira turmoil encourages speculation in digital assets Despite having a masters degree and a stable job, a middle-class lifestyle has felt increasingly unobtainable in recent years for Orhan, a 39-year-old Turkish web security expert. Frustrated by his rapidly eroding purchasing power, Orhan last year joined the millions of Turks who have flocked to cryptocurrencies amid soaring inflation and a plunge in the Turkish lira. “The lira is as volatile as a shitcoin,” he said, referring to the catch-all term among crypto enthusiasts for failed digital currencies. The lira plunged by about 45 per cent against the…

It’s not been a great start to the year for HODLers. If governments (other than El Salvador’s) have their way, it could get a lot worse. This week Russia, a massive centre for mining, proposed a clampdown on that and on trading. A vice-president of the European Securities and Markets Authority wants to outlaw some forms of crypto mining in the EU. Earlier this month, Madrid called time on dodgy adverts, while the UK plans on doing the same thing. We expect more attempts to rein in the industry over the course of 2022. Global financial officialdom, which has made…