Author: The Wall Street Journal

Like stocks, cryptocurrencies have extended a selloff to start the year because of expectations that the central bank will raise interest rates as early as March. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency, is down 8.7% year to date, according to CoinDesk, and the second-largest, ether, is down 14%. That has spilled over to publicly traded crypto companies. Coinbase Global Inc. is down 12% so far this year. Marathon Digital Holdings Inc. is down 21%. Riot Blockchain Inc. is down 16%. MicroStrategy Inc., which makes business software but has invested billions in bitcoin and whose chief executive, Michael Saylor, has become a vocal bitcoin advocate, is down 16%. On Tuesday, bitcoin rose 1.7% to $42,407. Most…

A new federal law mandates reporting transactions of more than $10,000. Why? Without fanfare or debate, Congress has recently determined that economically meaningful transfers of digital assets should be as rare, burdensome and criminally suspect as transacting in bricks of cash. An eight-word amendment to the U.S. tax code in the infrastructure spending bill, which become law on Nov. 15, defines digital assets as cash for the first time—a small change with bad consequences for American innovation. Enacted in 1984, Section 6050I of the tax code mandates onerous reporting when businesses receive more than $10,000 in physical currency. This discourages…

Crypto exchange FTX Trading Ltd. has launched a $2 billion venture fund, one of the largest vehicles to date aiming to tap into the crypto market’s startups. The large size of FTX Ventures will allow it to invest flexibly across startup stages, with check sizes that could range from as little as $100,000 to hundreds of millions of dollars, said Amy Wu, the fund’s chief. “We could possibly deploy it all [by] next year but it depends on the opportunities we see in the market,” she added. Ms. Wu joined FTX this month from Lightspeed Venture Partners, where she led…

A new wave of wealthy investors is moving to the island. Locals are greeting them with excitement — and suspicion. Gustavo Diaz Skoff met the crypto utopians in 2018 amid the devastation of Hurricane Maria. Just six months out of college, he was drawn to their innovative vision for rebuilding this battered island. For a while, Skoff worked with a cryptocurrency investor who made vague promises of donating $1 billion. But only a fraction of the cash ever materialized, and Skoff increasingly heard: “ ‘Vendepatria. You’re selling your country, you’re selling your island.’ ” Today, Skoff, 26, is a skeptical…

iPhone maker hasn’t disclosed its plan for the virtual world, but many are betting the company will introduce extended-reality devices Apple Inc. AAPL 0.26% may not have triggered the current buzz about the metaverse, but the company is reaping the benefit. Excitement about how the iPhone maker could gain from a broad embrace of digital alternate realities has been a central facet of the rise in its share price in recent months, according to investors and analysts. Excitement about how Apple could gain from a broad embrace of digital alternate realities has been a central facet of the rise in its share price in…

Retail-trading platform Robinhood Markets Inc. doesn’t plan on spending significant amounts of corporate cash on crypto assets anytime soon, despite growing demand from its users for such investments, Chief Financial Officer Jason Warnick said. Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s virtual CFO Network Summit on Wednesday, Mr. Warnick said, “There aren’t compelling reasons strategically for our business to put any meaningful amount of our corporate cash into cryptocurrencies.” His comments echo those of other finance chiefs—including Twitter Inc. CFO Ned Segal —who said they worry about the volatile nature of some of these assets or limitations around companies’ investment policies. Robinhood, which reported…

Cryptocurrency lenders are going to be able to start checking credit reports. TransUnion, TRU +0.28% one of the three major U.S. consumer credit reporting firms, will let consumers give blockchain companies access to their personal credit data through the security firm Spring Labs’ ky0x Digital Passport. Consumers will be able to receive better interest rates when borrowing money from financial-services companies that operate on public blockchains such as Ethereum by providing this information, the companies said. Cryptocurrency investors can currently borrow money by putting digital assets such as bitcoin up as collateral. The companies said that because lenders will be able…

Cryptocurrencies are embraced in Turkey and parts of the developing world where government economic policies spark significant distrust. The Turkish lira has become so volatile that Turks have ditched the local currency for assets with an even riskier reputation: cryptocurrencies. While the lira unraveled against the dollar in the last quarter of 2021, cryptocurrency trading volumes using the lira leapt to an average $1.8 billion a day across three exchanges, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. Those volumes are still modest compared with the results of a 2019 survey by the Bank for International Settlements that found roughly $71 billion…

More than 17 million metric tons of carbon offsets are now tied to digital tokens; Mark Cuban says he is among those holding them Cryptocurrency technology is making a splash in the carbon market. In recent months, millions of credits for offsetting greenhouse-gas emissions have been virtually tied to newly created cryptocurrency tokens and removed from circulation. Some market participants say the technology is bringing transparency to the unregulated voluntary carbon market and helping create new incentives for projects that benefit the climate. Not everybody is convinced. Many companies aiming to compensate for their emissions buy credits representing reductions in…

Accounting firms are following the example set by other companies to launch operations in the metaverse, a digital space where players simulate real-life activities from shopping to gaming to business consulting. Businesses across industries, including real estate, technology and cryptocurrency, have been purchasing digital land on platforms such as Decentraland and the Sandbox. Executives have started drafting business plans for operating in those virtual worlds, which are typically conceived by videogame developers. Prager Metis International LLC, a New York-based accounting and advisory firm, on Friday said it opened a virtual three-story property on a site it bought for nearly $35,000 in late…