Author: Coindesk

On April 14, someone put in a sell order for 2,500 bitcoin, worth roughly $212 million, on the Binance order book at $85,600, around 2-3% above the spot prices trading at the time. Seeing such a large order, the bitcoin price started to gravitate to this level at around 17:00 UTC. Suddenly, the order was gone, as seen using Coin Glass data, which caused a brief moment of market apathy as bulls and bears tussled to fill a void in liquidity.The bitcoin price at the time, however, was already on shaky ground due to geopolitical concerns. Subsequently, it went lower…

There’s something that stands out about Monday’s suspicious transfer of more than 3,520 BTC ($330.7 million) to privacy coin monero (XMR), a conversion that blockchain sleuth ZachXBT said was probably linked to a hack: coordinated activity in the derivatives market.Monero, which obscures the sender’s and recipient’s addresses to provide an untraceable currency, has limited liquidity on exchanges, which makes it harder for users to transact without affecting the market and exposes them to slippage, the chance of the price changing for the worse before the deal is finalized. The decision to go through an illiquid cryptocurrency is unusual. Tether’s USDT…

Base, the popular layer-2 network from cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN), is now a “stage 1” rollup, said the company, setting up its path towards full decentralization.The transition to a “stage 1” rollup comes as other layer-2s have also reached that milestone, making these networks less reliant on centralized entities.The move means that Base will now have a security council, a network of ten “independent entities, which we chose from all around the globe,” said Tom Vieira, the head of product at Base, in an interview with CoinDesk. “These are folks from the Base ecosystem and from the broader Ethereum ecosystem,”…

Two recent shepherds of U.S. crypto oversight — Republican former lawmaker Patrick McHenry and Democrat former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chief Rostin Behnam — shared a view that there’s a tremendous amount of work still to do on U.S. crypto legislation but that now is the moment to do it.McHenry, in a discussion hosted by Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy, said that Senator Tim Scott, the South Carolina chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and Representative French Hill, the Arkansas Republican who leads the House Financial Services Committee, present the industry an ideal opportunity to establish…

Truth Social, the social media platform owned by Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT), which is majority-owned by U.S. President Donald Trump, is considering launching a cryptocurrency.”As part of our rewards program, we’re exploring the introduction of a utility token with a Truth digital wallet that can initially be used to pay for Truth+ subscription costs, and later be applied to other products and services in the Truth ecosphere,” the company said in a letter to its shareholders on Tuesday.DJT barely reacted to the news; the stock is down 0.52% in after-hours trading.The company is also looking into launching exchange-traded…

Tornado Cash is officially safe from U.S. sanctions, following a district court ruling on Monday.The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) removed Tornado Cash from its sanctions list in March, several months after an appeals court ruled that the agency had “overstepped its Congressionally-defined authority” by sanctioning the crypto mixing service’s smart contracts back in 2022.However, the way that OFAC de-listed Tornado Cash, and the subsequent notices and motions its lawyers filed with the court in March, left apparent wiggle room for the agency to put the mixing service back on its no-fly list in the future, a…

The crypto market experienced another relatively calm day on Tuesday despite widespread pessimism about the impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs on the economy.Bitcoin (BTC) is up 1% in the last 24 hours, trading at almost $95,400 and within sight of topping $96,000 for the first time since the second half of February. The CoinDesk 20 — an index of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization except for stablecoins, exchange coins and memecoins — rose 1.1%, with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) outshining the rest of the index by surging 6.3%.Crypto stocks had fairly muted performances Tuesday, with Coinbase (COIN) and…

SoFi has plans to bring back crypto services for its clients after suspending those operations in 2023 so as not to impede its effort to become a regulated bank.“We’re going to re-enter the crypto business, which we had to exit,” SoFi CEO Anthony Noto said in an interview with CNBC. “We’ll re-enter the business of allowing our members to invest in cryptocurrency. We want to actually make a bigger, more comprehensive push into cryptocurrency, to include really providing crypto or blockchain capabilities in each product area that we have.”The tech company had offered clients access to more than 20 tokens…

When Dean Skurka joined Bitbuy in 2018, the platform had only four employees, a few thousand users, and about $25 million in trading volume. Fast-forward to today, Skurka now oversees WonderFi: A company that’s consolidated multiple Canadian exchanges, boasts 1.7 million accounts, and guards $2 billion in client assets.But Skurka isn’t just sitting on a domestic empire—he’s building outward.In a conversation with CoinDesk, WonderFi’s president and CEO, Dean Skurka, detailed his company’s next chapter: launching a Layer-2 blockchain in partnership with zkSync and expanding into Australia, a country he says “checks both boxes” of regulatory clarity and strong adoption. He…

New York prosecutors are seemingly considering whether or not to drop their case against Samourai Wallet co-founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, according to a Monday court filing.In a joint letter to District Judge Richard Berman of the Southern District of New York (SDNY), both prosecutors and lawyers for Rodriguez and Hill requested that the case be granted a 16-day continuance, or extension, “while the Government determines its position” in response to the defense’s request that the case be dismissed under the auspices of U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s recent memo to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) staff.In…