Author: Coindesk

Profit taking ahead of the halving, due later this week, and macroeconomic tremors weighed on the market since late Friday, with bitcoin dropping from last week’s highs around $70,500 to as low as $62,800. That caused a market-wide decline as majors dropped as much as 18%. Read the full article here

In the latter, as long as you profit, everything is fine. In fact, if you have sufficient capability to financialize, you don’t even need profit now. You can promise endless future profits, “grow” (i.e., “increase”), sell the rights to them, and move on. Everything becomes reducible to its immediate flows. But as you gradually strip away your own and everybody else’s capital – as you dismantle, trade, and consume every tool – you will find returns to be more and more elusive and, eventually, impossible. The only important question becomes, who is holding the bag? Read the full article here

The head of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Rostin Behnam, had a lot of contact with Sam Bankman-Friend, the disgraced former CEO of FTX, but lawmakers suggest he hasn’t been fully forthcoming about those interactions. So, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) are demanding more. Read the full article here

Stone X Group’s chief strategist, Kathryn Vera, gave a presentation at the Miami conference, stating that bitcoin won’t be a reserve currency – economics jargon for a currency like the dollar, euro or yuan held by central banks to support global trade and finance – “in her lifetime.” A key reason why the largest conventional currencies are cornerstones of finance is this reserve currency status. Read the full article here

“A handful of $BTC and $ETH futures ETFs listed in Hong Kong in December 2022, and today, more than a year later, have a combined AUM of just under $170 million,” Acheson tweeted. “For contrast, $BITO – the largest U.S.-listed BTC futures ETF – has an AUM of over $2.8 billion.” Read the full article here

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A contract asking users to bet on the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election—which has over $110.8 million staked, easily a record for crypto-based prediction markets—saw “yes” shares for Biden winning rise 1 cent, to 45 cents, and “yes” shares for Trump dip by a penny to 45 cents. A share pays out $1 if the prediction turns out correct, so the market is signaling each candidate now has a 45% chance of winning. Read the full article here

At yesterday’s hearing, she was asking the deputy treasurer questions about if a validator is in Iran, somehow that means Iran is making millions of dollars. Now, you and I and everybody reading this knows that a validator could be anywhere. It could be in Iran, it could be anywhere else in the world. That’s what’s a decentralized distributed ledger system is. But a validator doesn’t get cash. If anything, a validator could get paid in the native asset of the network, whether it’s Bitcoin or Ethereum, but then you have to have an off-ramp. And the off-ramps and on-ramps…

“Obtaining the CASP license from the FSCA is a monumental achievement for VALR,” Farzam Ehsani, the co-founder and CEO of VALR said in a press statement. “We welcome this regulatory milestone for South Africa and applaud the regulators for taking this important step for the nation.” Read the full article here

The tax implications of Celsius, which finalized its bankruptcy in January, are complex. Creditors are categorized into specific groups, each with different rights and claim treatments. And that’s without even considering those who sold their claims to creditors who’ll face different tax implications on top of this. Furthermore, the preferential way to deal with your Celsius transactions from a tax perspective will also depend on the amount you had in Celsius, your total annual income, and many other circumstances. Read the full article here