Author: Coindesk

Ripple’s upcoming RLUSD stablecoin is attracting bids upto 836 XRP on onchain marketplaces ahead of its Tuesday release, a sign of frenzy among enthusiasts who may want to be the first to hold the token.These bids range from 500 XRP to as much as 836 XRP as of Asian morning hours on Tuesday, CoinDesk viewed on the Xaman application. Each XRP exchanges hands for just under $2.5, data shows.“There actually is someone willing to pay $1,200/RLUSD for a tiny fraction of one RLUSD.,” Ripple Labs CTO David Schwartz said in a Monday post. “Tools will show you the highest price…

Disclaimer: The analyst who wrote this piece owns shares of MicroStrategy (MSTR) and Semler Scientific (SMLR).Self-described bitcoin (BTC) development company MicroStrategy (MSTR) has increased its bitcoin holdings to a total of 439,000 BTC following its latest purchase of 15,350 BTC with the acquisition finishing on Dec. 15. MicroStrategy disclosed that the 15,350 BTC purchase came to a total of $1.5 billion for an average price of $100,386 per bitcoin. This brings the company’s total holdings to 439,000 BTC worth $45.6 billion at current market prices. The company’s overall average purchase price is $61,725 per bitcoin. The latest acquisition purchases was…

Bitcoin (BTC) mining economics continued to improve this month, as the hashprice, a measure of daily profitability, rose 5% from the end of November, JPMorgan (JPM) said in a research report Monday.The hashprice increased as the rally in the world’s largest cryptocurrency outpaced the rise in the network hashrate, the report said. The hashrate is a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty.The network hashrate has increased 6% month-to-date to an average of 773 exahashes per second (EH/s), the bank noted.”We note miners earned about $57,300 in daily block reward revenue per EH/s over the first two weeks…

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 3805.48, down 1.7% (-64.94) since 4 pm ET on Friday.Two of 20 assets are trading higher.Leaders: LINK (+5.2%) and BTC (+2.2%).Laggards: HBAR (-11.3%) and ICP (-7.1%).The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally. Read the full article here

Dear President Elect Trump,As the co-head of a major law firm’s digital assets practice, I am hopeful that your nominee to chair the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) will make much-needed (and long-overdue) reforms to the way the SEC approaches crypto market regulation in the United States.However, as you know, it will take some time for your nominee to be confirmed as SEC chair, and for him to formulate new SEC guidance and rules for the crypto industry. Bearing that in mind, I write respectfully to propose an Executive Order that you can issue — on Day One of your Presidency…

Web3 has long struggled with mainstream adoption. We have yet to achieve the true cultural relevance that other cutting-edge technologies enjoy. Our most widely used product as an industry is cryptocurrency itself, but even our biggest advocates now realize that coins alone will not be enough to provide the consumer breakthrough we have been building towards for over a decade.NFTs, Web3 gaming, social apps, and various forms of decentralized music, art, film, and TV have not broken beyond a crypto-native audience, and many of these projects have been unable to attain even that level of traction. Challenges include complex user…

Crypto wallet company Exodus Movement (EXOD) has been approved to list on the NYSE American, the New York Stock Exchange’s sibling market.Exodus, which will be listed under its current ticker at the open of trading on Dec. 18, was originally meant to be listed on NYSE American in May, but the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it was still reviewing the company’s registration. The approval of Exodus’ uplist may be a sign of a change in the regulatory sentiment toward cryptocurrency following President-elect Trump’s victory in November’s election with the promise of running a pro-crypto administration.”We expect this…

Avalanche, a layer-1 blockchain launched in 2020 that’s now the tenth-largest by total value locked (TVL), activated its highly anticipated Avalanche9000 upgrade Monday, marking the ecosystem’s biggest technical changes to date.The network has been prepping for these changes for months, with new features that will cut the costs for sending transactions, operating validators and building applications on the network.Leaders at Avalanche have previously told CoinDesk that part of the goal with the upgrade is to attract developers to Avalanche and encourage them to create customized blockchains using its technology, known as subnets, or “L1s”. The upgrade, also referred to as…

Ripple, an enterprise-focused blockchain service closely related to the XRP Ledger (XRP), said it will start making its highly-anticipated U.S. dollar stablecoin accessible to users on Tuesday, Dec. 17 following the token’s regulatory approval.RLUSD will be initially listed on several exchanges and crypto platforms including Uphold, MoonPay, Archax and CoinMENA, the company said in a press release, with further listings on Bitso, Bullish, Bitstamp, Mercado Bitcoin and Independent Reserve, Zero Hash and others in the coming weeks.The company also announced two additions to its stablecoin advisory board: Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and Kenneth Montgomery,…

I will remember 2024 as the year blockchain broke through. The transformations started early and just kept coming. What’s astounding to me is that at no time during this year did the overall direction or the market change. The only thing that happened was constant acceleration.At the end of 2023, we already knew that 2024 was looking likely to turn out well. The European Union’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MICA) act was going to come into effect. This created a legal framework for crypto-assets, real-world assets and stablecoins in Europe. We were already seeing business turn up across the region…