Author: Coindesk

Bitcoin (BTC) surged to over $106,000 in early Asian hours, setting new all-time highs before quickly retreating to $104,500 amid concerns about the upcoming U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) rate cut.The U.S. central bank is expected to reduce the benchmark borrowing cost by 25 basis points to the 4.25% to 4.5% range, marking a total easing of 100 basis points since September. However, there are concerns that the accompanying Fed commentary will seek to temper expectations for further easing, potentially diminishing the bullish impact of the rate cut.The Fed will announce its rate decision, the dot plot, comprising interest rate projections,…

MicroStrategy (MSTR) is set to soon be included in of the world’s largest exchange-traded funds after becoming the first bitcoin-centric company to win entry into the Nasdaq-100 Index.The Nasdaq-100 Index tracks the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange and is filled with dominant market names like Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and Costco.On Nov. 29, the day when the Nasdaq took a market snapshot in preparation for the index’s annual rebalancing, MicroStrategy had a market cap of roughly $92 billion. That would rank the Michael Saylor-led company as the 40th largest in the Nasdaq 100 and…

Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital (GLXY) has hired former Point72 chief financial officer Anthony Paquette to serve in the same role at the crypto financial services firm. He will replace Alex Ioffe, who will transition into a senior adviser role, the company said in a statement on Friday.Paquette previously spent four years as the CFO at Steve Cohen’s hedge fund Point72, leading the firm’s global finance, treasury, and broker relations, among other things. Before that, he worked at SoFi, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America.“I am thrilled to join Galaxy, whose reputation as a world-class operator and investor in digital…

In today’s issue, Kelly Ye from Decentral Park Capital takes us through the relationship between AI and blockchain and how this combination will drive these growing technologies’ adoption and use cases.Then, Alec Beckman from Advantage Blockchain answers questions about how AI, blockchain and crypto work together in Ask an Expert.–S.M.You’re reading Crypto for Advisors, CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter that unpacks digital assets for financial advisors. Subscribe here to get it every Thursday.Crypto X AI: Why Blockchain is the Secret Sauce for Mass AI AdoptionArtificial Intelligence (AI) holds transformative potential across industries and daily life, yet its mass adoption faces hurdles—resource intensity,…

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 3837.79, down 0.0% (-1.86) since 4 pm ET on Thursday.Nine of 20 assets are trading higher.Leaders: HBAR (+5.5%) and APT (+3.7%).Laggards: RENDER (-2.6%) and SOL (-2.1%).The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally. Read the full article here

Societe Generale said it carried out a blockchain-based repurchase agreement with the Banque de France in what it called the first such tokenized transaction with a euro-zone central bank.The lender’s digital assets-focused subsidiary, SG-Forge, deposited as collateral some bonds issued in 2020 on the public Ethereum blockchain in exchange for central bank digital currency (CBDC) issued by the Banque de France on its DL3S blockchain, it said in a press release.With the European Union’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulatory framework already in place for stablecoin issuers, SG-Forge has maintained a high profile exploring ways to deploy its euro stablecoin,…

By Omkar Godbole (All times ET unless indicated otherwise)Bitcoin and ether’s bull momentum has hit a roadblock. The U.S. Producer Price Index (PPI) came in hotter than expected Thursday, prompting investors to tighten their stances and keep a bid for the dollar, as we anticipated. There’s also the Truflation index stirring up concern. Seen by some as more reliable than government numbers, it rose above 3% for the first time in over two years.But guess what? Fed fund futures remain confident the central bank will cut rates by 25 basis points next week, and traders on decentralized exchanges, who have…

Disclosure: The author of this story owns shares in MicroStrategy (MSTR).Since Donald Trump won the U.S. election on Nov. 5, bitcoin (BTC) has soared from $67,000 to around $100,000. This has coincided with a huge rise in bitcoin’s total trade volume which has now surpassed $100 billion.According to checkonchain data, bitcoin futures trading volume hit an all-time high of around $120 billion on Nov. 17, almost doubling since the U.S. election. However, since then futures trade volume has plateaued and steadied around $100 billion.BTC: Futures vs Spot vs ETF Trade Volume (checkonchain) The same can be seen with spot trade…

MicroStrategy (MSTR), the software company founded by Michael Saylor, is not the only large-scale corporate buyer of bitcoin (BTC), JPMorgan (JPM) said in a Wednesday report. Crypto miners are also adopting the accumulation strategy. The shift to building up bitcoin holdings is driven by growing pressure on profitability, which stems from the reward halving in April and a rising network hashrate, the report said. Hashrate is the total computational power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain and is a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty.”This likely prompted miners to hoard or seek further…

A Polygon DAO community cohort is considering a proposal to use its more than $1 billion of idle stablecoin reserves, currently held on the Polygon PoS Chain bridge to capture yields, per a pre-proposal governance post.“The PoS Bridge currently holds around $1.3B of stablecoins, which makes it one of the largest, but also idle, holders of stablecoins onchain,” the pre-proposal reads. “At the current benchmark lending rate for the 3 major stables this is an opportunity cost of around $70M annually.”“The authors believe that DeFi as a whole has matured whereby assets held in the Polygon PoS bridge can be…