Author: Coindesk

Haliey Welch, widely recognized as “Hawk Tuah,” transformed her fleeting viral fame into a formidable media empire. With a burgeoning social media presence (230K followers on Instagram), lucrative brand partnerships, and the successful podcast Talk Tuah, Welch appeared to be transitioning from internet personality to business mogul.That was until the 22-year-old launched her memecoin, $HAWK. Now Hawk Tuah isn’t flying so high.$HAWK was launched on the Solana blockchain with considerable fanfare, initially skyrocketing to a $491 million market cap. This meteoric rise was short-lived, as the coin’s valuation plummeted to under $20 million, according to data from DEX Screener.The rapid…

The ranks of cryptocurrency developers held steady in 2024, as some recent entrants left the industry while veterans mostly stuck around, according to a report released Thursday by Electric Capital.The total developers working in crypto worldwide was basically flat, declining a statistically insignificant 7% from a year earlier, and the number of monthly active developers went to 23,613 in November, the report said.Meanwhile, the Solana ecosystem, ground zero for the memecoin craze, was the most popular blockchain among new developers, an 83% increase in its ecosystem compared to a year earlier. In July, this community became the first since 2016…

Avalanche, the layer-1 blockchain that is upgrading its technology platform, has raised $250 million in a token sale led by Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly and ParaFi Capital.More than 40 investment firms participated in the deal.The sale follows the project’s Avalanche9000 upgrade went live in a testnet environment. The overhaul aims to make it cheaper to conduct transactions and run validators on the network, with the goal of making it easier to build apps on Avalanche. The upgrade cuts deployment costs by 99%, according to an announcement on Thursday.AVAX, the native token of Avalanche, has climbed 4.95% since the token sale was…

Congressman French Hill will be the next chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, Punchbowl News reported Thursday.The Arkansas Republican was named to the role Thursday by the party’s Steering Committee, which named the leaders of the various committees ahead of the 119th Congress’s start next year. Hill will succeed North Carolina’s Patrick McHenry, who will retire after 20 years in Congress and multiple terms leading Republicans on the Financial Services Committee.Hill has chaired the Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion subcommittee over the past few years and cosponsored the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act…

Memecoins, whether people want to accept it or not, have become big business. Without delving into statistics, anyone immersed in the crypto space this year can confirm that memecoins have dominated conversations. Critics often argue that memecoins are just a rehash of Jordan Belfort’s “Wolf of Wall Street” era — a world of unregulated securities and insider trading. This time, however, the penny stocks have been replaced by on-chain memes financialized in ways that make it seem like anyone can create and profit from them.Yet, this perception of memecoins as a quick, easy way to win a digital lottery and…

Solana’s nearly $500 million decentralized finance (DeFi) derivatives market is getting a new participant, one that’s looking to take a slice of all the other venues’ pies.Ranger Finance is an aggregator service that wants to be for perpetual futures what Jupiter is to spot swaps: Solana traders’ de-facto homepage for an entire category of on-chain trading.”We want the Solana ecosystem to compete with your massive decentralized exchange (DEX) players — Hyperliquid, dYdX, Vertex — and currently the best way to do that is via aggregation,” said Ranger co-founder Barrett, a DeFi veteran who also runs the biannual mtnDAO hacker house…

Real-world asset tokenization firm Securitize appointed Michael Sonnenshein, formerly CEO of asset management company Grayscale Investments, as chief operating officer.”There is massive demand for tokenization, and I am thrilled to join Securitize at such a pivotal moment for the company and the industry,” Sonnenshein said in a Thursday statement. His appointment started on Dec. 9.Tokenization is a booming sector at the intersection of digital assets and traditional finance. The process involves representing financial instruments like bonds, credit, commodities and other real-world assets on the blockchain in pursuit of operational efficiency, speedier settlements and cheaper transactions.Securitize is a key service provider…

Activist investor Starboard Value has made a large investment in bitcoin miner Riot Platforms (RIOT) and is pushing for changes in the company’s business model, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.Starboard has been pushing Riot to convert some of its bitcoin mining sites into data centers that can host machines to enable high-performance computing (HPC) for big tech companies, according to the story. Riot is currently a “pure-play” bitcoin miner that gets its revenue only from mining bitcoin, as opposed to some other peers, such as Core Scientific (CORZ), which has dedicated a significant amount…

Solana Foundation’s former stablecoin lead Anna Yuan has left the mothership to build her own startup catering to the fast-growing crypto subsector.The company building Perena, a stablecoin trading infrastructure project, raised “around $3 million” in a pre-seed funding round led by Borderless Capital, Yuan told CoinDesk in an interview last month.Perena isn’t solely focused on launching another stablecoin. Instead, it’s creating on-chain systems that allow the seemingly endless droves of other stablecoin newcomers to have good trading liquidity, even in nascency.That’s the funny thing about stablecoins. While their exact backing recipes may slightly differ, most every stablecoin gets its value…

<a href=”https://www.coindesk.com/indices/” target=”_blank”>CoinDesk Indices</a> presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the <a href=”https://www.coindesk.com/indices/cd20/” target=”_blank”>CoinDesk 20 Index</a>. The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 3895.67, up 1.7% (+65.05) since 4 pm on Wednesday.Seventeen of 20 assets are trading higher.Leaders: LINK (+15.9%) and UNI (+8.6%).Laggards: HBAR (-0.4%) and BTC (-0.4%). The <a href=”https://www.coindesk.com/indices/cd20/” target=”_blank”>CoinDesk 20</a> is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally. Read the full article here