Author: Coindesk

“Good artists copy, great artists steal,” was a favorite saying of Apple’s Steve Jobs to explain his company’s blatant copying of technology from Xerox.Fast forward to the Web3 era, and BitMEX CEO Stephan Lutz, who was appointed to the role in late 2022, says he’s fine with competitors copying the crypto exchange’s invention of the perpetual swap, the financial instrument that underpins the crypto derivatives market. The more traders access the tool, the healthier the market, the logic goes.“It was copied by everyone, because that’s just open-source know-how,” Lutz said in an interview with CoinDesk. The whole world works on…

Here’s the new political calculus for a U.S. congressional candidate: You nod to crypto and say you’re on the pro-innovation side, and chances are, a million dollars (or more) could drop from the sky to pay for TV spots that highlight your strengths or pillory your opponent.In any of hundreds of lesser known districts of the House of Representatives, a few hundred thousand dollars tends to make or break a candidate. When the leading crypto-driven political action committee notices you, a massive influx of cash can pave your way straight to Congress. The Fairshake super PAC isn’t subtle. It’s nuclear.…

As (literally) a thousand DePIN projects bloomed in 2024, they could thank one decentralized physical infrastructure network in particular for showing the way: Helium. The original DePIN (before DePIN was a word), Helium was started by Amir Haleem, Shawn Fanning, and Sean Carey all the way back in 2013. It took until 2019 for the team to deploy IoT hotspots, allowing users to share wireless coverage and earn tokens.Of course, it’s harder to deploy hardware to people’s homes than it is to issue a memecoin on Pump.Fun. And as chief operating officer at Helium for the last seven years, Frank…

Howard Lutnick’s firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, is a prominent Wall Street bond broker and a member of an exclusive club: It’s a primary dealer that gets to trade directly with the Federal Reserve. So when Lutnick — Tether’s U.S. Treasuries dealer — said this year that Tether actually has the money it says is backing its huge USDT stablecoin, that put a final nail in the coffin of conspiracy theories claiming otherwise.Lutnick’s other source of influence is being a supporter of crypto — well, he’s specific: just bitcoin and stablecoins — in close orbit around President-elect Donald Trump, serving now as…

Under Fred Thiel’s leadership, MARA Holdings (MARA) — previously known as Marathon Digital Holdings — has become not only one of the largest bitcoin miners in the world but also the second-largest corporate owner of bitcoin, with about $3.9 billion worth on its balance sheet.Thiel joined the mining company in 2018 as a director and was appointed CEO in 2021. Since then, he has navigated through the bull market of 2021 and the subsequent brutal crypto winter. His company has been focused on a bitcoin-centric business model, while other miners had to pivot to artificial intelligence-related computing as the industry…

The relentless efforts by Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley and chief investment officer Matt Hougan’s to bring institutional money into crypto for the past seven years finally paid off when spot ETFs for both bitcoin and ether were approved by the SEC earlier this year. The digital asset manager launched funds for both, taking its assets under management to north of $10 billion, and a third ETF for Solana may be in the offing soon as well. But their efforts in the crypto space go much further than that, as the two regularly share insights with their sizable social media followings…

XRP, the native token of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) network, surged during the U.S. afternoon hours on Tuesday as Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the company’s much-anticipated stablecoin obtained regulatory approval from the New York Department of Financial Services.”This just in…we have final approval from NYDFS for RLUSD! Exchange and partner listings will be live soon,” Garlinghouse posted on X.XRP rallied 10% following Garlinghouse’s announcement in a broader crypto market bounce, erasing today’s losses. The token was up 6.8% over the past 24 hours, outperforming bitcoin (BTC) and the broad market CoinDesk 20 Index. The XRPL network was developed by…

Early traders of NFT marketplace Magic Eden’s new token ME had a lot to be thankful for – if they could access their airdrops, that is.In the first minutes of trading Tuesday, the token’s fully diluted valuation hit $15 billion. But as more claimants managed to process their airdrops – and in some lucky cases, sell – that valuation began to crater. It eventually settled at an FDV around $5 billion.ME’s rocky rollout stood in sharp contrast to other recent token launches. Hyperliquid’s HYPE token immediately went parabolic after launching in late November. And Move’s days-old MOVE token had a…

El Salvador and Argentina are partnering to help develop the crypto industry in Latin America.Juan Carlos Reyes, El Salvador’s top crypto regulator and president of the Comisión Nacional de Activos Digitales (CNAD), and Roberto Silva, the president of the Comisión Nacional de Valores of Argentina (CNV), on Tuesday signed an agreement for the two countries to collaborate on crypto regulation.“At CNAD we have two core objectives, when it comes to international collaboration,” Reyes told CoinDesk in an email. “To share our expertise with international partners, enabling them to harness the benefits of a well-regulated industry. … [And] to broaden the…

A deputy in the Russian parliament proposed the creation of a strategic bitcoin (BTC) reserve to tackle sanctions imposed on the country, state-owned news agency Ria reported on Monday.Anton Tkachev of the New People party, which formed in 2020 and has 16 out of the 450 seats in the State Duma, asked Finance Minister Anton Siluanov to “assess the feasibility of creating a strategic bitcoin reserve in Russia by analogy with state reserve in traditional currencies.”The reserve would help counter the threat posed to Russian financial stability by sanctions, inflation and the volatility of traditional currencies that the country holds,…