Author: Coindesk

However, the general public’s distaste of NFTs hasn’t stopped the art industry from embracing them. In 2021, Christie’s auction house made history with the $69 million sale of Beeple’s “Everydays” collage. Since then, the storied company has expanded further into the realm of crypto, including countless NFT auctions, investments in Web3 firms via Christie’s Ventures and even the launch of its own NFT marketplace, Christie’s 3.0. Read the full article here

EigenDA, the first AVS to launch, is built by Eigen Labs as a way to help other blockchain protocols store transaction data and other information. It will compete with similar protocols, like Celestia, that have quickly become critical pieces of blockchain infrastructure as the industry has expanded. Read the full article here

NEW YORK – To federal prosecutors, Avi Eisenberg’s $110 million crypto trade on Mango Markets put a digital twist on an old scam. But to the DeFi trader’s defense team, it was a legitimate windfall from the risky world of crypto, where finance’s old rules don’t apply. Read the full article here

“I, for one, would like to look at the possibility of working with [the Treasury Department] to address some of the things in your punch list that we agree with, so that we may be able to get regulations on the books in this Congress that will certainly not go as far some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to go, but [will be] far short of the wild, wild West that we find ourselves in now,” Tillis said. Read the full article here

But that’s not the only way Lazzarin thinks a16z’s research initiatives can help advance the firm’s bottom line. The code for Jolt has been open-sourced, meaning anyone can theoretically use or repurpose it without paying a16z. “Because we’re long-term investors, we don’t trade day-to-day, week-to-week, or even month-to-month,” said Lazzarin. “We benefit most if the space advances fastest over the next five to 10 years, and so our incentive is purely to advance everyone through public goods that we will never monetize.” Read the full article here

“Zeta’s vision from day one has been to make decentralized finance a viable alternative to centralized, black-box financial systems. With a platform that has already stood the test of time and facilitated billions in volume for tens of thousands of traders, we’re excited to launch Z, the governance token of Zeta, to closely align the long-term interests of users with the protocol,” Tristan Frizza, Founder of Zeta Markets said. Read the full article here

Solana is conducting pilots with Visa and Shopify, but it’s unclear whether the blockchain can break into more mainstream consumer and business-to-business payments, which would require a massive jump in scalability, the note said.“Scalability requirements for consumer payments would require 15-20 fold growth from here (Solana ~700 TPS versus 10K+ for payment networks), and general purpose blockchains are yet to cross that chasm,” the report added.Read more: Stablecoin USDC Is Making a Comeback: Coinbase Read the full article here

As ether (ETH) prices rallied and bitcoin (BTC) fell during the early hours of the East Asia trading day, Toncoin (TON) outperformed the market, climbing almost 17% and displacing Cardano as the 10th-largest token by market capitalization. A trader on X said the token could be rallying due to positive ecosystem news. He said USDT on TON is expected to be announced at the Token 2049 conference in Dubai next week. The Ton Network was initially a spinoff from Telegram, with development starting as early as 2018. Telegram stopped work on the network in 2020 following legal action from the…

The fundraising also involved Multicoin, Hack VC, ParaFi Capital, Nascent, Draper Associates, Primitive Ventures, Asymmetric Ventures and Dan Held, and DCF God, Thesis said Tuesday. Mezo is a “permissionless Bitcoin economic layer that leverages a neutral smart contract infrastructure” to offer a wide range of applications for users, Thesis said. It is designed to amplify the Bitcoin blockchain’s infrastructure and provide cheap and fast transactions by allowing users “to access applications that use Bitcoin for everything, enabling a thriving circular economy,” the venture firm said. Mezo will go live with support from Thesis’ bitcoin-backed Ethereum token tBTC, which allows users…

On Monday, 12.95 million BTC, equating to 65.84% of the circulating supply of 19.67 million BTC, remained unchanged for over a year, the lowest percentage since October 2022. The metric peaked above 70% with the debut of nearly a dozen spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the U.S. in mid-January and has been falling ever since. Read the full article here