Author: Coindesk
If you asked a cypherpunk in the 1990s about their worst-case scenario for the future of money, they probably would have described something very close to Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). The fight against financial surveillance was fundamental for Bitcoin’s early instigators, and CBDCs go against everything they stand for: privacy, decentralization and individual sovereignty.In “The Cypherpunk Manifesto” (1993), Eric Hughes argued that cryptography should protect individual freedoms, not be a tool for centralized control. Bitcoin, born out of concerns over financial censorship and systemic instability, represents an alternative to traditional monetary systems. While central banks typically operate with a…
Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Ben Schiller, CoinDesk’s Opinion and Features editor.In this issue:Can Based Rollups solve Ethereum’s problem?Lido goes modularUniswap finally unveils UnichainEthereum’s Pectra upgrade is comingNetwork newsBASED ROLLUPS TO THE RESCUE: In recent years, Ethereum has embraced a layer-2 scaling roadmap—a plan that encouraged the development of third-party auxiliary networks called “layer-2 rollups”—to help scale the base Ethereum ecosystem. Offloading activity to these upstart networks has helped bring down fees and improve speeds for end-users, but it has led to a massive, deeply fragmented ecosystem of…
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 3136.62, down 0.6% (-20.46) since 4 p.m. ET on Tuesday.Six of 20 assets are trading higher.Leaders: APT (+1.8%) and DOT (+1.7%).Laggards: LTC (-4.7%) and HBAR (-3.9%).The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally. Read the full article here
Alexander Vinnik, the jailed former operator of once mighty bitcoin exchange BTC-e, is being released from U.S. custody as part of a prisoner exchange with Russia.Vinnik, 44, is being swapped with jailed American teacher Marc Fogel, who returned to the U.S. last night after negotiators struck a surprise breakthrough with the Kremlin. It had not immediately been clear who was on the other side of the deal.But BTC-e was one of the early exchanges that popularized the buying and selling of the world’s most popular digital asset. It had over 1 million customers and moved over $9 billion of transactions…
In traditional finance, the “risk-free rate,” the interest rate an investor can expect to earn on an investment that carries zero risk, serves as a fundamental benchmark for all investment decisions. Today, DeFi has quietly established its own equivalent: the base rate for lending stablecoins. Through battle-tested protocols like Morpho and Aave, lenders can now access double-digit yields that substantially outperform traditional fixed-income instruments, all while maintaining remarkable transparency and efficiency.The emergence of this new base rate isn’t just a passing trend — it’s a structural shift that challenges traditional finance by demonstrating the market-driven sustainability of high-yield, low-risk on-chain…
Crypto mid-caps are struggling. While some digital asset investors may seek hidden gems and future powerhouses in the next tier of market capitalization and liquidity, that pursuit has generally not been rewarded. Furthermore, mid-caps have delivered significantly higher volatility. Less reward, more risk. What gives?Is this a mirror of “Mag 7” dominance in equities, a lack of promising assets in the mid tier or just the future of finance taking longer to bear fruit than we previously thought?You’re reading Crypto Long & Short, our weekly newsletter featuring insights, news and analysis for the professional investor. Sign up here to get…
Circle’s USDC, the second-largest stablecoin on the market, rose to a record market capitalization over $56 billion this week as stablecoin growth showed signs of reaccelerating.USDC added $10.2 billion to its market cap over the past month, driven primarily by rising Solana-based DeFi trading volumes, Artemis data shows. That’s more than double the $4.6 billion growth of Tether’s USDT, the largest stablecoin in the market and Circle’s biggest competitor, during the same period. USDT still dominates the stablecoin space with a $142 billion market cap.With the latest growth spurt, USDC surpassed its 2022 peak and fully recovered from the 2023…
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) likely doesn’t have jurisdiction over many of the memecoins flooding the crypto market, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg.“We always have to look at the facts and circumstances, but many of the memecoins that are out there probably do not have a home in the SEC under our current set of regulations,” Peirce said. “If that’s something Congress wants to address, they can do that. Maybe that’s something that the [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] wants to address. But many of those, I think, are probably not within our…
President Donald Trump is just about done naming the key figures he’s seeking to get into financial regulation posts that will direct the future oversight of the crypto industry, now including lawyer Jonathan Gould as a nominee to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that oversees U.S. national banks.With a widely circulated White House nominations document showing Trump has settled on Gould, a partner at law firm Jones Day who was a top lawyer at the OCC and a former crypto executive, and the president will reportedly nominate the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s Jonathan McKernan to run…
Franklin Templeton has made the OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX), the third-largest tokenized money market fund, available on Solana in another signal of growing interest in the blockchain.The fund is already available on Ethereum, Coinbase’s Base, Aptos and Avalanche, which were all added last year. The Stellar network functions as the primary blockchain. The asset manager announced the expansion on Wednesday.Solana has emerged as the leading venue for new tokens (mostly memecoins) and decentralized trading. It now accounts for over 90% of all new tokens appearing on decentralized exchanges (DEX), according to a Pantera Capital report. That’s up…