Author: Coindesk

21X, a Frankfurt-based company building a blockchain-based exchange to list and trade tokenized securities, has received approval to go live from Germany’s financial supervisory authority, BaFin.The 21X exchange, which runs on the scalable Polygon chain, plans to launch its exchange for tokenized financial instruments from its Frankfurt headquarters in the first quarter of 2025, the company said on Tuesday.The plan is to trade tokenized equity, debt securities, funds, as well as more exotic real-world assets (RWAs) such as real estate or artworks that qualify as eligible financial instruments.Tokenization has become popular among traditional finance firms, with the likes of asset…

Michael Saylor’s pitch to Microsoft’s (MSFT) board on whether the software giant should add bitcoin to its balance sheet is unlikely to get shareholder approval, with Polymarket bettors only giving an 11% chance of it being approved.(Polymarket) Each bet comprises a “Yes” and a “No” side. Each share pays out $1 in USDC, a stablecoin, or cryptocurrency that trades at par with the U.S. dollar, if the prediction comes true, and zero if not.In October, a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research urged Microsoft to add bitcoin to its balance sheet as a diversification investment, but the…

The Ethereum blockchain’s transactional revenue has increased substantially since Donald Trump’s U.S. election victory, Steno Research said in a Monday report.”This outcome is crucial for all onchain activity,” wrote analyst Mads Eberhardt.The surge has led to higher staking rewards and more ether (ETH) being burned via transaction fees, the report said.”This combination strengthen’s Ethereum’s tokenomics,” Steno said, making ether a more appealing asset.Steno noted that the amount of USDT on the Ethereum network surpassed supply on the Tron blockchain for the first time in more than two years. This is a clear sign that on-chain activity is booming, resulting in…

XRP prices have zoomed 430% in the past 30 days, reaching price levels last seen in 2018 and leaving scores of Crypto Twitter traders surprised with the strength. The rise started in early November after the Republican victory in the U.S. election reignited investor confidence in tokens linked to U.S. companies, including XRP’s associated Ripple Labs.Large holders are playing a key role in contributing to the move. CryptoQuant data shows whale activity – which tracks movements from large wallets to and from exchanges – has been consistently elevated since the past month, multiples higher than any other period.XRP’s whale activity…

DeFi protocol Ethena announced Tuesday a new partnership with Derive.xyz, the world’s leading on-chain options and structured products platform, featuring a multi-million dollar investment to enhance liquidity and drive growth for both protocols.Under the partnership, Ethena will integrate Derive’s basis trading, options, futures and vaults, leveraging Ethena’s USDe stablecoin and staked USDE to boost liquidity and trading volume, the press release shared with CoinDesk said. Ethena will begin its basis trading on Derive’s perpetual markets, pending approval from the Ethena Risk Council. That’s expected to boost volumes and liquidity on Derive, bolstering Derive users’ ability to execute large orders at…

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 3696.8, up 5.6% (+195.83) since 4 pm ET on Friday.Three of 13 assets are trading higher.Leaders: HBAR (+42.3%) and XRP (+38.5%).Laggards: SOL (-7.4%) and RENDER (-4.5%).The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally. Read the full article here

During the dog days of summer, Polymarket’s election betting surged on (correct) speculation that the Democrats would make a “hot swap” of Joe Biden for Kamala Harris as their presidential candidate. Trading volume grew and grew through the fall. All along, doubts lingered about whether the platform’s trader base would hold steady after the ballots were cast.On Election Day, the research arm of gaming and VC giant Animoca put out a report with a bold prediction: there’s nothing for Polymarket to worry about. The crypto-based prediction market, according to the report, had a significant base of non-election bettors to carry…

EDX Markets, the institution-only crypto exchange that started operations in June 2023 with support from Wall Street giants like Fidelity, Charles Schwab and Citadel Securities, has appointed its current chief technology officer, Tony Acuña-Rohter, as CEO.Wall Street veteran Jamil Nazarali, the founder and current CEO of the exchange, will move to the position of executive chairman of the board, according to a press release.Acuña-Rohter previously served as the chief technology officer of the firm since joining in 2022. Before EDX, he was the CTO of ErisX, a crypto firm acquired by Cboe in late 2021 that led to the start…

BitGo, a cryptocurrency custodian that has been meeting companies’ safekeeping needs since 2013, said it is introducing a dedicated retail platform for everyday crypto investors.The retail custody offering is live for all global investors and provides the same institutional-grade security guarantees under the hood that the firm’s existing customers are familiar with, CEO Mike Belshe said in an interview.In fact, the very first incarnation of BitGo was kind of a retail-ish website, he said.“What we quickly found back then was building a business around security turned out to be kind of the bigger play for us,” Belshe said. “I’ve always…

Bitcoin (BTC) daily mining revenue and gross profit rose in November as the world’s largest cryptocurrency hit record highs, but it is still about 50% below pre-halving levels, JPMorgan (JPM) said in a research report Monday.”We estimate that bitcoin miners earned an average of $52,000 per EH/s in daily block reward revenue in November, up 24% from October,” analysts Reginald Smith and Charles Pearce wrote.The bank noted that transaction fees on the network spiked following the U.S. Nov. 5 presidential election and this provided some “hashprice relief.” The hashprice is a measure of mining profitability.The total market cap of the…