Author: Coindesk

Variational, a protocol enabling leveraged peer-to-peer trading for customizable crypto derivatives, announced Wednesday it has secured $10.3 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and Peak XV Partners (FKA Sequoia India) with support from Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, North Island Ventures, HackVC, Brevan Howard, and many other VCs, angel investors, and industry leaders. Read the full article here

Crypto markets have shown explosive growth, far outpacing traditional asset classes in terms of returns. For example, bitcoin has delivered an annualized return of 230% over the past decade, compared to the S&P 500’s annualized return of around 11%. Ether, another dominant cryptocurrency, has also offered triple-digit annual growth rates in its early years. Even with their volatility, these digital assets provide investors with the potential for significantly higher returns, particularly during periods of market expansion. Read the full article here

First, and perhaps foremost, the Fed would be conflicted. As an alternative payment service, stablecoins compete with the Fed’s own payment infrastructure, including FedNow, the central bank’s instant payment service. The Fed’s consideration of a central bank digital currency would leave it further conflicted when regulating privately issued stablecoins, as those two digital representations of the dollar can be seen as substitutes. Any government body, the Fed included, would struggle to objectively analyze private payment innovations that compete with its own services. Giving the Fed the authority to regulate stablecoins unfairly stacks the deck against payment alternatives. Simply put, the…

The new DEX’s aim is to eliminate the practice of mempool sniping, which is when users exploit the time lag in which a transaction is waiting to be added to a Bitcoin block. Under the blockchain’s design, the “mempool” is the queue where transactions sit waiting to be added to new blocks by Bitcoin miners. Read the full article here

Another example: Whether you’re mining bitcoin or running an AI cluster, machines must be cooled to avoid overheating – but the optimal cooling method will depend on the application, Cann said. Most bitcoin rigs are cooled by fans or by being submerged in a pool of dielectric fluid, which comes at little cost. The GPUs used for AI, on the other hand, require some form of air conditioning, or to pass fluid over the machine’s silicon chip – two methods that consume large amounts of energy. Other differences emerge when you look at the kind of hard drives used for…

“Falsely claiming that ordinary people of ordinary wealth are extraordinarily rich exposes them to threats like robbery and kidnapping,” Todd told Wired. “Not only is the question dumb, it’s dangerous. Satoshi obviously didn’t want to be found, for good reasons, and no one should help people trying to find Satoshi.” Read the full article here

From November 2023 to July 2024, we saw over 30,000 bitcoin leave miner wallets, one of the longest distribution periods from miners on record. However, we can now observe that since July, miner balances have been relatively flat and have shown signs of accumulation, telling us remaining miners on average can handle the new environment. Read the full article here

“Partisia was founded to tackle a critical ‘real world’ challenge: enabling collaboration on sensitive data without compromising privacy,” Youngman said. “Our blockchain draws on decades of cryptographic expertise from pioneers like Ivan Damgård allowing us to build solutions that not only overcome barriers to real-world adoption but also create entirely new business models, giving individuals and enterprises unprecedented control over their data.” Read the full article here

Christensen wrote that three proposals are being considered to address community concerns: continue with Sky as the core brand to build on its recent momentum, recenter the Maker brand with its original identity and reinstate MKR as the sole governance token, or bring Maker back with a refreshed brand that aligns with the current ecosystem while maintaining its established trust and stability. Read the full article here

The broad-based CoinDesk 20 (CD20), a liquid index tracking the largest tokens by market capitalization, fell nearly 2% while bitcoin lost 1%. Traders, however, foresee a run to $80,000 in the coming weeks as the U.S. elections draw near, regardless of who is elected president. Read the full article here