Author: Coindesk
Michael Sonnenshein, the former CEO of Grayscale Investments, has joined Aptos Labs as an adviser alongside OpenAI’s chief product officer, Kevin Weil.Aptos Labs, the developer of layer-1 blockchain Aptos, said in an email it will harness Sonnenshein’s knowledge to bring more traditional financial institutions to the network.Weil, who is also a former vice president of product at Facebook owner Meta (META), will advise Aptos Labs on AI strategies for blockchain applications.Sonnenshein stepped down as Grayscale’s CEO in May after 10 years with the company, during which the digital asset management company grew its flagship Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) into the pre-eminent…
Memecoins are the most divisive topic in crypto.By memecoins, I mean tokens that represent an idea and fluctuate in price based on the attention that idea receives. The best meme investors tend to be young people who are very online and attuned to internet culture. Memecoins are commonly juxtaposed with tokens that possess actual utility within protocols, or so-called utility tokens.Even with market caps surging and retail interest growing, most people tend to describe them as “stupid,” “degenerate,” or a “casino.” This includes the vast majority of crypto VCs, perhaps because their investment mandates tend to exclude memecoins (which can…
After a prolonged downtrend relative to bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum’s ether (ETH) is showing signs of a resurgence.ETH, the second-largest cryptocurrency on the market, gained over 4% in the past 24 hours, while BTC lost 1.5% during the same time, dipping below $95,000 during the Monday session. ETH even outperformed the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index, which was up 0.5%.The outperformance happened as investors started to rotate capital to smaller, riskier cryptocurrencies over the weekend following the stall of bitcoin’s near-vertical surge since Donald Trump’s election victory. The ETH/BTC ratio, which measures ether’s strength vs. bitcoin, plummeted to as low as 0.0318…
What does the ragtag group including a fitness equipment maker, biopharmaceutical company and producer of battery materials have in common?Bitcoin, of course.As the cryptocurrency skyrockets to unheard-of levels this month, at least 12 publicly traded companies that previously had nothing to do with crypto announced they plan to buy bitcoin (BTC), choosing it as a modern — and, lately, quite profitable — place to park spare cash. It’s a path illuminated by Michael Saylor’s laser eyes since 2020, when he began converting his sleepy software maker MicroStrategy into a corporate vault for bitcoin.That’s turned MicroStrategy into a massive stock market…
The Donald Trump-backed cryptocurrency platform World Liberty Financial got off to a sluggish start, with investors buying far fewer of its WLFI tokens than the project hoped for.But now, Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun has just given it a significant boost, buying $30 million worth of WLFI.World Liberty is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform backed by the incoming U.S. president and all three of his sons. The project is run by a circle of Trump world insiders, crypto entrepreneurs and financial figures.Sun, meanwhile, is best known for establishing TRON, a blockchain platform mostly popular in Asia. He is also affiliated…
Avalanche, the eighth-largest blockchain by total value locked (TVL), is moving ahead with a major technical makeover.The Avalanche9000 upgrade went live in a test network environment (testnet) Monday, bringing the changes one step closer to the main network (mainnet), the Avalanche Foundation said.Avalanche9000 will be the largest upgrade that Avalanche has seen. It is designed to cut the costs of sending transactions, operating validators and building apps on the network, whose native token (AVAX) is the 11th-largest cryptocurrency, with a $16 billion market cap.The foundation is trying to attract developers to Avalanche and encourage users to create customized blockchains using…
Kalshi may have tarnished its regulatory halo by slinging mud at a competitor.Late Friday, Pirate Wires, a technology and culture publication owned by Founders Fund marketing executive Mike Solana, published a bombshell of a story. It documented how Kalshi, the U.S.-regulated prediction market, paid social media influencers to disparage crypto-based, offshore rival Polymarket and its CEO Shayne Coplan after the FBI raided Coplan’s home this month.Solana (no relation to the $120 billion cryptocurrency) disclosed up-front he had reasons to be biased and report what Kalshi allegedly did: Founder’s Fund is an investor in Polymarket, and Pirate Wires has a paid…
Cryptocurrency transactions are often anonymous, but they’re not private. In fact, they’re quite public. Anyone with the right technical know-how can see every transaction ever made on most publicly accessible blockchains.This radical transparency and traceability has made it easier (contrary to popular belief) for law enforcement to track stolen and laundered cryptocurrency across various transactions. But it has also made it easier for criminal crypto actors to trace certain transactions, and — by collecting enough data points — recognize the real-world identity of crypto users who would otherwise remain anonymous.Dramatic stories abound about violent home invasions targeting those with large…
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 3382.04, up 3.2% (+104.5) since 4 pm ET on Friday. Seventeen of 20 assets are trading higher.Leaders: XLM (+47.7%) and DOT (+37.1%).Laggards: SOL (-2.3%) and BTC (-1.8%).The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally. Read the full article here
Starting next Monday, First Mover Americas will become Crypto Daybook Americas, your new morning briefing on what happened in the crypto markets overnight and what’s expected during the coming day. Publishing at 7 a.m. ET, it will kickstart your morning with comprehensive insights. You won’t want to start your day without it.Latest PricesCoinDesk 20 Index: 3,433.47 +3.11%Bitcoin (BTC): $98,230.02 +0.33%Ether (ETH): $3,483 +4.89%S&P 500: 5,969.34 +0.35%Gold: $2,685.55 -1.13%Nikkei 225: 38,780.14 +1.3%Top StoriesBitcoin traded above $98,000 having dropped below $96,000 on Sunday. A pullback had been expected as traders took profits after last week’s surge to nearly $100,000. XRP and DOGE…