Author: Coindesk

First, even the best-staffed teams in crypto are lean compared to traditional corporate setups. If these teams are meant to focus on driving adoption, who really benefits when we pull large portions of them away, covering $1,000+ conference tickets, flights, hotels, daily stipends for food and transport — and worse, the lost hours spent traveling, multiplied by their pay? In all honesty, the only true product-market fit this industry seems to have found is in hosting events. Read the full article here

Historically, institutions have hesitated to move on-chain due to regulatory risks. However, with bitcoin ETF AUM inflows on track to surpass the gold ETFs’ AUM within a year, finance and tech companies exploring the technology and offering crypto products, and corporates adding digital assets to their balance sheets, institutional interest in crypto has never been higher. That said, the coexistence of off-chain and on-chain capital thus far has mainly involved using on-chain capital to capture off-chain yield (e.g., Tether purchasing billions of dollars in U.S. treasuries). With regulatory clarity, we are now in the early stages of off-chain capital moving…

“I don’t think the competition for power from AI facilities will significantly impact hashprice,” Mellerud said. “The Bitcoin mining network is a self-correcting mechanism, so reduced hashrate in one country will simply increase profitability of miners in another country, giving them more room to grow.” “My thesis is that the U.S. will have less than 20% of the hashrate by 2030 due to competition from AI facilities, while hashrate will grow elsewhere, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia,” Mellerud added. Read the full article here

“If you ask five people: ‘What is Bittensor?’ You will get five different answers,” Silbert, a cryptocurrency OG investor and evangelist, said in an interview. “If you remember early bitcoin, some people would say it’s money, some people would say it’s gold. Some people would say it’s this blockchain […] The way that I look at Bittensor is as the World Wide Web of AI.” Read the full article here

Wang immediately met with prosecutors after FTX’s collapse, making him one of two key cooperating witnesses in Bankman Fried’s trial, alongside former Alameda Research CEO and Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend, Caroline Ellison. For that, he deserved a “world of credit,” Kaplan told Wang during his sentencing. Read the full article here

The heady growth is about as preordained as anything could be in DeFi. Sky is spending $2 million a month to incentivize traders that swap into USDS and deploy it, said Rooter, the pseudonymous leader of borrow and lend protocol Save, which is handing out 400,000 worth of USDS a month to suppliers of the new stablecoin. Read the full article here

“In just 1.5 months since the platform debuted, it saw already 13.6K plus memecoins launch with an overall volume of $430 million,” GraFun told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. “Even when only operating on one chain, it became the top-performing memecoin launchpad on any EVM-compatible chain.” Read the full article here

Bitcoin (BTC) is eyeing record highs once again heading into Wednesday’s U.S. session. The largest crypto is trading just below $94,000, the new record from Tuesday, and leading the broader market with a 2% climb over the past 24 hours. Meanwhile, the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index was little changed and large-cap altcoins ether (ETH) and solana (SOL) fell. Options on BlackRock’s spot bitcoin ETF (IBIT) saw staggering first-day trading activity yesterday, pushing the BTC price higher, analysts noted. Most of the activity focused on calls, representing a bullish view, with some traders betting on a doubling of IBIT’s share price.…

Park explained on X that the exercisable risk, representing the total value of option contracts exercised or converted to actual shares, equates to less than 0.5% of IBIT’s outstanding shares. Meanwhile, the industry standard is closer to 7%, which would represent a comparative figure of 7%. To show how small the 0.5% figure is, bitcoin CME futures contracts are allowed to trade 2,000 contracts, which is the equivalent of 175,000 for IBIT. Read the full article here

IBIT options went live Tuesday in a first, a move that market participants widely expect to draw more institutional interest in bitcoin (BTC). In September, the U.S. SEC approved options for several of the 11 spot bitcoin ETFs on several exchanges, and more options products are expected to be available in the coming days. Read the full article here