Author: Coindesk

The U.S. dollar is a global reserve and invoicing currency, playing a major role in international debt, non-bank borrowing, and global trade. When the dollar appreciates, USD-denominated debt becomes expensive, which, in turn, disincentivizes risk-taking in financial markets. A weaker dollar has the opposite effect. As such, over the years, bitcoin and the broader crypto market have tended to move in the opposite direction of the DXY, just as stocks and gold. Read the full article here

The HBAR token is still up by 61% over the past 24 hours, but the 2% market depth remains relatively thin, with $900,000 in cumulative bids on the Binance and Upbit order books within 2% of the current price of 14 cents. The token has over $2.6 billion in trading volume over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. Read the full article here

FalconX’s Prime Connect, unveiled on Tuesday, also includes post-trade settlement, institutional-grade credit, and portfolio margining, the company said in a press release shared with CoinDesk. Deribit, the world’s leading crypto options exchange, is the first to integrate FalconX’s prime broking and custody solution. Read the full article here

The SEC’s proposal asked the court to order Ripple Labs to pay $876 million in disgorgement, $198 million in prejudgment interest, and a $876 million civil penalty, amounting to a total of $1.95 billion. The court had found Ripple violated federal securities laws by making institutional sales of XRP but dismissed similar allegations by the SEC that the sale of XRP on exchanges and through algorithms also violated the law. Read the full article here

Tokens associated with Bitcoin layer 2 solutions have outperformed bitcoin (BTC) since the Bitcoin blockchain’s highly-anticipated mining reward halving took effect early Saturday. STX, the native token of leading Bitcoin layer 2 network Stacks, has risen nearly 20% to $2.87 since quadrennial halving reduced the per block coin emission to 3.125 BTC from 6.25 BTC, according to data source CoinGecko. Bitcoin, meanwhile, has gained just over 4.7% to $66,300. STX is one of the best-performing top 25 cryptocurrencies of the past 24 hours, per Velo Data. Other layer 2 coins, like Elastos’ ELA token and SatoshiVM’s SAVM, have risen 11%…

In the lead-up to going live, ZKasino opened up a token bridge that allowed investors to deposit ether (ETH) to earn ZKAS, the platform’s native token. Originally, the website said that bridged ether would be “returned” once the bridging period was over, that wording has since been removed. Read the full article here

Michael Welsh, a former lead attorney on the Debt Box case, and Joseph Watkins, an investigative attorney whose declaration served as the foundation for the SEC’s case against Debt Box, were reportedly forced to step down or else be terminated, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the situation. Read the full article here

On the longer outlook, though, the past three halvings were followed by an exponential move higher for bitcoin’s price about 50-100 days after the event, crypto hedge fund QCP Capital pointed out in a Monday market update. “If this pattern is repeated this time, BTC bulls still have a few weeks to build a larger long position,” the report said. Read the full article here

Called Nakamoto, honoring Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, the upgrade will decouple the Stacks block production schedule from Bitcoin’s. Although the layer-2 network has a higher transaction throughput than Bitcoin (which processes about 7 transactions per second), as initially designed, Stacks produced blocks at the same rate as Bitcoin, leading to congestion issues, network creator Muneeb Ali told CoinDesk. Read the full article here

The launch of Runes, a new protocol that enables the creation of meme coins on Bitcoin, coincided with the halving. Already hundreds of tokens have launched, contributing over $80 million in fees to bitcoin miners. This increased trading activity has also driven up the costs associated with sending a transaction on Bitcoin, with the current average price over $70, an increase of 1,395.8% over the trailing 30 day average, according to TokenTerminal. Read the full article here