Author: Coindesk

Trump has named his transition team co-chair, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, as commerce secretary. Earlier, Lutnick was fiercely jockeying to become treasury secretary, which now looks to be going to Key Square Group founder Scott Bessent, Apollo Global Management CEO Mark Rowan or former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh, who are top contenders. Read the full article here

“We feel that the ‘easy’ part of the rally has been done and the next stage will be much trickier with more price choppiness and potential for drawdowns,” Augustine Fan, head of insights at SOFA, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. “Bitcoin dominance remains on a one-way trend higher reminiscent of the mega-cap dominance in SPX, and is not particularly desirable for this stage of the crypto ecosystem.” Read the full article here

Cantor Fitzgerald’s history is marred by tragedy: 658 of its employees were killed on 9/11, almost one-third of its global team. Because it lost so many workers, the company was forced to embrace electronic trading instead of how things conventionally worked in the Treasury market: human brokers calling or visiting clients. Today, Wall Street is embracing crypto and blockchains as a way to disrupt old ways of doing business and keeping records. Read the full article here

Imagine a situation where an agent engages another agent to complete a specific task such as paying invoices and following up with clients via emails. In this scenario, agents might receive numerous of those tasks, with payments unlocked as these tasks are completed( ex: an invoice is successfully paid). The nascent state of the AI agent market is a challenge to making any of these scenarios work in practice. Therefore, the evolution of payment transactions in agentic workflows will likely not follow a straightforward path to crypto adoption and may undergo several iterations. Read the full article here

“Upon completion of the acquisition, Paxos will be a fully licensed EMI in Finland and the EU,” the company said Tuesday. “Paxos intends to make its portfolio of assets and tokenization solutions compliant with Markets in Crypto Asset (MiCA) regulations.” Read the full article here

Bybit, Bitget and OKX, three of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, all prohibit traders from the U.S., where the companies are not licensed. Yet in August, the three exchanges combined had almost a million monthly active users (MAUs) in the U.S., according to research by Sensor Tower obtained by CoinDesk. Read the full article here

Bitcoin ETF options trading in the U.S. is expected to start today. Options on BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) ETF cleared the last regulatory hurdle on Monday, and they could bring more institutional appetite for the largest cryptocurrency. “This marks a monumental shift,” 10x Research said in a Tuesday newsletter. The products “could attract significant trading volumes, potentially driving sharp price rallies in bitcoin,” it said. For example, MicroStrategy (MSTR), the Nasdaq-listed company that owns the largest corporate BTC treasury in the world, is punching above its weight due to the booming market in its share options. MSTR options open…

Futures and options account for a huge amount of trading in traditional markets, but crypto derivatives are disproportionately small, CEO James Davies, a co-founder of the company, said. Large centralized exchanges historically opted for payments licenses, which didn’t allow for derivatives trading, though a gap in the regulations regarding perpetuals allowed those products to be introduced. Read the full article here

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The hashprice, a measure of mining profitability, “increased 29% since the end of October as the BTC rally outpaced network hashrate growth and transaction fees increased as a percentage of the block reward,” analysts Reginald Smith and Charles Pearce wrote. Read the full article here