Author: Coindesk
South Koreans are paying a full 3% more to buy bitcoin (BTC) than their U.S. counterparts as they seek protection from the plummeting won, CryptoQuant data show.Priced in won, the largest cryptocurrency is valued at 145,000,000 ($98,600) on the country’s largest crypto exchange, Upbit. That compares with about $96,700 on Coinbase (COIN). The move follows a vote by the South Korean parliament to impeach Han Duck-soo, the prime minister and acting president, just weeks after impeaching President Yoon Suk Yeol. The won slumped a 15-year low against the dollar.”This unfolding saga is fundamentally about election fraud and the erosion of…
A Pump.Fun memecoin zoomed from zero to an $80 million market capitalization on Thursday after a father’s plea for donations into a research study for his daughter’s rare brain cancer attracted swathes of crypto traders.The token’s prices have since fallen 80% since a Thursday peak and trade at just over a cent as of Friday. But while late buyers are sitting on losses, the effort still raised over $1 million for the cause.In an X post on Thursday, Runaway founder Siqi Chen said his daughter Mira was diagnosed with a type of brain tumor in September and that research and…
With much of the globe celebrating Christmas, bitcoin (BTC) quietly appeared set to retake the $100,000 level after having fallen to below $93,000 just ahead of the holiday.The rally, however, stalled at just above $99,800 as Asia opened for business on Thursday morning and declined rapidly to roughly $95,000 only a few hours later.Bitcoin at press time was trading at $95,300, down 3.1% over the past 24 hours.The broader CoinDesk 20 Index was lower by 4.2% over the same time frame, with ETH, SOL, XRP, ADA and AVAX among cryptos in that gauge sporting 4%-7% losses.U.S. markets are open on…
The X account of Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu, one of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024, was compromised and used to promote a fictitious token, the company said in a post on the social media platform.Animoca, a metaverse and gaming venture capital firm, posted a warning on its own account at 01:36 UTC on Thursday saying Siu’s account had been compromised and the company was not introducing an official token or non-fungible token (NFT). ‼️🚨 Unfortunately @ysiu social media account has been compromised. There is no official token or NFT launch from Animoca Brands. The token launch on Solana as claimed…
Regulatory overhaul in America and a thawing of crypto antagonism globally in 2025 will usher in a new generation of decentralized capital formation, which was first popularized in 2017 as “ICOs” (initial coin offerings).During the 2010s, crypto hadn’t settled on a productive use case for Bitcoin and altcoins until Ethereum smart contracts enabled early-stage teams to raise capital from supporters dispersed around the world. We saw Ethereum bootstrap a global decentralized computer which spawned DeFi, NFTs and various crypto primitives funded by less than $20 million raised from a global community.Many other projects soon followed suit and we observed a…
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 3333.82, down 5.0% (-176.57) since 4 pm ET on Wednesday.None of the 20 assets are trading higher.Leaders: ETH (-3.7%) and BTC (-3.7%).Laggards: HBAR (-8.2%) and APT (-7.4%).The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally. Read the full article here
Six mutual funds tracking the price of bitcoin (BTC) will debut in Israel next week after the Israel Securities Authority (ISA) granted permission for the products, Calcalist reported on Wednesday.All six will start operations on the same day, Dec. 31, a condition imposed by the regulator, Calcalist said. Final approval for the funds was granted last week.The funds will be offered by Migdal Capital Markets, More, Ayalon, Phoenix Investment, Meitav and IBI, with management fees ranging from as high as 1.5% to 0.25%. One of the funds will be actively managed, trying to beat bitcon’s performance. They will initially transact…
Meme-turned-utility project Floki is working with an unidentified asset manager to develop an exchange-traded product (ETP) tracking its FLOKI token that could be available to investors in Europe early in the new year, one of the developers told CoinDesk.If approved, FLOKI would be the only meme token other than dogecoin (DOGE) with an institutional product in Europe.“We’ve been actively working with a respected Asset Manager and an ETP Issuer to launch a Floki ETP (Exchange-Traded Product) for quite a while now, and after months of due diligence and painstaking effort, we’ve been told that the Floki ETP is on track…
This is the third in a series of stories examining the crypto industry’s high-stakes 2024 foray into politics and campaigning. The first explored the electoral track record of Fairshake PAC’s strategy and the second its intense use of a 2010 Supreme Court stance.The leaders of the companies responsible for the river of money that flooded U.S. political shores this year have already benefited tremendously from the outcome of last month’s election — increasing their personal fortunes by billions of dollars, far outpacing the large spending they devoted to crypto-friendly candidates.Coinbase Inc. (COIN) CEO Brian Armstrong and his company devoted some…
One of the most significant emerging trends of 2024 has been the interplay between artificial intelligence (AI) and the crypto ecosystem. Historically this has primarily been on the infrastructure side, affecting various layers of the stack such as decentralized compute, storage and model training and inference. However, the last few months the crypto x AI crossover has taken stage front and center as agents have surfaced and are multiplying by the thousands. While the AI agent narrative has taken up a lot of mindshare of late, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what we’re going to see in 2025.What are…