Author: Coindesk

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Ben Schiller, managing editor at CoinDesk.In this issue:Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade Goes LiveAvalanche Visa card launchedEthereum Foundation executive director leavingHackers using GitHub to steal bitcoinNetwork NewsPECTRA GOES LIVE ON TESTNET: Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade went live on the Holesky testnet Feb. 24 but failed to finalize in the expected time. The Pectra hard fork combines together 11 major upgrades, or “Ethereum improvement proposals” (EIPs), into one package. At the heart of this is EIP-7702, which is supposed to improve the user-experience of crypto wallets. The…

Stablecoins and the role of Congress in addressing future digital assets legislation took center stage during one of the Senate Banking Committee’s first hearings to focus on what a regulatory framework for crypto may look like.The Wednesday hearing, framed as the jumping-off point for further Congressional action on digital asset regulations, was the first hosted by the banking committee’s new digital assets subcommittee and chaired by Wyoming Republican Cynthia Lummis, a longtime crypto proponent.”We’re on the precipice of finally creating a bipartisan legislative framework for both stablecoins and market structure,” Lummis said in her opening statement, referring to draft legislation…

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) might be done with Gemini, but Gemini isn’t done with the SEC.According to a Wednesday X post from Gemini co-founder and President Cameron Winklevoss, the SEC informed Gemini on Monday that it was closing its investigation into the New York-based crypto exchange and would not be filing enforcement charges against it.But the anti-climactic resolution to the long-running investigation was unsatisfying to Winklevoss, who said in his X post that the SEC’s retreat “does little to make up for the damage this agency has done to us, our industry, and America.”“The SEC cost us…

Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has published a forensic review on last week’s $1.5 billion hack, revealing that its systems had not been infiltrated and that the issue seemed to have stemmed from compromised Safe wallet infrastructure. Bybit concluded from the review that “the credentials of a Safe developer were compromised,” which allowed the Lazarus hacking group to gain unauthorized access to the Safe wallet and subsequently deceive Bybit staff into signing the malicious transaction.However, a person familiar with the matter told CoinDesk that despite the wallet’s infrastructure being compromised by social engineering, the hack would not have been possible had Bybit…

Bitcoin miners that are still drawing electricity from grid-attached power sources will struggle after the next halving event in 2028, MARA Holdings (MARA) said in a shareholder letter. “For those miners still relying on grid-attached power, the writing is on the wall. Energy costs will only rise. The 2028 halving will likely force another industry-wide reckoning. Many may not survive,” the letter said. The statement comes as the mining industry has already been struggling to stay profitable following a recent halving event that saw bitcoin rewards cut in half, forcing some miners to diversify their revenue sources into high-performance computing…

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent named Galaxy Digital regulatory counsel Tyler Williams to advise on digital assets and blockchain technology policy.Williams currently serves as head of Regulatory and Legislative Affairs & Regulatory Counsel at Galaxy Digital and also lectures part-time at The George Washington University Law School.He has previously worked with the government, most recently as Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Treasury under Steven Mnuchin from 2018 to 2020 where he advised on digital assets. He also worked under Senator Thom Tillis in the U.S. Senate and under Congressmen Robert Hurt and John Boehner in the House of…

Gotbit founder Aleksei Andriunin, a 26-year-old Russian national, was extradited to the U.S. on Tuesday to face fraud charges stemming from allegations that his firm participated in a “wide-ranging conspiracy” to manipulate token prices for paying client cryptocurrency companies, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a press release on Wednesday.Andriunin was arrested in Portugal last October and subsequently indicted by a Boston grand jury on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud, charges which carry a combined maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. The indictment also charged Gotbit itself, as well as…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a ruling on Wednesday largely agreeing with a lower court’s 2023 decision to toss out a class action suit against decentralized exchange Uniswap.A group of investors originally sued Uniswap Labs, the company behind the decentralized protocol of the same name, and some of its venture capital investors in 2022, alleging that the company was responsible for harming investors by allowing scam tokens to be issued on its protocol.District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) sided with Uniswap in 2023 and scrapped the suit…

The U.S. House of Representatives has taken the first significant move to erase the work of the Internal Revenue Service to impose a tax regime on decentralized financial (DeFi) platforms in the final days of former President Joe Biden’s administration.The House Ways and Means Committee — the panel responsible for overseeing the Treasury Department’s IRS — advanced a resolution in a 26-16 vote to reverse the IRS transaction-reporting policy under the Congressional Review Act. Such an effort requires majority approval in both the House and Senate before a presidential signature would make the move final, and the matter now moves…

Bank of America, which has historically taken a backseat in the crypto industry, is prepared to launch its own dollar-backed stablecoin if U.S. lawmakers approve legislation allowing it to do so, its CEO said Tuesday.“If they make that legal, we will go into that business,” Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said in an interview with David Rubenstein at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.Moynihan said that he believes there will certainly be a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, arguing that given these digital assets function just like money market funds or bank accounts. This is dependent on Congress passing…