Author: Coindesk

Matt Cole, CEO of Strive Asset Management—an investment firm co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy—has urged GameStop to adopt bitcoin as a reserve asset.Cole sent a letter to Ryan Cohen, Chairman and CEO of GameStop (GME), on Feb. 24. According to Cole, GameStop has a unique opportunity to redefine itself as a market leader with its nearly $5 billion cash reserve.”We believe GameStop has an incredible opportunity to transform its financial future by becoming the premier bitcoin treasury company in the gaming sector.”According to the letter, Strive’s clients hold shares of GameStop through the asset management’s exchange-traded funds (ETFs), giving the firm…

Confidential protocols put in place to deal with news of regulatory failings by one of the top-five crypto exchanges, OKX, suggest that the company likely has been expecting a settlement with U.S. authorities for some time.This happened on Monday when OKX announced a $500 million-plus settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice after failing to secure a money transmitter license and allegedly facilitating $5 billion in “suspicious transactions and criminal proceeds.”OKX’s meticulous planning makes for some fascinating reading. The secret crisis management document seen by CoinDesk refers to a messaging “SWAT Team” that can be mobilized to implement various ways…

Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital (GLXY) has hired Zac Prince as a managing director, according to an internal memo seen by CoinDesk.Prince will be working closely with Galaxy’s President, Chris Ferraro, to expand the company’s digital assets offering.Galaxy believes that crypto is entering a “pivotal era of transformation,” and has hired Prince to help deliver the firm’s strategic vision, the company said in the memo.He joins from real estate advisory firm RE Cost Seg, where he was employed as CEO for the last year.Prince is well known in the industry. He is the former CEO and co-founder of bankrupt crypto lender…

Ethereum Foundation Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi shared Tuesday that she would be leaving her position and would soon be transitioning to her new role as president at the organization.The news comes as the nonprofit goes through a leadership shake-up and as Ethereum has become less popular for new builders in recent months, with some even blaming Miyaguchi’s leadership as for why the blockchain’s token price is lagging behind other cryptocurrencies.“This new opportunity will allow me to continue supporting EF’s institutional relationships, and to expand the reach of our vision and culture more broadly,” Miyaguchi wrote in a blog post.The Ethereum…

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has dropped its investigation into Uniswap Labs, the Brooklyn-based company behind the decentralized protocol of the same name, according to a Tuesday announcement from Uniswap.Uniswap received a Wells notice — essentially, a heads-up from the regulator informing respondents of the charges the SEC is planning to bring against them — last April, accusing the decentralized exchange of operating as an unregistered securities broker and unregistered securities exchange, and of issuing an unregistered security. In subsequent blog posts and social media posts, the company and its executives defended the legality of Uniswap’s operations and pledged to…

Hacked cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has declared a “war against Lazarus” and launched a new website tracking the group’s wallet addresses, hoping to crowdsource the investigative efforts. In return for submissions that lead to frozen funds, the exchange is offering 5% of what gets frozen.The declaration of “war” came from Bybit’s CEO, Ben Zhou, in a social media post in which he noted the firm was launching the first “first bounty site that shows aggregated full transparency on the sanctioned Lazarus money laundering activities.”Read more: North Korean Hackers Were Behind Crypto’s Largest ‘Theft of All Time’Zhou wrote that users can connect…

Bitdeer Technologies Group (BTDR) said its fourth-quarter net loss widened to $531.9 million from $5 million in the year-earlier quarter.The Singapore-based bitcoin (BTC) mining company attributed the expenses to strategic investments in developing its proprietary ASIC mining rigs.“While our focus on ASIC development temporarily limited hashrate expansion, we made significant progress in strengthening our technology roadmap,” said Matt Kong, the firm’s chief business officer. “Owning our own ASICs allows us to rapidly deploy hashrate, lower cost and improve capital efficiency.”Revenue fell to $69 million, down 40% from the year-earlier period, with declines across self-mining, hosting and cloud hash rate services.The…

Cryptocurrency-focused asset manager Bitwise has completed a $70 million equity raise led by crypto venture firm Electric Capital.The raise also included participation from MassMutual, Highland Capital, MIT Investment Management Company, Haun Ventures and ParaFi Capital, Bitwise announced on Tuesday.The firm plans to use proceeds from the raise to bolster its balance sheet, expand its investment capabilities and services and grow its headcount across its offices in San Francisco, New York and London.Bitwise is the issuer of one of the 12 spot BTC exchange-traded funds listed in the U.S., which opened the door to previously unseen institutional investment in bitcoin.It has…

Crypto investment firm Multicoin is leading an $8 million purchase of GEOD tokens, a major capital injection into the crypto project building a hyper-accurate alternative to GPS.Geodnet hails from crypto’s buzzy DePIN wing of startups that financially incentivise regular people to host their physical infrastructure. The project’s token (its incentive mechanism) has more than doubled in the past 12 months amid torrid demand for Geodnet’s services.GPS satellites that tell your phone about how far you are from the next intersection are plenty good for a drive around town. Not so for Geodnet’s user base of farming drones and industrial robots,…

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 2822.97, down 7.2% (-218.33) since 4 p.m. ET on Monday.None of the 20 assets are trading higher.Leaders: APT (-3.8%) and DOT (-4.7%).Laggards: HBAR (-12.0%) and AAVE (-11.6%). The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally. Read the full article here