Author: Coindesk
What does it mean for a token to be useful? The best heuristic is whether people want to hold it for some reason other than as an investment. For example, some tokens grant access to blockchain-based products or services, similar to how baseball tickets grant access to a game. Other tokens coordinate human decision-making, as with governance tokens, or incentivize human work, as with base layer infrastructure tokens. And even other tokens memorialize contributions to a system, whether it be data or something else valuable (but that isn’t an investment). Read the full article here
The Fortune article, which debuted about a week after suspicions of a different kind of manipulation on Polymarket, cited research done by two blockchain analytics firms. One, Chaos Labs, “concluded that around one-third of trading volume — and overall users — on the presidential market alone was likely wash trading, along with across all markets.” The other, Inca Digital, “found that a ‘significant portion of the volume’ on the market could be attributed to potential wash trading,” the magazine said. Read the full article here
As national security experts, we invariably view emerging technologies through a lens that focuses on risk, mitigation and safety. We have decades of combined experience in numerous national security roles across the U.S. government, including careers at the FBI, CIA, U.S. Secret Service, and Departments of Justice and Treasury. Our experiences range from establishing the first dedicated digital asset illicit finance investigation unit, to high level roles at the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, to dismantling transnational organized criminal groups. Read the full article here
MicroStrategy’s most recent previous disclosure was in mid-September when it announced the purchase of 7,420 bitcoins (BTC) for $458.2 million. That brought its holdings to that point to 252,220 bitcoins acquired for a total of $9.9 billion, or an average price of $39,266 each. At the current price of about $72,000 the company’s bitcoin is worth more than $18 billion. Read the full article here
Singh, 29, who pleaded guilty to six criminal counts including wire fraud and conspiracy in February, is the fourth FTX executive to be sentenced for his role in the fraud. Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March for his role as ringleader. Former FTX Digital Markets CEO Ryan Salame, who did not testify against Bankman-Fried, recently began serving his 7.5 year prison sentence. And Caroline Ellison, former Alameda Research CEO and one-time girlfriend of Bankman-Fried, was sentenced to two years by the same judge, District Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York (SDNY), last…
“Really solid results across the board, I think quarter to quarter, you definitely see volatility playing a role in trading revenues and we saw that play out with softer market conditions in Q3 but we’re overall happy with the results,” Anil Gupta, vice president of investor relations, told CoinDesk. Read the full article here
Any potential CBDC issued by the Federal Reserve would be managed by private-sector banks, Fed officials have said, meaning some of the institutions represented in the advisory group. However, the political chances for U.S. CBDCs, which are strongly opposed by Republican lawmakers, remain dicey in the near term. Read the full article here
Liu Zhou, 39, said to be from China and Canada, will be sentenced early next year in federal court for “the wash trading of client cryptocurrencies across multiple cryptocurrency exchanges,” according to the DOJ. Wash trading refers to the artificial driving up of asset prices by suggesting a fake level of transaction interest. Read the full article here
In this week’s issue of The Protocol, our newsletter on blockchain tech, we’re covering the Optimism’s $42.5M token pledge to Kraken, crypto VC funding, grants for Bitcoin open-source developers, and Polymarket’s (negligible) impact on Polygon’s bottom line. Read the full article here
Termina, the SVM-as-a-Service platform by Nitro Labs, has raised a $4 million seed funding round, led by Lemniscap. [NOTE: SVM stands for Solana Virtual Machine — the operating environment for smart contracts on the Solana blockchain.) According to the team: “Recognizing the lack of SVM infrastructure offerings across the market, Nitro Labs got to work on building Termina, with a clear mandate to scale the SVM while empowering developers to create customizable Solana-based networks optimized for performance and privacy. Currently over 20 ecosystem partners are building alongside Termina, including both Solana-native and cross-chain projects, allowing developers to deploy and manage…