Author: Coindesk
World Liberty Financial, the DeFi project backed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s family, has denied reports that it sold ether (ETH) earlier this week.It was reported on Wednesday that a wallet closely linked to World Liberty Financial, which is tagged by blockchain data firm Arkham as potentially belonging to the project, sold $8 million worth of ether after surpassing $125 million in unrealized losses.In a statement to CoinDesk, a World Liberty Financial spokesperson said: “The claims that World Liberty Financial has sold any of its holdings are wholly inaccurate. WLFI has not sold any positions as currently reported. Speculation to…
Tokenized gold, such as Tether’s XAUT and Paxos’ PAXG continued to be a favorite of crypto investors in Asia as investors seek a safe haven despite a de-escalation in trade war tensions.On-chain data shows that Tether’s XAUT was a top-10 market performer out of all digital assets. Tether’s tokenized gold, the largest by market cap, is up 3.4% in the last 24 hours.CoinGecko data shows the sector is up 4.3% in the last 24 hours, compared to the CoinDesk 20, an index of the performance of the largest digital assets, which is down 2%.The price of gold initially moved down…
Ripple Labs and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have jointly requested a pause in their respective appeals to finalize a potential settlement, per a motion filed on Thursday.The filing signals a possible end to a high-profile dispute that has gripped the payments upstart industry since December 2020 for its sale of XRP tokens, which the SEC alleged were unregistered securities. The case has been a focal point for debates over the regulatory status of cryptocurrencies in the United States, with Ripple arguing that XRP is a currency, not a security, and thus outside the SEC’s jurisdiction.Ripple and the…
In the Ancient Greek tale of Oedipus, great rewards awaited travelers able to solve difficult riddles, but a powerful sphinx posed the riddles and devoured those who failed to solve them. Similarly, in ancient crypto times, circa 2017, blockchain technology stood to revolutionize finance and other fields. But two challenges stood in the way of this technology enjoying its full potential: (1) securities laws that don’t easily map onto decentralized systems, and (2) a securities regulator hostile to digital assets, which often posed grave risks to those who tried to solve the first challenge.Today, the sphinx has resolved to be…
Bitcoin miners are scrambling to adjust to Trump’s global tariffs, which are poised to increase prices on ASIC miners, electrical gear, network infrastructure and more.“It’s a complete scramble,” Luxor COO Ethan Vera said on last week’s Mining Pod news roundup. “From the ASIC trading front and brokerage, miners have not been very proactive here. They have not necessarily frontrun orders and gotten them into the U.S…they’re operating in a less than a week period here to make sure all shipments that are coming out of SE Asia are picked up and getting delivered.”This article first appeared on Blockspace Media, the…
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey recently said that the Bitcoin community should focus on scaling payments in order to remain relevant. “I think it has to be payments for [Bitcoin] to be relevant on the everyday,” he told Haley Berkoe on the 21 in 21 podcast.I disagree.As someone in the trenches with Bitcoin builders, who also talks to market-makers and investors, I fundamentally disagree with the idea that payments are the path forward for actual Bitcoin adoption.The only way to grow Bitcoin’s relevance is by creating more functionality for everyday users to do something with their bitcoin that doesn’t involve selling…
Crypto companies issuing or dealing with tokens that may be securities should provide detailed disclosures, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Thursday.The SEC published its latest staff statement on disclosures ahead of its second roundtable — which will focus on trading — “as part of an effort to provide greater clarity on the application of the federal securities laws to crypto assets.”The nonbinding guidance recommends companies filing disclosures be precise about what their businesses do and what role their tokens may play in those ventures. Much of it is based on observations about what companies have previously…
U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is under fire from Senate Democrats following his recent decision to narrow the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) crypto enforcement priorities and disband its crypto enforcement squad.In a Thursday letter to Blanche, six Senate Democrats — Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I), Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) — blasted his decision to cut the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) as “giv[ing] a free pass to cryptocurrency money launderers.”The Senators called Blanche’s directive that DOJ staff no longer pursue cases against crypto exchanges, mixers or offline wallets “for…
With a signature from President Donald Trump, the decentralized financial (DeFi) corner of the crypto sector is now freed from U.S. Internal Revenue Service demands that such platforms be treated as brokers and required to track and report user activity.That narrowly focused IRS rule, approved in the final days of former President Joe Biden’s administration, has been formally struck down, according to Representative Mike Carey, an Ohio Republican who backed the effort. And the agency is prevented from pursuing anything like it, according to the Congressional Review Act power used by lawmakers to get rid of the tax regulation.Though the…
Nova Labs, the parent company behind the Helium blockchain, has agreed to pay the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) $200,000 to settle civil securities fraud charges the regulator filed against the firm in January, a court filing said Thursday.Without admitting or denying any wrongdoing, Nova Labs agreed to pay the fine to settle accusations that it misled institutional investors during a funding round from late 2021 to early 2022, during which it raised $200 million in fresh capital at a $1 billion valuation. In its complaint, the SEC accused Nova Labs of lying to prospective investors about a number…