Analysis

Eris Clearing, the clearing and settlement arm of ErisX, has been awarded the hard-to-come-by Virtual Currency License from New York’s Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). “We are pleased that the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) recognized our commitment to the high standards we borrowed from existing capital markets structures and applied them to

With the right management strategy, bitcoin almost always boosts the value of a mixed portfolio, according to Bitwise research – even if bought at the all-time high. Based on a test portfolio using historical data, the San Francisco-based asset manager found that investors who allocated a small percentage of bitcoin to a portfolio made up of stocks and

Bitcoin is quickly gathering upward momentum alongside a surge in open positions on futures listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).  The top cryptocurrency by market value jumped to a high of $9,220 at 10:20 UTC on Wednesday, having settled (UTC) above $9,000 on Tuesday to register its first above-$9,000 daily close in two months.

Swedish startup ChromaWay is expanding a project aimed to make land ownership more transparent by putting records on a blockchain. With the launch of its LAC PropertyChain initiative, announced on Tuesday, the company hopes to strengthen blockchain standards, governance and protocols for land transactions in Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay. The initiative complements the LACChain initiative,

The CEO of fintech firm iSignthis has accused the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) of abusing its market-leader position by trying to delay the launch of ClearPay, a blockchain-based trading system on the rival National Stock Exchange of Australia (NSX). A joint venture between iSignthis and the NSX, ClearPay uses distributed ledger technology (DLT) to facilitate

Public blockchain network Nervos has launched a virtual incubator for early-stage startups building decentralized applications (dapps).  Dubbed CK Labs, the incubator will fund startups developing their dapps on Nervos’ platform and introduce the products to major crypto investors to help bring products to market. The firm thinks the incubator can help further develop its own

In the ever-curiouser markets of 2020, bitcoin is only slightly more volatile than the S&P 500 and nowhere close to the bumpy ride oil has been on. In early trading at 00:00 UTC, the world’s oldest cryptocurrency was in $8,800 territory before jumping as high as $9,125 on spot exchanges like Coinbase. After that quick

Every day, around mid-morning New York time, the average fee bitcoin users worldwide pay to send the cryptocurrency spikes for up to an hour, then returns to normal. A respected researcher thinks he’s found the reason: BitMEX. If the crypto derivatives exchange used more efficient technologies when broadcasting transactions, users could save as much as

Crypto intelligence firm TokenAnalyst is shutting down, the company announced Tuesday. The group said in a Medium post that it would stop supporting its platform and APIs, and a flashing note on the company’s website says “The data on this site does not refresh anymore.” The blog post did not give a reason for the

Buoyed by scandals including Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and the perennial reports of breaches at companies including Equifax and Marriott, the data privacy industry has expanded significantly over the last few years.  The information privacy and security industry was worth an estimated $124 billion in 2019, according to Gartner. The increased demand for privacy-guarding products

Dutch crypto companies must register with the Netherlands’ central bank by May 18 or cease operations immediately, the monetary authority said Monday. De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) is moving to quickly enforce enhanced Dutch anti-money laundering (AML) laws, which passed the Dutch Parliament last month to comply with the European Union’s AML directives and standards set

Tether growth is hitting new all-time highs across multiple blockchains, but the first protocol to support Tether is being left behind. Omni Layer, built on Bitcoin, has suffered negative growth in Tether transactions for the last 12 consecutive months. Tether supply on Omni Layer has also fallen more than 50% over the same period, according to Coin

A little-known Puerto Rico-based company has gone after Ripple in court, accusing the blockchain firm of running an unregistered securities sale of the XRP cryptocurrency. The company, Bitcoin Manipulation Abatement (BMA), filed a lawsuit Friday in San Francisco, alleging both Ripple and its CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, had violated federal and Californian laws on seven counts

Bitcoin (BTC) failed to plant a flag above $9,000 early on Tuesday, even as on-chain data suggests spiking investor interest in the top cryptocurrency by market value.  Prices rose to a high of $9,112 at 05:05 UTC, extending a recovery from Monday’s low of $8,528. At press time, the cryptocurrency had dropped back to near

IBM has created a new blockchain consortium with three of Europe’s electricity grid operators to help smooth the transition to renewable sources of energy.  It’s an important step in the direction of decentralizing and democratizing the way power is consumed, which is essential if nations are to reach 2050 carbon-reduction goals.   The new Equigy platform

Bitcoin mining difficulty – a measure of how hard it is to compete for block rewards – has neared an all-time high in the network’s last adjustment before the halving happens in roughly seven days. The world’s largest blockchain network by market capitalization just adjusted its mining difficulty to 16.10 trillion (T) at 4:05 UTC

Telegram won’t be repaying its investors in gram tokens after all. The messaging platform told investors in its TON blockchain project Monday that it would not be paying investors back in tokens, and it was looking to buy American investors out immediately. Telegram, which has twice delayed the launch of its new network, is contractually

Bitcoin’s trading volume was lower on Monday compared to the latter part of last week but traders appear to be staying optimistic ahead of the expected bitcoin halving next week.  Bitcoin (BTC) was trading down less than 1 percent over 24 hours , with 10-day and 50-day technical indicator moving averages signaling bearish sentiment Monday.

NLW unpacks a meaningful shift as the famously optimistic Warren Buffett struck a more sober note at Berkshire Hathaway’s first-ever virtual annual meeting. One month after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathway wrote an op-ed saying he was buying stocks. Yet, during the coronavirus crisis he is sitting firmly

Ethereum’s network is experiencing its busiest days in 10 months amid increased issuance of stablecoins and the runup to Ethereum 2.0.  The seven-day moving average of the total number of confirmed transactions on Ethereum’s blockchain rose to 845,400 on April 30 to hit the highest level since July 1 , 2019, according to the data

Around the world, from the Middle East to the D.C. Beltway, blockchain is proving its value. In the Middle East, citizens hampered by weak governments, unstable currencies and fraught political environments are turning to crypto to store their wealth and transact on a daily basis. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate is considering blockchain voting as a

NEAR, a blockchain project for running decentralized applications (dapps), announced Monday the closing of a $21.6 million token sale led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). It also revealed the stealth-mode launch of the NEAR mainnet on April 22. The terms of the deal were defined by a16z and joined by some 40 other

CoinDesk’s Nolan Baurle speaks with the Ethereum Foundation’s Hudson Jameson about private transactions, client improvements, dealing with FUD on Ethereum and more. Listen in to hear more about: CoinDesk Live: Lockdown Edition continues its popular twice-weekly virtual chats with Consensus speakers via Zoom and Twitter, giving you a preview of what’s to come at Consensus:

A hacking group has installed crypto mining malware into a company server through a weakness in Salt, a popular infrastructure tool used by the likes of IBM, LinkedIn and eBay. Blogging platform Ghost said Sunday that an attacker had successfully infiltrated its Salt-based server infrastructure and deployed a crypto-mining virus. “Our investigation indicates that a

Frances Coppola, a CoinDesk columnist, is a freelance writer and speaker on banking, finance and economics. Her book “The Case for People’s Quantitative Easing” explains how modern money creation and quantitative easing work, and advocates “helicopter money” to help economies out of recession. There’s a desperate shortage of dollars. Despite the Federal Reserve creating new money

A New Jersey judge ruled last week that Riot Blockchain’s decision to change its name was not, by itself, tantamount to securities fraud. U.S. District Judge Freda Wolfson of the District Court of New Jersey dismissed a lawsuit Thursday which tried to argue that the Colorado-based firm had changed its name to “Riot Blockchain” in

Japan has amended the way cryptocurrencies are regulated within the country, prompting BitMEX to begin restricting access to local residents, the exchange announced last week. The move follows a cabinet order, released April 3, with amendments made to the Japan Financial Instruments and Exchange Act and Japan Payment Services Act effective as of May 1,

Economic growth figures are starting to trickle in, and, as expected, they’re bad. Really bad. This past week the U.S. reported Q1 GDP growth as -4.8%. Italy’s GDP fell -4.5%, Spain came in at -5.2%, and France trumped that with a whopping -5.8%.  And that’s just warming up – Christine Lagarde, head of the ECB, has warned that euro-area GDP could fall by as much

How do you hack an enterprise blockchain? We may find out soon enough. Enterprise blockchain products have been designed mostly as private networks, limited to authorized parties. This is supposed to make them more efficient than public chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum because fewer computers have to reach agreement on who owns what, and in

“There have been days that F2Pool has lost 100 BTC in terms of having to pay miners without mining blocks themselves, but over a long period of time and with a significant amount of network hashrate those ups and downs even out,” said Thomas Heller, the mining pool’s global business director. F2Pool is the largest