The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) has approved Canada’s second bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). Evolve’s bitcoin ETF was conditionally approved on Tuesday to trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the company announced in a press release. “Evolve was the first to file for a bitcoin ETF in the U.S.,” said James Seyffart, ETF research analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “It’s a promising sign if there are no issues with launching a bitcoin ETF in Canada. … The U.S. regulatory framework tends to be a lot more in line with things that happen in Canada.” ETFs are an easy way for investors who want […]
Nathan DiCamillo
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Osprey Fund’s bitcoin trust is now available to retail investors via the over-the-counter (OTC) market, the company announced Tuesday. The fund was formed two years ago, and Osprey applied to register the trust with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the middle of last year, said Osprey CEO Greg King. It joins a crop of new bitcoin funds aimed squarely at the market-leading Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) before a bitcoin ETF is approved by the SEC. This includes offerings from Bitwise Asset Management, BlockFi and CrossTower that aim to give traditional investors exposure to bitcoin without having to touch […]
PayPal could be to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) what private banks are to physical dollars. The company’s CEO, Dan Schulman, laid out a vision during its investor day on Thursday for PayPal’s digital wallets being the means by which central banks distributed CBDCs to consumers across income levels. “You think about how many [digital wallets] we’re going to have in the next two, three or five years, and we’re a perfect complement to central banks and governments to distribute those digitized forms of currency,” Schulman said. Schulman also revealed that PayPal is looking into smart contracts and tokenizations of other […]
PayPal’s buy, sell and hold crypto products are coming to the United Kingdom in a few months, the company announced during its investor day Thursday. Its launch of crypto as a funding service will go live in a few months as well, and crypto products in Venmo will go live in the first half of 2021. The results from the new product at the e-commerce giant have “exceeded” expectations, said Jonathan Auerbach, executive vice president and chief strategy, growth and data officer at PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL). “We’re actually looking at our crypto services to help position PayPal, to help shape the […]
Apple, the maker of hot-selling items from iPhones to tablets, is the world’s largest publicly traded company, with a market capitalization of $2.3 trillion. A new report from the brokerage firm RBC Capital Markets posits that Apple, which already provides payments wallets for millions of consumers in an economy that’s gone increasingly cashless since the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020, might be able to easily generate more than $40 billion from the cryptocurrency business. The company’s move could also help to make the U.S. a technological leader in cryptocurrencies for the next decade or two. The RBC analyst, Mitch Steves, […]
The price of meme cryptocurrency dogecoin (DOGE) soared more than 36% Sunday after American rapper Snoop Dogg a day earlier joined DOGE booster-in-chief Elon Musk and Kiss rock star Gene Simmons in tweeting a meme of a Shiba Inu, the dog breed that represents the DOGE token. The price of the cryptocurrency started trading around $0.56 at the beginning of the day and rose as high as $0.069 Sunday morning, before settling back to $0.068, up more than 34% in the last 24 hours, a DOGE’s whisker from the all-time high of $0.078. Year to date DOGE is up more than 1,100%. […]
U.S. President Joe Biden said Friday he’s not budging on the $1,400 direct stimulus checks included in his $1.9 trillion stimulus plan. “It’s better economics,” Biden said of the relief package. “There’s a growing chorus of economists, right, center and left, that say we should be less focused on the deficit and more focused on the investment we make and can make now in jobs, keeping families out of poverty and preventing long-term economic damage to our nation.” The announcement followed a jobs report that underperformed economist expectations, boosting the case for stimulus, which if enacted could result in more inflation […]
Serbia has extradited a man to the U.S. after he was indicted by a Dallas-based federal grand jury on allegations that he duped investors around the globe–several of whom are in northern Texas–out of more than $70 million. The scheme involved soliciting investments in binary options and cryptocurrency mining, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged. The binary options were advertised as “an average payout of 80 percent, and promised 20 percent refunds on every lost trade.” The fraudulent advertisements also claimed that investors could “purchase bitcoin at half market price” on its crypto mining platform, the department alleged in a statement. […]
Miller Value Funds – run by veteran hedge fund manager and bitcoin bull Bill Miller – may invest in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust through its flagship fund, the Miller Opportunity Trust. “The Fund may seek investment exposure to bitcoin indirectly by investing in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, an entity that holds bitcoin,” the fund wrote in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust invests principally in bitcoin. The Fund will not make any additional investments in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust if, as a result of the investment, its aggregate investment in bitcoin exposure would be […]
On the Overstock-owned platform, TokenSoft customers will be able issue security tokens that retail and accredited investors can trade. Source link
In the final quarter of 2020, PayPal gained 16 million in net new active accounts and handled $277 billion in total payment volume. The earnings are the payment giant’s first since rolling out crypto buying and selling late last year. It removed the waitlist for BTC, ETH, LTC and BCH to all of its 350 million users on Nov. 12, 2020. Customers who purchased crypto through the platform have been logging into PayPal twice as much as they were before buying crypto, the company said in its investor update. PayPal’s transaction revenue increased by around 12% from Q3 to $5.7 billion. […]
Gemini, the crypto exchange and custodian, is allowing its customers to earn up to 7.4% annual percentage yield (APY) on their holdings through a partnership with crypto lender Genesis. “We have a lot of customers who look at the interest rate in traditional finance, which is pretty anemic,” said Noah Perlman, Gemini’s chief operating officer. The company hopes to give customers a reason to keep their crypto on the Gemini platform. The product is in line with other traditional-looking crypto products such as the Gemini credit card launched earlier this year. The APY is consistent with what’s typically seen among centralized […]
Virgil Griffith’s motion to dismiss the charges against him claiming that he violated U.S. sanctions law in North Korea was denied late Friday by a judge in the Southern District of New York (SDNY). U.S. Judge Kevin Castel denied the motion, leaving it up to a jury to decide whether Griffith is guilty of helping North Koreans circumvent U.S. economic sanctions using cryptocurrency. SDNY prosecutors allege that Griffith violated the International Emergency Economic Powers Act by giving a speech in April at the Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference on how to use cryptocurrency to get around U.S. sanctions. Griffith’s team has […]
Visa CEO Al Kelly said the payments giant is in a position to make cryptocurrencies more “safe, useful and applicable” and may add them to the company’s payments network. Speaking on the company’s fiscal first-quarter 2021 earnings call, Kelly described cryptocurrencies like bitcoin as “digital gold” which are “not used as a form of payment in a significant way at this point.” “Our strategy here is to work with wallets and exchanges to enable users to purchase these currencies using their Visa credentials or to cash out onto our Visa credential to make a fiat purchase at any of the 70 […]
The job listing follows comments made by Fed Chair Jerome Powell in recent weeks where he said the central bank needed “better regulatory answers” for global stablecoins. Source link
U.S. Federal Reserve officials voted Wednesday to keep monetary conditions at historically loose levels while waiting for the economy to heal. Chairman Jerome Powell said he doesn’t want to put a timeline on tapering the U.S. central bank’s $120 billion-a-month in asset purchases. “In terms of tapering it’s just premature,” Powell said. “We said we’d want to see substantial, further progress towards our goals before we modify our asset purchase guidance. It’s just too early to be talking about dates. We need to see actual progress.” A little bit of inflation in 2021 would be welcome news for the Federal Reserve […]
It’s the debate the Federal Reserve isn’t ready to have yet: How to keep inflation from spiraling out of control once the economy opens back up. Considering the devastating toll from the coronavirus and the trillions of dollars of stimulus pumped into the financial system over the past year, top economists say the looming transition could present one of the more challenging episodes in the U.S. central bank’s 108-year history – while providing a crucial test of bitcoin’s use as a possible inflation hedge. Economists are watching Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s remarks on Wednesday when he’ll sum up the January meeting […]
Upstart cryptocurrency exchange LVL is opening pre-orders for a Mastercard debit card linked to bitcoin and fiat accounts. The card is among Mastercard’s premium products and can be used anywhere globally, said LVL CEO Chris Slaughter. Mastercard did not respond to requests for comment by press time. “It took a couple of months to get [Mastercard] to be comfortable with it being connected to crypto,” Slaughter said. “Convincing them that it was aligned with their premium brand was more involved because their view on crypto businesses is that they’re transactional businesses, not member services businesses. … We’re a subscription service, which […]
Deposits from digital currency customers now make up nearly 16% of total deposits at New York’s Signature Bank. In an earnings call Thursday, Signature revealed that deposits from customers in the crypto industry now total $10 billion – twice that of California rival Silvergate Bank. “We’ve clearly become the preeminent player in that space,” said Eric Howell, the company’s executive vice president of corporate and business development. “It’s obvious that digital assets and cryptocurrencies are not going away.” Signature Bank CEO Joseph DePaolo added that the bank’s blockchain-based payments platform Signet is the main driver of deposit growth in digital asset banking, […]
Crypto firms are often a rich source of low-cost deposits for the few banks that openly serve the sector. As such, analysts have paid close attention to non-interest bearing deposit growth at Signature. These deposits represent nearly 30% of total deposits at the bank. Total deposits increased at the bank quarter-over-quarter by $8.98 billion, with money-market deposits representing the lion’s share. Signature’s average cost of deposits and average cost of funds for the fourth quarter of 2020 decreased by 66 and 69 basis points to 0.42% and 0.57%, respectively. Source link
The kind of inflation outbreak that might prove bitcoin’s power as a hedge asset isn’t coming in the near term, according to some economists. “Right now, low interest rates tell us there’s no evidence that we’re borrowing too much money,” Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson said. “Separately, but related, inflation is also very low. The [Federal Reserve] has set a target of about 2% for inflation, and it’s consistently been missing that target on the low side. We don’t see any evidence that inflation is taking off.” In fact, future economic growth could be in danger if the U.S. doesn’t embrace new […]
It joins several other ETP providers on the exchange, including ETC Group, with its own physically backed bitcoin product. Source link
The CEO of cryptocurrency lender Celsius believes CEL won’t meet XRP’s fate. In a Dec. 31 interview, Alex Mashinsky attributed a recent spike in CEL’s price to the token being registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Mashinsky said this would protect CEL – the native token of the Celsius lending platform – from being embroiled in an SEC lawsuit, like the one the securities regulator has filed against Ripple because of its XRP token. “We did not determine that CEL token is a security,” Mashinsky said in an interview with CoinDesk TV last Friday. “What we said is that […]
Crypto trading platform CrossTower is launching a capital markets desk for institutional clients. Leading the desk is securities industry veteran Greg Bunn, who’s being hired as CrossTower’s chief strategy officer. Previously, Bunn served as global head of counterparty strategy at foreign exchange giant Citadel, and he also worked in senior roles at Deutsche Bank for more than 16 years. Expanding from its spot exchange and over-the-counter (OTC) trading desk, CrossTower now offers digital asset lending, trade financing, structured products and trade execution across multiple venues. “Ultimately we end up with something that looks and feels a little bit like what you […]
Digital asset manager NYDIG is joining forces with banking technology provider Moven to offer plugins for banks that want to launch bitcoin products. “Being able to offer it on our platform for U.S. banks, it’s the right time frankly,” said Moven founder Brett King. “If PayPal and Square can do it, then community banks should be able to do it too.” Many of Moven’s clients have around $1 billion in total assets, he said, with some operating with up to $10 billion in total assets. NYDIG is Moven’s second partnership in the U.S., said King. It partnered with banking tech provider […]
Babel Finance is letting bitcoin mining firms put up their machines as loan collateral so the lender can offer them better terms. The loan-to-value ratio (LTV) for these loans is 30%, in part because Babel keeps the freshly mined crypto until the borrower pays back the loan. The LTV is significantly cheaper than the 160% Babel normally charges, which means borrowers would need to put up $1.6 million worth of bitcoin in order to borrow $1 million in U.S. dollars. In a bull market miners are increasingly uneasy parting ways with mined cryptocurrency. These loans allow the miners to cover expenses […]
Digital asset services firm Bequant has secured two “in-principle” approvals in Malta which will eventually lead to the firm being a licensed prime broker and crypto exchange in Europe. “The prime brokerage offering has been our anchor product since we launched it,” Bequant CEO George Zarya said in an interview. “We tailored it to quants, prop traders and arbitrageurs that are the clients of prime brokers. Prime brokers minimize the counterparty risk on exchanges and allows for a high level of capital efficiency.” After Coinbase acquired crypto prime broker Tagomi in May, it was able to facilitate at least $425 million […]
Patrick Sells is going from banking cryptocurrency businesses shunned by most financial institutions to pitching crypto-related services to banks that may suddenly be warming to the sector. Sells, the former chief innovation officer of New York-based Quontic Bank, is joining New York Digital Investments Group (NYDIG) as its head of bank solutions, the company announced Wednesday. Sells will be responsible for developing NYDIG’s custody, execution, financing and anti-money laundering and know-your-customer compliance services for banks through a white-labeled offering. In other words, if banks want to offer crypto trading and custody to their customers, NYDIG stands ready to do all the […]
Abra is expanding its cryptocurrency marketplace to dozens more countries through partnerships with four fiat-to-crypto gateways. The Silicon Valley-based crypto banking services firm is now available in over 150 countries (previously it only served about 40) stemming from deals with Simplex, Moonpay, Banxa and Transak. In an email to CoinDesk, Abra CEO Bill Barhydt said the service is akin to a “Kayak for buying crypto,” referring to the travel search engine. The international partnerships mean the California company now has access to additional payment methods including Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, SEPA, FasterPay, Australia Post and more. Over […]
Cryptocurrency derivatives platform ErisX launched cash-settled bounded futures on Tuesday, after seeing little interest from the market for its physically-settled futures. ErisX CEO Thomas Chippas said the company had released physically-settled futures thinking that traders would be interested in trading spot bitcoin with the protection of a futures exchange and a futures clearinghouse. Cash-settled contracts don’t require the delivery of bitcoin like physically-settled contracts, allowing investors who can’t touch bitcoin to still profit off of it. Physically-settled futures won’t become more popular until the exchange can offer physically-traded futures on margin, Chippas said. ErisX is working with the U.S. Commodity Futures […]
Cryptocurrency firm Pantera Capital has raised $134 million for its bitcoin fund, according to a form D filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Formed in 2013, the Pantera Bitcoin Fund Ltd. was the first U.S.-based bitcoin fund. In an investor letter at the end of 2017, Pantera boasted a 25,004% return on the fund, mainly due to the bitcoin bull run of that year. Recently, CoinDesk discovered that Pantera’s venture funds hadn’t fared well in comparison to the S&P 500. The venture funds Pantera Capital raised in August 2013 and August 2014 have returned 46.5% and 15.9% from their […]
In a wide-ranging speech, Xi said that the G20 group “needs to discuss developing standards and principles for central bank digital currencies.” Source link
Cryptocurrency assets would be treated like financial products under South Africa’s Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services (FAIS) Act, under a draft declaration by a financial regulator. “The Declaration would have the effect that any person furnishing advice or rendering intermediary services in relation to crypto assets must be authorised under the FAIS Act as a financial services provider, and must comply with the requirements of the FAIS Act,” wrote the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), which is seeking comment on the proposal. “This will include crypto asset exchanges and platforms, as well as brokers and advisors.” How each country treats cryptocurrency […]
Coinbase has seen a $14 billion increase in institutional assets under custody since April, its head of institutional coverage at Coinbase said in a YouTube interview published on Friday. Brett Tejpaul told interviewer Eliisabetta Bartolini, partner at Heidrick & Struggles, that institutional assets under custody were $6 billion when he joined the firm in April and have grown to $20 billion today. Tejpaul came to Coinbase after 25 years in sales and trading in the traditional financial markets with stints at Barclays and J.P. Morgan. “It radically transformed our ability to cater to institutional clients that want to use smart order […]
Call it the CPR for Operation Choke Point. The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a national bank regulator led by former Coinbase counsel Brian Books, has proposed a rule that would forbid banks to blacklist legal industries — including, presumably, cryptocurrency firms. Under the proposed rule, banks could deny financial services to customers only on the basis of “quantitative, risk-based standards established in advance,” and not in response to political pressures. The proposal, published Friday in the Federal Register, does not mention cryptocurrency. But it will likely come as welcome news to businesses in the space, which have […]
Cred’s bankruptcy has left hundreds of depositors who loaned the company more than $100 million worth of crypto wondering if and when they’ll get their money back. The company’s bankruptcy filing primarily blames its woes on alleged fraud by an outside investment manager whom Cred entrusted with 800 BTC, worth a bit more than $10 million today. Seven former employees, however, say the company also suffered mightily from the souring of a $39 million line of credit that Cred extended to a Chinese lender at the behest of CEO Dan Schatt. “If you add the totals up, $10 million alone can’t […]
Stablecoin issuer TrustToken is bringing its proof of reserves system for TrueUSD (TUSD) collateralization levels on-chain. Adding Chainlink to an existing partnership with accounting firm Armanino makes it possible. The transparency measure is meant to provide additional certainty for decentralized finance (DeFi) traders who often rely on asset-backed stablecoins – even without a clear understanding of whether the assets are fully backed. Pulling from Armanino’s TrustExplorer API, the Chainlink integration makes the data available on-chain, which then lets app builders develop preventative measures against fractional reserve banking or other potential red flags. “One of the things that we think will be […]
In a research report by JPMorgan’s global markets team, analysts noted that Grayscale Bitcoin Trust’s flow trajectory outperformed gold exchange traded funds. Source link
Mutual fund legend Bill Miller told CNBC Friday that the risks of bitcoin going to zero are “lower than they’ve ever been before” and predicted more institutional investment in the cryptocurrency. “The bitcoin story is very easy, it’s supply and demand,” Miller said. “Bitcoin’s supply is growing around 2.5% a year and the demand is growing faster than that.” On Friday, Miller warned of inflation “coming back” with the Federal Reserve “gunning the money supply” and future fiscal relief coming from Congress. Miller, who serves on the investment committee for the endowment of Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University, said that the endowment’s […]
PayPal’s cryptocurrency service is going to expand rapidly in 2021, executives said on the payments giant’s third-quarter earnings call Monday evening. That includes crypto services coming to Venmo and international customers in the first half of 2021, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said. Currently, only 10% of customers in the U.S. have access to the new crypto service with the rest of the U.S. gaining access to the tools in the next two to three weeks, Schulman said. PayPal saw enough interest following its Oct. 21 announcement that the firm has increased weekly crypto purchase limits from $10,000 to $15,000. Schulman went […]
Bequant is adding New York-based Solidus Labs’ surveillance tools to its digital asset services business. Solidus Labs serves several crypto exchanges, including New York-based BlockQuake and Hong Kong-based AAX. Bequant will be one of its first prime broker clients. The London-based Bequant has been rapidly adding features to its service as other firms enter the market to capture new institutional investors buying digital assets. Bequant is integrating both transaction surveillance and market surveillance for the exchange and prime brokerage sides of its business. The partnership will help Bequant pursue its license in Malta, said COO Sergiu Frasineanu. “This type of risk […]
Crypto lender Celsius is producing a series of experiments over the next few months that would test what it would look like for the company to decentralize some of its operations. The centralized finance (CeFi) stalwart is working with Horizen, a platform that develops and maintains the privacy token ZEN, to take a look at creating a proof-of-reserves system using Horizen’s zero-knowledge proofs. “The biggest challenge in DeFi [decentralized finance] is transparency,” said Nuke Goldstein, chief technology officer at Celsius. “How do we show the world that the numbers that we report are real?” The proof-of-reserves pilot would take the information […]
Blockchain pioneer Caitlin Long is now the CEO of her own special purpose depository institution (SPDI) in Wyoming. Avanti Financial’s banking charter was approved unanimously by the Wyoming State Banking Board on Wednesday, becoming the second newly chartered bank in the state in 2020 after Kraken Financial earned approval last month. Avanti, like Kraken, now has to jump through a few hoops – like raising more capital – before it can be granted a certificate of authority to operate. “Kraken definitely captured attention, but now that there’s a second one chartered it’s no longer a one-off situation and a trend is in motion,” […]
It took two years of infrastructure building but on Sept. 16 the Wyoming Division of Banking finally landed a prominent pioneer. That’s when Kraken Financial became the first entity to receive a special purpose depository institution (SPDI) charter in the Cowboy State, giving the cryptocurrency industry insight into roughly how long it takes to become a bank. It’s also the first newly chartered (de novo) bank the state has approved since 2006. While Kraken Financial still has some hoops to jump through before it has a certificate of authority to operate, Wyoming is running to keep its lead in the digital […]
Multinational payments firm Sia is partnering with cryptocurrency custodian Hex Trust to help its European banking clients hold digital assets. “When you have one bitcoin, it’s not a big problem, but when you start adding 10, 20 or 100, you have a treasury and you have to decide where to store this,” said Daniele Savarè, SIA’s innovation and business solutions director. “We are discussing digital custody needs with banks in Europe.” The firm is also helping banks manage and safekeep security tokens and central bank digital currencies, he added. Through SIA, Hex Trust plans to offer European banks the software to […]
Coinbase received more than 1,800 request for information from law enforcement in the first half of 2020, largely in the form of subpoenas, the company announced Friday. The San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange released the information in its first ever transparency report. Earlier this year, digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) requested that the exchange be more transparent in how it handles authorities’ requests for users’ private financial data. In addition to the criminal information requests, Coinbase received a number of civil or administrative requests from government agencies, for a total of over 1,900 requests. Source link
USDC is being added to its third blockchain: Stellar. Announced Thursday during the Stellar Development Foundation’s quarterly review call, the addition of the dollar-backed stablecoin seeks to bolster Stellar’s standing as a cross-border payments network. “We are focused on creating equitable access to the financial system by building a global network that delivers services to users regardless of their geography,” Stellar Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon said in a statement, adding: “The addition of USDC to Stellar will allow us to continue to expand our global reach in pursuit of this mission while opening up new avenues for growth and innovation […]
Coinbase is sponsoring at least two Bitcoin Core developers with a new grant program, the San Francisco-based exchange announced Thursday. “We believe helping to connect and grow the cryptoeconomy is essential to building an open financial system for the world,” Manish Gupta, executive vice president of engineering at Coinbase, said in a statement. “Our Crypto Community Fund aims to grow and improve the entire crypto industry, while making it simpler to use and more secure for everyone. If successful, we intend to expand the program to other types of projects and crypto communities.” Coinbase says the kinds of projects it is […]
Security token firm Securitize is trying to become a broker-dealer and alternative trading system for digital assets, the company announced Thursday. The firm signed an agreement to purchase Distributed Technology Markets (DTM), a broker-dealer and alternative trading system registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). The deal is pending regulatory approval and the terms of the deal were not disclosed. “We felt that an acquisition was the faster route with less uncertainty,” said Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo. “This will allow us to create a marketplace for secondary trading of private securities.” […]
COVID has not slowed crypto M&A. To wit, the value of industry acquisitions in the first half of 2020 has already surpassed that of full year 2019, according to a report released Thursday by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Around $597 million was spent in 60 deals in the first half of 2020, compared to $481 million spent in all of 2019 for 125 deals, according to data that PwC aggregated from M&A data firms MergerMarket, Capital IQ, Crunchbase and Pitchbook. That said, the acquisition of CoinMarketCap by Binance for a reported $400 million was one of the largest buys ever recorded in the […]
Three hundred investors have ponied up funds for the initial public offering (IPO) of crypto exchange INX, according to Etherscan. Source link
Dozens of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are exploring the next phase of decentralized technologies in a bid to put Black students at the forefront of new blockchain protocols. “These schools see it as a way to participate in Web 3.0,” said Tonya Evans, chairperson of the MakerDAO Foundation and visiting professor at Penn State’s Dickinson Law School. “We were not participating in the dot-com era. Most of the Black community didn’t know about it at the time.” This story is part of the CoinDesk U series about blockchain at universities. See our ranking of U.S. universities here. With many programs being only […]
For Coinbase users who don’t want to keep their funds on an exchange, the buying and storing crypto just became a lot easier. On Monday afternoon, the company announced that Coinbase Wallet users would now have a fiat on-ramp within the wallet itself. Previously, users holding their crypto in the non-custodial wallet would have to buy crypto on the Coinbase app (or elsewhere) and then send funds to Coinbase Wallet. This meant users trying to use, say, a DeFi dapp would have to install two separate apps to get started, the company said in an emailed statement. For decentralized app creators, […]
In a LinkedIn post, Vice President of Business and Data Dan Yoo announced he is leaving the company after CEO Brian Armstrong’s blog post saying the company was moving in an ‘apolitical’ direction and later offered a severance package for employees who disagreed. Source link
Coinbase has lost 60 people from its 1,200-person staff after an updated mission statement from CEO Brian Armstrong sparked fierce debate over how companies should respond to today’s charged politics. In a companywide memo obtained by CoinDesk, Armstrong informed employees that 5% of the company’s workforce had accepted the severance package offered last week. The deadline for employees to signal their interest in the package was Wednesday, and Armstrong said he expects the number to be higher after a “handful of other conversations” are completed. “I know there have been many difficult conversations happening to help clarify what our apolitical culture […]
JPMorgan Blockchain Lead Christine Moy has been promoted to lead the bank’s Ethereum-based Interbank Information Network (INN). Source link
Companies can’t become “apolitical” overnight. According to multiple Coinbase workers, the plan to offer a clean exit for mission-dissenting staffers has been in the works for over six months. So far, at least three people in the 1,200-person firm have taken the severance package, one of these sources told CoinDesk on Friday. In the past week, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong published a blog post discouraging politics in the office and offered a severance package for employees who disagreed with a new mission statement. According to three employees, who all spoke with CoinDesk on the condition of anonymity, Armstrong and other managers […]
Diginex has become the first crypto exchange operator to be traded on Nasdaq, listing under the “EQOS” ticker symbol. Source link
The cryptocurrency and security token exchange’s blockchain IPO is the first of its kind and gives observers and issuers a ground-level view of what’s going on through the Etherscan block explorer. The public can see roughly the number of investors receiving INX tokens after putting money into the sale by watching the number of holders on the token tracker. (Some of these are internal operational transactions, however, such as when Tokensoft loads the distribution smart contract.) Traditionally, to get information on who beneficially owns an interest in shares held at central securities depositories like the Depository Trust Company, investors or issuers […]
Kava Labs has launched its first application: a yield-generating decentralized finance (DeFi) platform for bitcoin (BTC) and other non-Ethereum assets. The product, called Harvest and built on the Kava blockchain, allows users to stake their crypto so it can be lent out to other users. Harvest will initially support deposits of BTC, BNB, BUSD and XRP. Soon, Kava Labs plans to debut automated market makers (AMMs) like Uniswap and robo-advisors like Yearn.Finance on the blockchain as well, said Kava Labs CEO Brian Kerr. Similar to DeFi platform MakerDAO, Kava will allow users to create collateralized debt positions (CDPs) on the Kava […]
Kraken is the first cryptocurrency firm to become a bank. On Wednesday, the Wyoming Banking Board voted to approve the San Francisco-based crypto exchange’s application for a special purpose depository institution (SPDI) charter. Kraken is the first SPDI bank in Wyoming and according to the Wyoming Division of Banking’s general counsel, Chris Land, Kraken will also be the first newly chartered (de novo) bank in the state since 2006. “By becoming a bank we get direct access to federal payments infrastructure, and we can more seamlessly integrate banking and funding options for customers,” said David Kinitsky, a managing director at Kraken […]
The inaugural project on ConsenSys’ anti-speculation platform, Activate, has completed a token sale with roughly 4,000 investors from 90 countries, the companies announced Monday. Around 13,000 investors with a total capital pool of $57 million had expressed interest in the Ethereum scaling project SKALE. Around $43 million of that pool was from 4,300 investors who made it through know-your-customer (KYC) checks. Ultimately, SKALE ended up raising $5 million because of regulatory constraints in Liechtenstein, where the nonprofit focused on promoting the SKALE network, the NODE Foundation, is based. SKALE is a proof-of-stake (PoS) network that aims to run thousands of transactions […]
Blockchain services firm Diginex could be a publicly traded company by Sept. 23. The firm’s backdoor listing on Nasdaq is happening more quickly than a regular initial public offering (IPO), but the company – which is behind the EQUOS.io crypto exchange – is cautiously making sure it’s flush with capital before it lists. Diginex CEO Richard Byworth said the firm’s public listing will give it more transparency than other exchange operators that mistreat customers with poorly structured liquidations and exorbitant fees. “Some of these guys are offering a ridiculous 250-times levered product,” Byworth said. “At that point it’s quite easy to be […]
How’s the first registered offering of security tokens in the U.S. going? See for yourself. In the two weeks since INX Ltd. commenced its long-awaited initial public offering (IPO), more than 350 investors’ Ethereum addresses have been added to the “white list” of approved buyers. You don’t need to take the company’s word for it, it’s all on the blockchain, viewable through block explorer sites like Etherscan. The public data doesn’t show who these registered investors are or how many of the tokens, priced at $0.90 each, any of them has agreed to buy. (INX is seeking to raise $117 million […]
Signature Bank extended dozens more loans under the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to cryptocurrency businesses than was previously reported. Around $20 million of the $1.9 billion in PPP loans the bank extended was given to roughly 40 firms in the digital asset space, said CEO Joseph DePaolo. The executive would not name the firms it gave PPP loans to or give an exact number of firms who took out a loan through the relief program. (Signature’s $1.9 billion in loans accounts for roughly .55% of the entire $350 billion that was disbursed through the U.S. Small Business Administration.) Public records […]
Ferrari sells cars so it can go racing; Bequant built a crypto exchange to get into prime brokerage. That’s the analogy offered by the firm’s head of institutional services, Alex Mascioli, when asked about a new banking relationship with Signature’s blockchain-based payments platform, Signet, first revealed to CoinDesk this week. Prime brokerage, Mascioli said, was always Bequant’s race to win. Prime brokers are facilitators for financing and trading for deep-pocketed institutional investors. While the digital asset space doesn’t have a lot of prime broker options currently, several crypto firms including Coinbase, BitGo and Genesis Trading have announced in recent months their […]
Crypto payments startup Wyre is offering white-labeled savings accounts that dole out interest on crypto, the company announced Friday. Wyre’s client list includes startups including crypto custody firm Casa, wallet provider BRD and traditional enterprises such as banks. “Partners of Wyre are able to offer their users a crypto savings account by simply creating a new savings sub-wallet via the Wyre API,” the company wrote. The new product’s interest rates are meant to be more stable than interest rates at crypto lenders because Wyre will manage funds between MakerDAO, Compound and two centralized crypto lenders, said Jack Jia, Wyre’s vice president […]
Genesis Capital’s lending portfolio rapidly recovered in the second quarter after a sharp decline that resulted from the mid-March bitcoin (BTC) sell-off. The cryptocurrency lender’s book of active trading loans increased 118% from the end of the first quarter to $1.4 billion at mid-year, the firm disclosed Tuesday. The blistering pace of growth was likely an anomaly, the company said. “The 100% growth rate in our loans is a function of the fact that we cut our data set at about March 31,” Genesis CEO Michael Moro said in an interview. “To think that our loans outstanding would grow by over […]
Blockchain infrastructure provider Bison Trails has hired BlockTower Capital’s former compliance director to be its first general counsel. Source link
For decentralized finance (DeFi) to make its mark, it must reach beyond the crypto bubble, said MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen. “Compared to where we’re going next, we’ve still just scratched the surface of what this technology will do,” Christensen, whose lending platform recently topped $1 billion in committed assets, said. He was joined by fellow DeFi luminaries Robert Leshner and Hayden Adams on Wednesday in a live-streamed conversation on the state of the $3.8 billion DeFi market. The session, part of CoinDesk’s Ethereum at Five series, was moderated by reporter Will Foxley. It will certainly be a hard row to hoe, […]
Standing in a spacious, white living room and sporting a black T-shirt, Alex Mashinsky, CEO and co-founder of cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network, urged his customers to ignore the naysayers. “Don’t listen to the FUD-ers, look at the facts,” Mashinsky said on the YouTube livestream on July 17, using crypto slang for “fear, uncertainty and doubt.” A few minutes later, he reassured the audience of “Celsians,” as the platform’s users are nicknamed, that the company is prudently deploying their crypto deposits. Like a bank, Celsius borrows from one set of clients, lends to other customers and pockets the difference in interest. Unlike […]
Banks across Italy are using R3’s Corda blockchain to vastly speed up the process of double-checking transaction logs. Silvia Attanasio, head of innovation at the Italian Banking Association (Associazione Bancaria Italiana or ABI), said both the process of interbank reconciliation and the technology underlying the exchange of data had to change. In the old system, reconciliation took a long time and was unpredictable. The average time for reconciliation was between 30 and 50 days, Attanasio said. On Corda, reconciliation is completed within a day. The Interbank Agreement, a part of Italian law that governs interbank transfers, was passed in 1978 and […]
Avanti Financial expects to open its doors this October with a new bank-issued digital asset. Led by Wyoming blockchain advocate Caitlin Long, the crypto-friendly bank announced Thursday its application was accepted by the Wyoming Division of Banking on July 15. Avanti will open in the fall because the regulator accelerated the timeline of its application process. In the same announcement, Avanti revealed its plans to issue Avit, a programmable digital asset that can only be issued by banks and will be treated as a cash equivalent. With Blockstream as the bank’s technology partner, Long said in an interview that “one could […]
Out of the nearly $8 billion in deposit growth that Signature Bank saw in the second quarter of 2020, $1 billion was raked in by the firm’s digital assets team, according to the bank’s most recent earnings report. While Signature doesn’t break out its total deposits by business line, the increase is a record for the New York-based, crypto-friendly bank. On an earnings call, Signature CEO Joseph DePaolo also attributed deposit growth to an increase across every business line in the bank, including the blockchain-based payment platform Signet. The crypto industry is often a rich source of low-cost, non-interest bearing deposits […]
Custody startup Curv is using the leading lending protocol in decentralized finance (DeFi) to help institutions that want to earn money on idle crypto. By way of the Compound protocol, Curv is offering its service to asset managers, exchanges and other institutional clients. Only deposits will be supported for now, though Curv says there are plans to enable clients to borrow crypto assets through Compound in the near future. “We got requests for it maybe about two, two-and-a-half months ago,” said Curv Chief Operating Officer Josh Schwartz. “Compound is the first DeFi integration. They’ve seen a lot of growth lately, and […]
Unidentified attackers exploited a Ravencoin vulnerability to mint extra RVN “beyond the coinbase of 5000 RVN per block,” Ravencoin lead developer Tron Black wrote in a Medium post on Thursday. According to Black, members of Ravencoin’s CryptoScope team, who developed Solus Explorer, reached out to the Ravencoin developer team recently with their findings. The vulnerability was caused by a community code submission. “Law enforcement has been notified and is working with us,” Black said. The extra coins increase the total supply of 21 billion RVN by 1.5% or the equivalent of 44 days worth of mining. Ravencoin is an open-source fork […]
Oxfam Ireland, a Belfast-based charity fighting global poverty, has received a €1 million ($1.1 million) grant to fund the next phase of a blockchain aid distribution project. Disclosure The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups. Source link
Mutual fund giant Vanguard has completed another blockchain pilot that aims to change the risk profile of foreign exchange (FX) transactions. The Valley Forge, Pa.-based investment firm ran the pilot on Symbiont’s Assembly blockchain with participation from State Street, BNY Mellon and investment firm Franklin Templeton. Vanguard and Franklin Templeton acted as dealer banks and State Street and BNY Mellon acted as counterparty banks as well as custodians, said Symbiont’s foreign exchange lead, Joe Ziccarelli. Symbiont believes the foreign exchange platform will go into production in the third quarter of 2020, Ziccarelli said. “The pilot has helped to prove out some […]
The full life of a digital asset-backed security (ABS) on a blockchain can be settled in 40 minutes versus the 10 to 14 days it would take in a paper-based setting. That was the outcome of a pilot first revealed June 11 by mutual fund giant Vanguard in partnership with blockchain startup Symbiont, Citi, BNY Mellon, State Street and an unnamed ABS issuer. The goal of the project: to see if the decades-old Wall Street practice of repackaging contractual debt – be it car loans, mortgages or credit card debt – into bonds sold to investors, known as securitization, can be […]
Racial diversity and financial inclusion are good for cryptocurrency and blockchain – and the industry has work to do. That was the overarching conclusion of a virtual Juneteenth event put together by Cleve Mesidor, founder of the National Policy Network of Women of Color in Blockchain. Juneteenth is the celebration of June 19, 1865, when the last group of enslaved African Americans were made aware of the Emancipation Proclamation that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had signed two years earlier. While America’s education system has left many ignorant of the origins of Juneteenth, there has been a revived interest in turning the day […]
Mason Privatbank Liechtenstein AG has become the latest private bank to offer digital asset custody through a partnership with Hong Kong-based Hex Trust. The Liechtenstein bank has high-net-worth clients across Asia and Europe that have an interest in investing in digital assets such as cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and security tokens, said Chief Markets Officer Hubert Buechel. As such, the bank has chosen to adopt Hex Trust’s least invasive level of integration, because of how few trades the bank’s clients are interested in making. “We don’t have any day traders in our client base,” Buechel said. In the future, the bank may connect […]
Mutual fund giant Vanguard has completed the first phase of a blockchain pilot to issue digital asset-backed securities (ABS). The Valley Forge, Pa.-based investment manager worked in close collaboration with blockchain startup Symbiont, an unnamed U.S. ABS issuer, BNY Mellon, Citi and State Street. Vanguard modeled the full lifecycle of an ABS settlement on blockchain in the pilot. Vanguard’s end goal for the pilot is to improve the process of securitization with blockchain. The decades-old Wall Street practice of repackaging loans into bonds sold to investors is one that many firms are trying to reimagine with blockchain technology. In March of […]
Crypto retirement savings firm Bitcoin IRA is ready to take on smaller accounts with the launch of its new IRA product, Saver IRA. Around four years ago, Bitcoin IRA launched its first self-directed individual retirement account that required balance minimums of $20,000. Now the firm has dropped that minimum to $3,000 for a standard account. With the addition of Saver IRA, the company has a no-balance-minimum account that instead requires a monthly deposit minimum of $100. “When it’s time to make the decision of when to buy, you’ll find that folks who want to get their toes wet will freeze,” said […]
Lebanon’s financial crisis has banks looking for alternative monetary policy and citizens scrambling for alternative banking services. The economic crisis has been raging for years, but political turmoil and the pandemic-induced global market downturn has raised fears of government defaults and the devaluation of the Lebanese pound. As a result, more Lebanese people are seeking information about bitcoin (BTC), which is relatively cheap and accessible compared to the fractured banking system. The exchange rate for Lebanese pounds to dollars has skyrocketed from 1,500 pounds for every dollar to 4,000 pounds for every dollar, said Patrick Mardini, CEO of the Lebanese Institute […]
Crypto bank Avanti now has the backing of several popular investors in crypto. The bank raised $5 million in an angel round and closed on a subscription to issue an additional amount at its option at a later date, said Avanti CEO Caitlin Long. The round was led by the University of Wyoming Foundation with participation from Anthony Pompliano’s Morgan Creek Digital, Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency Group, Lemniscap, Madison Paige Ventures, Malex Enterprises, Susan B. Anthony, LLC, Gary Gigot and others. “This announcement means Avanti is sufficiently funded to get through the process of applying for a charter application,” Long said. […]
Digital currency trader and lender Genesis Global Trading is moving toward full-service prime brokerage with the acquisition of crypto custodian Vo1t, the company announced Thursday. The New York-based trading firm, which is a subsidiary of CoinDesk parent firm Digital Currency Group, acquired Vo1t to begin developing a full suite of prime brokerage services under one roof including lending, trading and custody. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. “We’re coming at this after having a successful business on the trading and lending side,” said Genesis CEO Michael Moro. “The goal is for clients to be able to do any and […]
Digital asset services firm Bequant launched a prime brokerage service for institutional clients to have easier access to liquidity, custody, lending and other products, the company announced Thursday. With several services and pools of liquidity under one roof, Bequant is able to help institutional clients trade and expand their portfolios while keeping transaction costs low. Additional services include collateral management tools, smart order routing, leveraged trade execution and over-the-counter (OTC) block trading. “We are tailored to a lot of quant [hedge funds] and our clients typically look at trading through automated strategies, arbitrage, you name it,” Bequant CEO George Zarya said. […]