BITCOIN

A co-founder of Tether, the $41 billion company behind the tether (USDT, -0.02%) stablecoin, said the company and its reserves should be audited at least quarterly, and maybe even monthly. “Every time you print a tether, you should have a dollar being added to that cash pool,” said William Quigley, who left the project in 2015 and now runs the non-fungible token (NFT) exchange WAX. “Audited once a month, once a quarter.” The comments on CoinDesk TV come after Tether last month agreed to a $18.5 million settlement with the New York Attorney General on charges of an…

Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange (DEX) on Ethereum and a centerpiece of the $42 billion decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, is releasing its third iteration. In a Tuesday blog post, the firm behind the platform said its aim is to make Uniswap “the most flexible and efficient [automated market maker] ever designed.” AMMs – once nearly solely the domain of Uniswap – have grown in stature along with DeFi’s emergence last year. Rivals like SushiSwap, 1inch and others have also made the exchange of Ethereum-based assets easy for many crypto natives. Uniswap…

Uniswap has licensed the third iteration of its code bank in an apparent move to ward off would-be copycats. The white paper for v3 of the decentralized exchange (DEX) was released Tuesday. In a possible nod to rival project SushiSwap – which copied Hayden Adams’ creation bit by bit – the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based team’s blog post included one section detailing a “business source license” that acts as a time delay for commercial use of the code “for up to two years.” After that point, the code will remain in an open-source GPL license “into…

Digital-asset traders and analysts were scrambling Tuesday to assess a fresh data point extracted from the Bitcoin blockchain: Some $806 million worth of the cryptocurrency apparently transferred earlier in the day off of the Coinbase exchange’s institution-focused unit, Coinbase Pro. The jury is out on what it means. It could be that a large investor or several just completed a fresh round of buying and now are taking the bounty off the exchange for long-term holding or other purposes. Or it might be something else more innocuous, such as an…

The digital economy is an intelligent stage characterized by the deep mining and integrated application of blockchain, artificial intelligence and big data. In the face of new social conditions, the digital economy is booming, giving full play to the benefits of technological innovation and changing the current technology The way of application is to give play to the empowering role of technology to society. Under the wave of blockchain technology, the breakthrough in the financial field is epoch-making. Various forms of “blockchain+” applications have been launched. Blockchain technology has accelerated…

Decentralized finance (DeFi) idealists want to create perfectly free financial ecosystems that can’t be subverted by governments, corporations or regulators. They also want their decentralized nirvana to be equipped with stablecoins so users can be protected from price craziness. Therein lies the contradiction. J.P. Koning, a CoinDesk columnist, worked as an equity researcher at a Canadian brokerage firm and a financial writer at a large Canadian bank. He runs the popular Moneyness blog. Are decentralized anarchic systems, those that have no link to existing centralized institutions, capable of creating stability?…

Cryptocurrencies are banned in Morocco, but peer-to-peer bitcoin (BTC, -5.01%) trading platform LocalBitcoins is reporting all-time trading highs this year. February 2021 was the platform’s “best month ever” in Morocco in terms of trading volumes, according to LocalBitcoins Chief Marketing Officer Jukka Blomberg, who said approximately $900,000 worth of bitcoin was traded on the platform through the month. LocalBitcoins also saw a 30% increase in user registrations between 2019 and 2020, with over 700 new accounts created, Blomberg said. Bitcoin purchases are rising despite a ban on cryptocurrencies in the North African country. In November…

Cryptocurrency fund inflows declined by roughly 58% to $99 million last week. Lower investor appetite for digital asset funds could reflect uncertainty over bitcoin’s price, which recently has traded in a range between $53,000 and $61,000. “Since the February price highs and heightened volatility, we have seen a steady decline in appetite amongst investors,” according to a report by CoinShares, a digital asset management firm. “We have also seen a decline in bitcoin investment product trading volumes to $713 million per day last week, versus $1.1 billion per day for 2021,” wrote CoinShares. Fund flow…

Bitcoin stabilized near $54,000 early Tuesday after posting its worst daily loss in almost a month. Bitcoin (BTC) was trading around $54,680 as of 12:50 UTC (8:50 p.m. ET), after falling late Monday to around $53,715, the lowest since March 16. The largest cryptocurrency fell 5.8% over the previous 24 hours, for its largest daily decline since Feb. 23, according to Bitstamp exchange data. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $53,795.15-$58,407.62 (CoinDesk 20). BTC’s 4-hour chart shows seller volume has been building alongside a falling price, a bearish signal for market technicians. BTC 4-hour…

Prominent users of Crypto Twitter have suddenly discovered they have another profile on a new social network called BitClout, except over there some people are buying and selling tokens representing their identities. It does not matter whether the people behind those profiles have ever touched the social network. “The core insight behind BitClout is that if you can mix speculation and content together, you can not only get a 10x product that creates innovative ways for creators to monetize, but you also get a new business model that’s not ad-driven…