Cryptocurrencies were designed to be anonymous or pseudonymous, so there is an inherent tension when protocols come up against jurisdictional authorities. In the United States, the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector has jousted with regulators over the need to comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules, and even over adherence to economic…
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An extended market price drawdown (crypto winter) throughout 2022 has tested the crypto industry’s mettle, and more recently, a crackdown by United States regulators on some prominent entities like Coinbase, Binance and Kraken has further shaken the sector. So maybe it’s only natural for the industry to employ colorful, vivid language to describe what’s been…
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In the United States, crypto reform legislation isn’t the province of a single political party, and that’s why a former U.S. Congressman, who also played a prominent role in the Trump administration, believes that passage of a federal “digital assets” law this year is a real possibility. “Democrats aren’t all on one side; Republicans aren’t…
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USD Coin (USDC), the world’s second-largest stablecoin, may simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The place was Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a commercial bank with $209 billion in assets, where USDC issuer Circle had deposited $3.3 billion of its cash reserves for safekeeping. The time was the present: one of…
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Banks are the lifeblood of a nation’s economic system, and any bank collapse is disturbing. Last week saw two failures. On March 8, Silvergate Capital — the cryptocurrency-focused banking company — entered into voluntary liquidation. On March 10, United States regulators shut down and seized the deposits of tech-oriented Silicon Valley Bank in what was being…
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Earlier this year, Joshua Browder, CEO of AI startup DoNotPay, attempted to bring a robot lawyer into a California courtroom, despite almost certainly knowing that it was illegal in almost all 50 states to bring automated assistance like this into a courtroom. DoNotPay bills itself as the “world’s first robot lawyer” whose goal is to…
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There’s been little sunlight this crypto winter, so it may seem odd to present the “Bitcoin as legal tender” argument again. That is, will or should any country — other than El Salvador and the Central African Republic (CAR), which have already done so — declare Bitcoin (BTC) an official national currency? The International Monetary…
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In a year of crypto upheavals, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s settlement with crypto exchange Kraken, announced on Feb. 9, set off yet another tremor. Agency chief Gary Gensler took to mainstream media last week to explain the agency’s action, which seemed to be an attack on crypto staking — part of the…
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Bitcoin experienced the second-strongest January in its history — and the best since 2013 — rising nearly 40% amid wide reports that institutional investors were back on board. Zhong Yang Chan, head of research at CoinGecko, told Cointelegraph that there were “net institutional inflows into digital asset funds in January 2023, particularly in the last…
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Is crypto lending dead, or does it just need better execution? That’s a question asked with more urgency in the wake of Genesis Global Capital Jan. 19 bankruptcy filing. That, in turn, followed the demise of other prominent crypto lenders, including Celsius Network and Voyager Digital in July 2022, and BlockFi, which filed for Chapter…
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