Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) has awarded a virtual asset service provider (VASP) license to Bahrain-headquartered cryptocurrency exchange CoinMENA to operate and offer services in and from the Emirates. The license acquired by CoinMENA FZE, the Dubai subsidiary of CoinMENA B.S.C., permits the platform to offer virtual asset broker-dealer services, the Dec. 12 announcement…
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Su Zhu, co-founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Three Arrows Capital (3AC), is reportedly set to be released this month after facing an extensive interrogation in a Singapore court. Zhu was arrested in Singapore in September 2023 when he attempted to flee the country after a local court sentenced him to four months of imprisonment. At the…
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Bitcoin (BTC) tapped $40,000 after the Dec. 8 Wall Street open as United States employment data shrunk market bets on interest rate cuts. BTC/USD 1-hour chart. Source: TradingView Bitcoin holds firm as jobs data unsettles U.S. dollar Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView covered the latest BTC price action as risk assets reacted to…
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As the first blockchain and cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (BTC) paved the way for everything that’s come since: nonfungible tokens (NFTs), smart contracts, tokenization, layer-2 solutions, and all the rest. Due to Bitcoin’s value to the cryptosphere, forming the bedrock that supports the rest of the market, its protocol is rarely altered. With hundreds of billions of…
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Bitcoin and the broader crypto market have been gleefully declared dead more than a few times during bear markets, but some experts say it would take a genuinely extreme set of events for it to truly die. According to 99Bitcoins — a website that, among other things, tracks how many times Bitcoin (BTC) has been…
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The UK’s antitrust regulator is considering initiating a merger investigation into Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar collaboration with OpenAI. This announcement resulted in a response from Microsoft, declaring that it only plays a non-voting observer role on the board of the ChatGPT maker. The investigation announcement follows the ChatGPT maker’s disclosure that the U.S. tech giant would…
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In 2023, Kazakhstan’s Financial Monitoring Agency (FMA) blocked access to almost a thousand crypto exchanges serving the country’s citizens without proper registration. According to a Dec. 7 press release published on the government’s website, the FMA denied access to 980 illegal platforms in 2023. It also launched nine investigations into “illegal exchange operations” and money…
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Developers of Bitcoin side-chain MicroVisionChain (MVC) have unveiled a BRC-20 decentralized exchange (DEX) as part of its roadmap for Q1 2024. In an interview with Cointelegraph, MVC chief operating officer Jason Kwok claims to have developed a “1:1 mapping relationship” with Bitcoin on its sidechain. “This essentially creates a parallel version of your Bitcoin assets,…
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Bitcoin (BTC) struggled to hold above $43,000 into Dec. 8 as an altcoin surge put Ether (ETH) in the spotlight. BTC/USD 1-hour chart. Source: TradingView ETH, SOL step up as Bitcoin takes liquidity Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed ongoing BTC price consolidation as ETH/USD added up to 7.6% in around 24 hours.…
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A specialized exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm called YieldMax has filed to launch the first yield-bearing ETF product based on shares in Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin holding company, MicroStrategy. According to a Dec. 7 filing with the United States SEC, YieldMax has officially applied to launch its Option Income Strategy ETF based on shares in MicroStrategy, slated…
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