Analysis

Even as markets were shaken by the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus, exchange and payment provider Crypto.com says interest in cryptocurrencies reached an all-time high. CEO and co-founder Kris Marszalek told CoinDesk that transaction volumes on Crypto.com more than doubled between December and February, with app downloads also hitting all-time highs. “We saw a

Anthony Xie is the founder of HodlBot, a trading tool that enables cryptocurrency investors to automate their trading strategies. Many lifelong cryptocurrency stalwarts had their savings wiped on Black Thursday when a sudden price crash triggered the auction of under-collateralized ethereum posted in the MakerDAO vaults.  While the system did not technically malfunction, a confluence of

A U.S. judge ordered messaging platform Telegram to refrain from issuing its gram cryptocurrency next month as planned, granting a request by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In a preliminary injunction dated March 24, U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel, of the Southern District of New York, said the SEC had demonstrated a plausible

Mentions of a “digital dollar” in a coronavirus-related relief bill before the U.S. House of Representatives have been scrubbed. The lawmakers first introduced the bill last week, envisioning a digital payment system organized by the Federal Reserve and its member banks to directly send these funds to U.S. residents to assist them with expenses during

Peer-to-peer exchange Paxful has deployed Chainalysis’ cryptocurrency investigations and transaction intelligence software tools, the companies announced Monday in a joint press release. The deal represents an about-face for Chainalysis, one of the industry’s most prominent crypto surveillance developers and regular partner of exchanges, governments and private companies. It had never signed on a peer-to-peer client

How would a bitcoin economy react to coronavirus? For now, we don’t know. However, we can turn to a proxy for insight: gold. Bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative has stuck well, namely because of the cryptocurrency’s low issuance supply schedule and a hard cap of 21 million bitcoins. In turn, theory on how a gold-based economy

Bitcoin’s price shot up along with gold and stock futures after the U.S. Federal Reserve announced a quantitative easing package with no upper limit to support the economy amid the coronavirus crisis. Immediately after the 12:00 UTC announcement, bitcoin jumped from $5,860 to $6,628 in an hour, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index. Gold, a

The Ethereum community now has a roadmap, albeit a confusing one. Dropped Wednesday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s state of the network map helps contextualize the next five to ten years for a global community of 20,000 developers while highlighting a key issue for the blockchain’s next version: scalability. The Eth 2.0 research team is now

Catherine Coley is the CEO of Binance.US. Previously she was Head of XRP Institutional Liquidity at Ripple after working for Morgan Stanley Foreign Exchange desks in Hong Kong and London.  Amid the fear and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US government is looking for ways to financially support Americans as soon as possible, even

The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations. From Boeing to bitcoin in this week’s discussion we’re talking about our disrupted reality, the politically expedient path forward, why it almost certainly won’t work, the alternatives to it, what this means for bitcoin and what you can do to help. This week on Let’s

CoinDesk reporter Leigh Cuen is joined by cognitive economist Leigh Caldwell, author of “The Psychology of Price,” to talk about mental health and cryptocurrency in a time of coronavirus crisis. For daily insights and unique perspectives listen or subscribe to the CoinDesk Podcast Network with Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcasts, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Stitcher, RadioPublica, IHeartRadio

Osho Jha is an investor, data scientist, and tech company executive who enjoys finding and analyzing unique data sets for investing in both public and private markets.  The week of March 9 was a ride regardless of what market you trade and invest in. Markets spiking up, markets spiking down, longs taking drawdowns, shorts getting

Ajit Tripathi, a CoinDesk columnist, is an entrepreneur and crypto co-host at the Breaking Banks Europe Podcast. Previously, he served as a Fintech Partner at ConsenSys and a co-founder of PwC’s UK Blockchain Practice.  Before coronavirus hit the west in late February, the world’s attention was focused on billionaires saving the world in Davos. This

Coinbase saw record site traffic and a massive surge in 24-hour trading volume during last week’s coronavirus-driven market swings, CEO Brian Armstrong said in a statement shared with CoinDesk. The San Francisco-based crypto exchange said it processed $2 billion in crypto last Thursday and Friday (for comparison, Coinbase saw $394 million in volume over the

The Federal Reserve is ready to flood the U.S. with coronavirus-free banknotes – but doesn’t anticipate that happening just yet, according to a spokesman for the central bank’s Philadelphia branch. For now, the Fed does not think that “cash destruction” will be necessary to stymie the spread of the novel coronavirus. COVID-19 has quickly overtaken

Preston Byrne, a columnist for CoinDesk’s Opinion section, is a partner in Anderson Kill’s Technology, Media and Distributed Systems Group. He advises software, internet and fintech companies. His biweekly column, “Not Legal Advice,” is a roundup of pertinent legal topics in the crypto space. It is most definitely not legal advice. In my last column

The Covid-19 pandemic arrives as American’s trust in institutions is faltering. According to a January 2019 Pew Research Center survey, only 35 percent of adults have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in elected officials to act in the public’s best interest, while less than half trust corporate or media leaders.  Further,

As bitcoin (BTC) experiences vertigo-inducing gains, cryptocurrencies are breaking out of a period where they followed or even lagged behind traditional markets. In fact, prices in the crypto market are seeing such a steep upward trend that arbitrage traders are able to trade between Bitfinex and other exchanges to easily capture profit.  Bitcoin is up

Decentralized storage provider Storj Labs says its blockchain-based cloud service is now available for businesses and individuals to securely store files and documents. With the formal launch announced Tuesday, users are now able to begin migrating and backing-up data onto the Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage Service – named after the famously hard to destroy microorganisms.

As the global equities markets continue along their uncertain path, most major stablecoins are holding up to the “stable” part of name amid the worst global pandemic since 1918. Cryptocurrencies have fallen to historic lows with most major assets trending at the same prices seen nearly a year ago, erasing most of the bullish gains