Coindesk

As President Donald Trump's biggest memcoin buyers such as Tron founder Justin Sun bask in his attention over dinner on Thursday, Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups have arrayed a series of protests and complaint sessions to decry the president's crypto event as fundamentally corrupt.Trump will host his dinner for more than 200 of his leading memecoin investors, whose money will fill the coffers of the president's own business entities. They've reportedly been invited to his capital-area golf course, the Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C., outside of which the memecoin buyers may encounter protesters.Some of the counter-programming for his dinner will start earlier in the day in front of the Capitol Building. At 12:45 p.m., Representative Maxine Waters, the top...

Prosecutors have charged Jeremy Jordan-Jones, the self-styled founder of a now-defunct crypto startup called Amalgam, with fraud, alleging that he swindled investors in his “sham blockchain” of more than $1 million, using the money to fund a lavish lifestyle.According to prosecutors, Jordan-Jones painted Amalgam as a tech company that created blockchain-based point-of-sale payment systems, which he claimed had multi-million-dollar partnerships with sports teams including the Golden State Warriors and a professional soccer team in England’s Premier League, as well as a big restaurant conglomerate with more than 500 restaurants. None of these partnerships existed, prosecutors said. Jordan-Jones also allegedly solicited investments from would-be investors by telling them the money would be used to facilitate the listing of Amalgam’s non-existent crypto...

Bitcoin BTC notched a new all-time high of $109,000 on Wednesday, but that's small consolation for bitcoin miners, who last month were forced to cash in a record number of their BTC reserves, according to mining news outlet TheMinerMag.The firm’s latest research report reveals that public miners sold 115% of their bitcoin production in April — meaning they sold more than they produced. That is the highest ratio since the tail end of the 2022 bear market.Even today, with bitcoin breaking to a new record high above $109,000, hashprice (what miners earn per unit of computational power) has failed to follow suit. It stands at just $55 per petahash per second (PH/s), well below the $63/PH/s level it briefly reached...

Hong Kong passed a stablecoin bill that will enable the region to establish a licensing regime for fiat-backed stablecoin issuers."Hong Kong’s stablecoins are backed by fiat currency as underlying assets, and we welcome global enterprises and institutions interested in issuing stablecoins to apply in Hong Kong," legislative council member Johnny Ng said on X on Wednesday.Institutions are expected to be able to apply for a license from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority by the year-end.Hong Kong has been working on establishing a stablecoin regime since 2023. The nation had published a consultation paper on stablecoin guidelines towards the end of 2023. It later introduced the Stablecoin Bill, which the Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region passed in...

Bitcoin BTC became the world’s fifth-largest asset after hitting a new all-time high on Wednesday, which pushed its market cap to $2.16 trillion.Though the crypto’s price consolidated lower after hitting a high of $109,400, its market cap passed Amazon (AMZN), which stands at $2.15 trillion.Bitcoin is up 16.44% year-to-date while shares of the online retailer are down about 8% over the same period. It is currently trading at $108,954.Gold is the largest asset, by far, standing at a $22 trillion market cap, followed by Microsoft (MSFT), NVIDIA (NVDA) and Apple (AAPL) which stand at $3.1 trillion to $3.4 trillion respectively.As a result of the surge in bitcoin’s price since the win of U.S. President Donald Trump, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust...