Coindesk

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wants the crypto industry to grow up fast — stressing that the industry is at an “inflection point.”Speaking in front of a packed room at the Ethereum Community Conference, in Cannes, France, Buterin used his keynote to deliver a clear-eyed reality check: Decentralization, he argued, must evolve from a catchphrase to a concrete set of user guarantees — or risk becoming another hollow promise.As the industry has gone mainstream with endorsements from major corporations and political figures, builders need to return to the ecosystem’s key ideals surrounding decentralization and building for users' needs, Buterin said.In his typical jeans and relaxed dark T-shirt uniform, Buterin laid out practical “tests” that he said every crypto project should pass....

REX Shares and Osprey Funds have selected Anchorage Digital as the exclusive custodian and staking partner for their newly launched REX-Osprey Solana + Staking ETF (SSK), the first crypto staking exchange-traded fund (ETF) listed in the U.S.The fund, which offers investors exposure to Solana (SOL) while generating staking rewards, began trading Wednesday on the Cboe exchange Wednesday at $25.47 per share.Unlike existing spot bitcoin and ethereum ETFs, which fall under different regulatory frameworks, SSK is registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. That means a qualified custodian — not the fund issuer — is required to hold the underlying assets. Anchorage Digital, currently the only federally regulated bank authorized to both custody and stake digital assets, will fill that...

Bitcoin (BTC) is set to defy historical post-halving patterns and push toward an all-time high in the second half, investment bank Standard Chartered (STAN) said in a research report Wednesday.The cryptocurrency's price typically falls about 18 months after the halving, a quadrennial event that slows the rate of growth in bitcoin supply. This time, structural support from institutional investors is expected to counter any such weakness, said Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered."The bitcoin halving cycle is dead," Kendrick wrote.The analyst reiterated his year-end bitcoin price forecast of $200,000, and said he expects the largest cryptocurrency to rise to around $135,000 by the end of the third quarter.Strong inflows from spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and...

Layer-2 network BOB has launched its testnet ahead of the mainnet going live in Q4 of this year.Describing itself as a hybrid layer-2, BOB's aim is to combine Bitcoin's security and reserves with Ethereum's programmability using the BitVM computing paradigm to create a decentralized finance (DeFi) hub.BitVM was introduced in late 2023 by Robin Linus as a means of enabling rollups atop Bitcoin, thus allowing faster and cheaper transactions without compromising the network's security.BOB's bridge harnesses BitVM to allow BTC to be transferred to the rollup and later bring it back so that it can be withdrawn.Central to BOB's ethos is that it will use actual BTC rather than a wrapped version of the asset as the fuel for DeFi...

Deutsche Bank (DB) is planning to debut a crypto custody service next year, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.Germany's largest bank has enlisted cryptocurrency exchange Bitpanda to help build the offering, according to the report, citing people familiar with the matter.Deutsche's prior involvement in crypto custody has largely been through Swiss custodian Taurus, of which the German bank is both an investor and a client. It is not clear how this relationship would develop should Deutsche begin offering its own service in-house. The bank's other recent crypto initiatives have been concentrated in the stablecoin sector, with its asset management subsidiary DWS planning to issue a euro stablecoin as part of a joint venture with Flow Traders and Galaxy (GLXY).Deutsche did not immediately...