Coindesk

The crypto rally took a long-overdue pause on Thursday as traders took some profits following weeks of relentless advance that lifted bitcoin BTC close to record prices.The consolidation occurred amid a slew of U.S. economic data releases. April retail sales missed expectations, producer prices rose less than forecast, jobless claims stayed on track, while the NY Empire State Manufacturing Index and Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Survey showed softening business activity—signals that did little to rattle traditional markets. The S&P 500 added 0.4%, while the Nasdaq finished flat.Bitcoin pulled back to $101,000 early in the U.S. session before rebounding above $103,000 later, modestly down over the past 24 hours.Altcoins fared worse with the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index declining 3% during the same...

Banks need to be part of crypto for stablecoins to succeed—that was the message from Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s senior vice president of digital currencies, during a panel discussion at Consensus 2025 in Toronto."It might sound counterintuitive, but you do want the banks in this space," Fernandez da Ponte said, adding that their infrastructure—from custody to providing fiat rails—will be essential if stablecoins are to scale beyond crypto-native circles. "You want that connectivity and that fabric to work."His remarks came amid efforts to bring regulatory clarity for digital assets in the U.S., with lawmakers inching closer to pass stablecoin legislation that could redefine the market and allow banks to enter the space.Read more: U.S. Senate's Stablecoin Push Still Alive...

The latest draft of the U.S. Senate's stablecoin legislation includes enough changes that Democratic senators may now have an easier time getting back on board, though consumer advocates say it still falls short.The bill to set oversight and standards for stablecoin issuers sailed through the Senate Banking Committee with wide bipartisan support in March, but it hit a wall on the Senate floor last week as many Democrats raised objections. Chief among them were the conflicts that may be presented by President Donald Trump's own crypto interests and the possibility that big technology firms like Meta and social-media site X may be able to issue such tokens. "As the result of hard-fought negotiations, Democrats won major victories on a range...

The SEC has been investigating crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN) over whether it misstated its user numbers in past securities filings and marketing materials. The probe began under the former presidential administration while the SEC was still under the control of then-Chair Gary Gensler, according to the NYT, which first reported the story, but has persisted under the SEC’s current, crypto-friendly leadership.The metric at the heart of the investigation is Coinbase’s claim to have over 100 million “verified users.” It stopped using the metric in both disclosure and marketing materials in 2021, the year it went public on the Nasdaq.Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, told CoinDesk in an emailed statement that the SEC’s investigation is a “hold-over investigation from the...

Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio shared Thursday that he thinks the blockchain wasn’t necessarily meant to be a “competitor to Bitcoin,” but rather “it was meant to be an alternative.”Speaking to a crowd at Consensus 2025, Di Iorio shared with the audience about his time during Ethereum’s early days, noting back then that he understood that the project could become a really big movement. “We could sense and feel that it was picking up,” Di Iorio said.Di Iorio was one of the eight co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain, but originally got into cryptocurrency through his advocacy with Bitcoin. He started Bitcoin meetups in Toronto in 2012, and through that met Vitalik Buterin, who came up with the Ethereum whitepaper and...