Coindesk

Crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN) surged over 8% on Monday after market closing on news that the stock will be included in the broad-market S&P 500 stock index.The company would replace Discover Financial starting on May 19, according to an S&P press release. Discover Financial is being acquired by Capital One.The S&P 500 tracks 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the U.S. across several sectors, including tech, healthcare, finance and more. Prominent names in the index include Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google. COIN, at a market cap of nearly $53 billion, currently trades on the Nasdaq exchange.The inclusion would be a significant milestone for the digital asset industry, giving millions of average investors and model portfolios exposure to a...

Education tech firm Classover Holdings (KIDZ) said in early May that it would sell $400 million worth of shares to buy solana. Its stock exploded higher. Shares of the thinly traded company, then with a market cap well shy of $50 million soared from $1.15 to more than $7 in just two sessions before settling back to the current $3.69. .Classover wasn’t the first company to experience the crypto surge, and it won’t be the last.A growing number of obscure, microcap and nanocap companies are embracing cryptocurrency — not as a business line or payment method, but as a headline-grabbing balance sheet item. They often follow the same script: an announcement of a shift in strategy to hold digital assets...

In another addition to the old Wall Street maxim of "buy the rumor, sell the news," bitcoin (BTC) has headed lower after the U.S. and China announced at least a temporary truce in their trade war.Bitcoin had been pumping higher since bottoming just under $75,000 in the days following President Trump's early April Liberation Day tariff shocker. The price finally again topped $100,000 late last week following an agreement with the UK. China was the gorilla though and BTC nearly reached $106,000 in the early morning hours on Monday after the two countries over the weekend agreed to suspend most tariffs on each other’s goods for 90 days.At press time, bitcoin had pulled back to $101,300, lower by 3% over...

The last time ICON (ICX) was making headlines, it was at the height of the ICO bubble when it was competing with Tron and Filecoin to buy BitTorrent in a high-profile bidding war.ICON, once heralded as the “Korean Ethereum,” peaked early in 2018 but later struggled to retain relevance amid fierce competition and a changing narrative.Now, ICON is back in the news, as it recently announced that it has rebranded to SODAX and is migrating its entire DeFi infrastructure from its own Layer-1 blockchain to Sonic, an EVM-compatible network focused on high-speed, low-cost transactions.Sonic itself is a product of a rebrand, shifting from the name Fantom in 2024.In an interview with CoinDesk, ICON founder Min Kim explained the logic behind...

Leemon Baird first published his work on hashgraph consensus in 2016, positioning it as an alternative to traditional blockchain architectures. With a background in computer science and a career spanning both academia and industry, Baird co-founded Hedera to commercialize the technology.His academic trajectory is notable for his early work in neural networks and reinforcement learning during the 1990s, a period when AI research was navigating what would later be called the "AI winter." Since then, the Hedera project has evolved in a landscape crowded with competing distributed ledger approaches, each claiming technical superiority and targeting different segments of the market.Baird, a speaker at Consensus 2025, transitions easily between technical explanations and business strategy, reflecting the dual challenges of building both...