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Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the ride-hailing giant is exploring the use of crypto as a payment method, which marks the third time the company has made the claim since 2021.Speaking Thursday at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, Khosrowshahi said the company is in the “study phase” of evaluating stablecoins for operational use.“I think stablecoins are one of the more interesting instantiations of crypto that have a practical benefit beyond being a store of value,” Khosrowshahi said.Uber was an early member of the Diem Association (formerly Libra), joining in 2019 to support Meta’s now-defunct stablecoin initiative aimed at reshaping global payments.“You can have your opinions on Bitcoin, it’s a proven commodity, and people differ on where it’s going....

Good Morning, Asia. Here's what's making news in the markets:Welcome to Asia Morning Briefing, a daily summary of top stories during U.S. hours and an overview of market moves and analysis. For a detailed overview of U.S. markets, see CoinDesk's Crypto Daybook Americas.Bitcoin BTC is trading above $101.5K as Asia begins its trading day, shrugging off fresh tariff uncertainties from the Trump administration.However, the real story, according to Semir Gabeljic, director of capital formation at Pythagoras Investments, is that traders continue to be laser-focused on a bull market throughout the remainder of the year, with a high degree of confidence that BTC will reach $120,000, buoyed by persistent corporate buying and declining volatility."The uncertainty from unexpected tariff increases by the...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As many as 16 Democrats may vote in favor of the Senate's stablecoin bill when it gets to its final set of votes in the legislative body, Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego said Thursday.The "Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins of 2025" (GENIUS) Act faced headwinds last month after Gallego led a group of Democrats against voting for cloture, a procedural hurdle that would advance legislation, citing concerns about consumer protection and other provisions. Within a week and a half, however, Gallego and other Democrats who had defected from the vote flipped, and the Arizona lawmaker told CoinDesk he predicted that his colleagues would continue advancing it out of the Senate."We've worked in a very honest,...

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned a Philippines-based tech company, Funnull Technology Inc., for providing the computer infrastructure for “hundreds of thousands of websites” involved in pig butchering scams, according to a Thursday press release from the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC).OFAC also sanctioned Liu Lizhi, a Chinese national working as Funnull Technology’s administrator. According to the press release, Funnull Technology has directly facilitated more than $200 million in losses from scam victims in the U.S. Of those victims, the average losses per individual were over $150,000.“Today’s action underscores our focus on disrupting the criminal enterprises, like Funnull, that enable these cyber scams and deprive Americans of their hard-earned savings,” said Deputy Secretary of the Treasury...

The family of U.S. President Donald Trump has allegedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to two entities behind a forthcoming — and already heavily disputed — Trump-branded crypto wallet, according to a Thursday report from Bloomberg.Since the announcement of the so-called $TRUMP Wallet (named for the President’s eponymous memecoin) earlier this week, Trump’s three sons — Don Jr., Eric, and Barron — have all publicly repudiated the project, saying that neither the Trump family nor its firm, the Trump Organization, is connected to or otherwise authorized the $TRUMP Wallet.“This project is not authorized by @Trump,” Eric Trump wrote in an X post. “I would be extremely careful using our name in a project that has not been approved and is unknown to anyone in our...