Coindesk

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will no longer instruct banks to get prior sign-off before they engage in crypto activities — a standard that was set in 2022 and that effectively severed institutions from the digital assets sector as they waited for approvals that never came.The FDIC, which is the chief federal supervisor of thousands of typically smaller banks and runs the banking industry's government backstop, had occupied a significant role in the crypto debanking saga. A courtroom fight with crypto exchange Coinbase had recently unveiled dozens of letters between the regulator and banks it supervised. In that 2022 correspondence, the FDIC had instructed them to steer clear of new crypto matters while it hashed out policies, though the agency...

Shares of CoreWeave (CRWV) opened at $39 apiece during the company’s debut on Nasdaq on Friday afternoon, just under its initial public offering which closed Thursday evening.The cloud computing firm had sold roughly 37.5 million shares at $40 each, raising about $1.5 billion for its initial public offering (IPO), making it the largest tech offering since 2021. It had, however, initially planned to file the offering at $47 to $55 a share at a much higher valuation than it ultimately saw.Nvidia, an early investor in the company, placed a $250 million order in the offering.Some experts speculated that the stock’s debut wouldn’t see the success it had hoped for. Bloomberg Opinion US technology columnist Dave Lee, for example, pointed out...

It was a bad week for crypto prices, with BTC and ETH both falling and the CoinDesk 20, which covers 80% of the market, losing 7% since Monday. But less speculative assets showed plenty of volume. Stablecoins, in particular, were the name of the game this week. The U.S. House introduced a stablecoin bill, following up on the Senate version that was approved by committee last week. Jesse Hamilton reported. Wyoming (aka “The Blockchain State”) wants its own stablecoin and it’s testing the idea on Avalanche, Solana and Ethereum, Kris Sandor reported.World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the financial protocol backed by Donald Trump and his family, confirmed the launch of its stablecoin (USD1) this week. And Don Trump Jr. trumpeted the...

An investment firm with ties to U.S. President Donald Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., is putting some of its excess cash into a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) — an unusual twist on the increasingly popular strategy of holding bitcoin as a corporate reserve.Dominari Holdings (DOMH), located in the Trump Tower in New York City, made headlines last month after the Trump brothers joined its 58-year-old board of advisors and became investors.In an earnings report on Friday, it announced that it would adopt a bitcoin reserve strategy and invest a portion of its cash reserves into BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the largest spot bitcoin ETF on the market.According to the report, Dominari has committed $2 million to...

Is Strategy (MSTR) in trouble?Led by Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, the firm formerly known as MicroStrategy has vacuumed up 506,137 bitcoin (BTC), currently worth roughly $44 billion at BTC's current price near $87,000, in the span of about five years. To the casual observer, the company seems to have a magic, unlimited pool of funds from which to draw on to buy more bitcoin. But Strategy acquired a sizable chunk of its stash by issuing billions of dollars in equity and convertible notes (debt securities which can be converted into equity under special conditions), and more recently via the issuance of preferred stock, a type of equity that provides dividends to investors.However, the price of bitcoin has been pushed down...