Coindesk

Paul Atkins, the nominee to take over the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, is set for a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing next week, putting President Donald Trump's pick for the SEC chairmanship on track to start working as soon as next month.At the same March 27 hearing, the Senate panel is also weighing the nomination of Jonathan Gould to take over the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees U.S. national banks — a key area of interest for crypto firms that have fought a long battle for banking access, the Senate Banking Committee announced in an email Thursday.Atkins is a former commission of the SEC and a digital assets advocate who ran a Washington firm advising clients...

Proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining does not trigger federal securities laws, according to a Thursday staff statement from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which told mining operators they do not need to register their transactions with the regulator.The statement, published by the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, declared that both solo proof-of-work crypto mining and pooled proof-of-work crypto mining do not meet the definition of a securities transaction under the Howey Test — the legal framework used to determine whether a transaction represents an investment contract — because they are “not undertaken with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of others.”The statement puts to rest any lingering fears that the SEC’s enforcement division...

Stock and other traditional financial asset traders across the world are wanting to be able to buy and sell assets around the clock, resulting in two of the biggest stock markets in the U.S., Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) making moves to offer round-the-clock trading soon.“We definitely see that this is where the markets are moving,” said Giang Bui, Nasdaq’s head of U.S. Equities & Exchange-Traded Products, speaking at the Digital Asset Summit in New York on Thursday. “There's a lot of demand globally for U.S. stocks and people want to trade within the hours that they're typically awake, and I think a lot of it is because people are used to trading crypto 24/7.”Both Nasdaq and...

Bitcoin miners are facing renewed financial pressure as declining transaction fees and a hashprice drop push operational costs higher, according to TheMinerMag’s February 2025 report​.Bitcoin’s hashrate climbed 3.8% in February to 810 EH/s, showing a slowdown in mining competition growth. However, the hashprice (the revenue that miners earn per unit of computing power) slipped to $45/PH/s, wiping out gains from the U.S. election-driven price surge. At this level, inefficient miners are feeling the strain.Transaction fees made up just 1.3% of total block rewards in February, marking their lowest share since the last bear market bottom in 2022. March is trending even lower, at 1.12% so far.These factors — alongside increased competition from artificial intelligence (AI) data centers — are putting...

A year ago, restaking was one of the hottest areas of crypto, and projects like EigenLayer were heralded as the next big thing.Fast forward to mid-2025 and total value locked (TVL) has fallen across the sector and the hype that surrounded point farms has withered away.Through it all, Ether.fi, the market leader, has stayed steady, helping users generate yield through liquid staking tokens (LSTs) that can be staked across the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.Now, Ether.fi is looking to expand with plans to become a neobank for crypto companies and users.Ether.fi's dominanceEther.fi, which is based in the Cayman Islands, benefited from being one of the first movers in the liquid restaking space, starting up a lucrative points farm which saw early...