Coindesk

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...

Another company has elected to add bitcoin (BTC) to its balance sheet.Christian Angermayer, the chairman of Germany-based biopharmaceutical company atai Life Sciences (ATAI) announced today that the firm would develop its own bitcoin treasury strategy.“In an era of persistent inflation and volatile markets, I find myself asking an important question for biotech companies looking to preserve and optimize the capital they have: Could allocating a portion of treasury cash to bitcoin help preserve, optimize, and even extend a company’s runway and hence contribute to its success,” Angermayer wrote on Substack.The company will initially invest $5 million in bitcoin, Angermayer said, while holding enough cash, short-term securities and public equity for operational expenses into 2027.The pharmaceutical firm is the latest in...

Bitcoin developers looking to expand the blockchain's decentralized finance (DeFi) capabilities are likely to be considering zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, functionality that's not currently available and which require a so-called soft fork, or new version of the software, to introduce them.That's a problem, according Edan Yago, a Bitcoin veteran of over a decade and core contributor to smart contract operating system BitcoinOS (BOS)."Forking a blockchain, especially one with $2 trillion worth of value on it, is like open-heart surgery," Yago told CoinDesk in an interview "Hard forks are obviously much more problematic, but I think introducing any kind of fork is fraught."A fork is a change to a blockchain's code that necessitates a divergence at a certain point onto a separate...