Coindesk

Nova Labs, the parent company behind the Helium blockchain, has agreed to pay the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) $200,000 to settle civil securities fraud charges the regulator filed against the firm in January, a court filing said Thursday.Without admitting or denying any wrongdoing, Nova Labs agreed to pay the fine to settle accusations that it misled institutional investors during a funding round from late 2021 to early 2022, during which it raised $200 million in fresh capital at a $1 billion valuation. In its complaint, the SEC accused Nova Labs of lying to prospective investors about a number of big-name enterprise customers — including Nestle, Salesforce and Lime — it claimed were using the Helium technology.The SEC accused...

Crypto companies issuing or dealing with tokens that may be securities should provide detailed disclosures, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Thursday.The SEC published its latest staff statement on disclosures ahead of its second roundtable — which will focus on trading — "as part of an effort to provide greater clarity on the application of the federal securities laws to crypto assets."The nonbinding guidance recommends companies filing disclosures be precise about what their businesses do and what role their tokens may play in those ventures. Much of it is based on observations about what companies have previously disclosed, the statement said. The statement did not delve deeply into which cryptocurrencies are being defined as securities or what...

Meanwhile, a startup offering life insurance and annuities denominated in bitcoin (BTC), raised $40 million in series A funding round, CEO Zac Townsend said on Thursday in an X post.The investment was led by venture capital firms Framework and Fulgur Ventures, with early Bitcoin-advocate Wences Casares also participating.Traditional life insurance pays out in fiat currencies. Meanwhile flips this model, keeping premiums and benefits in bitcoin, aiming to help policyholders guard against inflation and currency devaluation. In countries where local currencies lose value, holding policies in BTC could help preserve purchasing power for future payouts. However, policyholders also take on bitcoin’s price volatility.The firm plans to use the funds to accelerate its global rollout, targeting regions where inflation and currency instability...

As risk assets including cryptocurrencies struggled on Thursday amid tariff uncertainties, tokenized gold once again emerged as an outperformer in the carnage.The market capitalization of gold-backed tokens swelled to just under $2 billion on Wednesday, up 5.7% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data. The rise coincided with the yellow metal briefly touching a fresh all-time above $3,170/oz, TradingView shows. Alongside the price rally, gold tokens experienced a frenzy of activity and demand over the past weeks, fueled by the broader market turmoil. Weekly tokenized gold trading volume surpassed $1 billion, the highest since the U.S. banking turmoil of March 2023, according to a report by digital asset platform CEX.IO.The two largest tokens, Paxos Gold (PAXG), Tether Gold...

NEW YORK, NY — A recent U.S. Department of Justice staff memo dismantling the DOJ’s crypto unit and narrowing the scope of its crypto-related enforcement priorities will have no impact on the prosecution of Terraform Labs co-founder and former CEO Do Kwon, prosecutors said Thursday.The memo, sent Monday evening by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, informed staff that the DOJ would no longer be pursuing prosecution against crypto exchanges, mixing services, or offline wallets for the acts of their end users. Blanche told staff not to criminally charge any violations of federal securities or commodities laws, except under specific circumstances, in cases where the charges would “require the to litigate whether a digital asset is a ‘security’ or...