Coindesk

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a ruling on Wednesday largely agreeing with a lower court’s 2023 decision to toss out a class action suit against decentralized exchange Uniswap.A group of investors originally sued Uniswap Labs, the company behind the decentralized protocol of the same name, and some of its venture capital investors in 2022, alleging that the company was responsible for harming investors by allowing scam tokens to be issued on its protocol.District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) sided with Uniswap in 2023 and scrapped the suit before it went to trial, likening the plaintiffs’ arguments to “a suit attempting to hold an application like Venmo or...

Gotbit founder Aleksei Andriunin, a 26-year-old Russian national, was extradited to the U.S. on Tuesday to face fraud charges stemming from allegations that his firm participated in a “wide-ranging conspiracy” to manipulate token prices for paying client cryptocurrency companies, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a press release on Wednesday.Andriunin was arrested in Portugal last October and subsequently indicted by a Boston grand jury on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud, charges which carry a combined maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. The indictment also charged Gotbit itself, as well as two of its directors, Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili, both also of Russia.Between 2018 and 2024, prosecutors say that Gotbit...

The U.S. House of Representatives has taken the first significant move to erase the work of the Internal Revenue Service to impose a tax regime on decentralized financial (DeFi) platforms in the final days of former President Joe Biden's administration.The House Ways and Means Committee — the panel responsible for overseeing the Treasury Department's IRS — advanced a resolution in a 26-16 vote to reverse the IRS transaction-reporting policy under the Congressional Review Act. Such an effort requires majority approval in both the House and Senate before a presidential signature would make the move final, and the matter now moves to the overall House.In December, the IRS had approved a system that the crypto industry says forces DeFi protocols into...

Bank of America, which has historically taken a backseat in the crypto industry, is prepared to launch its own dollar-backed stablecoin if U.S. lawmakers approve legislation allowing it to do so, its CEO said Tuesday.“If they make that legal, we will go into that business,” Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said in an interview with David Rubenstein at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.Moynihan said that he believes there will certainly be a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, arguing that given these digital assets function just like money market funds or bank accounts. This is dependent on Congress passing legislation; lawmakers and White House Crypto and AI Czar David Sacks have suggested legislation may move within President Donald Trump's...

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) could have an even stronger Republican majority when the chairman picked by President Donald Trump arrives, with the announcement on Wednesday that Democratic Commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero will step down after that expected confirmation.If Trump nominee Brian Quintenz, a former Republican commissioner at the agency, is approved by the U.S. Senate, the Democrat's exit will leave just Commissioner Kristin Johnson to represent the agency's minority party. This leadership shift would take place at a particularly meaningful moment for the agency, when its expected leading role in crypto is being worked out in Congress and past resistance to the industry is being stripped away with the already active overhaul of CFTC personnel."History has shown...