Coindesk

The final dress rehearsal for Ethereum’s upcoming Pectra upgrade occurred Wednesday, as the blockchain's biggest changes in over a year were tested an additional time following a series of mishaps.The upgrade on the new Hoodi testnet was closely watched given that two previous tests, on the Holesky and Sepolia test networks, failed to finalize properly.Following those tests, developers created a new testnet, Hoodi, to give ecosystem players, particularly staking providers, one more testing opportunity before the Pectra upgrade hits Ethereum’s mainnet.The test involved passing Hoodi a series of code changes meant to make Ethereum more user-friendly for both end-users as well as developers. One of those changes adds smart contract functionality to wallets, allowing wallet software developers to build new...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. House of Representatives should have the actual text to debate on Wednesday of a bill that would regulate stablecoins, according to a key lawmaker pushing that legislation, which should get the House ready to potentially catch up with a parallel Senate effort.Rep. Bryan Steil, the Republican who leads the crypto subcommittee within the House Financial Services Committee, said at a Wednesday event in Washington that the bill would be unveiled before the day is out. The Senate has already recently advanced its own version of the U.S. stablecoin oversight legislation through the Senate Banking Committee.Both bills would set up guardrails for the issuance of digital tokens that are based on the value of steady assets...

Bitso, a crypto exchange focusing on Latin America, is entering the increasingly attractive stablecoin market as global adoption accelerates.The company's business development unit, Bitso Business, has established Juno, a subsidiary dedicated to issuing and managing digital assets including stablecoins. Bitso Business also recently appointed Ben Reid as head of stablecoins to drive the firm's ambition in the stablecoin market.The first token Juno issues is a fully-backed Mexican peso stablecoin (MXNB), aiming to facilitate cross-border payments and financial transactions between businesses across the region. The firm deployed the token on Ethereum layer-2 Arbitrum.Stablecoins, now a nearly $230 billion asset class, have been one of the biggest success stories in crypto adoption. With prices pegged to an external asset, predominantly to fiat...

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2805.5, down 0.0% (-0.17) since 4 p.m. ET on Tuesday.Fourteen of 20 assets are trading higher.Leaders: POL (+7.4%) and SUI (+6.0%).Laggards: AVAX (-2.0%) and NEAR (-1.0%).The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.Source link

As bitcoin's (BTC) recovery rally continues, $90,000 is now the key level where things could get interesting. The projection is based mainly on the current positioning of options market makers.Market makers, also known as dealers or MMs, are responsible for providing liquidity to the order book. They occupy the opposite side of investors' trades and work to maintain a market-neutral exposure by hedging in spot and futures markets. They make money off the difference between what they pay for an asset and how much they sell it for, known as the bid-ask spread.Deribit bitcoin options data tracked by Amberdata shows market makers are "short gamma" at the $90,000 strike. What that means is that as the bitcoin price moves closer...