Coindesk

The ransomware business took a hit in 2024, with payments falling 35% year-over-year, according to a new report from Chainalysis.Though the number of ransomware attacks increased in 2024, ransomware gangs made less money, pulling in $814 million compared to 2023’s record-high sum of $1.25 billion. The blockchain analytics firm attributes the decline to a variety of factors, including an uptick in law enforcement actions and sanctions, as well as a growing refusal by victims to pay their attackers.Last year, less than half of all recorded ransomware attacks resulted in victim payments. Jacqueline Burns Koven, Chainalysis’ head of cyber threat intelligence, told CoinDesk that part of the non-payment trend can be attributed to a growing distrust that complying with attackers’ demands...

Gold (XAU) is reaffirming its status as a safe haven asset amid ongoing fears of a U.S.-led trade war, while bitcoin (BTC) struggles to gather upside traction. The dynamic is driving the bitcoin-gold ratio lower.The ratio between bitcoin's USD price and gold's per ounce dollar price has dropped to 34, the lowest since Nov. 14, almost testing the previous peak hit in March 2024, data from charting platform TradingView show. It's down 15.4% since hitting a peak above 40 in mid-December.Gold's year-to-date surge of nearly 10% to a per-ounce record price of $2,877 has been driven by safe-haven demand amid the escalating U.S.-China trade war, according to Reuters. The tariffs threat has dedicated metal products Comex futures prices trading...

U.S.-listed spot bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have seen a 175% year-over-year increase in almost the first three weeks of trading. In 2025, from Jan. 13 to Feb. 5, net inflows equaled $4.4 billion, while the 2024 net inflows for the first three weeks equaled $1.6 billion.The spot bitcoin ETFs were one of the most successful ETF launches of all time, and have accumulated over $40.6 billion in total net inflows. In the same time, BlackRock iShares Trust (IBIT) has seen a total of $40.7 billion in net inflows. While the total net inflow for all 11 spot BTC ETFs is $40.6 billion, due to Grayscale GBTC witnessing outflows of $21.9 billion.To determine whether these inflows reflect a directional long...

Crypto exchange Bullish Global is considering selling shares to the public for the first time at some point during 2025, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The company, which owns CoinDesk, is working with Jefferies Financial Group on the potential listing, Bloomberg said. Talks of an initial public offering (IPO) comes as the prices of bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies have shot up since Donald Trump won the U.S. election in November. The total crypto market has climbed to to $3.15 trillion from $2.2 trillion. On Tuesday, U.S. crypto czar David Sacks spoke about a golden age for digital assets.Led by CEO Tom Farley, Bullish has more than 275 employees worldwide including Hong Kong, the U.S. and Europe....

The XRP Ledger (XRPL) was briefly unavailable early Wednesday as a consensus mechanism design led to a temporary halt in network operations.The incident began when the network's consensus process appeared to function, but validations were not being published, causing the network's ledgers to “drift apart.”In the XRP Ledger, consensus among validators is crucial for updating the ledger with new transactions. If validators cannot agree on which transactions to include in the next ledger version, the network can't move forward.A “drift” in this context means that while the consensus protocol was technically running, validations (or confirmations of transaction sets) weren't being published.At least one validator operator manually intervened to reset the network's consensus to a previously validated ledger state, although the...