Coindesk

It's deja vu all over again in crypto after a hopeful report on a tariff delay was refuted by the White House.To review, President Trump on Thursday promised to impose 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada beginning Saturday Feb. 1. Having rallied over $106,000 prior to that news, bitcoin (BTC) quickly reversed 2% lower to around the $104,000 level. U.S. stocks gave up a chunk of earlier gains, though still finished the session in the green.Friday then brought a report from Reuters suggesting the tariffs would be delayed until March 1 as a process was put in place to allow countries to seek exemptions for certain exports.The White House, though, called that report "false," with Trump's Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt...

It was another busy week at CoinDesk as the new Trump Administration continued to roll out a pro-crypto agenda and the industry laid the groundwork for growth in the new cycle. Ripple was at the center of the news. Ondo Finance announced it would offer tokenized treasuries on Ripple’s XRP Ledger, Kris Sandor reported. The San Francisco company also said XRP Ledger would offer clawback features, enhancing liquidity for Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin RLUSD, Shaurya Malwa reported. Meanwhile, CEO Brad Garlinghouse lobbied for XRP to be included in any national crypto reserve, riling Bitcoiners who say the reserve should be bitcoin-only. Omkar Godbole had that news, along with several incisive market analyses (his Daybook daily update is a must-read).In other protocol news,...

The supply of stablecoins on Solana jumped by 112% in January to a record high of $11.1 billion, CCData (a subsidiary of CoinDesk) said in a research report on Friday.The surge coincided with the launch of Donald Trump's memecoin $TRUMP, which caused a wave of inflows to the network, according to the report. Stablecoin supply has risen by 73.6% since $TRUMP launched on Jan. 18.Trading activity around $TRUMP resulted in record activity on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and contributed to stablecoin supply on Solana, surpassing its previous record set in 2022 and becoming the third largest network behind Ethereum and Tron, based on this metric.The report also said that the market capitalization of all stablecoins has passed $200 billion, having grown...

Evgeny Gaevoy began his career in traditional finance, specializing in market making and prop trading. But by 2016, seeing the inefficiencies of legacy financial systems and the potential for disintermediation, Gaevoy realized there was an opportunity to create something entirely new and better.With experience building up foreign exchange firm Optiver’s European ETF business — one of the largest in the EU — he decided to launch an algorithmic trading firm designed for the digital asset era. Since 2017, Wintermute has since grown into one of the largest algorithmic trading and liquidity providers in crypto, processing over $5 billion in daily trading volume and providing deep liquidity to 50+ trading venues across centralized and decentralized exchanges.This series is brought to you...

Tether, the crypto company behind the largest stablecoin USDT, said on Friday it generated $13 billion group-wide net profits last year in a record-breaking year.Some $7 billion of the profits derived from the firm's vast U.S. Treasuries and repo holdings, and $5 billion from unrealized appreciation of the company's gold and bitcoin (BTC) holdings. Other investments contributed $1 billion.According to the company's latest quarterly attestation signed by accounting firm BDO Italy, the group's stablecoin issuer arms Tether International Limited and Tether Limited disclosed $143.7 billion of assets in reserve against $136.6 billion in liabilities, adding up to $7 billion of excess reserves backing its stablecoins. Treasury bills in the reserve rose to $94.5 billion.The group also increased its bitcoin holdings...