Coindesk

It was a week of red in crypto and traditional markets, with bitcoin plummeting below $80K on March 10 and ETH falling to $1,821 the same day. So much for the “Trump Bump.” With the new administration on a tariff-tear this week, the markets were spooked about a recession and crypto was not immune.Still, progress in digital assets was all around, and our reporters reported it all with alacrity. BlackRock’s bellwether BUIDL fund topped $1 billion and tokenized treasuries hit $4.2 billion, Kris Sandor reported. MoonPay, a payments aggregator, made an important stablecoin acquisition, Will Canny wrote. Ripple won a payments license in the UAE (Shaurya Malwa). OKX won a license to operate in Europe, Camomile Shumba reported. Coinbase announced...

Sellers of risk assets are taking a breather on Friday, with crypto markets posting sizable gains along with U.S. stocks after a week of lame price action.Bitcoin topped $85,000 at one point during U.S. hours and is now trading at $84,400, up 4.7% over the past 24 hours. All cryptos in the CoinDesk 20 Index were higher during the same period, with Chainlink's LINK, Solana's SOL and SUI leading gains.The price action happened as risk appetite returned to traditional markets as well. The S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq indexes were 1.7% and 2.3 up, respectively. Meanwhile, gold, whose price action trounced that of bitcoin during the selling of the past few weeks, backed down below $3,000 after crossing the...

REX Shares has launched a first-of-its-kind convertible-bonds exchange-traded fund (ETF), allowing investors exposure to the convertible debt issued by corporates to add bitcoin to their balance sheet.Called the REX Bitcoin Corporate Treasury Convertible Bond ETF (BMAX), the fund is necessarily mostly made up of convertible paper issued by Michael Saylor's Strategy (MSTR), by far the largest issuer of such debt. Other top 10 holdings include the convertible notes of bitcoin miners Marathon Digital (MARA) and Riot Platforms (RIOT).“Until now, these bonds have been difficult for individual investors to reach,” said Greg King, CEO of Rex Financial, in a statement. “BMAX removes those barriers, making it easier to invest in the strategy pioneered by Michael Saylor — leveraging corporate debt to...

Crypto borrow and lend platform Euler Finance just clawed its way back from the DeFi wilderness.The protocol this week notched new all-time highs in total value locked (TVL) and total borrows – two pivotal metrics of activity for a DeFi lender. Euler's hundreds of millions of crypto-dollars now under management might leave it well short of the Ethereum world's lending powerhouses, like the multibillion dollar Aave. But it's nonetheless notable for a protocol that nearly went kaput following a $200 million hack exactly two years ago."A lot of people wrote us off and said it would have been totally normal for us to end the project right there," said Michael Bentley, CEO of Euler Labs. But his team decided to...

Russia has turned to cryptocurrencies to facilitate oil trade with China and India, effectively bypassing Western sanctions in its $192 billion oil trade, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.The country has been slowly moving deeper into the cryptocurrency space. Just this week, the Bank of Russia submitted proposals to create an experimental legal regime (ELR) lasting three years, allowing a “limited group of Russian investors” to trade cryptocurrencies.Some Russian oil firms use bitcoin, ether, and stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) to convert payments made in Chinese yuan and Indian rupees into roubles, the Reuters report said. These transactions currently represent a fraction of Russia’s oil trade.Other sanctioned countries, including Iran and Venezuela, have used crypto to maintain trade...