Coindesk

Bitcoin traded around the $105,000 level in European morning hours Thursday as the year’s first U.S. FOMC meeting concluded with keeping rates steady, bumping sentiment across stock equities and crypto markets.Jerome Powell-led FOMC maintained the policy rate steady at 4.25-4.50 per cent in the first decision of Trump's presidency after reducing the rates for three straight meetings in 2024.“We do not need to be in a hurry to adjust our policy stance," Powell said in a post-policy press conference. The rate pause comes because officials seek further progress on inflation.Interest rate hikes can make traditional investments more appealing, potentially reducing demand for bitcoin. Conversely, lower rates tend to boost bitcoin by making other investments less attractive. Higher rates might strengthen...

Bernstein remains bullish on Core Scientific (CORZ) even after the shares tumbled 30% earlier this week as Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek challenged the idea that bitcoin (BTC) miners had value as data center plays. The slide means the stock is now available at a deep discount, the broker said in a research report Thursday.Core Scientific is the "leader of the pack" of the AI-focused miners, the report said, with 1.3 gigawatt (GW) of available power supply and a 12-year AI deal with CoreWeave. "Bitcoin miners have a 12-18 month finite window to build a hybrid data center business, while the hyperscaler capex remains consistent," analysts led by Gautam Chhugani wrote.Bernstein said Core Scientific is on track to...

The cost of using Avalanche, a DeFi-focused smart-contract blockchain, has slumped since the implementation of the Avalanche9000 upgrade on Dec. 16, sending the number of transactions up by more than a third.Since the upgrade, the proof-of-stake blockchain's usage fees known as gas have averaged roughly 75% less than in the months beforehand, data from Flipside and Bitquery show. The number of transactions has increased by 38% to an average of 354,691 a day.Avalanche, the world's fifth-largest smart-contract blockchain by the market value of its native token AVAX, boasts of a multichain structure of C-Chain, which handles smart contracts, P-Chain for managing staking and validator coordination and X-Chain for processing asset transfers.The upgrade comprised seven improvement proposals, including ACP-125, which...

Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency, has fallen out of investor relative to bitcoin (BTC), returning the worst bull-cycle performance against its larger rival since the Ethereum blockchain's inception in 2015.A comparison of the ether to bitcoin ratio across past cycles from the tokens' respective lows shows consistent underperformance. The black line in the chart above represents the current cycle that started in November 2022, when bitcoin bottomed at around $15,500 during the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. With each cycle, ether's return against bitcoin has diminished.On Wednesday, the ratio dropped below 0.0300 to touch 0.02993, a four-year low. The previous low was recorded on Jan. 19, a day before President Trump's inauguration. This month, the ratio — the exchange rate...

Dutch bank ABN AMRO has conducted an onchain trade of tokenized assets against stablecoins alongside Germany-regulated 21X.The two firms completed a joint proof of concept (PoC) for the issuing of a token on the Polygon Amoy Testnet, which was listed as a trading pair with an e-money token, according to an emailed announcement on Thursday."The deployment of 21X's on-chain order book smart contract enabled trading between tokenized cash and the tokenized asset in one single transaction," the firms said. Frankfurt-based 21X, which is building a blockchain-based exchange to list and trade tokenized securities, won approval from German regulator BaFin in December.Tokenization - the representation of real-world assets such as stocks or bonds as tokens on a blockchain - has become...