Coindesk

The era of memecoins as a supposedly fair trading opportunity is "unquestionably over," according to Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures. In a post on X, Carter argued that memecoins—tokens with little to no utility beyond speculative trading—were initially attractive because they appeared to offer an even playing field for retail investors. However, with recent scandals such as LIBRA coin, the market has been overtaken by insiders, prelaunch deals, and bot-driven trading, leaving everyday traders at a disadvantage.“The entire premise of memecoins was that they were ‘fair launch’ opportunities where retail had just as good a shot as funds and VCs,” Carter wrote. “That was exposed as a lie—the casino wasn’t fair.”Carter pointed to the launch of Milei's...

Bitcoin (BTC) quickly bounced back from the Tuesday dip to $93,000, but downside pressure still persists risking a deeper pullback to $86,000, CryptoQuant analysts said. Waning demand, faltering blockchain activity and lack of liquidity inflows to crypto are among the factors that could drag BTC lower, the report said.Demand for bitcoin, which picked up in late 2024 amid optimism over easing regulatory headwinds on Trump's election win, is now retreating. CryptoQuant data shows that demand growth slumped to 70,000 BTC recently from the 279,000 BTC peak on December 4. Inflows to spot BTC exchange-traded funds (ETF), a typical occurrence during bitcoin’s previous rallies, have disappeared, booking regular net outflows over the past two weeks after previously seeing as much as...

Nearly every big name in the crypto industry has signed onto a letter calling for Congress to eliminate a U.S. tax policy they say could jeopardize decentralized finance (DeFi) technology by shoehorning much of that space into the field of brokers subject to data collecting and reporting.The Internal Revenue Service — the U.S. Treasury Department's tax arm — pushed through a key digital assets broker rule between Christmas and New Year's, just days before President Donald Trump's administration was set to arrive. It was meant to institute similar information-reporting demands on DeFi brokers as would be faced by securities brokers and exchanges.Recently approved rules can be erased under the Congressional Review Act, and Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, introduced...

Bitcoin price may be volatile but it didn't stop giant financial institutions from continuing to invest more.Large institutions such as pensions or hedge funds tripled their holdings of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the fourth quarter of 2024, data from 13F filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed.Institutional investors bought $38.7 billion worth of the spot bitcoin ETF, according to Bitwise chief investment officer, Matt Hougan. This is more than three times the previous quarter, in which only $12.4 billion worth of holdings were reported.Investors with assets over $100 million are required by the SEC to report their holdings each quarter.Several hedge funds and pension funds, among others, have started buying the funds since January 2024, when...

A group of top Ethereum developers and leaders released Wednesday a new framework that would simplify and standardize cross-chain token transfers.The initiative, called the Open Intents Framework (OIF), was kickstarted by contributors from the Ethereum Foundation and is supported by 25 projects including teams building layer-2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, ZKsync, and Scroll, according to a press release shared with CoinDesk.The goal of the initiative is to bring “intents” to all corners of the Ethereum ecosystem, which is a technological feature that lets a blockchain user accomplish a specific goal by asking an intermediary to fulfill that goal (like a trade or transaction they want to make.)There are some standards out there that are already trying to make cross-chain transactions easier...