Coindesk

Amazon's (AMZN) shareholders are urging the company to take a page from MicroStrategy's (MSTR) playbook by diversifying its reserves into bitcoin (BTC) to beat inflation and boost shareholder value."Though bitcoin is currently a volatile asset – as Amazon stock has been at times throughout its history – corporations have a responsibility to maximize shareholder value over the long-term as well as the short-term. Diversifying the balance sheet by including some bitcoin solves this problem without taking on too much volatility," according to a shareholder proposal shared by conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR)."At minimum, Amazon should evaluate the benefits of holding some, even just 5%, of its assets in Bitcoin," the proposal added.Bitcoin, the leading...

The Financial Stability Oversight Council published its 2024 annual report Friday, addressing various risks and areas of concern within the U.S. and global financial system. As it has done for the past few years, the report highlighted the role of stablecoins and the digital asset sector more broadly — though it stopped short of suggesting FSOC would take any concrete steps toward curbing these concerns.You’re reading State of Crypto, a CoinDesk newsletter looking at the intersection of cryptocurrency and government. Click here to sign up for future editions.'Emerging risks'The narrativeFor yet another year in a row, the Financial Stability Oversight Council — a group composed of the U.S.'s financial agency heads — warned that unchecked stablecoin growth could be an...

Cryptocurrency users who crave privacy protections had a lot to be thankful for this past Thanksgiving.Two days before the holiday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit ruled that the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) had acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner not supported by substantial evidence when it “overstepped its congressionally defined authority” in sanctioning “Tornado Cash’s open-source, self-executing software” instead of “the rogue persons and entities who abuse it.”In plain English, Congress didn’t give OFAC the power to do what it did: sanction software code owned by no one.But let’s back up. As I have explained for CoinDesk before, Tornado Cash is a crypto mixer that makes it tougher to trace cryptocurrency transactions....

So, now we know. Operation Chokepoint 2.0 was real.There really was a co-ordinated federal government effort to de-bank crypto following the collapse of three mid-sized crypto-friendly lenders (Signature, Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank) in March 2023. The crypto industry, led by VC-commentator Nic Carter, has long suspected and railed against de-banking. But, until today, we didn’t have much documentary evidence. Friday morning, internal communications at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp were released after a research firm (History Associates Inc.) hired by Coinbase sued to get them uncovered. “The heavily-redacted documents emerged on Friday, showing the banking regulator slamming the brakes on lenders offering or considering products and services in the digital assets sector,” CoinDesk’s Jesse Hamilton wrote in his report...

One bitcoin is worth $100,000 — a milestone that has crypto OGs in a tizzy. Donald Trump is selling DOGE T-shirts. It's a frenetic time for crypto.But what are my non-crypto friends texting me about?"Hawk Tuah" coin. Yep, in a very unscientific sample size of the seven friends who texted me — unsolicited — about crypto this week, six essentially asked: "What's the deal with Hawk Tuah coin?" (The seventh asked about litecoin).That a low-level celebrity's dalliance with memecoins would dominate the groupchat's mindshare at the same time the original cryptocurrency smashed through a historic level points to a chasm between the crypto industry's perception of itself and the general public's — or at least my friends' — perception.When HAWK...