Coindesk

Infrastructure providers, such as Northern Data (NB2), are well positioned to benefit from the growing demand from artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) firms, broker Canaccord Genuity said in a report Thursday initiating coverage of the stock.Canaccord assumed coverage of the shares with a buy rating and a 60 euro ($62) price target. The stock was trading 2.4% higher at 45.65 euros at publication time.Companies like Northern Data are "building the railroad for the AI gold rush," analysts led by Kingsley Crane said. The company's Taiga Cloud business has come online at the "forefront of what is shaping up to be a generational opportunity."The broker noted that Northern Data, which is 52% owned by stablecoin issuer Tether, has already...

The T3 Financial Crime Unit, a collaboration between the Tron blockchain, stablecoin issuer Tether and blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs, said it has frozen a total of 100 million of Tether's USDT used by illicit actors since the unit was formed in September.The venture analyzed millions of transactions spanning five continents, monitoring a total volume in excess of 3 billion USDT, the largest stablecoin, T3 said in a statement.T3 involves TRM Labs using its blockchain intelligence and monitoring tools to help Tron and Tether identify and freeze USDT linked to illicit activities. There's nearly $60 billion in USDT issued on the Tron blockchain, the largest issuance behind Ethereum, which has just over $75 billion.Money laundering as a service — where...

Tether's USDT, the world's leading dollar-pegged stablecoin, has experienced the sharpest weekly decline in market value in two years, spurring market volatility concerns.USDT's market cap slid more than 1% to $137.24 billion this week, the most significant decline since the crash of the FTX exchange in the second week of November 2022, data from TradingView show. It hit a record $140.72 billion in mid-December. The decline follows a decision by several European Union (EU)-based exchanges and Coinbase (COIN) to remove USDT due to compliance issues with the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulations that took full effect on Dec. 30, even though the rules on stablecoins — cryptocurrencies whose value is pegged to a real-world asset like the dollar —...

KuCoin has introduced a feature for merchants to allow customers to pay for purchases directly from their account on the crypto exchange.Merchants can integrate the tool, called KuCoin Pay, into their payment systems. Customers pay by scanning a QR code or using the KuCoin app, the exchange said in a press release.The exchange joins a number of crypto payment providers in facilitating direct payments for customers, a feature that’s supposed to bridge the gap between crypto and the legacy payments infrastructure.In August, for example, digital payments platform Flexa announced a similar product with retailers including Chipotle, Mikimoto, Regal Cinemas and 99 Ranch Market.The new infrastructure supports 54 cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH) and the USDT and USDC stablecoins.Several merchants,...

Crypto majors zoomed higher in the past 24 hours as the market entered a widely expected bullish year, with bitcoin (BTC) inching above $95,000 to shake off losses from last week.A CoinDesk analysis from Tuesday flagged unusually high trading volumes for XRP stemming from South Korean exchanges, which has historically acted as a harbinger for price volatility with a bias to the upside.XRP surged 11% to lead growth among majors as of Thursday, led by $1.3 billion worth of trading volumes on Korea-focused exchange UpBit.Among other majors, Cardano’s ADA, Solana’s SOL and Chainlink’s LINK added as much as 8%. Ether (ETH) and BNB Chain’s BNB rose 3%, while memecoins dogecoin (DOGE) and shiba inu (SHIB) added 5%.The broad-based CoinDesk 20...