Coindesk

A Pump.Fun memecoin zoomed from zero to an $80 million market capitalization on Thursday after a father’s plea for donations into a research study for his daughter’s rare brain cancer attracted swathes of crypto traders.The token’s prices have since fallen 80% since a Thursday peak and trade at just over a cent as of Friday. But while late buyers are sitting on losses, the effort still raised over $1 million for the cause.In an X post on Thursday, Runaway founder Siqi Chen said his daughter Mira was diagnosed with a type of brain tumor in September and that research and funding had “been lacking” because of how rare the condition was.His GoFundMe page has raised 80% of its $300,000 target...

Regulatory overhaul in America and a thawing of crypto antagonism globally in 2025 will usher in a new generation of decentralized capital formation, which was first popularized in 2017 as “ICOs” (initial coin offerings).During the 2010s, crypto hadn't settled on a productive use case for Bitcoin and altcoins until Ethereum smart contracts enabled early-stage teams to raise capital from supporters dispersed around the world. We saw Ethereum bootstrap a global decentralized computer which spawned DeFi, NFTs and various crypto primitives funded by less than $20 million raised from a global community.Many other projects soon followed suit and we observed a new dynamic in which raising early-stage capital from a decentralized community almost always resulted in more value-add for the project...

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 3333.82, down 5.0% (-176.57) since 4 pm ET on Wednesday.None of the 20 assets are trading higher.Leaders: ETH (-3.7%) and BTC (-3.7%).Laggards: HBAR (-8.2%) and APT (-7.4%).The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.Source link

The X account of Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu, one of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024, was compromised and used to promote a fictitious token, the company said in a post on the social media platform.Animoca, a metaverse and gaming venture capital firm, posted a warning on its own account at 01:36 UTC on Thursday saying Siu's account had been compromised and the company was not introducing an official token or non-fungible token (NFT). The exploit was probably perpetrated through a phishing email that purported to come from X and be related to copyright infringement, according to ZachXBT. The crypto exploit investigator posted on Tuesday about several similar attacks that took place over the past month, allowing the perpetrators to get...

Six mutual funds tracking the price of bitcoin (BTC) will debut in Israel next week after the Israel Securities Authority (ISA) granted permission for the products, Calcalist reported on Wednesday.All six will start operations on the same day, Dec. 31, a condition imposed by the regulator, Calcalist said. Final approval for the funds was granted last week.The funds will be offered by Migdal Capital Markets, More, Ayalon, Phoenix Investment, Meitav and IBI, with management fees ranging from as high as 1.5% to 0.25%. One of the funds will be actively managed, trying to beat bitcon's performance. They will initially transact just once a day, though future products will be able to trade continuously, Globes said in a Tuesday report, citing...