Coindesk

Activist investor Starboard Value has made a large investment in bitcoin miner Riot Platforms (RIOT) and is pushing for changes in the company's business model, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.Starboard has been pushing Riot to convert some of its bitcoin mining sites into data centers that can host machines to enable high-performance computing (HPC) for big tech companies, according to the story. Riot is currently a "pure-play" bitcoin miner that gets its revenue only from mining bitcoin, as opposed to some other peers, such as Core Scientific (CORZ), which has dedicated a significant amount of its facilities to HPC and artificial intelligence computing.“Riot regularly speaks with our shareholders and values their feedback," a spokesperson...

Solana Foundation's former stablecoin lead Anna Yuan has left the mothership to build her own startup catering to the fast-growing crypto subsector.The company building Perena, a stablecoin trading infrastructure project, raised "around $3 million" in a pre-seed funding round led by Borderless Capital, Yuan told CoinDesk in an interview last month.Perena isn't solely focused on launching another stablecoin. Instead, it's creating on-chain systems that allow the seemingly endless droves of other stablecoin newcomers to have good trading liquidity, even in nascency.That's the funny thing about stablecoins. While their exact backing recipes may slightly differ, most every stablecoin gets its value from essentially the same source: the U.S. dollar, the globally-recognized reserve currency. When dozens of fintech companies all have, essentially,...

Investor demand, onchain metrics and network activity are setting up ether (ETH) to reach a $5,000 level for the first time, CryptoQuant analysts said in a report.Ether spot ETFs posted a 13-day inflow streak on Wednesday to reach nearly $2 billion in cumulative net inflows. The funds attracted their first billion from July to early December, but SoSoValue data shows that they needed only five trading days to capture the next billion.Total daily transactions hovered around the 6.5 million to 7.5 million level in the past few months, compared to about 5 million through 2023, indicative of higher network activity.Meanwhile, the total supply of ETH has reached its highest level since April 2023, but the amount of ETH burned via...

By Omkar Godbole (All times ET unless indicated otherwise)The crypto market is looking to maintain the bullish momentum ignited by Wednesday's U.S. CPI report, which matched estimates and cleared the path for another Federal Reserve rate cut next week. BTC has retaken $100,000 and ether is again eyeing $4,000. A number of tokens, including AAVE and LINK, are trading 10% higher on the back of accumulation by wallets tied to World Liberty Financial, the project supported by President-elect Donald Trump's family.The key question now is whether BTC's rally will be long-lasting. It could be, thanks to bitcoin's consistent price premium on Coinbase compared with global exchanges and healthier leverage levels in the broader market. The upside may be capped, however,...

Bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is fighting a big milestone trying to sustain a $2 trillion market cap and a $100,000 price.Once bitcoin has conclusively overcome these milestones, there may be clear skies ahead. Bitcoin has rallied over $30,000, since Donald Trump won the U.S. election in November, which coincided with many coins leaving exchanges, but primarily BTC leaving in large chunks.Glassnode data shows that transactions worth more than $10 million of bitcoin have been leaving exchanges at a rapid rate which signals aggressive buying from an institutional level. Many of these transactions appear to be coming from the exchange Coinbase, which is why we have noticed a Coinbase premium in recent weeks.As of yesterday, almost 12,500...