Coindesk

When assets surge to lifetime highs or multimonth peaks, traders are often faced with the challenge of identifying key resistance levels, the price targets where the market could next take a breather. That's precisely the situation facing bitcoin (BTC) and XRP (XRP) traders. Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, is trading at record highs near $100,000, meaning it's now in uncharted waters. XRP trades at $2.44, with the 2018 record high around $3.30 as the only chart resistance before we enter the price discovery mode like BTC.One way to identify key resistances is to study the distribution of open interest, the dollar value of active option contracts, at various strike price levels.On Deribit, the world's leading crypto options exchange,...

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse in an interview with 60 Minutes, said that the 2024 election was a "major victory" for crypto as the majority of Fairshake, a crypto political action committee (PAC), backed candidates, won their seats.And this was a non-partisan effort, as crypto, itself is non-partisan, he argued, pointing to the cross-aisle support for the digital assets bill FIT21.“Of the 29 Republicans and 33 Democrats the industry backed in congressional races, 85% won. It’s incredible,” he said.“We absolutely helped supercharge the candidates with the money in the coffers… That’s absolutely right,” he said, arguing that, like other industries, they took the electoral cycle as a chance to educate voters.“Do I think we had an impact to elect a Democratic...

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....