Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, estimates it will spend more than $20 million this year in building Bakkt, its bitcoin futures trading and custody platform. In an earnings call for Q4, 2018, on Feb. 7, Scott Hill, ICE’s chief financial officer, said the firm’s investment in Bakkt will

According to local publications, Union Bank of the Philippines, one of the largest commercial banks in the Philippines, has launched the country’s first crypto ATM. The bank said in an official statement obtained by Philstar that the purpose of the ATM is to provide local users an easy way to convert cryptocurrency to fiat and

The Bitcoin community will be rolling its eyes right about now. Bitcoin Cash developer Amaury Sechet, the self-described “benevolent dictator” of the Bitcoin ABC (primary) implementation of BCH, has claimed he is Satoshi Nakamoto. I am Satoshi Nakamoto. There it is said and I can prove it:304502200fc3909c3224bc140b7aed365f33f066bd81eabedd198ad2a257882e86586ae8022100f03c6f63cddb43ebf48512c9a0cc0f97fd2cf227d22f15691d7ad65e49ddd659 — Deadal Nix (@deadalnix) February 8, 2019 In

A Southeast Asian stablecoin project aims to neuter corruption. It places an incentive on public reporting of problems. The International Blockchain Monetary Reserve calls the Asia Reserve Currency Coin (ARCC) a “macroeconomic stablecoin.” While it has a seemingly complicated structure, the premise is simple enough: as productivity and GDP increase as a result of its

The first thing to know about the BitTorrent Token (BTT) airdrop is that it’s not just a one-off event. This first one begins a series of monthly airdrops that will run until February 2025. There are 990 billion BTT tokens created on the Tron blockchain. Of those, 10.1 percent have been designated for airdrops to

Noelle Acheson is a veteran of company analysis and member of CoinDesk’s product team. The following article originally appeared in Institutional Crypto by CoinDesk, a newsletter for the institutional market, with news and views on crypto infrastructure delivered every Tuesday. Sign up here. ————————– You would be forgiven for thinking that the crypto winter seems to have passed

Provincial securities regulators in British Columbia, Canada, won’t be investigating the QuadrigaCX scandal. However, new developments could see Canada’s largest securities body, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), begin an investigation. On Friday, according to Reuters, the OSC has confirmed in a statement it will be looking into cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX, where currently $190 million in

The Wall Street Journal reports that banks will recast mortgage loans. Thanks to Federal Reserve policy changes, it’s currently cheaper for banks to get loans than it has been for a while. The other effect of a reduced LIBOR rate seems to be lower mortgage rates. Rates have been declining for decades. Depending on when

I was watching President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address Tuesday with my usual cynicism of any of the government’s propagandist ceremonies which cover over with pomp its many notorious defilements of so many people’s life, liberty, and property. These magnificent annual pageants of trite partisanship follow such a tight script that they are

If understanding how distributed ledger tech works inside banks is complex, finding ways to make different varieties of enterprise blockchains talk to each other is a doozy of a challenge. And yet, that’s exactly what a team of high school students – soon to sit their A-Level exams in computer science – has done. The

Andrew “Drew” Hinkes is a co-founder and the general counsel of Athena Blockchain, and an adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and NYU School of Law. Lost in the ICO frenzy of 2017 was a curious issuance. In April of that year, Blockchain Capital raised $10m for its third fund, a “tokenized

Everyone knew a breakout was coming. A tight trading pattern lasted for weeks, which is almost always a precursor to big activity, one way or the other. In the case of Bitcoin and most everything else in the crypto market over the past 24-hours, things went very positive. Bears lost their stranglehold on the market

The bitcoin price on Friday posted one of its most robust bullish sessions in weeks as it rose as much as 10.5 percent in just twelve hours. The bitcoin-to-dollar exchange rate (BTC/USD) established a higher high towards $3,710, up 10.38 percent from the Asian session open. It was not a matter of technicals only; the fundamentals

A proposed law in New Hampshire that would allow residents to pay their taxes with cryptocurrency is seeing some early traction. House Bill 470, which would allow state-level agencies (including New Hampshire’s tax office) to accept cryptocurrencies for payment if approved, cleared its first minor hurdle last week after being passed unanimously by a subcommittee

Nearly $1 million worth of ether (ETH) left QuadrigaCX and went to other cryptocurrency exchanges in December, the same month its CEO died, a CoinDesk review of public blockchain data shows. In a series of transactions sent from QuadrigaCX’s hot wallet (meaning one connected to the internet), more than 9,000 ETH moved from the embattled

The cryptocurrency market is making an emphatic return today after days of low volatility, with the price of bitcoin briefly surpassing $3,700 alongside other major coins printing double-digit gains in the past day. Litecoin (LTC), the world’s fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, led the charge by surging just over 40 percent from its opening price

Creditors of the failed cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX are bracing for a fight – among themselves. Customers who had fiat currency balances at the exchange before it went offline and sought protection from creditors in a Canadian court last week are beginning to argue they should be paid back first from recovered assets. But they expect customers

Asian markets slumped hearing that U.S. President Donald Trump had quashed hopes that a meeting over tariffs with Chinese leader Xi Jinping would happen before a key deadline. Trump didn’t flat out say a meeting with Jinping would never occur. However, the fact that a firm date still is not in the picture is not

The latest code version for the lightning network – often trumpeted as the future of bitcoin payments – includes a “block size increase.” One of the most active lightning implementations, LND, pushed out its newest “minor” release, version 0.5.2, of its beta code on Wednesday. Though it includes several changes from many contributors, mostly with the goal

Jeff Bezos blasted the National Enquirer, and its owner, David Pecker, in a shocking Medium post Thursday for attempting to blackmail the Amazon CEO and founder with a threat to publish his “d*ck pick [sic]” and nine other salacious photos obtained by the Enquirer. Here’s the full text of the extortion email Jeff Bezos says

Heading into Thursday evening, the cryptocurrency market continues to feel uncomfortably quiet, with the Bitcoin price consolidating below $3,400 during the final days of the Chinese New Year celebration — an event that some analysts say is depressing crypto trading volumes. In the altcoin markets, Bitcoin SV staged a pivot back above $60, still failing

The Palestinian military-political group Hamas, which the U.S. government deems a terrorist organization, may be using the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange for fundraising. Earlier this week, the Israeli blockchain analytics firm Whitestream identified several bitcoin wallet addresses referred to on official Hamas digital media channels in public requests for donations. One such appeal for bitcoin donations

Someone is poorly impersonating the highly anticipated bitcoin futures trading platform Bakkt in an apparent attempt to bilk people out of their bitcoin. On Wednesday night, the CoinDesk news team received an email (subject line: “Bakkt News!”) claiming that the platform was set to launch on March 12. The email, sent from a gmail address and

The Bitcoin SV posted an impressive rally during the trading session on Thursday but found enough resistance at a higher high formation. The coin briefly surpassed Binance Coin to claim its 10th top cryptocurrency spot but retraced back to 11th position due to weak upside momentum with a current market cap of $1.1 billion. Deja

Switzerland’s top stock exchange, SIX, aims to roll out a blockchain platform to speed up trading later this year. Reuters reported Feb. 6 that SIX chairman Romeo Lacher said the planned new SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) will initially operate alongside the existing SIX platform. Currently, a trade takes several steps to complete, which can take

The Bitcoin price took a sharp drop and the rest of the crypto market went with it. The rest of the market, that is, except for Binance Coin, which resisted the bearish tilt and climbed into the 10th spot in the market cap rankings. Outside of the top 10, nearly everything was red. Bitcoin itself

At a recent cryptocurrency conference, Vitalik Buterin answered a question about whether an Ethereum upgrade would have “any transaction throughput goals.” Buterin took the opportunity to cast shade on Ethereum alternatives like EOS, NEO, and Tron. Ethereum Pioneer Throws Serious Shade at ‘Centralized’ Crypto Networks [embedded content][embedded content] Buterin says: “So I’ve noticed a lot

QuadrigaCX, the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange, made headlines world last week when it announced it was filing for creditor protection and owed upwards of $130 million or more to its customers. The long-suffering exchange has had banking issues for more than a year, and customers complained they could not easily withdraw fiat or crypto over the

Chuck Kimble, head of partnerships at Circle, has left the company for a similar role at another blockchain startup, Celo. As Celo’s new head of strategic partnerships, Kimble will be helping the digital payments company “to bring better financial products to emerging markets and under-served populations around the world,” the company said in a press

With newly released data showing slower growth in the euro-zone, the struggle of Deutsche Bank, and BNP Paribas cutting $683 million in expenses, the euro may be in deep trouble. In the last quarter of 2018, a period in which even U.S. banks underperformed, the global markets division of BNP Paribas recorded a $256 million