Author: Annette Weber

Allen Farrington writes at Quillette, Areo and Merion West, as well as extensively on Medium, where he has several much longer essays on Bitcoin, finance, economics and related topics. His collected writings can be found here. He lives in Edinburgh.  At approximately 8:23 p.m. GMT on Monday, May 11, the 630,000th Bitcoin block was mined, the first to offer the reward to its successful miner of 6.25 bitcoin rather than 12.5, as has been the case for the past four years. You may have caught wind of this, what with #BitcoinHalving briefly trending on Twitter, an uptick in coverage of Bitcoin in the media over the past few days, or for some other reason. There are good ways and bad ways to describe “the halving.” Or rather, there are ways that are factually true and then there are ways that ar...

Digital currency trader and lender Genesis Global Trading is moving toward full-service prime brokerage with the acquisition of crypto custodian Vo1t, the company announced Thursday. The New York-based trading firm, which is a subsidiary of CoinDesk parent firm Digital Currency Group, acquired Vo1t to begin developing a full suite of prime brokerage services under one roof including lending, trading and custody. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.  “We’re coming at this after having a successful business on the trading and lending side,” said Genesis CEO Michael Moro. “The goal is for clients to be able to do any and all activities with Genesis.”  Moro wouldn’t put a figure on the number of liquidity providers Genesis is aiming to plug into.  “The answer is as many as we can that we ...

Bittrex really didn’t want to get involved in the war that’s currently raging within the Steem community. Richie Lai, co-founder of the U.S.-based crypto exchange, posted an announcement late on Wednesday saying his firm would return – reluctantly, it seems – million of dollars worth of disputed cryptocurrency back to a Steem wallet no one knows who controls. After the 23.6 million steem tokens were confiscated from community dissenters in a tit-for-tat Steem hard fork Wednesday, they were quickly diverted to Bittrex by an unknown individual (or individuals) in the hope they would be returned to their original 64 owners – currently all persona non grata at the blockchain project. The controversial hoard is worth a little over $5 million at press time and was worth approximately $6.3 milli...

Harsh new rules making many uses of digital assets punishable with fines or prison might soon become law in Russia.  New draft bills setting out how Russia should regulate cryptocurrencies were sent to the country’s parliament, the State Duma, earlier this week. Although the official website for the planned legislation hasn’t been updated yet, the two documents have been published in the OrderCom Telegram channel and were confirmed as genuine by sources of Russian news outlet RBK.  The legislative proposals were reportedly written by staff at the Digital Economy think tank and the Skolkovo business accelerator. They seek a new version of the bill on digital assets, which has been stuck in the Duma for more two years now, as well as crypto-focused additions to the country’s criminal code. T...

Anchorage now has six executives in its C-suite, hiring a head of finance and head of sales with experience in both tech and Wall Street. Julie Veltman, who’s joining the crypto custodian as head of finance, has issued new asset-backed securitizations for Merrill Lynch’s Structured Product Capital Markets group. She also built out a broker-dealer, debt issuance platform and fixed-income trading business for financial services firm Cohen & Company. Most recently, Veltman drove financial planning, reporting, and efficiency at Salesforce.  Geoff Clauss, who’s joining Anchorage as head of sales, has more than two decades of experience in private equity, wealth management and fintech. Before Anchorage, Clauss spent seven years overseeing sales at wealth management platform Addepar. He also ...

Top ShelfYesterday, some of the earliest mined bitcoin moved after more than a decade of dormancy. Whale Alert – a popular, mostly-automated Twitter account that tracks major crypto transactions – broadcast the message across the cryptoverse, saying 40 coins mined in the first month of the network’s operation had transferred from a “possible #Satoshi owned wallet,” referring to bitcoin’s long silent creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.  This unfounded connection – based on the age of the bitcoin, and the fact they had not been moved for 11 years – caused a minor market stir. You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.  Since then, blockchain...

The coronavirus pandemic is putting more pressure than ever before on the already structurally weakened European economic and political landscape. The European Union and the euro are part of the most ambitious political and economic experiment of the 21st century. The COVID-19 crisis, however, has exacerbated growing questions of political will and political legitimacy and led some to wonder if the eurozone can survive.  Tuomas Malinen is the CEO of GnS Economics, a macroeconomic advisory firm, and Adj. Professor of Economics at the University of Helsinki. In this interview, he and NLW discuss: Disclosure Read More The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an in...

The Kin Foundation is offering a peek under the hood. The group published a transparency report Thursday, laying out its structure and operations, in a partnership with Messari and its disclosure database.  According to the report, the Kin Foundation plans its budget a year in advance, with funds going to app developers, node incentives, user grants and marketing and operations. There are 1.45 trillion kin tokens currently circulating, out of 10 trillion created in all.  The foundation is currently run by a board of directors that consists of two members: Kik Interactive CEO Ted Livingston and William Mougayar, author of “The Business Blockchain” and one of the founders of the Token Summit annual conference. Kik created kin in 2017. “The Board of Directors is appointed annually by the memb...

Igor Mikhalev is an expert principal at BCG helping clients develop business models with blockchain technologies and digital currencies. Kaj Burchardi is a Managing Director with BCG and leads the blockchain practice of BCG/Platinion globally. Digital currencies hold a long-term promise to change the way nations, corporations, and people transact value. Some of them – combining both cryptocurrency benefits (disintermediation, high speed, and low cost of transactions) as well as qualities of traditional currencies (e.g. price stability and being able to act as legal tender) – challenge traditional financial systems at the core. While first-generation digital currencies deployed by consortia of industry players may only deliver incremental changes such as the reduction in money movement pric...

Top Chinese political advisers have proposed a regional digital currency that would be backed by four major Asian currencies including the Japanese yen, Korean won, Hong Kong dollar and the yuan.  The proposal unveiled Thursday describes the currency as a “stablecoin,” a term for cryptocurrencies designed to hold their value and backed by a reserve currency, although it does not explicitly mention crypto or blockchains. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) would lead the proposed effort. The basket of underlying collateral would follow the special drawing rights (SDR) model of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where each country’s currency is assigned a different weight based on its economy. As such, the proposal resembles the original vision for libra, before that Facebook-spawned proj...