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...

Mark Yusko, the CEO and chief investment officer at Morgan Creek Capital Management, shared several reasons he thinks bitcoin's price will hit $100,000 by the end of 2021.Yusko said it would be "perfectly logical" for bitcoin to hit $400,000 to $500,000 if its market capitalization moves toward that of gold.The call comes after the legendary investor Paul Tudor Jones' recent disclosure that he's built a stake of bitcoin futures, making him the latest investment mogul to buy the cryptocurrency.Click here for more BI Prime stories. With the legendary investor Paul Tudor Jones disclosing purchases of bitcoin futures for the first time, it's become increasingly clear that market denizens who were once skeptical about the cryptocurrency are revisiting their stance.But Mark Yusko, the CEO and ...

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 ...