Telegram has thrown in the towel in its court battle against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and will no longer be fighting the ban on its blockchain token project. In a filing on Friday (see bottom), the messaging app provider said it was withdrawing its appeal over a previous court decision that backed the SEC in prohibiting the issuance of “gram” tokens to investors both in and out of the U.S. The new document filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit states: “The parties in the above-referenced case have filed a stipulation withdrawing this appeal pursuant to Local Rule 42.1.” The rule means that the parties have filed an agreement for dismissal of the case without prejudice. As such, the case is over for now, but not necessarily forever. Telegram...

Famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) stirred up some discussion last week by dividing crypto history into cycles that look something like this: The price goes up, which leads to new interest, which triggers new ideas and use cases, which leads to new startups and funding, which leads to product launches that bring in more people. Rinse and repeat.   This would pass as a simple “hunh, cool” if it weren’t for their recent fund raise. Crypto Fund II hoped to reach $450 million; in April, the firm announced that the raise closed at $515 million. Given that the average VC deal size in 2019 was $3.5 million, that’s a hefty amount of firepower with which to kick off the beginning of the fourth cycle. Source: Andreessen HorowitzYou’re reading Crypto Long & Short...

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...