Cryptocurrency

Top Stories This Week Sam Bankman-Fried petitions court to prioritize reimbursing his legal fees Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is seeking to use FTX’s corporate insurance policies to cover his legal expenses, according to a court filing on March 15. As per the filing, the policies provide “priority of payment” to insured individuals such as Bankman-Fried. The

The total crypto market capitalization increased by 26% in seven days, reaching $1.16 trillion on March 17. Bitcoin (BTC) was the biggest winner among the top 20 coins, up 31.5%, though some altcoins gained 50% or more during the period. The surge in cryptocurrency prices occurred as the United States Federal Reserve was forced to

After a recovery on March 16, the United States equities markets are again down on March 17. Investors remain concerned about the vulnerability of banks in the U.S. and Europe. A silver lining for cryptocurrency investors is that Bitcoin (BTC) has remained decoupled from the equities markets and has risen to its highest level since

A target date for the highly anticipated Shanghai hard fork has now been set: April 12. Ethereum core developers approved the target deadline during the All Core Developers Execution Layer #157 call on March 16. Initially estimated for late March, the Shanghai mainnet upgrade features five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), including EIP-4985, which will enable

Stablecoin issuer Circle says it has cleared “substantially all” of the redemption and minting requests for its stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC). In a March 15 operational update, Circle said between the morning of March 13 to the close of banking business in the United States on March 15, it had redeemed $3.8 billion USDC and

The United States equities markets tumbled on March 15 after Saudi National Bank, Swiss Bank Credit Suisse’s largest investor, said it will not be able to provide any more funding to Credit Suisse due to regulatory limitations. Investors are nervous because Credit Suisse, which has large U.S. and global operations, warned on March 14 that

The depegging of USD Coin (USDC) and Dai (DAI) from the United States dollar prompted a frenzy of loan repayments over the weekend, allowing debtors to save a total of more than $100 million on their loans. Following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on March 10, the USDC price dropped to lows of $0.87 on March

Three banks — Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — collapsed within a span of a few days, increasing demand for United States government bonds and sendin the yield on the 2-year Treasury tumbling to 4.06%, a fall of 100 basis points since March 8. This was the largest three-day decline since Oct. 22, 1987, when a stock

Traders dumped risky assets following the crisis and failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). The S&P 500 Index plunged 4.55% while Bitcoin (BTC) is down about 9% this week.  The collapse of SVB led to a crisis in the crypto space with USD Coin (USDC) losing its peg to the U.S. dollar on reports that

The death spiral of the Terra ecosystem served as a catalyst to the 2022 bear market — causing losses in the billions, damaging investor sentiment and intensifying the regulatory spotlight over cryptocurrencies. However, the recent depegging of Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) led Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao to believe that traditional banks are a risk to

Bitcoin (BTC) led a sharp sell-off in the cryptocurrency markets on March 9 as the woes at Silvergate Bank and Silicon Valley Bank dented investor sentiment.  In addition, crypto-specific news of a suit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James against cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin for selling securities and commodities without registration increased uncertainty about

Hedera, the team behind distributed ledger Hedera Hashgraph, has confirmed a smart contract exploit on the Hedera Mainnet that has led to the theft of several liquidity pool tokens. Hedera said the attacker targeted liquidity pool tokens on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that derived its code from Uniswap v2 on Ethereum, which was ported over for

XRP’s (XRP) price extended its gains on March 9, rising around 1.5% to $0.40, despite a general downturn in the cryptocurrency market. XRP price four-day winning streak The rally in the XRP/USD pair started on March 5 with the XRP market capitalization gaining over 10% in the past four days. In contrast, the entire crypto market

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has gone on a shitcoin selling spree, exchanging nearly $700,000 worth of tokens previously airdropped to him for Ether (ETH). According to Etherscan, a wallet belonging to Buterin on March 7 offloaded 500 trillion SHIKOKU (SHIK) for 380.3 ETH ($595,448), nearly 10 billion Cult DAO (CULT) for 58.1 ETH ($91,021), and

The total value locked (TVL) in DeFi applications on the Arbitrum, a layer-2 Ethereum network blockchain, has doubled since the start of 2023. While investors’ hope of an ARBI token airdrop is a major factor attracting activity to the Ethereum layer-1 network, the ecosystem’s DeFi growth is also showing robust growth.  Arbitrum has become a

The Frax community recently approved a proposal to make its FEI stablecoin fully backed by USD equivalents, rather than maintaining a partially backed and semi algorithmic stablecoin. With Frax’s decision, the days of experimentation with algorithmic stablecoins could finally be behind us. The decentralized stablecoin space has only proved effective with ETH, USDC and BTC

Digital asset investment firms poured $2.7 billion into decentralized finance projects in 2022, up 190% from 2021, while investments into centralized finance projects went the other way — falling 73% to $4.3 billion over the same timeframe. The staggering rise in DeFi funding was despite overall crypto funding figures falling from $31.92 billion in 2021

Bitcoin (BTC) is leading the cryptocurrency markets lower, and the matter is being exacerbated by Silvergate Banks’ ongoing issues. This week, the cryptocurrency-focused bank said it needed additional time to file its annual 10-K report and warned that it might not make it another 12 months. Reacting to this news, several cryptocurrency companies announced they would

ConsenSys has announced the upcoming release of its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) rollup to a public testnet on March 28, allowing for stress testing of the layer-2 scaling technology. ConsenSys’ research and development team has been working on its zkEVM rollup over the past four years. The zkEVM is touted to offer fast finality,

Binance USD’s (BUSD) market cap has fallen below $10 billion for the first time in almost two years amid a United States regulatory crackdown on its token issuer and a planned delisting from a major crypto exchange. BUSD’s market cap has been on a steep downward trajectory since its all-time high market cap of $23.49