• Aug 01, 2024

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Peaks as BTC Price Falls

Bitcoin’s price might have taken a hit as of late, but there is one metric that is still impressive: mining difficulty. Data from BTC.com shows that Bitcoin difficulty hit a new all-time high on Wednesday at 90.67 trillion hashes. Hashing is a mathematical function performed by Bitcoin miners as part of the process of securing the blockchain. The higher the difficulty, the more computing power—and energy—needed to do the work. The record-high difficulty has “significantly reduced margins for pub...

• Aug 01, 2024

Morgan Stanley Advisors Given Go-Ahead to Pitch Bitcoin ETFs to Investors

Investment behemoth Morgan Stanley on Friday said it will soon permit its financial advisors to actively promote Bitcoin ETFs to eligible clients, marking the first time a major Wall Street bank has taken such a step. Starting next Wednesday, the firm's vast network of approximately 15,000 financial advisors will be authorized to pitch shares in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust and Fidelity's Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund to suitable investors. CNBC first reported the news. A source familiar with th...

• Aug 01, 2024

Is the SEC Backing Off Solana? It's Complicated

Earlier this week, crypto advocates received what appeared to be a sigh of defeat from one of the industry’s chief antagonizers: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) amended a complaint in its high-profile lawsuit against Binance to shelve allegations that Solana, Cardano, and Ethereum scaling network Polygon are unregistered securities. Could it be that the SEC, which earlier this year caved on the security status of Ethereum, might be giving up on Solana as well? Could Solana ETFs...

• Aug 01, 2024

Bitcoin Price Dips After Weak US Jobs Report Sparks Wall Street Panic

The price of Bitcoin wavered Friday as a stock market selloff intensified on Wall Street, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq slid into a market correction after a weaker-than-expected U.S. jobs report. As of this writing, the Nasdaq was set to close 10% below its record peak last month, falling 2.9% on the day. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped more than 2% each, setting stocks up for one of their worst trading days since 2022. Meanwhile, the Nikkei 225 had fallen 5.8%,...

• Aug 01, 2024

Bitcoin 'Digital Gold' Status Tested as Real Gold Sets New All-Time High

Gold has never been more expensive. On Friday, the spot price of gold went above $2,500 for the first time in history. And now the cryptocurrency market finds itself at a critical juncture, with Bitcoin's claim as "digital gold" facing its most significant challenge yet. The precious metal's rally has reignited debates about safe-haven assets in the digital age, forcing investors and analysts to reassess Bitcoin's role in portfolio diversification and wealth preservation. This surge in tradition...

• Aug 01, 2024

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust BTC Holdings Dropped 55% in First Half of 2024

Grayscale Investments disclosed Friday that its flagship Bitcoin fund has shed more than 348,000 Bitcoin in its past two quarters as investors bail for other funds. That's a sum valued at around $22.4 billion based on today’s prices. Not long before the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) converted into a spot Bitcoin ETF in January, the fund held close to 620,000 Bitcoin. In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Grayscale stated that figure has since fallen below 276...

• Aug 01, 2024

‘Hamster Kombat’ Telegram Game Airdrop: Everything You Need to Know

Hamster Kombat picked up the baton from Notcoin, leading the next generation of Telegram crypto games while apparently amassing huge droves of players—more than 300 million, the developers said in late July, just weeks after Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov claimed that the game had topped 239 million players earlier in the month. What’s driving players to the game, which pairs simple tapping gameplay with lightly strategic moves as you take the role of a hamster CEO of a crypto exchange? An...

• Aug 01, 2024

Man Pleads Guilty to Theft After Crypto.com Refunded His Partner $6 Million Instead of $65

Centralized exchange Crypto.com accidentally refunded a woman $6.8 million (approximately $10.47 million Australian dollars) instead of $65. She and her partner then withdrew and spent the money. Now, three years later, he pled guilty alongside his partner for theft of $4.42 million, as reported by NewsWire. Jatinder Singh tried to deposit $65 into his Crypto.com account back in May 2021 using his partner’s bank account. Due to the name discrepancy between the exchange and bank account, Crypto.c...

• Aug 01, 2024

Solana DEX Raydium Sees RAY Drop 5% After Twitter Meme Coin Misfire

Solana decentralized exchange (DEX) Raydium has seen its RAY token slump overnight following yesterday's abortive attempt to launch a meme coin using a Twitter token launchpad. Per data from CoinGecko, Raydium is currently priced at $2.06, down 5.1% on the day and 12.9% on the week, after dropping to a local low of under $2. The token remains up over 11% on the month, however. Yesterday, Raydium attempted to launch a meme token, CTO, using makenow.meme, a Twitter account that automatically spins...

• Aug 01, 2024

Terra Founder Do Kwon Will Be Extradited to South Korea—Court Says It's Final

The Montenegro Appellate Court upheld its decision to extradite Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs, to South Korea. The August 1 ruling marks the conclusion of a protracted legal saga involving multiple appeals and judicial reversals. The Appellate Court confirmed the June 28 decision of the Higher Court in Podgorica, which granted the extradition request from South Korea while rejecting a concurrent request from the United States. The court’s ruling is based on the provisions of Montenegro'...