The ranks of cryptocurrency developers held steady in 2024, as some recent entrants left the industry while veterans mostly stuck around, according to a report released Thursday by Electric Capital. The total developers working in crypto worldwide was basically flat, declining a statistically insignificant 7% from a year earlier, and the number of monthly active … Read more
Congressman French Hill will be the next chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, Punchbowl News reported Thursday. The Arkansas Republican was named to the role Thursday by the party’s Steering Committee, which named the leaders of the various committees ahead of the 119th Congress’s start next year. Hill will succeed North Carolina’s Patrick … Read more
Memecoins, whether people want to accept it or not, have become big business. Without delving into statistics, anyone immersed in the crypto space this year can confirm that memecoins have dominated conversations. Critics often argue that memecoins are just a rehash of Jordan Belfort’s “Wolf of Wall Street” era — a world of unregulated securities … Read more
Solana’s nearly $500 million decentralized finance (DeFi) derivatives market is getting a new participant, one that’s looking to take a slice of all the other venues’ pies. Ranger Finance is an aggregator service that wants to be for perpetual futures what Jupiter is to spot swaps: Solana traders’ de-facto homepage for an entire category of … Read more
Activist investor Starboard Value has made a large investment in bitcoin miner Riot Platforms (RIOT) and is pushing for changes in the company’s business model, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Starboard has been pushing Riot to convert some of its bitcoin mining sites into data centers that can host … Read more
Real-world asset tokenization firm Securitize appointed Michael Sonnenshein, formerly CEO of asset management company Grayscale Investments, as chief operating officer. “There is massive demand for tokenization, and I am thrilled to join Securitize at such a pivotal moment for the company and the industry,” Sonnenshein said in a Thursday statement. His appointment started on Dec. … Read more
Avalanche, the layer-1 blockchain that is upgrading its technology platform, has raised $250 million in a token sale led by Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly and ParaFi Capital. More than 40 investment firms participated in the deal. The sale follows the project’s Avalanche9000 upgrade went live in a testnet environment. The overhaul aims to make it cheaper … Read more
The power-hungry AI revolution is already spiking global demand for energy. That’s putting a bigger focus on nuclear energy, and with it — according to one venture capital company — the need for better ways to trade the fuel that makes fission possible. For crypto-focused VC firm Portal Ventures, the answer was downright radioactive. The … Read more
This is the second in a series of stories examining the crypto industry’s high-stakes 2024 foray into politics and campaigning. The first explored the electoral track record of Fairshake PAC’s strategy. While politicians battled each other across the 2024 U.S. electoral map, the crypto industry ran an unprecedented test of a 14-year-old Supreme Court decision … Read more
Solana Foundation’s former stablecoin lead Anna Yuan has left the mothership to build her own startup catering to the fast-growing crypto subsector. The company building Perena, a stablecoin trading infrastructure project, raised “around $3 million” in a pre-seed funding round led by Borderless Capital, Yuan told CoinDesk in an interview last month. Perena isn’t solely … Read more