Hong Kong has issued its first stablecoin issuer licenses, approving Anchorpoint Financial and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation under a new regulatory framework overseen by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA). The HKMA announced the initial batch of licensees on Friday, marking the first approvals under its stablecoin regime. Anchorpoint Financial is the stablecoin … Read more
Binance co-founder Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao said he hopes that cryptocurrencies and blockchain will simply become an invisible part of daily infrastructure by 2031, much like the internet today. Speaking on Scott Melker’s Wolf of All Streets podcast posted Thursday, Zhao said that while new use cases and advances will continue to emerge, he hopes talk … Read more
CAEX, a crypto platform linked to the Vietnam Prosperity Joint Stock Commercial Bank (VPBank) ecosystem, said OKX Ventures and HashKey are backing the company as it seeks to qualify for Vietnam’s pilot regime for crypto exchanges. CAEX said Friday that the two offshore companies will join VPBank Securities (VPBankS) and technology partner LynkiD as shareholders. … Read more
Key takeaways: Bitcoin climbed to $72,000 as rising recession odds and a weak US dollar boosted the appeal of scarce financial assets. Rising oil prices and a wobbly truce with Iran threaten to reverse Bitcoin’s recent gains. Bitcoin (BTC) reclaimed the $72,000 level on Thursday despite data showing rising inflation and weak economic growth in … Read more
Newly appointed company president Brett Redfearn briefly worked as Coinbase’s head of capital markets and served for more than three years at the SEC. Tokenization platform Securitize has named Brett Redfearn as president, with the former official at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also joining its board of directors. Securitize’s Thursday notice said … Read more
The Open Network (TON), an independent layer-1 blockchain that has integrations with the Telegram messaging application, said it has slashed block times to 400 milliseconds with the release of its Catchain 2.0 consensus upgrade. Payment transactions now settle in about 1 second, while trades settle in “real time,” and decentralized applications will now operate at … Read more
Authorities in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada have frozen millions of dollars tied to crypto scams in a joint enforcement operation called Operation Atlantic. The operation, focused on phishing attacks, took place in March and was coordinated by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), the US Secret Service, the Ontario Provincial Police and … Read more
Crypto ATM operator Bitcoin Depot revealed that it lost about 50.9 Bitcoin, worth roughly $3.7 million, after a hacker gained access to some of its internal systems. The breach happened on March 23 after the attacker took control of credentials linked to Bitcoin Depot’s corporate Bitcoin (BTC) wallets, according to a Monday filing with the … Read more
South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb has begun legal proceedings to recover 7 Bitcoin still missing from a payout error that saw 620,000 BTC mistakenly distributed during a promotional event in February. The exchange has filed for a provisional attachment, a court-approved measure that freezes assets ahead of a civil lawsuit, targeting users who have yet … Read more
Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis estimates that stablecoin volumes could hit a lofty $1.5 quadrillion within the next decade, beating the total volume of global cross-border payments today. In a report on Wednesday, the Chainalysis team said that adjusted stablecoin volume could hit $719 trillion by 2035 just through organic growth, up from $28 trillion in … Read more