BITCOIN

They call it “max pain” in the bitcoin options market: How to make one’s trading counterparty suffer the most. Although the largest cryptocurrency was changing hands Wednesday around $56,500, traders were handicapping the odds of a plunge to about $44,000 by Friday, when a record $6 billion of options contracts is set to expire. A drop to that price level would inflict “max pain” on buyers of options contracts, and it might be the most profitable price point for options sellers. It’s a remote risk, but not one to be discounted. The…

Canada’s tax authority, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has prevailed in a court battle for access to a trove of high-value customer data held by cryptocurrency exchange Coinsquare. And the CRA seems to be coming for more. Under a federal judge’s March 19 order, Coinsquare must hand over detailed information on its Canadian customers, their crypto trading activity and identifying information to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). Coinsquare told CoinDesk that it will disclose information on an estimated 5% to 10% of its 400,000 customers to the CRA, which had originally…

A co-founder of Tether, the $41 billion company behind the tether (USDT, -0.02%) stablecoin, said the company and its reserves should be audited at least quarterly, and maybe even monthly. “Every time you print a tether, you should have a dollar being added to that cash pool,” said William Quigley, who left the project in 2015 and now runs the non-fungible token (NFT) exchange WAX. “Audited once a month, once a quarter.” The comments on CoinDesk TV come after Tether last month agreed to a $18.5 million settlement with the New York Attorney General on charges of an…

Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange (DEX) on Ethereum and a centerpiece of the $42 billion decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, is releasing its third iteration. In a Tuesday blog post, the firm behind the platform said its aim is to make Uniswap “the most flexible and efficient [automated market maker] ever designed.” AMMs – once nearly solely the domain of Uniswap – have grown in stature along with DeFi’s emergence last year. Rivals like SushiSwap, 1inch and others have also made the exchange of Ethereum-based assets easy for many crypto natives. Uniswap…

Uniswap has licensed the third iteration of its code bank in an apparent move to ward off would-be copycats. The white paper for v3 of the decentralized exchange (DEX) was released Tuesday. In a possible nod to rival project SushiSwap – which copied Hayden Adams’ creation bit by bit – the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based team’s blog post included one section detailing a “business source license” that acts as a time delay for commercial use of the code “for up to two years.” After that point, the code will remain in an open-source GPL license “into…

Digital-asset traders and analysts were scrambling Tuesday to assess a fresh data point extracted from the Bitcoin blockchain: Some $806 million worth of the cryptocurrency apparently transferred earlier in the day off of the Coinbase exchange’s institution-focused unit, Coinbase Pro. The jury is out on what it means. It could be that a large investor or several just completed a fresh round of buying and now are taking the bounty off the exchange for long-term holding or other purposes. Or it might be something else more innocuous, such as an…

The digital economy is an intelligent stage characterized by the deep mining and integrated application of blockchain, artificial intelligence and big data. In the face of new social conditions, the digital economy is booming, giving full play to the benefits of technological innovation and changing the current technology The way of application is to give play to the empowering role of technology to society. Under the wave of blockchain technology, the breakthrough in the financial field is epoch-making. Various forms of “blockchain+” applications have been launched. Blockchain technology has accelerated…

Decentralized finance (DeFi) idealists want to create perfectly free financial ecosystems that can’t be subverted by governments, corporations or regulators. They also want their decentralized nirvana to be equipped with stablecoins so users can be protected from price craziness. Therein lies the contradiction. J.P. Koning, a CoinDesk columnist, worked as an equity researcher at a Canadian brokerage firm and a financial writer at a large Canadian bank. He runs the popular Moneyness blog. Are decentralized anarchic systems, those that have no link to existing centralized institutions, capable of creating stability?…

Cryptocurrencies are banned in Morocco, but peer-to-peer bitcoin (BTC, -5.01%) trading platform LocalBitcoins is reporting all-time trading highs this year. February 2021 was the platform’s “best month ever” in Morocco in terms of trading volumes, according to LocalBitcoins Chief Marketing Officer Jukka Blomberg, who said approximately $900,000 worth of bitcoin was traded on the platform through the month. LocalBitcoins also saw a 30% increase in user registrations between 2019 and 2020, with over 700 new accounts created, Blomberg said. Bitcoin purchases are rising despite a ban on cryptocurrencies in the North African country. In November…