Tech-heavy stock market indices, including the Nasdaq Composite and the S&P 500, have begun to recover. Amazon posted high pandemic sales that led profits to climb threefold and reported a 37% spike in revenue. Facebook also surpassed Wall Street expectations, achieving $21.5 billion in revenue during the third quarter. Although the correlation between Bitcoin and U.S. stocks has declined in recent weeks, the probability that the rising risk-on market sentiment could buoy BTC remains high. As Kevin Svenson, a chartist at Kraken’s Cryptowatch, explained, the market direction between Bitcoin and the S&P 500 is the “same 80% of the time.” …
Even though the cryptocurrency industry is not new to ups and downs, 2019 has turned out to be the year with the most surprising reveals. The long-lasting bear market of 2018 moved market analysts to call it the year of regulatory reckoning, leaving many jurisdictions uncertain about how to treat cryptocurrencies. However, 2019 also turned out to be the year of the comeback, as big tech giants like Facebook moved from banning crypto to embracing it. Escalating global events such as the trade war between the United States and China have shifted investors’ point of view on the utility of …
Cryptocurrencies were never apolitical. The fateful 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto treatise did not appear in an ideological vacuum: Notions of online privacy, proactive use of cryptography for protecting individual freedom, and denationalization of currency that informed the Bitcoin creator’s vision had been brewing for at least two decades, at least since the rise of the cypherpunk movement in the early 1990s. The libertarian spirit of individual sovereignty and suspicion of governments and central banks has dominated the intellectual milieu where the concept of digital cash was forged and developed into a working technology. As cryptocurrencies went more mainstream, the core community’s …
Facebook blockchain head David Marcus announced he was quitting his position on the board of U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Friday, August 10, in a statement seen by various media outlets. Marcus, who joined the exchange’s board in December 2017 and took on a blockchain research group at Facebook in May, said he now thinks it is “appropriate” to leave. “Because of the new group I'm setting up at Facebook around Blockchain, I've decided it was appropriate for me to resign from the Coinbase board. “...I've been thoroughly impressed by the talent and execution the team has demonstrated during my tenure, …
Former Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft employee Tim Wagner has joined Coinbase as vice president (VP) of engineering, according to a blogpost August 6. Wagner will now lead Coinbase’s engineering team, which is “central to [Coinbase’s] mission of creating an open financial system for the world,” Coinbase writes in the post. Aiming to build the “most open, secure, and accessible financial system,” Wagner will also be responsible for expanding the team by hiring engineering talent in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, according to his LinkedIn profile. Prior to Coinbase, Wagner served as general manager (GM) at AWS for …