Genesis Digital Assets has become the latest Bitcoin mining firm to raise millions toward plans for aggressive expansion amid the exodus of miners from China due to its crackdown on the sector. On Wednesday, Genesis announced it had closed a $125 million equity funding round led by United Kingdom-based Kingsway Capital. The capital will be mobilized to purchase mining hardware and launch new data centers in the United States and Nordic region. The terms of the deal will also see the Kingsway Capital CEO, Manuel Stotz, join Genesis’ board of directors. Stotz highlighted Genesis’ extensive experience in mining. “The GDA …

Rich Checkan, president of Asset Strategies International (ASI), has described central bank digital currencies (CBDC) as a product that was “concocted in hell by Satan himself.” ASI was founded in 1982 and deals in alternative assets, such as precious metals, foreign currencies and pre-1933 United States gold coins, and offers a precious metals trading platform. Speaking during an interview with streaming financial news provider Kitco News on Tuesday, Checkan slammed CBDCs due to the threat they posed to individual privacy, noting they give the state the ability to monitor every transaction you make and track your entire life. “I think …

Stakeholders in the Chinese firm that was founded to operate cryptocurrency exchange Huobi have resolved to dissolve the entity, according to publicly available records. The firm, Beijing Huobi Tianxia Network Technology Ltd., was established in late 2013 and is 70.52% owned by Li Lin, the founder and CEO of Huobi Group. It has 10 million yuan ($1 million) in registered capital and a total of five subsidiaries. Having passed the resolution in favor of dissolution on July 22, stakeholders will now proceed to deregister Beijing Huobi Tianxia within 45 days. Creditors are asked to declare their claims to the liquidation …

Bitcoin (BTC) maximalist and Ballet CEO Bobby Lee recently discussed the implications of China’s ongoing crackdown on cryptocurrency. Despite the government’s support for a digital renminbi, Lee suggested that Beijing has no interest in nurturing the cryptocurrency industry. Considering his collisions with the Chinese government during his stint in running China’s first crypto exchange, BTCChina, Lee said: “It (China) wants to regulate (cryptocurrencies) to achieve its overarching goal of globalization of digital RMB.” He further stated that the Chinese government is not looking after the vast crypto exosystem that exists in the region. Stressing on the wait-and-see approach, Lee highlighted …

The quest to understand the opportunities and challenges of a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, is underway in 81 countries, with five nations fully implementing a digital version of their currency, according to a new CBDC tracker from the Atlantic Council. The Caribbean region is home to all five CBDCs that are currently in use, with the Bahamas, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia, and Grenada all implementing digital cash systems. CBDCs are in their pilot stage in 14 other countries, including South Korea and Sweden, the tracker shows. Established in 1961, the Atlantic Council describes …

Bitcoin (BTC) has a better probability of recovering back to $60,000 than breaking below its current support level of $30,000 to target $20,000, believes Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence. A screenshot from McGlone's latest analysis on the flagship cryptocurrency, first shared by Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas, shows him comparing Bitcoin's ongoing price action with the "too-cold" period of the 2018–2019 trading session. In detail, the BTC/USD exchange rate entered a prolonged consolidation period near $4,000 following an 80%-plus crash in 2018, but a sudden run-up in 2019 sent its prices to as high as $14,000 …

China's nascent central bank digital currency, the digital yuan, has already been deployed for an extensive array of successful pilot schemes, ranging from e-commerce to salary payments and to festive traditional lotteries. This week has reportedly seen the currency debut in the insurance industry, in the city of Shenzhen, where it is being piloted by the local branch of the People’s Bank of China together with a local subsidiary of China’s leading insurer, Ping An. The project involves a new insurance policy tailored to medical workers in Shenzhen’s Nanshan district, offering them various levels of compensation for diagnosis of or …

The heat is rising between United States lawmakers and Chinese officials even before the lighting of the Olympic flame at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. During a press briefing on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian addressed U.S. senators’ warning letter to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee regarding the use of the digital yuan at the Olympic games next year. Calling for the U.S. politicians to “abide by the spirit stipulated in the Olympic Charter,” Lijian asked them to “stop making sports a political matter and stop making troubles out of the digital currency in China,” the South …

The rocky road that Bitcoin (BTC) has been on for the past two months continues as a widely predicted move downward materialized in the early hours on Monday and dropped the price of BTC below $31,000. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that a wave of mid-day selling pushed the price of BTC to a low of $30,400 before bulls arrived to provide support and lift the price back to $30,850. The market as a whole continues to face an uphill battle as the miner exodus following China’s crackdown on the mining industry has led to the fourth …

Three United States senators have signed a letter urging Olympic officials to forbid American athletes from using the digital yuan during the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. In a Monday letter to U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee board chair Susanne Lyons, Republican senators Marsha Blackburn, Roger Wicker and Cynthia Lummis requested officials prevent U.S. athletes from using or accepting digital yuan, given their allegation that it can be "tracked and traced" by the People’s Bank of China, or PBoC. The three claimed that the Chinese Communist Party could use the digital currency to surveil visiting athletes and upon their return to …

The ongoing United States-China trade war is in its fourth year. Former U.S. President Donald Trump saw different results from what he initially expected: America has taken a hit from higher tariffs and sanctions against Chinese companies and hasn’t benefited from it nearly to the same extent. It has cost the country up to 245,000 jobs. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce calculated that the situation puts the exports of each state at risk. For example, the damage to Florida’s exports alone has already reached $1.9 billion. At the same time, China was taking a smarter approach: It not only imposed …

Amid the ongoing crackdown on cryptocurrency mining in China, mining new Bitcoin (BTC) continues getting easier as BTC has experienced another mining difficulty drop. On July 18, the Bitcoin network posted its fourth consecutive negative adjustment of mining difficulty, dropping 4.8%, according to data from Bitcoin explorer BTC.com. The latest mining difficulty adjustment occurred at block 691,488, reducing the difficulty rate from 14.4 trillion to 13.7 trillion, the lowest level recorded since June 2020. The difficulty metrics have now almost halved over the past two months, after reaching over 25 trillion on May 13. The latest Bitcoin mining adjustment follows …