Bitfinex and Tether settled with the Office of the New York Attorney General in the landmark case against Tether. New York authorities alleged that Tether misrepresented the degree to which Tether (USDT) coins were backed by fiat collateral. The settlement requires Bitfinex and Tether to pay $18.5 million for damages to the state of New York and submit to periodic reporting of their reserves. The terms of the settlement mandate Bitfinex and Tether to report their current reserve status and budget and any transactions between the two companies, as well as provide public reports for the specific composition of their …

In a recent video debate, Bitcoin skeptic Frances Coppola debated Bloomberg senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone on the economics of Bitcoin, market manipulation and predictions for 2021. Coppola is skeptical that Bitcoin will ever succeed as a store of value because of its high volatility which, according to her, is a direct consequence of the asset’s fixed supply rate. “With a fixed rate of increase of supply (...) the only thing that can adjust to changes in demand is price”, she explained. Demand fluctuations mean Bitcoin's volatility is here to stay. McGlone, on the other hand, thinks that the fixed …

New Ethereum-backed stablecoin RAI hopes to be the savior of the DeFi sector by providing a truly decentralized stablecoin alternative. Developed by blockchain startup Reflexer Labs, RAI is not pegged to any fiat currency and its monetary policy is managed by an on-chain, autonomous controller. It's a fork of Maker's DAI. RAI co-founder Ameen Soleimani explained: “RAI is an asset backed only by ETH, governance-minimized, and programmed to maintain its own price stability without needing to peg to an external price reference like the USD.” Soleimani believes that RAI, which he dubbed “A Money God,” has far greate potential than …

Bitcoin (BTC) has already hit $50,000 on some exchanges but needs to get whales on its side to flip it to definitive support, data suggests. In a tweet on Feb. 16, Ki Young Ju, CEO of on-chain analytics service CryptoQuant, highlighted the so-called "Coinbase premium" as one of the final hurdles for BTC/USD. Negative premium slows upward grind On Tuesday, a clear battle was emerging within Bitcoin trading as $50,000 stayed de facto out of reach for bulls. Analyzing the premium, which pits the Coinbase BTC/USD price against the Binance BTC/USDT pair, Ki argued that the until it neutralized, higher …

When BitMEX launched its Bitcoin (BTC) perpetual futures market in 2016, it created a new paradigm for cryptocurrency traders. Although this was not the first platform to offer BTC-settled inverse swaps, BitMEX brought usability and liquidity to a broader audience of investors. BitMEX contracts did not involve fiat or stablecoins and even though the reference price was calculated in the U.S. dollar, all profits and losses were paid in BTC. Fast forward to 2021, and Tether (USDT)-settled contracts have gained relevance. Using USDT-based contracts certainly makes it easier for retail investors to calculate their profit, loss and the required margin …

In the past few months cryptocurrencies have become a frequent topic of discussion among the mainstream media and traditional investors partially because of the Bitcoin evangelism of well-known influencers like Elon Musk, Mark Cuban and Michael Saylor. One platform that has benefited from increased attention on the cryptocurrency sector is Algorand (ALGO), a scalable, secure, and decentralized digital currency platform. Since the start of 2021, ALGO price has steadily grown from $0.33 on Jan. 1 to $1.84 on Feb.12, its highest level since July 2019. Its trading volume also increased from $70 million to $1.1 billion during that same period. …

In a short statement today, Bitfinex — the sister company to centralized stablecoin Tether — announced that it has repaid Tether an outstanding loan balance of $550 million. This action fully closes out a larger $750 million loan from a $900 million credit line first issued in 2018 — a credit line which has been at the center of a market manipulation lawsuit in New York and a broader lawsuit from the New York Attorney General, among other legal proceedings. “Bitfinex is happy to announce that in January it repaid the remaining balance of $550,000,000 of the outstanding revolving loan …

Following an exploit last night that cost yield vault project Yearn.finance $11 million in stablecoin DAI, crypto community members from multiple projects have rallied to mitigate the effects, reclaim exploited funds, and reimburse affected users. First reported by the project at 5:09 pm EST, the exploit was a complex arbitration attack on Yearn’s version 1 DAI yield vault. According to a disclosure published by Yearn this morning, the exploit — which featured over 160 nested transactions and has been called one of the most complex to date — netted the attacker $2.7 million in profits, and cost the vault $11 …

The co-founder of crypto data and insights firm Coin Metrics has fired back at yet another article in mainstream media claiming that the “Bitcoin bubble” has been driven by Tether. Nic Carter, a former Fidelity crypto asset analyst and Castle Island Ventures partner, slammed the Wall Street Journal article titled “Behind the Bitcoin Bubble” by Andy Kessler, alleging that it verged on “journalistic malpractice”. “Normally, if you are a columnist writing in one of the most respected financial publications, you might try and evaluate the data behind that claim, instead of just uncritically accepting it. But Mr. Kessler did no …

The sands are shifting in the stablecoin ecosystem, with Circle’s USD Coin quickly eating into the dominance of the sector’s leader, Tether. According to a Feb. 1 report from Glassnode, the amount of USDC on exchanges increased by more than 112% in January alone, growing from $431 million to over $915 million. Since the beginning of the year, roughly $1 billion worth of new USDC has been minted — of which more than 90% has been sent to centralized exchanges. With nearly half a billion worth of USDC making its way onto exchanges in a single month, Glassnode speculates that …

Circle, the company behind the second most popular stablecoin USD Coin, has rolled out a new API that will allow for the seamless transfer of USDC to USD via automated clearinghouse (ACH) systems. The first exchange to adopt the new API will be derivatives and futures specialist FTX, looking to speed up USD settlement processes on behalf of their customers. In a blog entry, project manager Gee Chuang described how Circle’s ACH API improves connections between the fiat world and the digital world by introducing interoperability among payment rails, such as card, wire and blockchain transfers. Using the API, USD …

iFinex — the parent company of crypto exchange Bitfinex and stablecoin issuer Tether (USDT) — has written to the New York Supreme Court requesting that its upcoming trial date be pushed back even further. According to a filing submitted to the New York court system on Jan. 19, the legal counsel for iFinex Inc requested another 30 days to produce the documents demanded by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG). The document production process was supposed to be completed by Jan. 15 — a date which itself was an extension on the original deadline of Dec. 16. Legal counsel …