Cryptocurrency

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments. Thailand’s crypto UBI Thailand may soon have a national airdrop in the works where every citizen 16 years and older will receive 10,000 Baht ($285).  According to local news reports on August 30, Thailand’s ruling Pheu Thai party will consult the

Human ID project Worldcoin signed up over 9,500 users in Argentina in a single day in August, setting a record for single-day signups. To achieve this feat, facilitators onboarded participants at an average rate of less than nine seconds per person, according to an Aug. 31 announcement from the project. Argentina is one of the

The biggest new memecoin of 2023, Pepe (PEPE) suffered one of the worst possible fates that can befall a new crypto asset; a partial rug pull — after its anonymous developers abruptly sold nearly $16 million worth of the token on Aug. 24.  The official Pepe X (formerly known as Twitter) account explained the drop

Bitcoin (BTC) led the cryptocurrency markets higher on Aug. 29 following Grayscale’s victory in the lawsuit against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. However, the rally could not be sustained as analysts cautioned that the victory did not guarantee the approval of a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. Still, the victory may prove to be

Shibarium, a new layer-2 blockchain for Shiba Inu (SHIB) has surpassed 100,000 wallets on its platform with 35,000 coming within 24 hours of Shibarium’s relaunch on Aug. 28. Shytoshi Kusama, the lead developer and co-founder of Shiba Inu, confirmed Shibarium was back up and running in an Aug. 28 blog post. At the time, Kusama

Bitcoin (BTC) is down about 11% in August, just shy of the 13.88% fall seen in the corresponding month in 2022, according to CoinGlass data. The picture does not look very bright for September either. History shows that every year since 2017, Bitcoin has declined in September.  Bloomberg Intelligence senior macro strategist Mike McGlone is

Bitcoin (BTC) has gone silent over the weekend. CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju said in a recent post on X (formerly Twitter) that Bitcoin’s velocity has declined to a 3-year low. He said this could either be considered positive as whales were holding on to their positions or negative because the transfer to new investors

The circumstances behind the mysterious $16 million withdrawal from the Pepecoin (PEPE) project’s multisig wallet have seemingly been revealed, with the finger being pointed at three ex-team members who went rogue. On Aug. 24, the price of PEPE plunged by roughly 15% amid fears of a potential rug-pull after the community spotted that $16 million

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell spoke today and in his Jackson Hole speech he cautioned that inflation remains too high and that the central bank remains open to raising rates further if needed. The remarks by Powell strengthen the narrative that interest rates are likely to remain higher for longer.  However, a positive sign is that after

The price of the frog-themed memecoin Pepe (PEPE) has plunged nearly 15% after recent changes to a multisig wallet and new token transfers ignited fears of a “rug pull” by its developers.  The allegations — as well as the negative price action — came as $16 million worth of Pepe tokens were sent from the developers’

Twitter polls and Reddit forums suggest that around 70% of people find it difficult to be rude to ChatGPT, while around 16% are fine treating the chatbot like an AI slave.The overall feeling seems to be that if you treat an AI that behaves like a human badly, you’ll be more likely to fall into

Bankrupt cryptocurrency lender BlockFi is trying to block attempts by the similarly bankrupt FTX and Three Arrows Capital (3AC) that aim to retrieve hundreds of millions of dollars to pay back their creditors. BlockFi claimed in an Aug. 21 filing to a New Jersey bankruptcy court that its own creditors shouldn’t be pushed to the

The Stellar Development Foundation has joined the Bytecode Alliance, an industry group promoting the development of WebAssembly (Wasm), according to an Aug. 21 announcement. Wasm is a competitor to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) used by the Ethereum ecosystem. It is also used in non-blockchain, browser-based applications. We are officially members of @bytecodeallies! Our goal?

Digital asset investment products saw $55 million in outflows for the week of September 13-19, according to a report from CoinShares.  Optimism surrounding what was previously thought to be the impending approval of a spot-based Bitcoin exchange-traded fund has begun to give way as $42 million worth of the week’s outflows came from BTC alone.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is likely to approve multiple applications for Ether futures exchange-traded funds (ETFs) at the same time, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.  Since July, the regulator has been flooded with applications from several investment firms, including requests combining futures Bitcoin (BTC) and

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you the most significant developments from the past week. Over two weeks after Curve Finance’s multiple pool exploits, the DeFi protocol has assured the hack victims that it is assessing each impacted user for reimbursement. This

A tight range usually resolves with a range breakout and that is what happened in Bitcoin (BTC) on Aug. 17. Bitcoin fell sharply, resulting in a $1 billion liquidation for derivatives traders, the biggest since the FTX collapse in 2022. It is difficult to pinpoint any specific reason for the sell-off but analysts believe that the

Update (Aug. 18 at 2:09 pm UTC): This article has been updated with both sides’ perspectives and additional information. Further commentaries are expected from both sides. Crypto influencer Evan Luthra has brought a lawsuit against crypto exchange Bitget for freezing his account after a new token listing in March. According to Luthra, the exchange suspended

Ripple Labs has voiced its opposition towards the United States securities regulator’s move towards filing an interlocutory appeal relating to the summary judgment laid down by U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres on Jul. 13. In an Aug. 16 letter to Torres of the Southern District of New York, Ripple’s lawyers explained that because the Securities

Asset management firm Valkyrie has filed for an Ether (ETH) futures exchange-traded fund (ETF) with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. According to documents on Aug. 16, the application is an addition to the company’s previous move to change its investment strategy for a Bitcoin futures ETF in line with the regulator.  As per