Each Bitcoin halving sees Bitcoin miners rewarded with a smaller block subsidy, but ViaBTC is optimistic that innovative Bitcoin applications will more than cover these needs, as Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned. Bitcoin transaction fees from applications such as Ordinals, Runes and BRC-20s will be key to making sure miners stick around even as more halving events occur, according to a cryptocurrency mining pool. “[The Bitcoin network’s] evolution has led to an expanding array of use cases and a growing user base [which] has significantly impacted miners’ fee income from on-chain transactions,” Vi ..read more

Analysts at Deutsche Bank also argued Tether’s solvency status is “questionable” which the stablecoin firm said is “ironic” considering the bank’s own history with fines. Stablecoin giant Tether has slammed Deutsche Bank over a newly released report suggesting that stablecoins — including its dollar-pegged token Tether (USDT) — could witness a “peso moment,” that would wreak havoc on the crypto industry.  In a May 7 research report on stablecoins, Deutsche analysts cited the 2022 collapse of the Terraform Lab’s algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (TUSD) which saw at least $40 billion wiped f ..read more

Traders will be closely watching how Bitcoin’s weekly chart closes on May 12 to look for signs of the end of the downtrend. Bitcoin (BTC) traders are pointing to a “bullish candle hammer” that has emerged on Bitcoin’s weekly price chart — which they say could signal a possible reversal of the past month’s downtrend. “Bitcoin still looks like it is about to BLOW higher,” market intelligence firm Glassnode founders Jan Happel and Yana Allemann wrote on their shared X account “Negentropic” in a post on May 9. They noted that the Bitcoin price chart closed on May 5 with a bullish hammer — the nam ..read more

Base is already home to 46% of transactions related to SocialFi on-chain, but the asset manager says it has even more room to grow. Trillion-dollar asset manager Franklin Templeton suggests “Base Season” has arrived with the rise of Social Finance (SocialFi) apps, with Base leading other Ethereum layer 2s in the vertical. “[It is] positioning itself well to capture a material share of SocialFi activity and remain a leader in the Ethereum L2 sector going forward,” Franklin Templeton said in a May report. About 46% of transactions related to SocialFi are on Base, which has increasingly stripped ..read more

Binance hits back at claims it fired investigator who found manipulation, Hong Kong crypto ETFs take the “equivalent” of $50B. Asia Express. Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industrys most important developments. Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has been accused of firing its own investigators after discovering that its VIP client, props trading firm DWF Labs, engaged in alleged acts of market manipulation.  A May 9 Wall Street Journal report claimed that DWF Labs engaged in market manipulation, wash trading, and inflated trading volumes amounting to $300 million thro ..read more

Coinbase head of tokenization Anthony Bassili described plans for its Base network at TokenizeThis 2024 in Miami. Coinbase is preparing for a future of a billion customers using decentralized applications on millions of blockchains safely and securely in a system integrating the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Circle’s USD Coin (USDC).  Coinbase head of tokenization Anthony Bassili, speaking at TokenizeThis 2024 in Miami, said Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 Base blockchain will save time on Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) with identity attestation through the Eth ..read more

Politically themed memecoins defy the crypto market’s drab performance by rallying in excess of double-digit gains. Trump-themed memecoin MAGA (TRUMP) surged as much as 78% on May 9 following Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s comments on cryptocurrencies.  Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows MAGA trading at $6, up 46% over the last 24 hours. Its 24-hour trading volume has jumped 620% to rest at $281.8 million, and with a market cap of $281.8 million, TRUMP is ranked at position 248 at CoinGecko. At the time of publication, the token was the 13th large ..read more

An attacker could have placed a limit buy order with an arbitrarily high open price to automatically win every trade, the Zellic security platform discovered. Two different bugs in a fork of the Gains Network leveraged trading protocol could have allowed traders to profit 900% on every trade, regardless of the price of the token traded, according to an April 19 report from blockchain security firm Zellic. One of the bugs existed in a previous version of Gains but was later patched. The other was only found in a fork of the protocol.  According to Zellic, its staff informed the devel ..read more

This week’s Bitcoin options expiry sits at $1.35 billion, but what is the expected impact on BTC price? Whenever Bitcoin's (BTC) price action exhibits significant corrections, analysts and traders are quick to search for a reason, often pointing fingers at derivatives markets where bears allegedly exploit futures contract liquidation levels or anticipate increased profits from weekly BTC options expiries.  Such talk has been on the decline recently, thanks to Bitcoin’s range-bound price action, but now that murmurs of a trend reversal have come back, let’s take a look at how whales are p ..read more

Former SEC commissioner Troy Paredes was not the first to criticize the U.S. financial regulator’s lack of clarity on digital assets. Troy Paredes, who served as a commissioner at the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from 2008 to 2013, suggested that the regulator might be overreaching on what digital assets it considered securities. Speaking at the TokenizeThis 2024 conference in Miami on May 9, Paredes said SEC Chair Gary Gensler seemed to suggest that the commission had clarity on his views of what constituted a security under the Howey test. However, he said there wa ..read more