The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was recently trading at about $39,928, a little down from where it stood 24 hours earlier and about the same as where it started the Good Friday, holiday weekend.
Trading over the long weekend was light as investors continue to process rising inflation, the possibility of a recession and the latest developments from Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Russia pressed forward with its attacks on major Ukraine cities, including the capital Kyiv, and demanded the surrender of the strategic Black Sea port of Mariupol to the Southeast.
Joe DiPasquale, the CEO of fund manager BitBull was pessimistic about the coming week, noting that support could form well below $40,000.
Michael Saylor really wants corporations to follow his lead and put bitcoin on the balance sheet.
Square has it as it allows its clients to trade crypto, while a few game developers have it as part of a Web 3 gaming push or because they accept crypto as a payment method.
But in this void, Terra has stepped in with its frequent bitcoin buys which have pushed the Luna Foundation Guard’s bitcoin holdings to nearly $1.7 billion and founder Do Kwon has expressed a wish for that number to hit $10 billion.
Cryptoquant’s data suggests that institutional interest continues to be strong for crypto, but hedge funds, family offices and high-net-worth individuals aren’t listed corporations.
But LFG isn’t a listed Fortune 500 company, so the market doesn’t apply the same prestige to the purchases as bitcoin continues to stay correlated with equities and decline in value.
But, for perhaps the first time in Dorsey’s yearslong flirtation with Bitcoin , there’s a significant disconnect between his plans and crypto long-timers’ preferences.
At least in the case of consumer goods like cellphones, the motivation for adding biometric access control is usually simple convenience, but the ultimate implications could be dire.
In part because the planned wallet is a single-user device, it will be able to create and store its biometric credentials locally, as your phone does.
But even local processing and storage is a real risk – ultimately, no local data that can be reached via the internet should ever be considered truly secure.
Equally worrisome, making a fingerprint the main way of authorizing a crypto wallet could mean less emphasis on private key management.
And in the communications business, Fridays are when you drop news you don’t want anyone to pay too much attention to – reporters are largely finishing up their assignments and looking forward to a blissful weekend.
All that said, Block is trying to thread an extremely tricky needle, and its current plans deserve a thoughtful rather than knee-jerk response.
The presumption that something should be a mass-market product, ideally usable by even the slowest kids on the bus, is baked into the business models and culture of even relatively agile entities like Block.
The logic also, however, aligns with many calls within the crypto industry to prioritize making user experience better and more intuitive, not just for wallets but also for decentralized exchanges and everything else.
In fact, the assumption that front-end design can make a crypto system just as smooth and effortless to use as a Web 2.0 system may well prove to be fundamentally flawed: The complexity of crypto is inextricable from its decentralization, and methods of “abstracting away” that complexity almost always add new attack surfaces for people who want to take your money.
Sam Bankman-Fried: The Man, the Hair, the Vision: SBF is 30 and his company, FTX, is everywhere.
The leader in news and information on cryptocurrency, digital assets and the future of money, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies.
As part of their compensation, certain CoinDesk employees, including editorial employees, may receive exposure to DCG equity in the form of stock appreciation rights, which vest over a multi-year period.