A half-billion dollar loan has been closed out, but multiple court cases grind on 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 […]

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Coinbase posted an in-depth explanation of its Jan. 29 platform difficulties. On Jan. 29, a number of Coinbase users reported issues with the platform’s buy and sell functions. The Coinbase difficulties arose just a day after Robinhood barred GameStop share purchases following surging prices on the stock. A recent blog post indicates the Coinbase difficulties arose from an outage, not a ban on trading.  “Between 4:25am and 9:31am PST on Friday, January 29, api.coinbase.com had an outage,” Coinbase said in a post on Feb. 5. “During this […]

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Feeless transactions can play a role in enabling DeFi, allowing the sector to further develop and grow in importance. Face-to-face transactions are starting to seem quaintly archaic as many countries continue or even expand lockdowns due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Since the start of the crisis in early 2020, digital transactions have surged, particularly in e-commerce and digital banking. In contrast with face-to-face transactions, such as a direct payment of cash in exchange for a product or service, digital financial transactions typically require an intermediary, such […]

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Protego joins Anchorage as the first string of digital asset firms to get national trust bank licensing. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has granted another crypto firm a national charter. Per an announcement shared with Cointelegraph today, Washington-based institutional crypto custodian Protego is the second crypto-native firm to get national licensing from the OCC.  The new charter is conditional, and Protego is authorized as a national trust bank rather than a traditional bank, meaning that it will not handle deposits. Interestingly, Protego is a […]

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Seized funds bring the damage down to $9 million as multiple communities ponder the next step in reimbursing user funds 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, […]

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It’s not just the Ether price itself setting records on Friday — users are having to pay more than ever to send transactions and some exchanges can’t cope. Largest altcoin Ether (ETH) built on its recent all-time highs on Feb. 5 to climb ever closer to $2,000. ETH/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView Ether price hits record $1,750 Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView showed a fresh breakout occurring for ETH/USD during Friday trading.  At the time of writing, Ether was targeting $1,750 as 6.5% daily […]

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Was stock trading app Robinhood the villain in the GameStop saga? “In a decentralized trading market, no one would have that power.” Was last week’s Reddit versus Wall Street stand-off really the “beginning of the end for centralized finance,” as Gemini founder Tyler Winklevoss described it? Or was it just a one-time instance of individuals coming together to right a perceived wrong — with no long-term economic consequences? As GameStop, a struggling videogame retailer, came under attack by hedge-fund short sellers, a coalition of individuals spearheaded by […]

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