The FCA’s paper also asks for industry input on its incoming markets admission and disclosures as well as market abuse regime.
The U.K. intends to prohibit public offers of crypto, the Financial Conduct Authority said in its paper on the incoming crypto regime on Monday.
Legislation will be put in place to prohibit public offers of crypto, building on the U.K.’s promotion rules that prevent unregistered crypto firms from reaching out to U.K. clients. Only crypto asset trading platforms and offers qualifying for exemptions may not be subject to this.
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CoinDesk reached out to the Treasury for input on whether or not this only applies to regulated companies as the FCA could not comment on this.
The paper asks for industry input on its market admission and disclosures as well as market abuse regime and is one of many more papers to come from the regulator as it prepares for its crypto regime.
The FCA is the U.K.’s regulator in charge of overseeing financial activities in the country including crypto. It has been watching over the sector and seeing how it will comply with its money laundering rules since 2020 but it plans to put in place a new regime in 2026 following the implementation of draft regulation that is coming out next year.
It will need industry feedback on how it can ensure consumers have the necessary information to make informed decisions as well as on their plans to reduce fraud via the market abuse regime.
OFAC says a front company in the UAE had been converting crypto into cash for North Korea.
The U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday said it had shut down a North Korean money laundering network that used crypto to clean millions of dollars for the hermit kingdom, a global leader in crypto crime.
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A front company in the UAE called Green Alpine Trading, LLC, had been converting crypto into cash for North Korea, according to a press release by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The U.S. government’s sanctions wing stuck that company on its blacklist as well as two Chinese nationals who had been participating in the network since 2022.
The United Arab Emirates partnered in the takedown, according to the press release. It is not clear what’s become of the two now-sanctioned Chinese nationals, Lu Huaying and Zhang Jian. They worked in cahoots with DPRK “agent” Sim Hyon Sop, the press release said.
North Korea is among the most aggressive state actors to target the crypto industry. Its agents have allegedly stolen billions of dollars worth of crypto to fund the country’s nuclear weapons program. But making digital cash useful, requires its conversion into fiat.
Green Alpine may have played a small part in that web. The Treasury press release didn’t say what money it laundered, beyond that it was from “illicit revenue generation schemes.”
Read more: How North Korea Infiltrated the Crypto Industry
As a U.S. Treasury official, Nelson went after the asset mixing service in a consequential case for the crypto sector that came to a head in 2024.
When Brian Nelson left the U.S. Treasury Department late this year, he became a leading crypto voice working on Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. Nelson had previously carved himself an outsized role with respect to crypto as the Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, leading its charge against digital asset mixing services and connections to terrorists, and trying to increase the federal government’s reach into the sector.
Nelson focused on crypto’s dark side, arguing that the technology poses a danger as a tool for funding international terrorism and criminal cartels and viewing anonymizing services such as Tornado Cash as a means for bad guys to move cash with impunity. To that end, Nelson sought to shift the tools of government to put a stop to that technology.
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After Nelson led the push to sanction Tornado Cash in 2022, he became a point person for the federal government’s battles against the way the crypto sector does business. Under his watch, the Treasury became a crypto antagonist — well beyond what the Internal Revenue Service has done in proposing tax standards that could threaten decentralized finance (DeFi). Nelson shepherded an effort by the department’s financial crimes arm to label mixing services a “primary money laundering concern,” insisting that he was aiming for necessary transparency rather than a blanket ban on mixers.
But just last month, his Treasury legacy took a heavy blow from a federal appeals court, which ruled that the department was out of bounds when it went after the software underpinning Tornado Cash transactions. And Nelson’s campaign against crypto’s illicit finance dangers may soon be further eclipsed by the government’s expected sharp turn toward openness to digital assets when Republicans take the wheel in 2025.
This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here [INSERT LINK BEFORE PUBLISHING].
The Wyoming senator has been a major crypto supporter since joining Congress in 2021. Now she’s the leading advocate for creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
“Lummis like hummus” reads the press secretary’s signature. It’s a nod to how sometimes people mispronounce the name of the junior senator from Wyoming. But it’s a good bet most people in crypto know how to say it these days.
Lummis is the the most important advocate for crypto in Congress, being the main proponent for the creation of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a key advocate for stablecoin legislation in the second chamber. Both issues are likely to come up for votes this year as Republicans take control of all three branches of government in 2025.
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“President Trump has made it clear he is interested in comprehensive digital asset legislation and creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve to address our crippling national debt,” Lummis told CoinDesk in a written statement. “And I am excited to partner with him to get these initiatives across the finish line.”
An Early Convert to Bitcoin
CoinDesk started covering Lummis in 2020, when the now 70-year-old was first running for Senate. She told us she’d held bitcoin since 2013 and that she had an intrinsic sense of why bitcoin matters. “Each of those cattle,” she said, pointing outside to her Wyoming ranch, “they’ve decreased by over $400 a piece because of coronavirus. We need stores of value that are decoupled from the economy.”
By then, Wyoming had already passed a number of crypto-favorable laws, with Lummis’s help. And, at the time, she was one of the first Senate candidates to have made crypto a part of her pitch to voters. Once in Congress, Lummis continued to champion crypto, even as it became unfashionable to do so following the FTX scandal. This year, she introduced stablecoin legislation with New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D) and looks set to be a key advocate on that issue too.
The Bitcoin Reserve
In July, when Lumms joined a stage at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville in July and proposed a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, few people had heard of the idea, let alone talked about it. But now it’s become a fixture of Trump’s agenda, and Lummis tells us she now hopes Republicans will pass legislation on it in the first 100 days of the new administration.
Exactly how the Trump administration will set up the Reserve is an open question, with legal experts disagreeing about the authorities needed. In its simplest form, the Reserve would be made up of the roughly $20 billion in bitcoin the U.S. Treasury currently holds, largely from seizures in federal cases.
But Senator Lummis has argued for more. Her bill would also sell off a portion of U.S. gold reserves and buy 1 million bitcoin, with the eventual goal of acquiring a total stake of about 5% of bitcoin issuance.“This is very much in line with what the U.S. has done with gold reserves and something we can accomplish without spending additional taxpayer dollars,” Lummis told CoinDesk.
“President Trump has made it clear he wants to harness the power of Bitcoin to alleviate the strain our soaring national debt has put on American families and I am hopeful this is something we can accomplish in the first one hundred days of his presidency.”Lummis also intends to keep pushing for a law on stablecoins, the most popular form of digital assets by transaction volume.
“We need to get my bipartisan legislation with Senator Gillibrand establishing a comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets across the finish line so we can prevent illicit finance and ensure we don’t derail innovation,” Lummis said.
The two Bitwise executives have worked tirelessly to get crypto exchange-traded funds approved by the SEC, and this year they finally succeeded.
The relentless efforts by Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley and chief investment officer Matt Hougan’s to bring institutional money into crypto for the past seven years finally paid off when spot ETFs for both bitcoin and ether were approved by the SEC earlier this year. The digital asset manager launched funds for both, taking its assets under management to north of $10 billion, and a third ETF for Solana may be in the offing soon as well.
But their efforts in the crypto space go much further than that, as the two regularly share insights with their sizable social media followings about their work, pushing the narrative that large banks, multi-family offices and other highly relevant institutional investors are “working to open up access to Bitcoin.”
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When it came to which U.S. presidential candidate they thought would be better for crypto, Horsley and Hougan continued to stay laser-focused on crypto, saying that the industry would win no matter who took office in January. Following Trump’s victory, however, Hougan declared that we are now entering the “Golden Age of Crypto.”
This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here.
Since 2021, pseudonymous blockchain sleuth ZachXBT has built an unmatched reputation for the relentless pursuit of crypto thieves and scammers. The detective generally provides this service free of charge, as a crypto fighter for the people. Probably because, as a victim of crypto fraud himself, ZachXBT knows what it feels like.
Discovering that there is no recourse to being scammed, he took it on himself to use blockchain’s transparency and his own uncanny ability to detect patterns to sniff out Ponzi schemes, pump and dumps and rug pulls.
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On August 19, while waiting for a flight, ZachXBT was casually monitoring blockchain ledgers when he noticed the first stirrings of what would become the largest crypto theft ever caught: a $600,000 Bitcoin sale. An unusually large transaction. The deal ignored steep fines no serious investor would accept. ZachXBT traced subsequent, even larger trades through a maze of false fronts, until by the time his plane landed, he was able to identify both the victim and the thieves — of a $243 million fortune.
The target subsequently hired ZachXBT to work with the authorities to capture the criminals, which he did within a month. It was the first time ZachXBT accepted a commission for his work. He otherwise depends on donations — which he receives to the tune of roughly $1.3 million a year.
In interviews (where he has also revealed his use of the male pronoun) ZachXBT has been clear that it’s the satisfaction he gets from fighting crypto crime that motivates him. It does seem to be that and his dedication to making his investigations transparent that has attracted his 700K followers on X and 45.5K on Telegram. This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here.
The approval is a necessary step towards the public launch of the RLUSD token, which is currently in test mode on Ethereum and XRP Ledger.
XRP, the native token of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) network, surged during the U.S. afternoon hours on Tuesday as Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the company’s much-anticipated stablecoin obtained regulatory approval from the New York Department of Financial Services.
“This just in…we have final approval from NYDFS for RLUSD! Exchange and partner listings will be live soon,” Garlinghouse posted on X.
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XRP rallied 10% following Garlinghouse’s announcement in a broader crypto market bounce, erasing today’s losses. The token was up 6.8% over the past 24 hours, outperforming bitcoin (BTC) and the broad market CoinDesk 20 Index. The XRPL network was developed by engineers who later established Ripple, and the company has long been associated with products and services using the token.
Ripple laid out its plans in April to enter the quickly growing stablecoin market with its heavily regulated, short-term U.S. government bond-backed cryptocurrency. Stablecoins are a key piece of infrastructure in the crypto economy, and increasingly used for global payments, which is one of Ripple’s business focuses. The two largest issuers, Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC), currently dominate the almost $200 billion stablecoin market. The sector, however, is forecasted to grow to trillions of dollars over the next few years, and Ripple is vying for a piece of that.
With RLUSD, Ripple strives to leverage the company’s established position for payments services among institutions and serve as a key intermediary for real-world asset tokenization, Ripple President Monica Long told CoinDesk in an interview in October. Tokenization is a red-hot trend in crypto to place traditional financial instruments on blockchain rails for more efficient transactions.
RLUSD is in beta testing on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum networks. Ripple’s Long said earlier that the token has been “operationally ready,” only awaiting approval from regulators for the token’s public launch.
There are currently $41.7 million worth of RLUSD tokens on Ethereum and $10.4 million on XRPL, data compiled by analytics firm CryptoQuant shows.
Asset manager Bitwise sees the stablecoin market growing to $400 billion next year, with U.S. legislation, fintech adoption and global payments driving the growth.
The booming stablecoin market hit another milestone Wednesday, crossing the $200 billion total market value mark for the first time ever as demand accelerates and adoption expands for the assets.
The asset class as a whole added $10 billion market value in only two weeks since it surpassed the 2022 bull cycle record of $190 billion, according to CCData and DefiLlama.
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Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to hold a steady price, predominantly pegged to the U.S. dollar. They are a key piece of infrastructure for the digital assets space, serving as the main source of liquidity for trading crypto assets on exchanges and move value on blockchain rails.
Demand for stablecoins grew steadily through the past year as crypto markets emerged from a brutal bear market. The growth significantly accelerated following Donald Trump’s election victory last month, adding $30 billion supply as investors poured funds into cryptocurrencies in a frenzy.
Tether’s USDT, the most popular stablecoin, climbed to a record supply of $139 billion, up 12% in a month, DefiLlama data shows. USDT was recognized as an accepted virtual asset by the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) earlier this week, and the issuer aims to expand services across the Middle East region.
Circle’s USDC, the second-largest in the asset class, also grew 9% to nearly $41 billion market value during the same period. Circle just recently teamed up with Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, to push USDC adoption globally.
It’s not just the booming crypto market that drives growth, though.
There’s evidence for increasing stablecoin usage for payments, remittances and savings, especially in developing countries with rapidly depreciating local currency and fragile financial systems. One indication of stablecoin adoption for non-crypto use cases is the rapidly growing number of stablecoin transactions on transfer applications including peer-to-peer payment platforms, Nik Milanovic, partner at the venture capital firm Fintech Fund, pointed out in an X post.
Tokenized products with stable prices that offer yield to investors are also in vogue. Ethena’s dollar-pegged USDe token, which generates yield by shorting bitcoin and ether perpetuals farming the funding rate, surged over $5 billion, up 90% in a month, per DefiLlama data. Up-and-coming decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Usual’s stablecoin zoomed to $700 million, doubling in size during the same period.
Stablecoin market cap (DefiLlama)
Market cap could double in 2025
The growth will likely continue into the next year, with digital asset manager Bitwise predicting the stablecoin market as reaching $400 billion in 2025. According to a Tuesday report, one of the key catalysts could be the U.S. Congress passing long-awaited stablecoin legislation that defines rules for businesses and institutions to issue and interact with tokens.
“Clear answers to big questions—Who regulates them? What are the proper reserve requirements?— will spark massive new interest among issuers, consumers, and businesses,” Bitwise analysts wrote. “When that happens, expect some large traditional banks like J.P. Morgan and others to enter the space.”
Other growth catalysts include popular fintech applications integrating stablecoins to their services following Paypal’s example with its PYUSD stablecoin, and the increasing role of stablecoins in global payments and remittances, the report added.
It’s not just Bitwise who came out with bullish projections for stablecoins. Standard Chartered and Zodia Markets forecasted in a report last month that stablecoins could reach to the equivalent of 10% of U.S. money supply and foreign exchange transactions, up from the current 1%.
The trading app will let customers deposit and withdraw over 20 cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, ether, solana and USD coin.
Robinhood (HOOD) customers in the European Union can now transfer more than 20 cryptocurrencies, including include bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), solana (SOL) and USD coin (USDC), in and out of the trading app.
The California-based company is expanding its offerings as the bloc’s crypto laws known as Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) come into effect.
“With the launch of crypto transfers in Europe, we’re making self-custody and entering DeFi simpler and more accessible for our customers,” Johann Kerbrat, VP and general manger of Robinhood Crypto, said in a statement. “Support for deposits and withdrawals gives customers more control over their crypto, while ensuring they have the same safe, low-cost, and reliable experience they expect from Robinhood.”
The new capability comes 10 months after the trading app started letting customers in the EU trade crypto, saying the region has one of the world’s most comprehensive policies for crypto asset regulation.
In March, the company fully rolled out its brokerage operations in the U.K. It began to onboard customers in the non-EU country a year ago after an earlier attempt failed due to a shift of focus during the Covid pandemic.
Many U.S.-based crypto exchanges have doubled down their operations in Europe after the advent of MiCA, which will come into effect this year. Coinbase (COIN), the largest U.S. exchange, is looking to offer derivatives in the European Union, it announced in January, while Kraken recently acquired a German crypto service provider to expand its footprint in the region.
The asset manager’s S-1 comes a day after it registered a trust entity with the state of Delaware.
Bitwise, dünyanın en büyük kripto paraları arasında yer alan Ripple ile ilişkili token olan XRP’ye (XRP) bağlı bir borsa yatırım fonu başlatmak için büyük bir adım attı.
Varlık yöneticisi Çarşamba günü, yeni bir menkul kıymet ihraç etmek ve halka açık bir borsada listelenmek isteyen şirketler için bir gereklilik olan S-1 formunu ABD Menkul Kıymetler ve Borsa Komisyonu’na sundu .
“Bugün bir Bitwise XRP ETP için S-1 başvurusunda bulunduk!” diye yazdı Bitwise CEO’su Hunter Horsley, X’te yazdığı bir gönderide. “ XRP, on yıldan uzun bir süredir birçok yatırımcının maruz kalmak istediği kalıcı bir kripto varlık olmuştur.”
Bu hamle, Bitwise’ın Delaware eyaletinde “XRP ETF” adlı bir güven kuruluşu kaydettirmesinden bir gün sonra geldi; birçok şirket tüzel kişiliklerini bu eyalette listeliyor ve kripto ETF ihraççıları, Delaware başvuruları aracılığıyla planlarını birden fazla kez bildirdi.
CoinDesk verilerine göre XRP, 33 milyar dolarlık piyasa değeriyle yedinci en büyük kripto para birimidir . Daha büyük rakipleri olan bitcoin (BTC) ve Ethereum’un ether’i (ETH), bu yılın başından beri yatırımcılara geleneksel finans alanında oldukça popüler bir ürün türü olan ETF olarak sunulmaktadır.
S-1 başvurusunun sunulması bir fonun tanıtımında ilk adım olsa da, yatırım fonunun listelenmesini isteyen borsada gerekli kural değişikliğini işaret etmek için gereken 19b-4 adı verilen başka bir başvurunun ardından sunulmadığı takdirde belgenin temelde hiçbir anlamı yoktur.
SEC’in başvuruyu onaylama veya reddetme kararını katı bir zaman çizelgesine bağlayan 19b-4’ün aksine, düzenleyicinin S-1’e yanıt verme yükümlülüğü bulunmuyor; bu da Bitwise’ın onay almasının yıllar alabileceği anlamına geliyor.
Örneğin VanEck, 2021’de bir ether ETF’si başlatmak için S-1 başvurusunda bulundu , ancak fon üç yıl sonra, Temmuz 2024’e kadar piyasaya sürülmedi .
Ancak Bitwise’ın XRP’yi takip eden bir fon oluşturma çabası “son derece dikkat çekici” dedi sektör uzmanlarından biri ve ETF Store başkanı Nate Geraci Salı günkü dosyaya yanıt olarak.
“Bitwise, duvara bir şeyler fırlatmayan, son derece güvenilir bir kripto-yerel fon firmasıdır” diye ekledi.
