Carmine Agnello, the mob boss John Gotti’s grandson, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for defrauding the U.S. government’s Covid relief funding system out of $1.1 million, proceeds which he used to invest in crypto, the Department of Justice said. In a statement released Monday, the U.S. Attorney’s Eastern District of New York office…
Core Scientific (CORZ) is preparing to raise $3.3 billion through a junk bond sale as it continues its transition toward artificial intelligence-focused data center operations. Demand for AI services has pushed data centers, power supply and advanced chips to their limits. To keep up, firms are tapping riskier parts of the debt market for funds…
April appears to be a lost cause for the crypto Clarity Act, but a U.S. Senate committee hearing sometime in May could keep the critical market structure legislation alive, as long as it can reach a final vote of the overall Senate by July, according to lobbyists and a lawmaker aide focusing on the market…
The big picture: The film Finding Satoshi aims to solve what its creators call one of the biggest financial mysteries ever. Director Tucker Tooley said the project blends investigative reporting with storytelling about “a human being” behind Bitcoin. The team deliberately avoided conspiracy tropes, instead focusing on Satoshi’s motivations, struggles, and context. The mystery itself,…
New York sued Coinbase and Gemini on Tuesday, becoming the latest state to argue that prediction market contracts dealing with sports, entertainment and elections are violating state gambling laws. According to the lawsuits, Coinbase and Gemini’s prediction market offerings are really unlicensed gambling products, pointing to how the companies advertised their prediction markets and their…
Prediction markets are gaining traction as a new growth area for Coinbase (COIN) and Robinhood (HOOD), as investors look beyond a weak first quarter for crypto trading and focus on future products, according to Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Ramsey El-Assal. El-Assal said “investors are increasingly treating the quarterly print as backward-looking,” with attention shifting to “forward-looking…
A major decentralized finance (DeFi) hack could prompt Wall Street firms to reassess the pace of their blockchain and tokenization efforts, a Jefferies analyst wrote in a report. The note follows a $293 million exploit of Kelp DAO on April 18, in which attackers minted unbacked tokens and used them as collateral to borrow other…
Crypto and crypto markets pulled back Tuesday as Federal Reserve chair nominee Kevin Warsh said U.S. President Donald Trump never demanded he cut rates when he takes the helm at the central bank. Speaking before the Senate Banking Committee, Warsh emphasized the independence of the Federal Reserve, pushing back on speculation about political pressure on…
Aave, one of the largest decentralized lending platforms, effectively froze Tuesday after all its major lending protocols ran out of available funds, leaving users unable to withdraw billions of dollars in crypto, DeFi Warhold said as he explained what the 100% utilization means. Roughly $5 billion in stablecoins USDT and USDC are effectively locked, Warhold…
A new report commissioned by Coinbase sounds a cautious, but urgent, alarm: Quantum computing won’t break crypto tomorrow, but the industry can’t afford to wait. The 50-page paper, authored by an independent advisory board that includes prominent cryptographers and academics like Dan Boneh of Stanford University, Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation and Sreeram Kannan…
