Author: Benjamin Lee

Senator Elizabeth Warren is worried a bipartisan stablecoin bill working its way through Congress doesn’t do enough to address the systemic risks she thinks the dollar-pegged assets pose. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) introduced the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act in February. The legislation, which aims to establish regulatory clarity for stablecoins, passed out of the Senate Banking Committee on March 13th by a bipartisan 18-6 vote. In a speech to the committee earlier this month, Warren (D-Massachusetts) said the bill doesn’t protect consumers, national security or financial stability. “The bill lacks basic safeguards necessary to…

President Trump-backed World Liberty Financial is announcing plans to launch a new stablecoin on Tuesday that would be aimed at bridging traditional finance with digital assets. According to a press release, the new stablecoin is called USD1, which will be pegged to the US dollar and backed by short-term government treasuries, dollar deposits and cash equivalents. Says World Liberty Financial co-founder Zach Witkoff, “USD1 provides what algorithmic and anonymous crypto projects cannot—access to the power of DeFi underpinned by the credibility and safeguards of the most respected names in traditional finance. We’re offering a digital dollar stablecoin that sovereign investors…

Solana (SOL) is green on the day on reports that BlackRock is moving its blockchain-based money market fund onto the Ethereum (ETH) competitor’s network. Fortune reports that the world’s largest asset manager is adding its $1.7 billion BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) to the Solana blockchain. Solana is trading for $145 at time of writing, up nearly 19% in the last week. Launched a year ago, BUIDL uses traditional money market funds, which investors use to store cash in the near term and earn yield on it, combined with blockchain payment properties. Solana is now the seventh blockchain…

Deep-pocketed traders triggered a price crash over the weekend after depositing a huge chunk of an altcoin’s supply to digital asset exchanges. According to blockchain tracking firm Lookonchain, whales in the Bounce (AUCTION) market have been greatly influencing the altcoin’s price action for the past week, causing massive swings in both directions. Bounce Finance is a decentralized auction platform enabling auctions for various assets, such as physical assets tokenized on the blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). AUCTION tokens are used for governance, staking, and fees for participating in auctions or creating NFTs on the platform. Lookonchain says that in the…

A new survey by the crypto data aggregator CoinGecko finds that less than 50% of investors are bullish on artificial intelligence (AI)-based digital assets. CoinGecko polled 2,632 anonymous crypto investors around the globe between February 20th and March 10th of this year to gain insights on the merger of cryptocurrencies and AI. Results show that 46.9% of crypto investors are either somewhat bullish or bullish on crypto AI products. The survey also reveals that 29% are neutral and the rest are either somewhat bearish or bearish on AI-based crypto assets. Source: CoinGecko On the prices of AI crypto tokens, 44.3%…

A popular crypto strategist believes that memecoins will have their day under the sun after getting crushed over the last few months. Pseudonymous trader Altcoin Sherpa tells his 244,300 followers on the social media platform X that he expects meme tokens to eventually take center stage, highlighting that the crypto sector relies on trader attention. But while the analyst believes that memecoins will make a comeback, he says those that have been around longer than others will likely lead the surge. One asset on his radar is the Solana (SOL)-based token Bonk (BONK). “Most memes got smashed overall but I…

The chief executive of the world’s largest stablecoin issuer is reportedly looking to receive an audit from one of the biggest accounting firms in the world. According to a new report by Reuters, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says the company is in talks with one of the Big Four accounting firms – KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PwC – to receive an audit of its reserves, though no specific group was named. Tether says it holds dollar-denominated reserves for each USDT token it creates and an audit would help improve the transparency of said reserves, which are currently subject to quarterly…

An Ethereum (ETH)-based altcoin is skyrocketing after gaining support from South Korea’s second-largest crypto exchange. In a new announcement, crypto trading platform Bithumb says that it is now supporting the interoperable cross-chain bridge Across Protocol (ACX), triggering rallies for the digital asset. News of the event caused ACX to surge, as it went from a March 21st low of $0.275 to a peak of $0.462 just a few hours later, a rise of nearly 68%. It has since retraced and is trading for $0.319 at time of writing, a 10% gain during the last 24 hours. In its whitepaper, Across…

Binance is planning on launching trading support for the new native asset of a decentralized network focused on secure data storage. Binance Launchpool, which lets users stake coins to farm new assets, says its 65th project will be Nillion (NIL), a secure computation network that decentralizes trust for high-value and private data. Explains the project, “Nillion is Humanity’s First Blind Computer – a whole new category of decentralized network designed for AI and the future of the Internet. Nillion makes new applications possible by providing storage and computation on high-value, encrypted data without ever seeing it. Whether a user, an…

Venture capital firms have invested more than $400 million into the layer-1 asset Toncoin (TON), according to the team behind the project. The Open Network Foundation, also known as the TON Foundation, notes that investors include Sequoia Capital, Ribbit, Benchmark, Kingsway, Vy Capital, Draper Associates, Libertus Capital, CoinFund, Hypersphere, SkyBridge and Karatage. TON was initially developed by the encrypted messaging platform Telegram and known as Telegram Open Network, but Telegram parted ways with the project in 2020 following a legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Open Network, an open-source community of developers, took over management…