This is our final Crypto for Advisors newsletter of 2024. We are taking a break next week to relax before what we believe will be an action-packed 2025 in the crypto space.

This year, we’ve published 51 newsletters dedicated to educating advisors about digital assets. Our readership has nearly doubled from 24K to 44K active subscribers. We thank the many advisors who have signed up and engaged with us every week. As always, we enjoy hearing your feedback and suggested newsletter topics, so plea

When Michael Saylor announced MicroStrategy's conversion of $250 million in Treasury reserves to bitcoin in August 2020, Wall Street analysts dismissed it as a reckless gamble. "Superior to cash," Saylor declared of bitcoin at the time, drawing skepticism from traditional banking circles.

Yet today, those same banks that sneered at bitcoin's corporate adoption are now scrambling to participate in bitcoin-collateralized lending as they race to capitalize on its superior characteristics as instit

BOB, the "hybrid layer-2" network seeking to make Bitcoin the center of the decentralized finance (DeFi) universe, has taken a step toward that goal by integrating with BTC restaking protocol Babylon.

An abbreviation of "Build on Bitcoin," BOB's aim is to establish Bitcoin as the foundational network for DeFi by creating bridges between itself and other blockchains, using Bitcoin as the anchor chain to finalize transactions.

Integrating with Babylon forms part of BOB's roadmap by giving it "Bi

As 2024 draws to a close, cryptocurrency stands at a turning point. Bitcoin has crossed the $100,000 mark and digital assets have solidified their place in investment portfolios of all sizes. Yet, amid these milestones, a critical, yet overlooked issue remains: the estate planning challenges unique to cryptocurrency and other digital assets.

A Looming Crisis: Estate Planning in a Digital Era

Unlike traditional assets, cryptocurrencies and digital assets operate outside established estate plann

The U.S. Federal Reserve lowered its benchmark fed funds rate by 25 basis points to the 4.25%- 4.50% range, its third consecutive easing move this year and now marking a total of 100 basis points of rate cuts since September.

Market participants had fully expected Wednesday's move by the central bank, but recent data had shown continued solid economic growth and perky inflation. This turned the focus today to the policy statement, updated economic projections and the upcoming press conference w

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I'm Marc Hochstein, CoinDesk's deputy editor-in-chief for features, opinion and standards.

In this issue:

Solana was the biggest draw for new crypto developers in 2024

No wonder: Solana's transaction volume is off the charts

Coinbase alums take next step toward no-code blockchain development

Kraken’s 'Ink' layer-2 goes live

Avalanche activates biggest-ever upgrade

Ethereum'

Banking giant Deutsche Bank is building out a layer-2 rollup network on Ethereum with Matter Labs’ ZKsync technology.

Bloomberg reported the project Wednesday, and a representative for Matter Labs confirmed the story.

The chain will be "a public and permissioned L2," Omar Azhar, the head of business development at Matter Labs, told CoinDesk over Telegram. When asked to elaborate, he referred a reporter to another participant in the project, Memento Blockchain, which did not immediately respond

No one can argue with 2024 being a breakthrough year for crypto. BTC and ETH ETFs launched, BlackRock spearheaded bitcoin adoption, a pro-crypto president was elected and BTC broke the 15-year all-time-high, to name a few. But the inflection point for crypto still awaits. Here are three predictions for 2025 that can help spark it:

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Following the U.S. presidential election, crypto’s headwinds have seemingly dissipated. Since early November bitcoin has reached $100K amid regulatory wins such as the nomination of crypto-friendly Paul Atkins to replace Gary Gensler as SEC chair, the naming of crypto advocate David Sacks as the incoming White House “AI and Crypto Czar,” and Congressman French Hill’s appointment to head the House Financial Services Committee. With election season coming to a crypto-favorable close in 2024, some

Donald Trump's victory in the November presidential election is already ushering in a new era for crypto in the U.S., JPMorgan (JPM) said in a report Wednesday, noting that the total cryptocurrency market cap has jumped about 65% since his reelection.

"Not only does this new administration bring a sense of crypto friendliness, but it also has shown an eagerness to promote the asset class," analysts led by Kenneth Worthington wrote.

The incoming administration has shown a willingness to talk ab

Earlier this year, some users of wrapped bitcoin wBTC were dismayed to find its issuer BitGo was sharing custody of their bitcoin (BTC) with BiT Global, a Hong Kong-based crypto custodian partly owned by TRON founder Justin Sun.

The episode "reopened old wounds inflicted by previous centralized custody failure," even though it did not expose any novel flaws, the Bitcoin Builders Association (BBA) said in a report on Wednesday.

"These wounds cause BTC holders to be unwilling to trade off their

Crypto degens have a new – and, if all goes according to plan, faster, cheaper and safer – way to trade Runes, the Bitcoin ecosystem's answer to memecoins.

An automated-market maker (AMM) for the Runes protocol is being deployed on Stacks. It's the first AMM for such tokens on that Bitcoin layer-2 network. The AMM went live on Wednesday, following the unveiling of Stacks' native BTC-backed asset sBTC on Tuesday.

The teams behind decentralized exchange (DEX) Bitflow Finance and Bitcoin bridge P

Patchwork, a startup focused on simplifying blockchain and smart-contract development founded by former Coinbase employees, has released the next version of its low-to-no-code tools for building decentralized applications (dapps).

Currently linked to Coinbase’s popular Ethereum layer-2 network Base and backed by Coinbase Ventures, the “Create-Patchwork” picks-and-shovels approach lowers the barriers to building blockchain applications and attaching data to them.

Following the trend toward easi

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 3834.16, down 2.9% (-116.36) since 4 pm ET.

One of 20 assets is trading higher.

Leaders: HBAR (+0.8%) and BTC (-1.6%).

Laggards: LTC (-7.6%) and FIL (-6.2%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

Solana's network activity lit up on Tuesday as the Pudgy Penguins NFT project debuted its native token, PENGU, on the programmable blockchain.

The layer 1 blockchain, considered a cheap alternative to Ethereum, registered a total transaction tally of 66.9 million, the highest since its inception in 2020, according to data source Artemis. To highlight how busy it was, Solana's transaction count eclipsed the total of all other major chains combined.

Solana also led other blockchains in terms of

Plume, a blockchain network focused on real-world assets, raked in $20 million in fresh funds in a Series A fundraising round, the platform told CoinDesk on Wednesday.

Investors participating in the round included Brevan Howard Digital, Haun Ventures, Galaxy Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Superscrypt, Hashkey, Nomura's crypto arm Laser Digital, A Capital, 280 Capital, SV Angel, Reciprocal Ventures and others. The fresh investment round followed a $10 million seed fundraising in May led by Haun.

A Binance delisting decision sent prices of defunct crypto exchange WazirX’s WRX tokens down 60% in an hour, even as the exchange hopes for a “fresh start” of its platform.

Binance said Wednesday that it was delisting WazirX’s WRX, along with Kaon (AKRO) and Bluzelle (BLZ), as part of a regular review of tokens that no longer meet its offering standards.

Delisting a token from major exchanges is often perceived as a lack of confidence in the token's viability or future, triggering a negative m

Swiss cryptocurrency custody specialist Taurus is collaborating with Temenos, a firm that provides core banking software to many of the world’s largest financial institutions, allowing those banks to quickly and easily create crypto wallets and transfer a wide range of digital assets.

This collaboration is important as the Geneva-headquartered Temenos is quite big: the firm has 67 offices in 40 countries and serves over 3000 banks and financial institutions. Taurus, whose crypto custody clients

By Omkar Godbole (All times ET unless indicated otherwise)

The crypto market is derisking ahead of today's Fed rate decision. Everyone's buzzing about the likelihood of another rate cut that will supposedly galvanize risk-taking in the economy and financial markets.

Here's the twist: The central bank is expected to signal three rate cuts for 2025, not the four it projected in September, as well as revise growth and inflation forecasts higher. No surprise, then, that bitcoin and ether are tradi

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance posted a list of "alpha watchlist tokens" to one of its Telegram channels on Wednesday, causing a spike in the mentioned tokens, however it then clarified that the information was "false" which led to the tokens giving up their newfound gains.

The post read: "Ready to explore early stage crypto projects?" before naming Wise Monkey (MONKY), Happy Cat (HAPPY), Rifampicin (RIF), Zircuit (ZRC) and ai16zeliza (ELIZA) as five projects with "strong fundamentals" and "ac