The European Parliament approved its slate of commissioners on Wednesday, including the individuals who will be responsible for monitoring regulations around digital assets.

In September, European Parliament President Ursula Von der Leyen proposed a list of commissioners. While crypto did not stand out as a core topic amongst the roles, this group will be responsible for ensuring digital asset rules are implemented.

The European Union (EU), a bloc of 27 nations, was the first major jurisdictio

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:

Ethereum's blob mob

Staking on Starknet

Avalanche's big upgrade

L2 teams beam over Beam Chain

Sui suffers a brief outage

Bitcoin bridged, trustlessly

This article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, o

Bitcoin saw explosive growth immediately after the recent U.S. presidential elections, rising and retaking the spotlight from former highs of $73,000 in March. Now the question is, will bitcoin (BTC) continue its uptrend, and at what point can a sharp reversal happen?

If we take a look at former BTC market cycles, which happen every four years, then we see that we are now just starting to go into new bitcoin price discovery areas, and BTC could top out at new all-time highs, which is practicall

Bitcoin miner IREN (IREN) rose nearly 30% on Wednesday after executives said the company had received interest from an artificial intelligence (AI) firm and mentioned a potential dividend in BTC during an earnings conference call.

The Sydney-based company has been approached by a hyperscaler firm (large cloud service provider) for potentially hosting computing infrastructure at IREN's Sweetwater mining site in Texas, co-CEO and co-founder Daniel Roberts said on the call.

"Two hours ago, we got

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin donated 320 ether — worth over $1 million — to crypto think tank Coin Center on Tuesday night, according to blockchain data.

Buterin’s donation came mere hours after a U.S. appeals court overturned U.S. sanctions against embattled crypto mixing service Tornado Cash, ruling that Tornado Cash’s smart contracts “are not the property of a foreign national or entity” and thus cannot be blocked under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). By impos

Solana was trading at 97% discount to ether’s market cap in January of 2023 – a clear market dislocation that has closed significantly over the last two years.

Today the gap has closed to a 70% discount.

However, solana is starting to challenge ether in terms of on-chain activity and important network usage KPIs.

Which begs the question: Is the market still dislocated?

In this short piece, we explore this key question with relative analysis across four key data points. Let’s dive in.

1. Net

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 3293.73, up 3.9% (+125.0) since 4 pm ET on Tuesday.

All 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: LINK (+0.9%) and NEAR (+0.4%).

Laggards: ICP (-5.3%) and RNDR (-4.1%).

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

The bitcoin (BTC) bull market has further to run, and the world's largest cryptocurrency is expected to punch through the $100,000 level in the near term, Galaxy Research said in a note on Tuesday.

Galaxy said bitcoin will continue to rise for several reasons.

Increasing institutional and corporate adoption, the potential for the creation of bitcoin nation-state reserves, and a new pro-crypto U.S. administration all point to a move higher in the near and medium term, the report said.

It may n

Stablecoin issuing giant Tether is closing down its euro stablecoin, EURT.

"After careful consideration, we have made the decision to discontinue support for EUR₮," the firm said in a press release on Wednesday. Users will be able to redeem tokens until Nov. 27, 2025, the post added.

The decision comes as digital asset businesses operating in the EU are in crunch time before region-wide regulations, known as MiCA, enter into full force by the end of this year. MiCA requires stablecoin issuers

Starting next Monday, First Mover Americas will become Crypto Daybook Americas, your new morning briefing on what happened in the crypto markets overnight and what's expected during the coming day. Publishing at 7 a.m. ET, it will kickstart your morning with comprehensive insights. You won't want to start your day without it.

CoinDesk 20 Index: 3,278.83 +4.32%

Bitcoin (BTC): $$93,338.67 +1.05%

Ether (ETH): $3,462.51 +3.99%

S&P 500: 6,021.63 +0.57%

Gold: $2,652.77 +1.2%

Nikkei 225: 38,134.9

Following bitcoin (BTC) and solana (SOL) reaching all-time high prices earlier this month, the stablecoin sector has now joined crypto's record-breaking streak.

The combined market size of stablecoins hit $190 billion this month for the first time ever, Wednesday's report by digital asset analytics firm CCData noted. CCData is owned by Bullish, CoinDesk's parent company. The previous peak of $188 billion was recorded in April 2022, just before the cataclysmic implosion of the Terra-Luna stablec

Long-term holders of XRP realized over $1.5 billion in profits last week as the payments-focused cryptocurrency zoomed to a three-year high, data shows, marking the highest profit realization since April 2021. Profit-taking is usual investor behavior after rallies and doesn’t indicate a change in the long-term sentiment for any token. The Market Value to Realized Value (MVRV) ratio surged to 217% on Tuesday, according to an FXStreet report citing Santiment data, suggesting that the current marke

Bitcoin (BTC) volatility is back and investors have two choices either embrace the volatility or have no part of it. However, the current bitcoin cycle has been rather muted in terms of realized volatility and drawdowns compared to previous ones. The recent drop from nearly $100,000 to almost $90,000, just shy of a 10% correction, has kept investors on their toes. Over the past two days, Glassnode data shows that short-term holders or those that have held bitcoin for less than 155 days, have sen

Disclaimer: The analyst who wrote this piece owns shares of MicroStrategy (MSTR). Bitcoin (BTC) development company MicroStrategy (MSTR) has been one of the stocks to watch in 2024. The company is up 416% year-to-date, up as much as 600% at one point last week. However, since the short report from Citron Research came out on Nov. 21, the stock has dropped almost 40%, subsequently burning retail in the process. This drop coincided with bitcoin dropping almost 10% to $90,000 from its all-time high

Partior, a blockchain payment network backed by TradFi giants including JPMorgan (JPM), DBS (D05), and Standard Chartered (STAN), added Deutsche Bank (DBK) to its list of investors, the company said in a press release Wednesday.

The German bank joined Partior's Series B funding round as a strategic investor, taking the total raised by the payments firm in the round to $80 million, the Singapore-based company said.

Adoption of blockchain technology by traditional finance firms is growing. Last

Japanese messaging app giant Line plans to give its 196 million active users the ability to use decentralized apps (dapps) such as games and utilities.

The social network, which is mainly used in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia, will debut with 30 dapps in its portal by the end of January and plans for a further 150 by the end of the first quarter, said Sam Seo, the chairman of Kaia DLT Foundation, whose Kaia blockchain will host the applications.

Line's initiative reflects a growing tre

Bitcoin's (BTC) bullish momentum has hit a snag this week for several reasons, including a weaker stateside demand. Now, the Australian dollar-Japanese yen exchange rate or the AUD/JPY pair, the classic risk barometer, has turned south again, signaling caution to risk asset bulls.

The Australian dollar (AUD), a commodity currency, is a proxy for global economic health, particularly for emerging markets and China. On the other hand, the Japanese yen (JPY) is seen as a safe-haven currency that in

The overwhelming chatter on social media, especially Crypto Twitter is that Ethereum’s ether (ETH) is dead, a narrowly moving token. Still, the market is betting on higher ETH prices as traders pile into derivatives tied to the cryptocurrency alongside a boom in Ethereum's blob usage. Cumulative open interest in perpetual and standard futures contracts has surged to a record 6.32 million ETH, worth over $27 billion, registering a 17% month-to-date gain, according to data source CoinGlass. An upt

U.S. sanctions against Tornado Cash, a service that anonymizes crypto transactions, must be abandoned, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The decision answers a controversial privacy debate on whether the government — via a sanctions list maintained by the U.S. Treasury Department — has a right to target the technology because it's associated with criminals. The ruling reversed a district court's August ruling that had sided with the government's pursuit of what it had characterized as a "n

Ripple Labs has kicked in another $25 million to the cryptocurrency industry's Fairshake political action committee, one of the most aggressive and high-dollar campaign-finance operations in corporate history.

The super PAC has made an unprecedented head start on the 2026 election cycle. Between Ripple, crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN) and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Fairshake has amassed $73 million in fresh commitments. That's on top of $30 million held over from the 2024