Bitcoin Pioneer Wants Much More Than Digital Gold
This is a published version of our weekly Forbes Crypto Confidential newsletter. Sign up to get Crypto Confidential as soon as it is published free in your inbox here.
A late October surge pushed bitcoin past $73,000 for the first time since March.
getty
Blockstream CEO Dr. Adam Back, a British computer scientist, is widely known in the crypto community because he communicated with Satoshi Nakamoto before the pseudonymous bitcoin creator wrote his seminal white paper in 2008. However, while Satoshi stepped away more than a decade ago, Back continues to work on the $1.4 trillion chain through Bitcoin development company Blockstream. Fresh off of a $210 million convertible note fundraise, Back has big plans to bring everything from professional-grade trading to stablecoins to Bitcoin.
He also does not think that it matters anymore whether Satoshi ever comes back.
Read the full story in Forbes.
What’s In Your Wallet Barry Silbert?
In the world of cryptocurrency privacy is a huge issue. For those with something to hide, so-called cryptocurrency mixers exist to cloak the identity of owners by scrambling the digital currency in pools, disassociating it from the original crypto wallets and making it nearly impossible to know the original source of funds. In 2022, perhaps the most notorious mixer, Tornado Cash, was blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Treasury for allegedly money laundering billions of dollars for criminals, including the group fronting for North Korea.
Now, a similar hack may have ensnarled a prominent American crypto firm led by a former billionaire, Barry Silbert. Digital Currency Group (DCG) invested in a similar but little-used mixer called Railgun in 2022 and provided it with additional operational capital in exchange for fees from future usage of the platform. This support led to an unexpected bump in fees in 2023 when North Korean hackers laundered $60 million through the mixer in January 2023 in just two days.
Read the full story in Forbes.
Sources: Forbes Digital Assets, CoinGecko. Prices as of 3:00 p.m. on November 2, 2024.
Bitcoin Rallies Into The Election
After treading water and slightly declining over the past six months, bitcoin had a late October (Uptober) surge that pushed the asset past $73,000 for the first time since March. The burst coincided with growing expectations of a victory for former president Donald Trump in the election on Tuesday, who has come out as a major crypto supporter after castigating the industry years ago. According to the prediction betting site Polymaket, the odds of a return to office for the 45th president are now at 61%. But are these sentiments accurate? Recent reporting has suggested that Polymarket is rife with wash trading and that the recent boost in Trump’s chances is largely due to the bets of a very small percentage of large traders.
But here is the good news. For as much talk as there has been about what either candidate has said or not said about crypto, it may not matter much for the industry’s trajectory over the long term. The $2.4 trillion industry has proven itself to be antifragile in the face of legislative uncertainty and a regulatory climate that has varied from cloudy to outright hostile. Either through the courts or laws, clarity is coming. And the industry will be better off for it.
Elsewhere
Polymarket’s Influence On Wall Street’s Election ‘Game Plan’ Grows Despite Red Flags [Bloomberg]
Kraken Lays Off 15% Of Workers And Names New Co-Chief Executive [New York Times]
SEC Goes After Another Crypto Firm, Slaps Immutable With Wells Notice [CoinDesk]
