Tag: Virtual Currency

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Nonprofits Get a New Type of Donation: Cryptocurrency

Still, she said, there are plenty of resources, like the Giving Block, that allow people to donate cryptocurrency and nonprofits to receive it safely and relatively easily.Donor-advised funds, which allow people to make donations today for tax purposes and recommend charitable grants at a later date, have seen an increase in cryptocurrency donations. Among them are Fidelity Charitable, the largest donor-advised fund in the United States, with over $35 billion in assets, and its main competitor, Schwab Charitable, with over $17 billion.So far this year, Fidelity Charitable has received $150 million in cryptocurrency, up from $28 million for all of 2020 and $13 million …

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A Painting or an NFT of It: Which Will Be More Valuable?

The British artist Damien Hirst, best known for putting a shark in a tank of formaldehyde, has gotten on the NFT bandwagon.NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, rely on blockchain technology to designate an official copy of a piece of digital media that would otherwise be cheap or free. Mr. Hirst is selling a collection of 10,000 NFTs, each of which corresponds to a physical dot painting, for $2,000 each. A year from now, the collectors of the series, called “The Currency,” will have to decide whether to keep the NFT or the painting; whichever one they don’t choose will be destroyed. …

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Crypto Nomads: Surfing the World for Risk and Profit

It is just after midnight in Hong Kong, and Sam Bankman-Fried stares at the trading data on his six monitors, watching a global cryptocurrency crash happening in real time.Mr. Bankman-Fried, a 29-year-old from California, often works around the clock, as he was on that May evening. He naps on a beanbag set up near his computer. A folded up blanket sits on the floor. He’s worth at least $8 billion, on paper.That is even after the downturn that started in the spring, where total global losses in the value of all cryptocurrency eventually topped $1.3 trillion. And as Mr. …

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Regulators Can’t Make Their Minds Up About Crypto

The trans-Atlantic antitrust danceThe review of an $8 billion deal between the life sciences companies Illumina and Grail may point to a new playbook for antitrust enforcement. Regulators are looking to block the merger in the U.S. and Europe, a trans-Atlantic coordination that unlocks resources to question more deals as …

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Cryptocurrency Seeks the Spotlight, With Spike Lee’s Help

Some celebrity endorsements of cryptocurrencies have run into trouble. In 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission cautioned that some famous people were hyping the virtual currency sales known as initial coin offerings without disclosing that they had been paid to promote them. The commission has since settled charges against the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., the music producer DJ Khaled and the actor Steven Seagal.Social media influencers and e-sports stars have also been linked to shady cryptocurrency schemes, accused of pumping up coins just before their value crashes.Coin Cloud’s chief marketing officer, Amondo Redmond, said he hoped Mr. Lee’ …

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No End to Whiplash in Meme Stocks, Crypto and More

Drew Austin, an entrepreneur and investor, invested heavily in cryptocurrencies and NFTs, including digital horses, digital sports cards and some digital art. He took a “substantial liquidity hit” when cryptocurrency prices crashed in May, he said. But he is not cashing out, because he believes these new assets are the future. Still, the volatility can be stressful. Unlike a stock exchange, these newer markets never close.“There are nights when I go to bed and I think, ‘Please, God, China, don’t mess this up,’” he said using stronger language. “It’s 24/7. It never stops.”Bitcoin’s volatile month — dropping …

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Bitcoin Is Actually Traceable, Pipeline Investigation Shows

When Bitcoin burst onto the scene in 2009, fans heralded the cryptocurrency as a secure, decentralized and anonymous way to conduct transactions outside the traditional financial system.Criminals, often operating in hidden reaches of the internet, flocked to Bitcoin to do illicit business without revealing their names or locations. The digital currency quickly became as popular with drug dealers and tax evaders as it was with contrarian libertarians.But this week’s revelation that federal officials had recovered most of the Bitcoin ransom paid in the recent Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack exposed a fundamental misconception about cryptocurrencies: They are not as …

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Thousands Descend on Miami to Glorify Bitcoin

MIAMI — There was money in the air. Buzzwords floated around, like NFT, BTD, blockchain, token. There was a frenzied energy.And there was heat — a humid, sticky South Florida heat; the kind all the Californians and New Yorkers who moved to Miami during the pandemic’s winter doldrums were warned about. The kind generated by thousands upon thousands of people gathering to worship at the altar of cryptocurrencies.Such was the vibe at Bitcoin 2021, an occasional gathering of digital currency enthusiasts run by a magazine named after the cryptocurrency. Last year’s event had been postponed. But on Friday and …

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He’s a Dogecoin Millionaire. And He’s Not Selling.

Last February, when Glauber Contessoto decided to invest his life savings in Dogecoin, his friends had concerns.“They were all like, you’re crazy,” he said. “It’s a joke coin. It’s a meme. It’s going to crash.”Their skepticism was warranted. After all, Dogecoin is a joke — a digital currency started in 2013 by a pair of programmers who decided to spoof the cryptocurrency craze by creating their own virtual money based on a meme about Doge, a talking Shiba Inu puppy. And investing money in obscure cryptocurrencies has, historically, been akin to tossing it onto a bonfire. …

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Gary Gensler, Wall Street’s New Watchdog, Has a Full Plate

Mr. Gelzinis said Mr. Gensler would probably draw on his familiarity with the subject matter — he taught classes on blockchain technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — to approach regulation around digital currencies more strategically. That would be a departure from his predecessor Jay Clayton, who favored enforcement actions against initial coin offerings without providing much regulatory guidance, he added.Today in BusinessUpdated April 21, 2021, 12:05 p.m. ETPaul Grewal, chief counsel of Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange that went public last week, said the industry was “hopeful” about Mr. Gensler, noting that he is fluent in its language. Mr. Grewal said the …

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