The price of XRP edged higher on Sept. 2 as traders assessed Ripple Labs gaining an edge over the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in an ongoing courtroom battle. The XRP/USD exchange rate surged 4.74% to reach $1.296 for the first time since Aug. 23. The pair's climb appeared alongside a spike in trading volume on the four-hour chart, confirming traders' intent to support the upside move in the coming sessions. XRP has shot to go higher this week, reflecting a similar bullish move in other top digital assets. CrediBULL Crypto, an independent market analyst, noted that the Ripple …

Glenn Arcaro, former director and promoter of the notorious BitConnect Ponzi scheme, has pled guilty to fraud charges related to his role in the now-defunct crypto exchange and lending platform. He has been ordered to pay back $24 million to investors. In a parallel action in the long-running saga, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission has charged BitConnect, its founder, Satish Kumbhani, former director Arcaro, and Future Money Ltd. for the scheme. The defendants are accused of running a fraudulent, unregistered securities offering that netted $2 billion. The latest developments come three years after BitConnect shut down its lending …

A Salvadoran news outlet has reported that a computer and cryptocurrency expert critical of the country accepting Bitcoin as legal tender was arrested by local police and held for hours before being released. According to multiple interviews conducted by La Prensa Gráfica, police in San Salvador arrested computer specialist Mario Gómez Wednesday without a warrant, seizing his phone and attempting to take possession of a computer from his mother Elena de Gomez. The National Civil Police, or PNC, released a statement saying Gómez’s detainment was related to an investigation for financial fraud. Otto Flores, Gómez’s lawyer, said authorities released Gómez …

Not Legal Advice... is a monthly column from Zachary Kelman, Cointelegraph’s general counsel. He is a New York-licensed attorney specializing in political, legal and regulatory issues surrounding Bitcoin, digital currencies and blockchain technology. For two decades, United States presidents kept the American military in Afghanistan to back the fragile local government, tasked with keeping the Taliban at bay. Earlier this month, the U.S. military left, and the Afghan government that the U.S. armed forces supported collapsed like a pitched tent whose pole had been removed. It was obvious to all observers that fundamental change in Afghanistan was always impossible, and …

Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York — who has been in office for only a week since the departure of Andrew Cuomo — has nominated Adrienne Harris to lead the state’s Department of Financial Services. According to a Tuesday Wall Street Journal report, Hochul tapped Harris to lead the New York Department of Financial Services, or NYDFS, following the resignation of Superintendent Linda Lacewell. Harris is currently a senior adviser at the public relations firm Brunswick Group, but prior to that was a special assistant for economic policy to United States President Barack Obama and a senior adviser to …

Amid El Salvador preparing to officially enforce the country’s Bitcoin Law in early September, Salvadorans took to the streets to protest over the adoption of Bitcoin (BTC) as an official currency. El Salvador’s anti-Bitcoiners have expressed discontent regarding the government’s plans to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, with hundreds of protesters marching through the capital, San Salvador, last Friday, Euronews TV network reported. The demonstrators — including retirees, veterans, disability pensioners and workers — voiced their concerns over Bitcoin’s unstable price. The crowd was worried that the government would start paying their pensions in Bitcoin instead of the United States …

Ripple has filed a motion to compel the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to disclose its internal cryptocurrency trading policies as part of the ongoing legal battle with the securities regulator. James Filan, an attorney closely following the SEC's case against Ripple, shared a new motion document seeking to bring clarity to whether the SEC permitted its own employees to trade XRP, which, as per the regulator’s allegations, is an unregistered security. Filed on Friday on behalf of several defendants — including Ripple Labs, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and Ripple executive chairman Chris Larsen — the motion asks the …

The entire cryptocurrency industry is waking up to a new reality. Politicians and regulators have decided to wade into the space, which had flown mainly under their radar until now. A House committee chair is launching a working group; the Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking new authorities to regulate digital assets as securities; and the Senate-passed infrastructure bill includes $28 billion in tax revenues from crypto transactions. This last handful of weeks has arguably seen more regulatory activity around digital currencies since the name Satoshi Nakamoto first entered the popular lexicon. Anyone whose business deals in this asset class …

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has reportedly signed a $125,000 deal with blockchain analytics firm AnChain.AI to help monitor and regulate the decentralized finance industry. According to a Friday report from Forbes, an AnChain.AI company spokesperson confirmed the agreement with the federal regulator, saying the SEC and blockchain firm had the option to sign up to five separate 1-year contracts for $125,000 each, or $625,000 total. The first contract reportedly began in May. “The SEC is very keen on understanding what is happening in the world of smart contract-based digital assets,” said AnChain.AI CEO and co-founder Victor Fang. “We …

When does decentralization stop being an experiment in technological democracy and start being a way to avoid accountability? That’s the question at the heart of a potential $100 million arbitration lawsuit against cryptocurrency exchange Binance, where close to 1,000 traders seek damages for losses suffered during the site’s outage on May 19. Binance experienced technical issues for several hours on May 19 amid one of the worst market crashes of the year as the global cryptocurrency market suffered a 33% drop. Traders were unable to execute trades for the duration of Binance’s outage, and many found their accounts depleted when …

Digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future has publicly called out Alabama lawmaker Richard Shelby for preventing an amendment clarifying the role of crypto in the infrastructure bill to be addressed in the United States Senate. Fight for the Future has used donations it received in cryptocurrency to place a billboard in Birmingham, Alabama asking lawmakers not to support measures it believes would harm crypto and blockchain firms. Shelby, one of two senators representing Alabama since 1987, objected to the introduction of a crypto amendment to infrastructure bill HR 3684 that was under consideration in the Senate at the …

The transition to a more digitalized society based on an information economy has created intense pressure for companies to rethink their intellectual property (IP) management. Intangible assets can represent more than 80% of the value in a firm’s balance sheet, and intellectual property in the United States is now worth over $6 trillion in gross domestic product, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Well-managed and leveraged IP can provide a company with a strategic advantage over the competition — not only in terms of customer acquisition, but also with investors and potential employees. Yet these valuable assets present a …