Editor’s note As many of you were certainly following in real time, a bull market gave way to a bloodbath yesterday, which happened to be Thanksgiving in the United States. Personally, I’ve never thought that Bitcoin’s (BTC) price was any sort of proof of its value proposition, but for many, its retreat yesterday certainly dashed many a planned gloat to family members more receptive to massive gains than concepts like censorship resistance. But obviously, volatility is part of the game with cryptocurrencies. One of the more prominent solutions to this problem has been the rise of stablecoins, especially following the …

Cypherpunk Holdings (CSE:HODL), a privacy-focused Canadian investment company, has upped its stake in Bitcoin (BTC). The company disclosed Thursday that it has added 72.979 BTC to its reserves since June 30, 2020. Cypherpunk funded the acquisition by liquidating its holdings of Monero (XMR) and Ethereum (ETH), as well as through partial proceeds from a private placement of CA$505,000, or $388,000, closed on Aug. 27. With the purchase, Cypherpunk now has 276.479 BTC in its reserves, making it the ninth-largest public Bitcoin holder. At current values, Cypherpunk’s stake in BTC is worth just under $4.8 million. At the time of writing, …

The United States national security apparatus is warning other agencies about China’s upcoming digital currency. On Wednesday, news outlet the Washington Examiner reported on a letter that National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe had sent Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton earlier in the month. According to the report, Ratcliffe offered to have staff brief Clayton on the security issues that derive from China’s dominance in crypto mining as well as the country’s progress in digitizing the yuan. Ratcliffe’s letter also apparently pushed Clayton to ensure that U.S. crypto firms remain competitive. Cointelegraph has reported extensively on the race for …

Since the United States Federal Reserve and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network opened for public comment a proposed rule to acquire more information on smaller international transactions, many crypto users have labeled the measure an invasion of privacy. On Oct. 23, the regulatory agencies published a notice of a proposal to modify a long-standing rule in which financial institutions in the U.S. are required to exchange client information for all international transactions greater than $3,000. The proposal — which includes “transactions involving convertible virtual currencies and digital assets with legal tender status” — would lower this monetary threshold to $250. …

Cash use has lost a ton of ground to digital payments as the pandemic has changed the way people transact worldwide. Some experts have recently argued that central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, could solve the problem of leaving that payments data in the hands of major tech platforms. In a blog post published Monday morning, Federal Reserve of New York researcher Michael Lee and University of California Santa Barbara economics professor Rod Garratt expounded on a paper they released earlier this month. The authors point to tech firms' troubling use of consumer data, which has landed everyone from Visa …

Crypto analytics firm CipherTrace announced on Friday that it had filed two patents for technology capable of tracing transactions for privacy coin Monero (XMR). In a Friday blog from CipherTrace, the firm states that the patents would include forensic tools to explore Monero transaction flows to assist in financial investigations, statistical and probabilistic methods for scoring transactions and clustering likely wallet owners, as well as visualization tools and ways to track stolen or illegally used XMR. “CipherTrace’s Monero tracing capabilities will allow [Virtual Asset Service Providers] to identify when inbound XMR may have criminal origins, allowing them to adequately risk …

On Friday, the International Monetary Fund published a new working paper on central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, and their legal ramifications. In the paper, researchers including IMF legal counsel Wouter Bossu and Catalina Margulis argue that current frameworks are inadequate for issuing public-facing CBDCs. The researchers are particularly concerned about how existing definitions of money can apply to such a new technology, but, optimistically, suggest the problem is simple enough to fix: "The absence of an explicit and robust legal basis for the issuance of token-and/or account-based CBDC can be relatively easily remedied through targeted central bank law reform." …

Oasis Labs has announced the successful launch of its Oasis Network mainnet, with more than 70 independent validators already live. Oasis is a privacy-focused layer-one network designed to support decentralized applications that claims a throughput of 1000 transactions per second. In June 2018, Oasis raised $45 million from crypto-venture heavyweights including A16z, Binance Labs, Pantera and Polychain. Oasis allows data to be encrypted, and for privacy policies surrounding its use to be enforced through smart contracts Oasis Labs says its “confidential compute” functionality enables encrypted data to be processed by the network’s nodes to ensure the privacy of a wide …

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that regulators are starting to pay close attention to cryptocurrencies this year. For instance, as the price of Bitcoin (BTC) continues to soar, it’s predicted that regulators will start taking direct action – possibly even banning Bitcoin completely. While the ban may sound extreme, regulators have recently honed in on the use of privacy coins like Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC) and Dash. For example, in September this year, the United States Internal Revenue Service offered a bounty of up to $625,000 for intelligence firms that could break the untraceable privacy coin Monero. Moreover, on …

Robert Bench, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s director of applied research, thinks privacy should be a focus during the creation of digital money, not an afterthought. “Privacy is a question that we have learned is critical from a technical perspective,” Bench said during a Chamber of Digital Commerce panel on Friday: “One of our learnings is that the questions of privacy and identity must be considered at the earliest stage of the architecture. Making privacy or identity an ad hoc process is suboptimal from both a privacy or identity perspective, and most importantly from a security perspective.” A largely …

Cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift recently delisted three privacy coins: Dash, Zcash (ZEC) and Monero (XMR). This was an unexpected move to say the least, given the exchange’s historic commitment to privacy. As a noncustodial platform, Shapeshift did not impose user identification requirements on traders in its early days, although this began to change with the gradual introduction of a mandatory membership model, compliant with Know Your Customer rules, as of 2018. Why then, did it move to delist Dash, Zcash and Monero, even as other exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken and Binance.US still list these coins? In a statement shared with …

Douglas Tuman, a crypto enthusiast and host of the Monero Talk podcast, has lost in his bid to represent New York’s 4th District in the United States Congress. According to election results from The Associated Press, Tuman, a Republican, received 134,243 votes to incumbent Democrat Kathleen Rice’s 147,580 in New York’s 4th District, which includes parts of central and southern Nassau County. Rice has served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2015. The Monero (XMR) podcaster first announced his intentions to run for Congress in March, stating that he was running on a platform “to improve …