Ravencoin (RVN) price has rocketed higher in February as a fresh wave of buying volume lifted the token's price by more than 800% in the past 20 days. Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that RVN rose from $0.016 on Jan.29 to a new all-time high of $0.189 on Feb. 19 on top of a record $1.28 billion in 24-hour trading volume. A scroll through the project’s Twitter feed shows an increase in activity from the account beginning on Jan. 27, when the project tweeted, “Stock markets are transforming. Ravencoin is here for those who want to build services …

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor's note Technology is by and large not the major barrier — though many in the industry have a decent bit of hubris about it. More important is that people, whenever their money is on the line, get mighty conservative. Which is not necessarily greedy or unreasonable, but it is why it was easier for lawmakers to greenlight email than electronic signatures. Conservatism surrounding money also means that old systems have to fail in a pretty conspicuous fashion for anyone to …

BitMEX co-founder and former CEO Arthur Hayes has returned from exile with a post on the derivatives exchange’s official blog calling for a boycott of legacy platforms following the GameStop drama. Hayes said the incident, where trading on Robinhood was halted after retail traders forced a short squeeze causing hedge funds to suffer billions in losses, showed that markets are stacked against retail traders: “The game masters just didn’t like how the game was being played, so they jacked up margin to force a course correction,” he said. The former BitMEX CEO urged retail traders trader to “opt-out” of the …

Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s CEO, very much occupied the hot seat in today’s hearing before the House Financial Services Committee over January’s market volatility. None of the representatives seemed particularly interested in putting the screws to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and many seemed to give Keith Gill the same props the rest of us did. These aren’t the market manipulators you are looking for Gill, in all fairness, was the most likeable character involved, introducing his remarks by saying “A few things I am not: I am not a cat and I am not an accredited investor.” Gill, who really started …

United States lawmakers are set to grill Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev over the GameStop trading frenzy at a Congressional hearing later today. In his prepared remarks, Robinhood CEO appeared to place responsibility for the platform’s stock trading suspensions on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Tenev said that the company blocked trading to meet “regulatory deposit requirements” defined by the SEC. The exec specifically criticized an SEC rule that requires equities transactions to clear over two days: “It takes several days for the clearinghouse to process the transaction [...] This is known as “T+2” settlement, denoting the trade date plus …

The controversy-laden trading platform Robinhood announced on Wednesday that it intends to implement cryptocurrency deposits and withdrawals. While customers have been able to buy and sell cryptocurrency via the platform for some time, they are unable to access the coins themselves to transfer them to other wallets. According to a series of tweets published from the company’s Twitter account, work on integration of cryptocurrency transfers has already begun, though no dates or specifics were provided on when it will go live. Robinhood also clarified that crypto deposits would be custodied by their own wallets and added that the company does …

As Bitcoin and numerous altcoins surge toward new all-time highs, traders who are coin rich but cash poor are increasingly flocking to decentralized finance lending platforms where they can collatoralize their holdings to raise funds for new investments. Compound is one of the leading DeFi lending platforms and over the past month its TVL and governance token price has rallied to new highs. Compound, which ranks third among DeFi lending protocols, has $4.55 billion worth of assets locked on the platform and its COMP governance token has doubled in value over the past week. Currently COMP trades for $566, a …

The Department of Justice is reportedly the latest to turn up the heat on last month's crazed markets. Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the DoJ's fraud division and the San Francisco district attorney's office had launched probes into the brokers (read: Robinhood) and social-media platforms (read: Reddit) who were at the center of wild bull markets on stocks like GameStop and AMC weeks ago. A number of agencies have announced that they are looking into market manipulation concerns. The Securities and Exchange Commission released a cryptic statement to that effect as GME stocks were …

Executives from companies involved in the recent controversy between hedge funds and retail investors from Reddit may be testifying at a House Financial Services Committee hearing next week. According to a Reuters report, two people familiar with the matter said executives from trading app Robinhood, investment manager Melvin Capital, and hedge fund Citadel are expected to testify in a congressional hearing scheduled for Feb. 18. Bloomberg reported that Citadel founder Ken Griffin is likely to be in attendance, as is Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev. However, it is unclear at this time whether Melvin founder Gabriel Plotkin or anyone else from …

King Midas is most famously remembered through the fable we tell our kids that the king could turn everything he touched into gold. At first, it was a great idea that his greed turned even food into gold, leaving him wealthy but unable to live. Robinhood’s CEO and its board had the impossible King Midas dilemma this week: deciding whether to side with their customers and let them make over $15 billion in profits or halting trading and allow only the sale of GameStop (GME) to enable the money-hungry shorts to cover their position at lower prices and avoid massive …

GameStop and Twitter are both a mirage and an iceberg — but don’t try tweeting that. Not because you won’t own the tweet (because you won’t), but because the only completely true expression that Twitter is capable of delivering as a platform is unlocking the ugly truth about the internet itself. Or as Elon Musk recently tweeted: In retrospect, it was inevitable — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 29, 2021 Let me explain. In the midst of Robinhood halting trading for its supposed users, Jack Dorsey has been talking about decentralizing Twitter and social media in general. But other than a …

Was last week’s Reddit versus Wall Street stand-off really the “beginning of the end for centralized finance,” as Gemini founder Tyler Winklevoss described it? Or was it just a one-time instance of individuals coming together to right a perceived wrong — with no long-term economic consequences? As GameStop, a struggling videogame retailer, came under attack by hedge-fund short sellers, a coalition of individuals spearheaded by r/Wallstreetbets, a Reddit forum, jumped in to save GameStop by buying its shares, driving its stock price from $20 to as high as $483 — and doing some real damage to short traders in the …