Crypto industry actors in Hong Kong have been trying to push back against a forthcoming law that would restrict legal cryptocurrency trading to professional investors, locking out 93% of the local population from the market. In comments to the South China Morning Post published on Monday, industry body Global Digital Finance warned that the proposed law would likely push retail traders to embrace unregulated platforms. Global Digital Finance represents cryptocurrency exchanges such as BitMEX, Huobi, Coinbase and OKCoin and has been at the forefront of industry efforts to push back against the forthcoming legislation. Hong Kong's Financial Services and the …

Residents of the United Kingdom will be the first people outside of the U.S. who are able to use PayPal for buying and selling crypto. According to journalist Carl Quintanilla, the payments platform is planning to expand its crypto offerings to the U.K. in the coming months. PayPal also plans to make crypto available for Venmo wallet holders before the end of Q2 2021. Other non-crypto services include expanding Venmo internationally before 2026 and a broader rollout of the app’s credit cards. * PAYPAL WILL ADD CRYPTO TO VENMO WALLETS IN FIRST HALF $PYPL (h/t @JohnSpall247) pic.twitter.com/ETsgKqXC6V — Carl Quintanilla …

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 …

Thailand’s booming cryptocurrency trading market is causing some concern for government officials. According to Bloomberg, Arkhom Termpittayapaisith — the country’s finance minister — has warned that the ongoing crypto speculative mania could have dire implications for Thailand’s capital market. The finance minister issued the warning while addressing a capital market conference on Thursday. As part of his remarks, Termpittayapaisith highlighted the massive surge in trading activity that saw crypto volume on Thailand’s regulated exchanges reach 65 billion baht (about $2.17 billion) in January. In December 2020, the total trading volume recorded was about 19 billion baht ($630 million) — roughly …

Do you remember the bone-chilling tale of the man who spent 10,000 BTC on pizza — a sum that would be worth $400 million today? How about the scary story of the IT engineer who threw away a hard drive containing 7,500 BTC, only to be told that the council wouldn’t allow him to retrieve it from landfill? We haven’t even mentioned the sorry saga of the San Francisco programmer who has just two password guesses left before losing a $277.4 million crypto fortune. There’s plenty of upbeat milestones in the crypto industry to celebrate too — including the anonymous …

The recent GameStop saga — a financial spectacle that was a good deal more contradictory than a straight-up "David vs. Goliath" tale of Redditor retail investors vs. predatory hedge funds — has sparked numerous blockchain commentators to step in to try to redirect attention to their bet on a future overhaul of the financial sector. Frederik Gregaard, CEO of the Cardano Foundation, is attempting to shift the conversation away from heated arguments over the balance of forces, rules of the game, or legitimate tactics in the recent showdown between the little guys, the hedge funders, intermediaries, Robinhood and regulators. Some …

A growing number of options traders are sitting on large unrealized losses following Ether’s (ETH) latest price surge, highlighting once again the volatile, unpredictable nature of the cryptocurrency market. Pankaj Balani, CEO of Delta Exchange — a St. Vincent-based cryptocurrency derivatives platform — told Cointelegraph that he has observed “a lot of naked call writing activity in ETH for deep out of the money call options all the way up to $2,000 and $3,000 strikes.” A call option becomes deep out of the money if its strike price is significantly above the current price of an underlying asset — in …

Stock and crypto trading app Robinhood has reportedly re-enabled instant deposits for cryptocurrency purchases after almost a week. Robinhood has removed the original update on its support page suspending instant deposits, and its website currently shows certain users once again have "instant access" to up to $1,000 to buy crypto. Many of the app’s users also reported on social media they were able to access the trading feature last night. The "instant buying" function is a paid feature that gives Robinhood customers instant access to funds from bank deposits and stock trades. Though users were still able to buy crypto …

Robinhood, the stock trading app formerly popular with millennials, is facing another class-action suit, following its recent temporary suspension of purchases of GameStop and other “meme-stocks” through its platform. The lawsuit, filed Jan. 29 in Houston, Texas, alleges that Robinhood, along with other named defendants including TD Ameritrade and WeBull, arrived at “a common understanding of what must be done, which they carried out with conscious parallelism.” Conscious parallelism, in competition law, refers to behavior in which competitors in an oligopoly set prices or terms without a formal agreement. One entity will take the initiative in setting a price, while …

Bitcoin (BTC) exchanges in the United States are seeing unprecedented popularity as a wave of adoption sweeps the market. Data from statistics resources Alexa and Similarweb shows that major exchange Coinbase now ranks within the top 1,000 most popular websites around the world. Coinbase in top 400 U.S. sites As BTC/USD circles all-time highs, its run to $42,000 in January appears to have sparked a tsunami of new user engagement with some of the most popular cryptocurrency trading platforms. In the U.S., the focal point of institutional inflows into Bitcoin in recent months, exchanges Gemini, Kraken and Binance U.S. are …

Melvin Capital started 2021 with $12.5 billion in assets before retail investors from Reddit caused the firm to lose billions on its GameStop short positions. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the hedge fund has a little more than $8 billion in assets at the end of January, which includes a $2.75 billion investment from Citadel and Point72 Asset Management earlier this month. This represents a 53% loss, according to people familiar with the firm. In the report, a client claims that Melvin has "massively de-risked" its investment portfolio following the controversy involving short selling GameStop stocks. People familiar …

Investors who knew when to swap Bitcoin (BTC) and altcoins could have boosted their gains significantly in 2020, according to new research from eToro, the popular social trading platform. The challenge, of course, is pinpointing when the coveted alt season begins. In its latest quarterly report, eToro breaks down various cryptocurrency investment themes related to the 2020 bull market. It also devotes an entire section to alt season – the part of the cryptocurrency market cycle where altcoins rally against the dollar and, possibly, outperform Bitcoin. The research found that the top 100 altcoins, when held equally, were “a more …