The minister of finance of India, Nirmala Sitharaman, has given a ray of hope for the Indian cryptocurrency community as more fear, uncertainty and doubt circulate regarding a supposedly impending ban on digital assets. In a Saturday interview with India Today, Sitharaman emphasized that the ministry does not plan to shut off Indian innovations associated with Bitcoin (BTC) and its underlying blockchain technology. “From our side, we are very clear that we are not shutting all options off. We will allow certain windows for people use, so that experiments on the blockchain, Bitcoins or cryptocurrency [...] and fintech, which depend …

Chinese holding conglomerate Ping An Group filed the largest number of blockchain-related patents in 2020, according to a new report. Intellectual property-focused magazine Intellectual Asset Management has released a report on the rankings of the world’s foremost blockchain patentees. Based on data from the Derwent World Patents Index, the rankings show that Ping An filed 1,215 blockchain patent families in 2020, more than Tencent and Ant Group combined. Owning a total of 1,749 blockchain patent families, Ping An sharply increased its number of patent applications in 2020, up from just 291 in 2019. Based in Shenzhen, Ping An operates a …

Though seemingly coming from nowhere for many, the themes behind the Reddit-fueled r/Wallstreetbets pump of GameStop feel familiar. Watching it unfold, I tried to figure out just why it had captured my interest to such a degree, and, to me, it was a spillover into the traditional markets of some pervasive themes driving crypto. Despite some competition in the narrative, I view the motivating force — and by it, I mean the social media-fueled spread of the message that drew enough widespread interest to have an impact in the market — behind the GME pump as analogous with what, at …

Dan Loeb, CEO of New York-based asset management firm Third Point and a well-known figure on Wall Street, has said he is looking into ways to bridge the gap between traditional finance and the crypto space. In a series of tweets to his followers on Monday, Loeb said he had been "doing a deep dive into crypto," referencing a recent article on nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, from Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Dixon described the ways NFTs could change the economics of content creators — namely that the technology allows them “a new way to take the …

Google Finance has added crypto prices to the finance.google.com domain. The section, titled “Crypto,” now appears in the “Compare Markets” category alongside conventional stock and currency markets. The section provides key pricing information for various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Google's parent, Alphabet, also owns video platform YouTube — which has consistently irked crypto users by banning educational and news content, often seemingly at random. Cointelegraph and CoinDesk, the two largest publications in the crypto news space, have both been subject to suspensions that have subsequently been overturned after the video streaming platform …

United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is concerned about crypto's supposed criminal element. In Feb. 10 remarks to a financial sector innovation roundtable, United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated that the misuse of cryptocurrencies and virtual assets has been a growing problem alongside cyber attacks triggered by the global pandemic. Secretary Yellen said that despite the potential of new technologies like crypto, such assets are still associated with major risks. “I see the promise of these new technologies, but I also see the reality: cryptocurrencies have been used to launder the profits of online drug traffickers; they’ve been a …

Kenanga Investment Bank Berhad, one of the largest financial services companies in Malaysia, is moving into the cryptocurrency industry with a new investment. According to an official Feb. 8 announcement, Kenanga has entered into a conditional agreement to acquire a 19% equity stake in a licensed crypto exchange. The investment was facilitated through Kenanga’s fully-owned private equity arm Kenanga Private Equity. According to the agreement, Kenanga will invest in Tokenize Technology, the operator of local crypto exchange Tokenize Xchange. Offering trading services for major cryptos like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), the platform is one of the three licensed digital …

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 …

Earlier this week, Elon Musk made history when he placed his full support behind Bitcoin (BTC) during a Clubhouse stream. When discussing Bitcoin and the GameStop debacle with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, Musk said: “I am late to the party, but I am a supporter of Bitcoin.” This came a few days after Musk changed his Twitter profile, adding “Bitcoin” to his bio. Interestingly enough, Musk's public endorsement of Bitcoin comes at a time when legacy financial markets have been openly caught defrauding their own customers, and the Robinhood app is at the center of this fraud. Indeed, the richest …

Ant Group, the financial affiliate of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba, has reportedly reached an agreement with Chinese regulators over the company's status. According to a Feb. 3 report by Bloomberg, Chinese regulators have agreed on a restructuring plan that will turn Jack Ma’s fintech giant into a financial holding company. Ant Group’s new status will reportedly make it subject to capital requirements similar to those for Chinese banks. The agreement will impact a wide scope of Ant’s business operations, including its technology offerings in areas like blockchain and food delivery, unnamed sources told Bloomberg. According to the report, the restructuring …

Another Canadian company has filed an application for a Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund, or ETF, amid a renewed interest in crypto ETFs from global financial firms. Accelerate Financial Technologies has filed and obtained a receipt for a preliminary prospectus with Canadian securities regulators for the Accelerate Bitcoin ETF (ABTC). Announcing the news on Feb. 3, Accelerate Financial said that ABTC will offer units denominated in both United States and Canadian dollars. The company has applied to list ABTC units on the Toronto Stock Exchange, with listing being subject to the exchange's requirements. “The TSX has not conditionally approved ABTC's listing …

Global companies are implementing distributed ledger technologies in an attempt to gain efficiencies in areas such as global payments and supply chain transparency. Blockchain tech can replace slow, paper-based processes, as well as improve security. However, many of the platforms in use today suffer from poor design. Networks become clogged with traffic too easily, resulting in latency issues and, ultimately, a sub-par user experience. According to a 2019 McKinsey report, there are now over 20 billion connected devices in the world, all of which “require management, storage and retrieval of data.” However, blockchain design is ill-equipped to handle this immense …