Author: NBTC

The cash-and-carry arbitrage that used to be a goldmine for big desks is now barely hanging on. This was the play where companies would buy Bitcoin on the spot market and short it on the futures side, locking in the price difference as profit. For a while, it was the go-to move. But that’s not the case anymore. The trade is getting crushed by low yields, tighter spreads, and shrinking interest from U.S. institutions. Bitcoin futures open interest on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has dropped below Binance for the first time since 2023. Wall Street used to favor CME…

The co-founder and board of crypto infrastructure platform Cere Network have been hit with a $100 million lawsuit claiming they undertook a pump-and-dump scheme that stole millions of dollars from investors. In a lawsuit filed in a San Francisco federal court on Tuesday, Vivian Liu, who said she worked for and invested in the company, claimed Cere co-founder Fred Jin, his brother, his wife, and the company’s board stole $41 million from investors. According to the lawsuit, Jin promised ahead of a public token launch for the platform in November 2021 that he and early Cere investors could not sell…

DraftKings has announced that it will enable crypto-to-cash deposits in four states across the United States. In its statement, the betting platform said it will roll out a new feature that will allow all users in the US to use digital assets converted to cash to fund their online betting accounts. The statement was corroborated at a Massachusetts Gaming Commission (GMC) meeting this week. The meeting was headed by the Chief of the Division of Sports Wagering, Carrie Torrisi, who mentioned that DraftKings has been given the all clear to introduce the new deposit source in the four states over…

Vitalik Buterin said he no longer agrees with his 2017 tweet that downplayed the need for users to personally verify Ethereum end-to-end. This week, he argued the network should treat self-hosted verification as a non-negotiable escape hatch as its architecture gets lighter and more modular. Buterin’s original position grew out of a design debate over whether a blockchain should commit to state on chain or treat state as “implied,” reconstructable only by replaying ordered transactions. Ethereum’s approach, putting a state root in each block header and supporting Merkle-style proofs, lets a user prove a specific balance, contract code, or storage…

California-based crypto firm BitGo has relocated its headquarters from Palo Alto to South Dakota as it prepares for its initial public offering, to avoid the state’s proposed 5% billionaires tax on high-net-worth individuals. BitGo declared in its December filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission about the shift and is now officially based in South Dakota’s largest city, Sioux Falls. BitGo will keep its Palo Alto location and has offices in San Francisco, New York, Canada, India, Germany, Singapore, South Korea, and Dubai. BitGo moves its headquarters due to California’s Billionaire Tax Act The company did not reveal in…

Australia’s Federal Court has fined crypto Qoin Wallet operator BPS Financial $14 million (US$9.9 million) after finding it misled consumers about whether its token could be spent at merchants or exchanged for cash and other digital assets. The penalty was handed down on Monday after the court found in 2024 that BPS Financial promoted and operated Qoin Wallet without an Australian Financial Services Licence for almost three years. The court also found that the company had “engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct” after making false representations about Qoin Wallet.  Qoin Wallet is a non-custodial digital assets app that allows…

Nearly four months after crypto’s record Oct. 10 flash crash wiped out leveraged positions across the market, the industry is still arguing about what actually broke. That argument turned into a public spat on Saturday after OKX founder and CEO Star Xu claimed the crash was neither complicated nor accidental, but the result of irresponsible yield campaigns that pushed traders into leverage loops they did not understand. On Oct. 10, President Trump’s fresh tariff escalation on China rattled macro markets and hit crypto at the worst moment. With leverage already stacked, the initial drop turned into a wipeout with roughly…

Everstake, a crypto staking provider, said in a new report that 2025 was a “year of sharp contrasts” for Ethereum, filled with major network upgrades and rising institutional adoption even as the price of $ETH remained relatively flat. In its Ethereum Staking Insights & Protocol Analysis report, Everstake said total value staked reached about 36.08 million $ETH, or roughly 29.3% of supply, with net growth of more than 1.8 million $ETH. As of Tuesday, Jan. 27, about 36.5 million $ETH is staked – roughly 30.26% of supply, according to Coinbase data. The report also highlighted continued growth in network activity,…

Dutch indirect crypto investments have surged to record levels, buoyed by households, pension funds, and a small number of high-profile securities, according to new data from the Netherlands’ central bank. The Dutch central bank said total indirect crypto securities holdings in all sectors reached about $1.4 billion by October, an uptick from just $94 million in 2020. Despite the growth, the bank reiterated that indirect crypto investments account for only 0.03% of the Netherlands’ total securities holdings. The analysis focused on three categories of instruments: exchange-traded funds, exchange-traded notes, and so-called crypto treasury shares. ETFs and ETNs track the price…

The government of Kazakhstan is stepping up efforts to curb illegal cryptocurrency transactions, including capital flight via digital assets. The Central Asian nation is a leader in the latter, its head of state says, insisting illicit transactions through crypto trading platforms have become a serious issue. Astana goes after shadow crypto circulation and outflows Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has sharply criticized illegal cryptocurrency transfers, including those serving tax evasion schemes and capital flight, local media reported. In a statement on the matter, the Kazakh leader directly described such transactions as a threat to the economic security of the country, which…