CoinDesk Crypto

Surveillance is power, as authoritarian regimes across history have known. The emergence of the internet in the late-20th century made surveillance easier than ever, by creating a historically unprecedented repository of information about individuals and organizations stored on s

DeFi (and the Canadian crypto community, especially) woke up yesterday to a pretty terrible headline. We learned that “Sifu,” who goes by the handle @OxSifu, a core member and CFO of DeFi protocol Wonderland, was Michael Patryn (also known sometimes as Omar Dhanani),

Professionals have a major piece of advice for those who traded cryptocurrency for the first time last year: Take your tax prep seriously. The IRS has been zooming in on…

Given the stupendous amount of personal information stored and transferred online, it's good that regulators are moving to bolster consumer privacy. But these rules – ranging from the "right to be forgotten" to the ability query a database to see what information they keep

When token markets plunged in 2018 following the initial coin offering (ICO) bubble, I wrote a column entitled “Crypto Winter Is Here and We Only Have Ourselves to Blame.” It lamented the get-rich-quick schemes and “lambos” that took precedence over the de

There’s no question that OpenSea, now far and away the most dominant non-fungible token marketplace, has been a success for its investors. It was valued at over $13 billion earlier this month, cementing its status as a unicorn among unicorns. And last week, it was integrate

The “Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” begins, “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.” But privacy coins – cryptocurrencies with strong privacy features—have failed to take off. Monero and zcash are both worth less today t

Nearly everyday, it seems non fungible tokens (NFTs) are in the news with high-priced sales and celebrity endorsements.

The transparency of blockchains is often marketed as a benefit. It's not. Main Street financial consumers are never going to adopt blockchain-based financial tools as long as blockchains are radically transparent. Regular folks have secrets that they want to keep.One of the most

One of the most common questions I get from people who are starting to realize the need for personal privacy is, "Where do I start?"To better answer that question for yourself, it can be helpful to build out a simple threat model by considering what data you want to protect, whom

Public institutions of all kinds, including government treasuries, are steadily warming to bitcoin and cryptocurrency. The volatile new asset class presents an opportunity for governments, which are often underfunded, to reap massive rewards. The risks are self-evident, although

It’s Privacy Week here at CoinDesk, and we’ve been diving into a variety of technological and legal angles on the consequences of digital surveillance. Anxiety about the rise of omnipresent snooping can often feel like an academic matter of principle, or a series of w

Every day seemingly brings a new scam in the world of crypto, and yet the growth of the industry is in no way slowing.The popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), at least for now, continues to overshadow news of scams such as “rug pulls,” where NFT creators hype up

Blockchain privacy is really hard.Central to the magic of blockchain technology is the consensus algorithm, the tool that maintains the validity of the entire network. The simplest way to understand a consensus algorithm is that it involves everyone being able to check everyone e

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs as they are known in the crypto world, have something of an undeserved reputation.

Contrary to popular lore, cryptocurrencies are not a haven for anonymous criminals.In fact, because of smart blockchain analytics, it’s easier to follow money trails on blockchains than it is on legacy payment networks, however a circuitous route they may take.

At 2:30 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) will discuss the decisions reached during its latest two-day meeting that started yesterday. The announcement will have a huge bearing on the direction of the U.S. economy as a whole. It may have parti

Crypto has undergone an impressive spate of growth recently. We’ve gone from a few hundred users of non-fungible tokens (NFT), a couple of thousand Ethereum node operators and maybe a multitude more of bitcoin holders to several million investors and users across the indust

In a world where our personal information, interests and activities are being increasingly tracked and documented, it’s little surprise cryptocurrencies that offer users anonymity continue to remain popular despite efforts from regulators and exchanges to restrict their acc

The Ethereum Foundation announced in a blog post that it is nearly time to put an end to “ETH2” and the nomenclature that seems to separate the proof-of-stake chain from the proof-of-work chain. While it made sense when Ethereum’s roadmap looked to build out a s