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Early traders of NFT marketplace Magic Eden's new token ME had a lot to be thankful for – if they could access their airdrops, that is.In the first minutes of trading Tuesday, the token's fully diluted valuation hit $15 billion. But as more claimants managed to process their airdrops – and in some lucky cases, sell – that valuation began to crater. It eventually settled at an FDV around $5 billion.ME's rocky rollout stood in sharp contrast to other recent token launches. Hyperliquid's HYPE token immediately went parabolic after launching in late November. And Move's days-old MOVE token had a far more stable rollout – even shooting up at times.Some observers saw ME's down-only price action as comeuppance for a crypto project whose airdrop processing procedure was highly atypical, and, according to three industry insiders, threatened to breach security best practices.Magic Eden did not respond to CoinDesk's questions. Traders who managed to claim thousands of dollars-worth of ME publicly shunned anyone badmouthing their "free money." Others bemoaned apparently getting their wallets drained while wading through Magic Eden's convoluted process.It was a mixed day for Solana's best-known NFT trading platform, which has partly weathered the hollowing-out of crypto's digital collectibles economy by supporting newer, flashier and more highly-traded NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain too.Security concerns The same wallet issues that complicated ME's launch also could threaten user privacy, according to one industry source who asked not to be named.Magic Eden earmarked ME tokens for NFT traders as a reward for their past business. To get their airdrop, those traders had to either import the private keys from their qualifying wallets into Magic Eden's wallet app or create a new wallet on Magic Eden's app and link it to their old ones. The latter action potentially creates a privacy-busting link between previously unaffiliated wallets.Usually, crypto apps are content to let their users claim airdrops within their wallet of preference. Of course, most apps don't pair their token launch with an in-house wallet. The process doubtless boosted adoption of Magic Eden's new wallet.Nevertheless, CoinDesk found a number of atypical security practices within the Magic Eden wallet. It keeps a backup of users' recovery phrases and private keys on-app with no clear route to delete that information. While this makes the service more user-friendly, it also goes against established norms in wallet design and security."It's a very bad idea to store this stuff" anywhere digitally, be it locally on one's own device or – even worse – remotely on a company's servers, said Ogle, a pseudonymous crypto-security sleuth. It's not clear exactly where Magic Eden is storing the wallet recovery information.The process also opened up airdrop claimants to attack from bad actors who might pretend to be Magic Eden.Wallets created within Magic Eden's app cannot easily be transferred to other wallet applications. CoinDesk attempted to recover a Magic Eden-created wallet on Phantom by using the Magic Eden-provided 12-word recovery phrase. This process resulted in the control of a completely different address.An industry source said it had to do with Magic Eden's reliance on a different tech setup than other leading wallets. It can be overcome by importing the private key, which is nestled deeper in Magic Eden's app settings.Not-so-savvy users might attempt to move their Magic Eden wallets to a different app using the 12 word recovery phrase alone."They are not going to be finding any money in there," the insider said, predicting such users would panic, and perhaps incorrectly assume their money was gone for good.... Read more

El Salvador and Argentina are partnering to help develop the crypto industry in Latin America.Juan Carlos Reyes, El Salvador’s top crypto regulator and president of the Comisión Nacional de Activos Digitales (CNAD), and Roberto Silva, the president of the Comisión Nacional de Valores of Argentina (CNV), on Tuesday signed an agreement for the two countries to collaborate on crypto regulation.“At CNAD we have two core objectives, when it comes to international collaboration,” Reyes told CoinDesk in an email. “To share our expertise with international partners, enabling them to harness the benefits of a well-regulated industry. … [And] to broaden the international footprint of our regulated companies by forging strategic partnership agreements with nations worldwide.”“This landmark agreement with Argentina holds particular significance, given the country's standout reputation for pioneering innovative technologies and its remarkable rate of adoption,” Reyes added.While the details of the deal are still unknown, Reyes stated on LinkedIn that the agreement aimed to enable the two regulatory bodies to share knowledge and experience, to spur crypto innovation.“The joining of efforts between El Salvador and Argentina will lay the foundations for greater regional cooperation, promoting a favorable environment for the development of the digital asset industry,” he wrote.Reyes previously told CoinDesk that El Salvador had a head start on most countries in terms of crypto regulation thanks to President Nayib Bukele making bitcoin legal tender in the Central American nation.Argentinian President Javier Milei, meanwhile, has been ideologically open to cryptocurrencies and bitcoin and is popular among Argentinian crypto developers for his inflation-mitigating policies.... Read more

XRP, the native token of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) network, surged during the U.S. afternoon hours on Tuesday as Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the company's much-anticipated stablecoin obtained regulatory approval from the New York Department of Financial Services."This just in…we have final approval from NYDFS for RLUSD! Exchange and partner listings will be live soon," Garlinghouse posted on X.XRP rallied 10% following Garlinghouse's announcement in a broader crypto market bounce, erasing today's losses. The token was up 6.8% over the past 24 hours, outperforming bitcoin (BTC) and the broad market CoinDesk 20 Index. The XRPL network was developed by engineers who later established Ripple, and the company has long been associated with products and services using the token.Ripple laid out its plans in April to enter the quickly growing stablecoin market with its heavily regulated, short-term U.S. government bond-backed cryptocurrency. Stablecoins are a key piece of infrastructure in the crypto economy, and increasingly used for global payments, which is one of Ripple's business focuses. The two largest issuers, Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC), currently dominate the almost $200 billion stablecoin market. The sector, however, is forecasted to grow to trillions of dollars over the next few years, and Ripple is vying for a piece of that.With RLUSD, Ripple strives to leverage the company's established position for payments services among institutions and serve as a key intermediary for real-world asset tokenization, Ripple President Monica Long told CoinDesk in an interview in October. Tokenization is a red-hot trend in crypto to place traditional financial instruments on blockchain rails for more efficient transactions.RLUSD is in beta testing on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum networks. Ripple's Long said earlier that the token has been "operationally ready," only awaiting approval from regulators for the token's public launch.There are currently $41.7 million worth of RLUSD tokens on Ethereum and $10.4 million on XRPL, data compiled by analytics firm CryptoQuant shows.... Read more

Tether's stablecoin USD₮ has been recognized as an accepted virtual asset in the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), the company announced on Tuesday.The approval from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority means that companies which are licensed can offer pre-approved USD₮ services in Abu Dhabi's Global Market. Though, the release did not say what those approved services might be. CoinDesk reached out to Tether for comment.Tether 's USD₮ exceeded a $138 billion market cap but the company wants to continue advancing its growth, the statement said.“By bringing USD₮ to the forefront of ADGM’s regulated virtual asset framework, we are not only validating the importance of stablecoins as critical tools for modern finance but also opening new doors for collaboration and growth across the Middle East,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, in a press release.The United Arab Emirates has been praised for being a crypto hub. Abu Dhabi, its capital, started regulating crypto activities including those undertaken by exchanges and custodians in 2018 ahead of most regulators. The European Union will begin enforcing its rules in the coming days and the U.K. by 2026.Circle, another stablecoin issuer, is also diving into the Middle East after incorporating a company in the ADGM, it said in a statement.... Read more

Cryptocurrencies continued to this week's decline on Tuesday, with altcoins in near-freefall as bitcoin (BTC) slid further from the $100,000 level.Among the worst-hit cryptos were XRP, Polkadot (DOT), Litecoin (LTC), Aptos (APT) and Cardano (ADA), down 15%-18% over the past 24 hours, extending Monday declines. The CoinDesk 20 — an index of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, excluding memecoins, stablecoins and exchange coins — tumbled almost 10% Most cryptos in the index plunged by double-digit percentage amount at the minimum, though Ethereum's ether (ETH) and Solana's SOL fell just 8% and 9%, respectively.Bitcoin, in comparison, held up relatively well compared to the rest of the market, dipping to $95,000 and down nearly 3% over the past 24 hours. Cryptocurrencies had already plunged on Monday, triggering one of the largest leverage flushes in years liquidating over $1.5 billion of bullish derivatives positions. Tuesday's fall so far forced $450 million in liquidations across all digital assets, mostly bullish bets, CoinGlass data shows. Open interest for bitcoin futures remains at record high at almost $58 billion, though it has decreased 6.8% from Sunday.This week's sell-off followed a month-long breakneck rally in crypto prices after Donald Trump's election victory in early November. Some altcoin majors doubled or more in price, while bitcoin crossed the $100,000 threshold for time ever.Bitcoin's market cap dominance, which shows BTC's share of the total cryptocurrency market, spiked to 57.9% on Tuesday, its strongest reading since late November, underscoring the general risk-off move from altcoins towards BTC.The market moves could be in anticipation of inflation data coming on Wednesday, according to Youholder Chief of Markets Ruslan Lienkha. "The market anticipates a slight uptick in inflation," he told CoinDesk in an email. "However, if CPI reveals figures higher than expected, it could intensify the ongoing correction across financial markets. In such a scenario, the timing and likelihood of Federal Reserve rate cuts will become a critical focus heading into the new year." Stocks, though, haven't suffered the same way crypto has. After modest declines on Monday, the major U.S. average are flat today.... Read more

Microsoft (MSFT) doesn't appear to be adding its name anytime soon to the list of corporate entities holding bitcoin (BTC) after its shareholders voted against a proposal that would have directed the board of directors to study such a move.Titled "Assessment of Investing in Bitcoin," the proposal was put forward by the National Center for Public Policy Research. The think tank group suggested that Microsoft should consider diversifying 1% of its total assets into bitcoin as a potential hedge against inflation. According to the latest data by Bloomberg, Microsoft holds $78.4 billion of cash and marketable securities on its balance sheet.The board last month had urged shareholders to vote against the proposal.The preliminary vote result was announced minutes ago at the company's annual meeting.Shares of MSFT were trading for $446 in the minutes after the decision was announced, roughly flat for the day. Already under pressure on Tuesday, bitcoin prices fell a bit more following the news, now lower by 4% over the past 24 hours to $95,700.Michael Saylor gets involvedA 3-minute presentation by Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Bitcoin Development Company MicroStrategy (MSTR), which has seen its stock price surge as much as 2,500% since adding bitcoin to the company’s treasury strategy more than four years ago, was meant to convince shareholders otherwise.Saylor argued that Microsoft had surrendered $200 billion in capital over the past five years by issuing dividends and stock buybacks instead of purchasing bitcoin.From the beginning, though, Microsoft's board had concerns over bitcoin due to the inherent volatility of the asset. The company, according to the board, prioritizes stable and predictable investments to mitigate as much risk as possible.... Read more

A deputy in the Russian parliament proposed the creation of a strategic bitcoin (BTC) reserve to tackle sanctions imposed on the country, state-owned news agency Ria reported on Monday.Anton Tkachev of the New People party, which formed in 2020 and has 16 out of the 450 seats in the State Duma, asked Finance Minister Anton Siluanov to "assess the feasibility of creating a strategic bitcoin reserve in Russia by analogy with state reserve in traditional currencies."The reserve would help counter the threat posed to Russian financial stability by sanctions, inflation and the volatility of traditional currencies that the country holds, such as the Chinese yuan, U.S. dollars and the euro, according to the proposal."In conditions of limited access to traditional international payment systems for countries under sanctions, cryptocurrencies are becoming virtually the only instrument for international trade," Tkachev said in the proposal.The proposal appears to echo U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's plan to establish a strategic BTC reserve as a store of value to alleviate the pressures of the country's national debt. Read More: Putin Says No One Will Be Able to Ban Cryptocurrencies: State Media... Read more

For decades, prediction markets were a backwater, a science experiment.In 2024, Shayne Coplan, founder of Polymarket, turned them into a multibillion-dollar business and a popular barometer of the political winds, cited by everyone from Donald Trump to CNN.In so doing, he demonstrated a real-world consumer use case for cryptocurrency – and, some argue, a new model for news media at a time when the public has lost trust in traditional sources of information."Most people I know were checking Polymarket for odds during the election," said Meltem Demirors, a crypto O.G. and early investor in the company. "You're creating so much signal that you're getting people who don't care about crypto, and would never care about crypto" to look at the site.Like many crypto founders – and even some successful tech founders – the 26-year-old Coplan also took what looks like a calculated risk in pushing the regulatory envelope. In mid-November, the FBI raided his New York home and confiscated his devices, reportedly as part of a Department of Justice investigation into whether Polymarket was operating illegally in the U.S. Coplan has laid low since then, and would not comment for this article.However that investigation shakes out, Coplan has brought unprecedented attention to an idea long advanced by academics: That the wisdom of the crowd, backed by skin in the game, can produce more accurate forecasts – or at least, more accurate gauges of sentiment – than traditional experts or polls."This man made prediction markets mainstream. Simple as that," said Hart Lambur, co-founder of UMA, the decentralized oracle service that Polymarket uses to resolve contracts. "He's just been the guy that's grinded through the pain and been dedicated to the Polymarket concept for years."A stubborn wunderkindDemirors recalls meeting Coplan in 2018, when the college dropout was about 18 years old, on the recommendation of a crypto colleague."Shayne came to my office, and we basically just argued with each other for two hours," Demirors said. "I was like, 'wow, this kid is sharp.'"Pratik Chougule, executive director of the Coalition for Political Forecasting, got a similar impression interviewing Coplan for the Star Spangled Gamblers podcast early in Polymarket's history."He's a very unique figure in the sense that he's this creative artist type, but he's also delved deeply into academic literature, and he really understands technicalities of building something on the blockchain," said Chougule.Demirors said that in addition to investing in an early Polymarket round during the pandemic, she has been "a little bit of a big sis" to Coplan, acting as a sounding board as he built the business."He's just an opinionated, stubborn little f*ck, and I love him," she said, adding that Coplan's headstrong personality served him well as a founder.Early on, "people tried to pressure him to launch a token, and he was like, 'we're not doing that.' People tried to pressure him to open up markets before the infrastructure was ready. He was like, 'we're not doing that.'"Volume and vindicationFlip Pidot, a veteran prediction market trader and analyst, estimated that Polymarket racked up $3.6 billion in trading volume just from this year's U.S. presidential election, giving it a dominant, 74% market share. In previous election cycles, the entire prediction market industry never cracked $1 billion, he said.Many saw the election as a moment of vindication for Polymarket. In the weeks leading up to the event, Polymarket odds signaled a sizable lead for Trump while the polls showed a toss-up between the former president and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump won handily.Read more: Polymarket 'Manipulation' Claims Miss the MarkYet a clearer validation of Polymarket's informational value arguably came in July, when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris.For months, cable news' talking heads dismissed any talk of replacing Biden on the Democratic ticket, despite the 82-year-old's frequent public stumbles.Polymarket told a different story: Even after Biden won enough votes to clinch the Democratic nomination in mid-March, traders gave him only an 80% chance of being the nominee. A separate contract asking point blank if he would drop out gave low but nontrivial odds in the teens and 20s throughout the first half of the year."People were like, 'Oh, these [traders] are right-wing crypto bros, they're just conspiracy theorists. They don't know what's going on,'" said a Polymarket user who goes by the handle CSPTrading. "And they were completely vindicated."Following Biden's disastrous, doddering performance in the June 27 debate with Trump, the narrative quickly changed, with Democratic leaders and donors calling for the incumbent to step aside, as he did a month later.More so than with the election, the pundits (who had nothing to lose from being wrong) got it wrong by claiming epistemic certainty. Polymarket's traders (who had money on the line) got it right by telegraphing a modicum of doubt.Spectrum of decentralizationIn prediction markets, traders bet on verifiable outcomes of events in specified timeframes. (Which movie will gross the biggest box office of 2024? Will this be the hottest year on record?) Questions are usually framed as yes-or-no propositions, for which traders can purchase "yes" or "no" shares. Each share pays $1 (or, in Polymarket's case, the equivalent in crypto) if the prediction comes true, bupkis if not.Bettors can buy and sell shares any time, and prices fluctuate like on stock markets. Expressed as cents on the dollar, these prices signal the market's assessment of an outcome's probability. On Dec. 4, for example, "yes" shares for the Detroit Lions winning the next Super Bowl traded at 18 cents on Polymarket, meaning bettors gave the team an 18% chance of victory. The corresponding "no" shares were priced at 82 cents.Prediction markets date back to the late 19th Century, when Wall Street traders would bet millions (tens of millions in today's dollars) on city, state and national elections. "There was more money bet in presidential betting markets than in the stock markets at the time," said Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.Since the late-1980s, Hanson has championed prediction markets as a way to aggregate information and thereby improve decision making by corporations and even governments."One of the obstacles, of course, was that betting markets had many legal barriers, and cultural barriers [because] many people disapproved of them and thought they had little social value," Hanson told CoinDesk.This is one reason why blockchains, decentralized financial systems with no central authority that a government can shut down, have long been seen as a natural home for prediction markets. They are one of the use cases Ethereum architect Vitalik Buterin described in his 2014 white paper for what would become the second-largest blockchain. (As a teenager, Coplan bought into the Ethereum crowdsale; a decade later, Buterin invested in Polymarket.)The modern-day prediction markets Hanson inspired can be viewed on a spectrum. On one end there's the model used by Augur, one of the first projects built on Ethereum."One of the advantages is that it's 100% decentralized," said Joey Krug, who co-founded Augur in 2015. "If you're building it, you're effectively writing code. It's effectively free speech, assuming you're not taking a fee for yourself, and it's also pretty flexible in the sense that anyone can kind of create a market on anything."But as crypto veterans know all too well, decentralization requires trade-offs.Best of both worlds?"It's really hard to market if you're building something decentralized," said Krug, who is now a partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and led its investment in Polymarket's $45 million Series B round.(For whatever it's worth: Thiel was an early investor in Bullish, two years before that company acquired CoinDesk. Bullish has not disclosed a cap table since 2021, and CoinDesk journalists do not know the current roster of investors in its parent.)"The whole point is that you don't want to take on the regulatory version of being this central operator that does everything," Krug said. "And so you don't really market it. … You don't do all this stuff that you need to do to actually get usage."Consequently, Augur had very little. (In fairness, Polymarket benefits from Ethereum infrastructure that wasn't around when Augur debuted).On the "very centralized" end of the continuum, there's Kalshi. Founded in 2018, the startup boasts about its status as the first (and, until recently, only) regulated prediction market platform in the U.S.This route has its own disadvantages. In 2023, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission denied Kalshi's application to list election-related contracts, and the company spent most of this year fighting the regulator in court for the right to do so – while watching Polymarket enjoy the volume and publicity from political betting fever. Only after an appeals court upheld a ruling in its favor in early October, a month before the election, was Kalshi cleared to list political contracts.Polymarket is in the middle of the spectrum. In some ways, it's decentralized. It uses smart contracts on a blockchain (Polygon, a layer-two, or auxiliary network, to Ethereum) and doesn't custody users' funds. Bets are denominated in USDC, a stablecoin that trades 1:1 for dollars. Early on, an internal... Read more

There are many in the Web3 space who have only recently jumped into AI. Illia Polosukhin isn’t one of them. Long before he co-founded the decentralized app blockchain protocol NEAR, Polosukhin worked at Google as an AI researcher and co-wrote the seminal 2017 paper “Attention is All you Need,” which is widely credited as pioneering the “transformer” technology that powers popular large language model (LLMs) AI apps such as ChatGPT. His AI credentials are impeccable.“AI is a really powerful force,” Polosukhin told me in 2023, “but what we don't want is it to be controlled and biased by a single company.” So now Polosukhin is marrying his original love (AI) with NEAR’s mission of decentralization, working to create an entire ecosystem for decentralized AI, from compute to training to agents.At NEAR’s recent [Redacted] conference in Bangkok, there were literal signs everywhere showing just how seriously Polosukhin is taking this: “AI is NEAR.”This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.... Read more

The relentless efforts by Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley and chief investment officer Matt Hougan’s to bring institutional money into crypto for the past seven years finally paid off when spot ETFs for both bitcoin and ether were approved by the SEC earlier this year. The digital asset manager launched funds for both, taking its assets under management to north of $10 billion, and a third ETF for Solana may be in the offing soon as well. But their efforts in the crypto space go much further than that, as the two regularly share insights with their sizable social media followings about their work, pushing the narrative that large banks, multi-family offices and other highly relevant institutional investors are “working to open up access to Bitcoin.” When it came to which U.S. presidential candidate they thought would be better for crypto, Horsley and Hougan continued to stay laser-focused on crypto, saying that the industry would win no matter who took office in January. Following Trump’s victory, however, Hougan declared that we are now entering the “Golden Age of Crypto.”This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.... Read more

Under Fred Thiel's leadership, MARA Holdings (MARA) — previously known as Marathon Digital Holdings — has become not only one of the largest bitcoin miners in the world but also the second-largest corporate owner of bitcoin, with about $3.9 billion worth on its balance sheet.Thiel joined the mining company in 2018 as a director and was appointed CEO in 2021. Since then, he has navigated through the bull market of 2021 and the subsequent brutal crypto winter. His company has been focused on a bitcoin-centric business model, while other miners had to pivot to artificial intelligence-related computing as the industry faced reduced margins following the recent bitcoin halving event.Under Thiel, MARA went all-in on bitcoin by becoming the first miner to follow MicroStrategy executive chairman Michael Saylor’s lead and buy large amounts of the digital asset on the spot market. The company was even able to successfully raise $1 billion recently to buy more bitcoin, making Thiel perhaps the Michael Saylor of the bitcoin mining industry.... Read more

Howard Lutnick's firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, is a prominent Wall Street bond broker and a member of an exclusive club: It's a primary dealer that gets to trade directly with the Federal Reserve. So when Lutnick — Tether's U.S. Treasuries dealer — said this year that Tether actually has the money it says is backing its huge USDT stablecoin, that put a final nail in the coffin of conspiracy theories claiming otherwise.Lutnick's other source of influence is being a supporter of crypto — well, he's specific: just bitcoin and stablecoins — in close orbit around President-elect Donald Trump, serving now as co-chair of Trump's transition team and a nominee to run the Commerce Department. It's not clear how responsible Lutnick was for Trump's turnaround on crypto (going from somewhat opposed during his first presidency to full embrace on the campaign trail this year), but if Lutnick whispered the “pro” argument in Trump’s ear, it couldn't have hurt.This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.... Read more

As (literally) a thousand DePIN projects bloomed in 2024, they could thank one decentralized physical infrastructure network in particular for showing the way: Helium. The original DePIN (before DePIN was a word), Helium was started by Amir Haleem, Shawn Fanning, and Sean Carey all the way back in 2013. It took until 2019 for the team to deploy IoT hotspots, allowing users to share wireless coverage and earn tokens.Of course, it’s harder to deploy hardware to people’s homes than it is to issue a memecoin on Pump.Fun. And as chief operating officer at Helium for the last seven years, Frank Mong has seen the struggle to deploy hardware up close. There are now more than 350,000 Helium hotspots deployed in 80-some countries.“You have hurdles of building physical products and that's everything from structures to electronics," Mong said. "And those take time. And I think in the early days of Helium, at least for me, seven plus years ago, I recall that even when we do build a network, it takes time for things to be built physically to use that network.”Mong says it’s “very gratifying” to see so many DePINs come to life this year (1,300 is one estimate). “We’re seeing new companies come out this year in 2024 with all kinds of ideas and use cases for Helium's economic model to really power through real-life physical infrastructure. It is quite amazing to see,” he said.Mong particularly likes mapping as a DePIN category and recommends that people watch Hivemapper.Helium Mobile has 100,000 subscribers and the company is making money by onboarding customers from regular mobile providers, acting as an extra network inside buildings in cities like New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. Helium launched on its own blockchain before switching to Solana in 2023.Mong hails from the Tenderloin in Downtown San Francisco, which he calls “the slums of the city.”Helium continues to deploy at a lightning rate. In Portugal, its hotspots form parts of smart cities and smart utilities. U.S. Pacific Gas and Electric is using Helium for wildfire detection, and the U.S. Geological Survey uses the network for flood detection in Madison, Wisconsin. Nova Labs (the company that created the open-source tech) also has a beta test underway with Telefonica in Mexico to provide hotspots in certain neighborhoods, showing how Helium, and DePIN, is increasingly becoming part of real infrastructure.Mong says it’s a long road, but worth the struggle. “The initial part is taking that leap. You have to just jump off the cliff and believe that you're going to land safely. That's probably the hardest part. Once you do it, the journey is amazing,” he said.“Just realize that it's going to take a long time. Physical products take time to iterate and you have to have the patience to enjoy the journey.”Looking forward to 2025, he adds: “I hope that the innovation of crypto software continues to thrive and continues to grow. Along the way, I hope responsible actors show up and come to a table with real useful products and services for consumers.” This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.... Read more

As (literally) a thousand DePIN projects bloomed in 2024, they could thank one decentralized physical infrastructure network in particular for showing the way: Helium. The original DePIN (before DePIN was a word), Helium was started by Amir Haleem, Shawn Fanning, and Sean Carey all the way back in 2013. It took until 2019 for the team to deploy IoT hotspots, allowing users to share wireless coverage and earn tokens.Of course, it’s harder to deploy hardware to people’s homes than it is to issue a memecoin on Pump.Fun. And as chief operating officer at Helium for the last seven years, Frank Mong has seen the struggle to deploy hardware up close. There are now more than 350,000 Helium hotspots deployed in 80-some countries.“You have hurdles of building physical products and that's everything from structures to electronics," Mong said. "And those take time. And I think in the early days of Helium, at least for me, seven plus years ago, I recall that even when we do build a network, it takes time for things to be built physically to use that network.”Mong says it’s “very gratifying” to see so many DePINs come to life this year (1,300 is one estimate). “We’re seeing new companies come out this year in 2024 with all kinds of ideas and use cases for Helium's economic model to really power through real-life physical infrastructure. It is quite amazing to see,” he said.Mong particularly likes mapping as a DePIN category and recommends that people watch Hivemapper.Helium Mobile has 100,000 subscribers and the company is making money by onboarding customers from regular mobile providers, acting as an extra network inside buildings in cities like New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. Helium launched on its own blockchain before switching to Solana in 2023.Mong hails from the Tenderloin in Downtown San Francisco, which he calls “the slums of the city.”Helium continues to deploy at a lightning rate. In Portugal, its hotspots form parts of smart cities and smart utilities. U.S. Pacific Gas and Electric is using Helium for wildfire detection, and the U.S. Geological Survey uses the network for flood detection in Madison, Wisconsin. Nova Labs (the company that created the open-source tech) also has a beta test underway with Telefonica in Mexico to provide hotspots in certain neighborhoods, showing how Helium, and DePIN, is increasingly becoming part of real infrastructure.Mong says it’s a long road, but worth the struggle. “The initial part is taking that leap. You have to just jump off the cliff and believe that you're going to land safely. That's probably the hardest part. Once you do it, the journey is amazing,” he said.“Just realize that it's going to take a long time. Physical products take time to iterate and you have to have the patience to enjoy the journey.”Looking forward to 2025, he adds: “I hope that the innovation of crypto software continues to thrive and continues to grow. Along the way, I hope responsible actors show up and come to a table with real useful products and services for consumers.” This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.... Read more

Here's the new political calculus for a U.S. congressional candidate: You nod to crypto and say you're on the pro-innovation side, and chances are, a million dollars (or more) could drop from the sky to pay for TV spots that highlight your strengths or pillory your opponent.In any of hundreds of lesser known districts of the House of Representatives, a few hundred thousand dollars tends to make or break a candidate. When the leading crypto-driven political action committee notices you, a massive influx of cash can pave your way straight to Congress. The Fairshake super PAC isn't subtle. It's nuclear. For a relatively small industry, Fairshake is the biggest corporate money player in U.S. politics. And it's not close to hanging up its hat as the Nov. 5 elections recede into the past. The main PAC and its two affiliate cousins spent some $139 million on the 2024 elections. Just Congress, mind you, not the presidential showdown. What the crypto sector wants is legislation, and Fairshake is all about securing the most expedient path toward the right number of supporters on Capitol Hill.It's got about $30 million left from this cycle. And its top industry benefactors have committed to another $73 million. Before the 2026 cycle even begins, this super PAC is already dominating the field with $103 million.Thanks to current U.S. election rules, corporate interests can spend unlimited amounts to support or oppose campaigns, as long as they do so through "independent expenditures" that purchase advertising without coordinating with the campaigns they're helping. Fairshake aimed to take full advantage of that with a simple goal. According to its primary spokesman, Josh Vlasto, the goal was to "support candidates who supported this industry and wanted to work across the aisle to advance responsible regulation," he told CoinDesk in an interview.They set out to show Washington that crypto was now "really focused on building a professional political operation that was going to be very well resourced and effective." Into 2026So what can we still expect from what may be the most influential, issue-driven political force in the U.S.? A close look at 2024 probably tells you all you need to know about what's still to come.Coinbase, Ripple Labs and crypto investment firm a16z raised Fairshake from the ashes of the industry's most recent campaign machinery, tapping at least two people involved in running a previous version. But, in contrast to the customary radical-transparency vibe the industry is proud of, Fairshake's origin story is a no-go for the involved companies. They won't talk about how Fairshake was formed and who hired whom. They won't discuss the ongoing relationship between the heavy donors and the PAC management."We have consultants and advisors on both sides of the aisle," said Vlasto, the person who most often does the talking for Fairshake. "We also take input from our supporters, you know, which represent real industry leaders from the crypto and blockchain sector."While the activity of the organization is publicly disclosed, as the rules require, and the broad strategy of Fairshake is clear, the nuts and bolts are off-limits."I'm not getting into the sort of day-to-day," Vlasto said. "All I can speak to is sort of the outcome of it. And the outcome is a very successful election cycle."The industry had a profoundly tarnished reputation to build on, because disgraced FTX frontman Sam Bankman-Fried was the leading driver of crypto's campaign contributions in the last congressional election. One in three members of Congress were funded by he and other FTX executives under his watch, though the dollar amounts paled in comparison to what the industry spent this time. Still, all those members were forced to figure out how to deal with the tainted contributions after the company imploded in a cloud of fraud.That's nothing Vlasto can speak to, he insists, because Fairshake is an entirely new effort with "really the crème de la crème and the blue chip companies across crypto and blockchain."And, while they were erecting their political siege engine, Coinbase also propped up an advocacy organization called Stand With Crypto meant to rally the troops. It was billed as "crypto’s first true grassroots movement," despite its origin as a corporate-funded project in which Coinbase initially handled its public relations and staffed its events.It features Fairshake's company-led effort on its website, but it also raises money for its own activities, such as running events and maintaining a database evaluating politicians' crypto support. The organization says it's so far taken in $2.8 million, though its supporter list indicates $2.3 million of that is from companies Exodus and Moonpay.Stand With Crypto signed up almost 2 million online supporters. That large number of digital assets enthusiasts is often touted as evidence of a groundswell in public support.From political pariah to belle-of-the-ball in less than two years, the crypto industry learned in 2024 that aggressive tactics and a whole lot of money were the answer to overcoming reputational damage.Influencing the agendaThis current congressional session provided Fairshake a live-fire exercise in influence. Instead of a theoretical idea of what crypto legislation future members of Congress may be willing to support, Fairshake got to make a more urgent case with its outsized war chest.Two highly significant crypto test cases made a splash in Congress earlier this year.First — and most notably — the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21) was Representative Patrick McHenry's effort to move a wide-reaching set of standards to regulate the U.S. crypto markets from top to bottom.The other was a campaign to permanently erase a Securities and Exchange Commission crypto accounting policy in which the agency sought to make public companies hold their customers' digital assets on their own balance sheets. It effectively forced banks to maintain capital against those assets — a cost-prohibitive demand that contributed to U.S. bankers shying away from crypto.Both matters came up for votes. FIT21 was shepherded personally by McHenry, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who hoped the bill could be his swan song as he leaves the Hill at the end of the year. The Republican legislation became the first significant crypto measure to clear the committee and win passage by the House, pulling in a massive 71-vote block of Democrats and demonstrating that there's a wide bipartisan cooperation available on digital assets legislation.And it provided the simplest litmus test possible for the industry to know which House lawmakers were worthy of crypto cash. At the time the bill was on the House floor, the existence of Fairshake's campaign muscle had already been noisily demonstrated when it spent about $10 million to throttle the Senate hopes of Representative Katie Porter, a crypto skeptic in California. The lawmakers who voted on FIT21 were well aware that the new player in campaign finance was watching and stood very willing to spend millions to bolster friends and defeat enemies.Even before it spent millions to ensure more allies in the 2025 session of Congress, Fairshake was already influencing policy. The SEC's controversial accounting rule — known as Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 121, or SAB 121 — came up for a vote in the Senate as lobbyists sought to reverse the SEC's position. That vote was made possible after the Government Accountability Office said the regulator mishandled the policy by trying to tuck it into staff guidance rather than treating it as a full-blown rule. Lawmakers sought to toss it out under the Congressional Review Act, and both the House and Senate passed the effort. Most notably, the 60-38 Senate vote showed a significant number of Democrats bucking their leadership to join. It forced President Joe Biden to make good on a veto threat, meaning the policy remained intact at the SEC despite Congress' wishes.Still, it gave Fairshake and the crypto industry a list of which sitting senators were on the side of this financial technology."The broad strategy was to pick races where ultimately someone who was pro-crypto, pro-blockchain, pro-innovation would come out on top and win the scene," Vlasto said.During the primaries, the PAC often deployed money in big bursts, sometimes dumping more than $1 million into a relatively obscure campaign where that kind of money could drown out opposition. On social media, high-profile Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterized the spending as "insane sums." At first, much of it was based on relatively flimsy evidence of crypto support on candidate websites, but with incumbent lawmakers, their recent voting record made for harder targets.In the Democrat-dominated congressional district that covers Westchester County and part of the Bronx in New York, incumbent Representative Jamaal Bowman has opposed both of the big crypto efforts. Fairshake dropped more than $2 million in negative ads against him in that race, and Bowman was easily defeated in the primary.When it came to lining up the congressional races it would support, the group was also very careful to balance its choices between the two major parties, often angering both. In the end, it backed about the same from each, though its two marquee efforts devoted tens... Read more