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French Hill in Key Hill Role |
Congressman French Hill will be the next chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, Punchbowl News reported Thursday. The Arkansas Republican was named to the role Thursday by the party's Steering Committee, which named the leaders of the various committees ahead of the 119th Congress's start next year. Hill will succeed North Carolina's Patrick McHenry, who will retire after 20 years in Congress and multiple terms leading Republicans on the Financial Services Committee. Hill has chaired the Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion subcommittee over the past few years and cosponsored the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), a market structure bill that much of the cryptocurrency industry hoped would become law. He's also introduced or cosponsored a number of other bills over the years addressing various aspects of the crypto world. McHenry shepherded multiple pieces of crypto legislation through the House of Representatives, including FIT21. Over the past few years, he also worked on stablecoin legislation with his counterpart, California Representative Maxine Waters, though this bill was not ultimately introduced. Waters will again lead Democrats on the House committee after being "unanimously" picked by the caucus, a Wednesday press statement said. In the statement, Waters said she was "honored that the Democratic caucus has once again put their faith in me." |
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A message from The Interchain Foundation |
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Cosmos is expanding: Skip joins the Interchain Foundation.
The Interchain Foundation has acquired Skip, one of the leading Cosmos teams, to bring their excellence in engineering, product strategy, and execution in-house and usher in an era of growth for Cosmos, and its vision for the interchain. Skip will rename to Interchain Inc. and become the ICF’s main subsidiary, concentrating product, vision, and go-to-market for the Interchain Stack and Cosmos, led by Skip co-founders Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck. This acquisition marks a departure from the ICF’s distributed product development model and starts a new growth-driven stage defined by the alignment between the Interchain Stack’s vision, and the vision for a Cosmos Hub that is at the center of the ecosystem, driving user and liquidity growth for the entirety of the Cosmos’ interchain ecosystem. |
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Activist Investor Builds Stake in Riot |
Activist investor Starboard Value has made a large investment in bitcoin miner Riot Platforms (RIOT) and is pushing for changes in the company's business model, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Starboard has been pushing Riot to convert some of its bitcoin mining sites into data centers that can host machines to enable high-performance computing (HPC) for big tech companies, according to the story. Riot is currently a "pure-play" bitcoin miner that gets its revenue only from mining bitcoin, as opposed to some other peers, such as Core Scientific (CORZ), which has dedicated a significant amount of its facilities to HPC and artificial intelligence computing. “Riot regularly speaks with our shareholders and values their feedback," a spokesperson for the firm told CoinDesk in an emailed statement. "We have engaged with Starboard on multiple occasions and welcome their input on the company. We are committed to creating value for all shareholders, and we look forward to constructive dialogue with Starboard on ways to achieve this shared goal."
For many years, publicly traded mining companies were considered one of the main ways for institutional investors to get exposure to bitcoin. This was good for their stock prices, which soared during the 2020-21 bull market. The 2022 crypto winter, though, decimated the sector and most of the names haven't come anywhere close to recovering the previous bull market highs even though bitcoin has soared past $100,000. The industry has faced an intense profit squeeze following the bitcoin halving earlier this year (which slashed mining profitability), leading some miners to look for ways to diversify their revenue sources. Still, nothing was a game change until Core Scientific signed a multi-billion dollar deal with a hyperscaler— a firm operating large-scale data centers for cloud computing and AI. This changed the sentiment and brought large investors back into the sector.
However, some firms, including Riot, remained pure-play miners, largely ignoring the trend of turning some of their sites into HPC computing. This, in turn, led to their underperformance relative to others in the industry. Starboard's move would mark the first time a traditional activist investor is taking a position in a publicly traded miner to push them to diversify their revenue into data centers. Riot hasn't been completely opposed to this trend, as its CEO Jason Les has said that the company has been considering deals with these large tech companies. However, it hasn't announced anything so far that would suggest a potential deal is in the works, while other miners forge ahead with AI and HPC deals. |
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Bitcoin’s Pumping. Memes Are Minting Millionaires. The bear market’s snoozing, and the bull run is here.
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Solana Was Hottest Chain For Devs |
The ranks of cryptocurrency developers held steady in 2024, as some recent entrants left the industry while veterans mostly stuck around, according to a report released Thursday by Electric Capital. The total developers working in crypto worldwide was basically flat, declining a statistically insignificant 7% from a year earlier, and the number of monthly active developers went to 23,613 in November, the report said. Meanwhile, the Solana ecosystem, ground zero for the memecoin craze, was the most popular blockchain among new developers, an 83% increase in its ecosystem compared to a year earlier. In July, this community became the first since 2016 to bring on board more devs than Ethereum. Solana attracted 7,625 new developers in 2024, the most of any chain and a little over 1,000 more than Ethereum. The results underscore the challenge Ethereum faces as rival smart contract platform Solana's low fees and fast transactions attract investment and talent. According to Maria Shen, a general partner at Electric Capital, the share of developers who have worked in crypto for more than two years grew in 2024. Among those who left the industry, the largest group were relative newcomers. “These are people who effectively joined during the bear market, and haven’t really seen anything since then,” Shen told CoinDesk in an interview. The stability of the developer population is an auspicious sign, Shen said. |
Successful Trading Takes More Than a Bull Market Choosing the right exchange is crucial throughout the business cycle. This has been a very, very good month to trade in crypto. People who regularly read CoinDesk are making money just by checking their phone alerts. And yet, this environment isn’t as kind to the exchanges. Continue reading here. |
EigenLayer's Sreeram Kannan Profiled |
For a crypto founder who's attracted so much controversy, Sreeram Kannan is surprisingly sanguine. In a wide-ranging interview after his selection as one of CoinDesk’s “Most Influential” figures in crypto for 2024, the EigenLayer founder was generous with his time, chatting more than an hour beyond our scheduled slot. I was surprised at his openness because the last time we spoke, a colleague and I had just published an investigation into potential conflicts of interest at his company, Eigen Labs, and in the interim Kannan had disavowed our reporting point-by-point on a Blockworks podcast. This time, Kannan emerged in a different light. Whatever his misgivings about CoinDesk’s past coverage, they didn’t seem top-of-mind. What emerged wasn’t the portrait of a defensive tech founder, but rather that of a driven, thoughtful academic-turned-entrepreneur still adjusting to a spotlight few in this industry ever enjoy. Instead of bitterness or evasion, I found ambition, reflection and a quiet kind of excitement. Kannan seemed as astonished as anyone by how swiftly EigenLayer had transformed from a concept into one of crypto’s most talked-about experiments, telling CoinDesk that he continued to view EigenLayer as a “scrappy startup.” Over the past 12 months, EigenLayer — which allows emerging blockchain applications to borrow Ethereum’s robust security — went from a relative unknown to an industry heavyweight. The platform raised more than $100 million from venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz and, before even fully launching, drew hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits from crypto users seeking extra yield. Many were incentivized by a viral points program that investors hoped would translate into a lucrative future token airdrop. EigenLayer’s success during the bear market was striking, and Kannan may have played a larger role than any other entrepreneur in revitalizing decentralized finance on Ethereum. But not everything went according to plan. Industry critics took issue with the EIGEN token distribution plan — which locked up tokens for months and barred claimants from certain geographies — as well as the platform’s slower-than-expected feature rollout and concerns about “rehypothecation,” or the reuse of collateral for multiple purposes. In August, the CoinDesk investigation (that Kannan disputed in the podcast) raised questions about EigenLayer’s conflict-of-interest policies, which may have allowed employees preferential access to tokens powered by its platform. None of this seemed to derail Kannan’s intellectual ascent. Beyond running Eigen Labs, he still holds a position as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington, though he is currently on leave, and his theory of “restaking” — letting people reuse staked Ethereum assets to secure other networks — has sparked a wave of innovation and copycats. He’s become a familiar face on the conference circuit, where he unpacks his vision of blockchains as tools for solving humanity’s endless “coordination problems.” Blockchains, Kannan says, “are the biggest upgrade to human civilization since the U.S. Constitution.”
Read the full "Most Influential 2024" profile by Sam Kessler here. |
Takeaway: $HAWK Shows Meme Madness |
By Azeem Khan:
Haliey Welch, widely recognized as “Hawk Tuah,” transformed her fleeting viral fame into a formidable media empire. With a burgeoning social media presence (230K followers on Instagram), lucrative brand partnerships, and the successful podcast Talk Tuah, Welch appeared to be transitioning from internet personality to business mogul.
That was until the 22-year-old launched her memecoin, $HAWK. Now Hawk Tuah isn’t flying so high.
$HAWK was launched on the Solana blockchain with considerable fanfare, initially skyrocketing to a $491 million market cap. This meteoric rise was short-lived, as the coin's valuation plummeted to under $20 million, according to data from DEX Screener. The rapid decline raises questions about the project's legitimacy and the motives behind its management. A now-deleted Twitter Spaces discussion further intensified suspicions, leading to widespread allegations that $HAWK is nothing more than a “celebrity rugpull.” To understand what happened, it is first necessary to examine the structure and decision-making processes that seemed to have underpinned the $HAWK launch. Launching a memecoin might seem like a walk in the park (anyone can do it on Pump.fun). But doing it successfully is much harder. It requires capital, marketing and technical expertise alongside something good in the first place. You need teamwork.
I say this as a founder who’s been in Web3 since 2013, has raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital for projects of my own, and is a venture capitalist at a large venture fund, Foresight Ventures. (For more on how to launch a memecoin, see my other recent CoinDesk article here).
Read the rest of the op-ed here. |
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