Type of business | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Headquarters | New York, NY, U.S. |
Area served | Worldwide |
Founder(s) | Shakil Khan |
Editor | Marc Hochstein |
Industry | Digital currency |
Parent |
|
URL | coindesk.com |
Launched | May 2013 |
CoinDesk is a news site specializing in bitcoin and digital currencies. Founded by Shakil Khan, the firm also provides guides to bitcoin for those new to digital currencies. [1]
Seven years after being acquired by Digital Currency Group, it was purchased in November 2023 by Bullish. [2]
CoinDesk was founded by entrepreneur Shakil Khan and began publishing in May 2013. [3] Khan is also an investor in BitPay, [4] a bitcoin payment processor.
At the start of 2016, CoinDesk was acquired by Digital Currency Group for an estimated US$500,000–600,000. [5] The next year, in 2017, the company acquired blockchain data and research platform Lawnmower. [6] In 2021 the company acquired cryptocurrency data analytics firm TradeBlock. [7]
In December 2017, CoinDesk established CoinDesk Korea in collaboration with the 22nd Century Media Co., subsidiary of Hankyoreh Co., Ltd. to provide blockchain news service in South Korea. [8] [ non-primary source needed ]
In November 2022, CoinDesk reported that FTX's partner firm Alameda Research held a significant portion of its assets in FTX's native token FTT. The news led to a bank run and liquidity crisis at FTX, culminating in FTX filing for bankruptcy protection. [9] [10] [11]
In November 2023, CoinDesk was acquired by Bullish Global, run by Tom Farley, a former New York Stock Exchange president. It operates a cryptocurrency exchange. [12] [13] [14]
CoinDesk TV is an online video channel which produce live news program everyday. The channel produces daily and weekly shows including "First Mover", "The Hash", "All About Bitcoin", "Word On The Block" and so on. [15]
Consensus is CoinDesk's annual crypto summit. It started in 2015. It has been held in New York City from 2017 to 2019, [16] [17] virtually in 2020 and 2021, and in Austin, Texas since 2022. [18]
The CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index (CoinDesk BPI) was launched in September 2013. [19] The Bitcoin Price Index is an average of bitcoin prices across bitcoin exchanges, and began by using price data from Bitstamp, BTC-e and CampBX. Although Mt. Gox data was not used initially, due to withdrawal concerns for US customers, [20] in November 2013, Mt. Gox was added to the BPI due to "a reduction in the risk premium and the option of additional deposit/withdrawal methods". [21] The Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange was eventually removed from the index in February 2014 after its "persistent failure to meet the index's standards for inclusion". [22]
The index was restored to an average of three exchanges in March 2014 with the inclusion of Bitfinex price data, according to CoinDesk: "Since the decline of Mt. Gox, we have observed that Bitfinex has been able to sustain a dramatic increase in its share of the total volume of U.S. dollar-denominated bitcoins traded". [23] [ needs update ]
Publications which have referenced the Bitcoin Price Index data or price include the BBC, [24] The Wall Street Journal , [25] Reuters, [26] The New York Times , [27] CNBC, [28] and Bloomberg News. [29]
In February 2014, CoinDesk released its first 'State of Bitcoin' report. The aim of the report is: to provide an overview of key cryptocurrency trends, challenges, and opportunities, while also highlighting the most important developments over the last year. [30] A follow-up report in Q2 2014 highlighted that venture capital investment in bitcoin companies was up 28 percent compared to the previous quarter, [31] and that VC investment was pouring into European Bitcoin startups. [32]
A cryptocurrency exchange, or a digital currency exchange (DCE), is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. Exchanges may accept credit card payments, wire transfers or other forms of payment in exchange for digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency exchange can be a market maker that typically takes the bid–ask spreads as a transaction commission for its service or, as a matching platform, simply charges fees.
Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Nodes in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network verify transactions through cryptography and record them in a public distributed ledger, called a blockchain, without central oversight. Consensus between nodes is achieved using a computationally intensive process based on proof of work, called mining, that secures the bitcoin blockchain. Mining consumes large quantities of electricity and has been criticized for its environmental impact.
A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. It has, from a financial point of view, grown to be its own asset class. However, on the contrary to other asset classes like equities or commodities, sectors have not been officially defined as of yet, though abstract versions of them exist.
The Bitcoin Foundation is an American organization that was formerly a nonprofit corporation. It was founded in September 2012 in an effort to restore the reputation of Bitcoin after several scandals, and to try to promote its development and uptake. The organization is modeled on the Linux Foundation and was funded mainly through grants made by for-profit companies that depend on the bitcoin technology.
Mt. Gox was a bitcoin exchange based in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Launched in 2010, it was handling over 70% of all bitcoin (BTC) buys/sells worldwide by early 2014, when it abruptly ceased operations amid revelations of its involvement in the loss/theft of hundreds of thousands of bitcoins, then worth hundreds of millions in US dollars.
Bitstamp is a European cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2011. It is the world’s longest-running cryptocurrency exchange. It allows trading between fiat currency, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, such as the U.S. dollar, the euro, the pound sterling, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Algorand, Stellar, and USD Coin. Business operations are conducted from its registered headquarters in Luxembourg City, with a satellite office in Ljubljana.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities. Originally designed as a medium of exchange, Bitcoin is now primarily regarded as a store of value. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline. From the mid-2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.
Stellar, or Stellar Lumens, is an open-source, decentralized protocol for digital currency to fiat money low-cost transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. The Stellar protocol is supported by a Delaware nonprofit corporation, the Stellar Development Foundation, though this organization does not enjoy 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS.
Roger Keith Ver is an early investor in Bitcoin, Bitcoin-related startups and an early promoter of Bitcoin, and sometimes known as Bitcoin Jesus. He now primarily promotes Bitcoin Cash as Ver sees it as fulfilling the intended and original purpose of the "Bitcoin White Paper", first published in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, in which Nakamoto referred to Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
BTC-e was a cryptocurrency trading platform primarily serving the Russian market, with servers located in the United States. The U.S. government seized their website and funds in 2017. It was founded in July 2011 by Alexander Vinnik and Aleksandr Bilyuchenko, and as of February 2015 handled around 3% of all Bitcoin exchange volume. The platform was eventually taken over by Russian Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, and funds from BTC-e were used for the war in Donbass, under the control of the FSB.
Kraken is a United States–based cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2011. It was one of the first bitcoin exchanges to be listed on Bloomberg Terminal and was valued at US$3 billion in January 2024. The company has been the subject of several regulatory investigations since 2018, and has agreed to cumulative fines of over $30 million.
Digital Currency Group (DCG) is a venture capital company focusing on the digital currency market. It is located in Stamford, Connecticut. The company has the subsidiaries Foundry, Genesis, Grayscale Investments, and Luno. It also formerly owned CoinDesk.
Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency that is a fork of bitcoin. Launched in 2017, Bitcoin Cash is considered an altcoin or spin-off of bitcoin. In November 2018, Bitcoin Cash further split into two separate cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV).
A cryptocurrency wallet is a device, physical medium, program or an online service which stores the public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys, a cryptocurrency wallet more often offers the functionality of encrypting and/or signing information. Signing can for example result in executing a smart contract, a cryptocurrency transaction, identification, or legally signing a 'document'.
Tether is a cryptocurrency stablecoin launched by Tether Limited Inc. in 2014.
A cryptocurrency bubble is a phenomenon where the market increasingly considers the going price of cryptocurrency assets to be inflated against their hypothetical value. The history of cryptocurrency has been marked by several speculative bubbles.
Cryptocurrency and crime describe notable examples of cybercrime related to theft of cryptocurrencies and some methods or security vulnerabilities commonly exploited. Cryptojacking is a form of cybercrime specific to cryptocurrencies that have been used on websites to hijack a victim's resources and use them for hashing and mining cryptocurrency.
FTX Trading Ltd., commonly known as FTX, is a bankrupt company that formerly operated a cryptocurrency exchange and crypto hedge fund. The exchange was founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang and collapsed in 2022 after massive fraud perpetrated by Bankman-Fried and his partner Caroline Ellison forced the company to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The bankruptcy of FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, began in November 2022. The collapse of FTX, caused by a spike in customer withdrawals that exposed an $8 billion hole in FTX's accounts, served as the impetus for its bankruptcy. Prior to its collapse, FTX was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume and had over one million users.
Erik Tristan Voorhees is an American cryptocurrency entrepreneur and founder of the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift. He also co-founded Satoshi Dice and was the Director of Marketing at BitInstant. He has been referred to as a crypto-libertarian and has advocated for "the separation of money and state".