Coinbase announces ‘nearly the entire company will shut down’ for four weeklong breaks in 2022 to allow workers to recharge

Major U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase will be giving its employees one week off each quarter in 2022 to recharge after “long days and long weeks” of intense work. In a Monday blog post, Coinbase chief people officer L.J. Brock said “nearly the entire company will shut down” for four separate weeks this year as part of an experiment in allowing workers to recuperate after completing intense workloads. Brock said the exchange’s employees aren’t necessarily limited to 40-hour work weeks and may have to “pivot at a moment’s notice,” seemingly creating…

One Day After Launch, OpenSea Competitor LooksRare Sells Over $100M in NFTs

“Each trade on LooksRare (except for private sales) incurs a platform fee of 2%, and typically a royalty fee of between 5-10%. The total LOOKS rewards for trading each day are also fixed, and distributed based on traders’ contribution to total trading volume, meaning that there’s no guarantee of the amount of rewards that a wash trader could earn in a day,” reads the documentation. Source

Market Wrap: Bitcoin and Equities Stabilize as Sentiment Improves

Bitcoin rose toward $43,000 on Tuesday and is up about 3% over the past 24 hours. Several alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) such as MATC and FTM were up about 14% over the same period, suggesting a greater appetite for risk among investors. It appears that bullish sentiment is starting to return to both crypto and equity markets, at least over the short term. Technical indicators suggest that BTC is at its most oversold level since December, which could encourage some traders to buy on the dip, although upside could be limited…

A Web 3 Company Just Bought a Stake in a TradFi Giant

This episode is sponsored by Nexo, Abra and FTX US. Download this episode On today’s episode of “The Breakdown,” NLW covers the latest news from macro and the crypto space, including: Value investing legend Bill Miller holds 50% of his net worth in bitcoin Paradigm invests in Citadel Securities’ first outside round $207 million in digital asset fund outflows last week Federal Reserve insider trading scandal PayPal considering launching a stablecoin See also: Paradigm, Sequoia to Invest $1.15B in Citadel Securities “The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with…

Traders Will Be Watching if December CPI Confirms Inflation at 4-Decade High

Bitcoin traders have been betting for years the largest cryptocurrency by market cap could serve as an effective hedge against inflation. That’s why they’ll be watching Wednesday as the U.S. Labor Department publishes its Consumer Price Index (CPI) report for December. The widely followed CPI, scheduled for release at 8:30 a.m. ET (13:30 UTC), is expected to show an acceleration in inflation, already at the highest point in 39 years, from the prior month. A faster-than-expected uptick in prices could spur the Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy aggressively over…

eToro rolls out smart portfolios for new metaverse investors

Brokerage firm eToro introduced MetaverseLife, a new smart portfolio covering stocks and crypto-assets from within the growing metaverse industry, on Tuesday. The company stated that its goal is to offer a diverse range of investments made for long-term exposure.  Currently included in the portfolio are Meta Platforms, the new parent company behind Facebook, Roblox and other blockchain-based metaverse developments like Decentraland, The Sandbox and Enjin. There are also a few companies listed in this portfolio that aren’t exclusively blockchain-based but have still contributed to metaverse adoption and development. These include…

Kevin O’Leary’s Crypto Investing Playbook

Yet, when it comes to crypto, O’Leary is an advocate for diversification. He says his largest holding today is ETH, the native currency of the Ethereum network, and he has also bought BTC, SOL, MATIC and 28 other coins. Likewise, seeing crypto exchanges as potentially lucrative, he sees a world where both decentralized and centralized exchanges can win. Source

Inside the Mnuchin Files

We FOIA’d former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s emails. Here’s what we found. You’re reading State of Crypto, a CoinDesk newsletter looking at the intersection of cryptocurrency and government. Click here to sign up for future editions. The Mnuchin files The narrative CoinDesk filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Treasury Department for former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s crypto-related emails. We received 250 pages of emails that shed light on everything from the department’s response to sanctions concerns from other nations to who advocated for central bank…

DeSo Wants Your Seed Phrase. Let Them Come and Take It

Why exactly is it so unspeakably bad to ask users to input the seed phrase from a crypto wallet into a web extension? For software wallets like Exodus or Electrum, a seed phrase is fairly analogous to the “private key” that grants direct control of a single on-chain Bitcoin account. It is generated by an automatic system, and unlike, say, a Google password, even the wallet’s developer can’t see the phrase – or reset or recover it if it’s lost. Source

175-Year-Old News Cooperative the Associated Press Plans to Launch NFT Marketplace – Blockchain Bitcoin News

On January 10, 2022, the Associated Press (AP), the American non-profit news cooperative founded in 1846, has announced the news agency is launching a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. The AP NFT market was built by the distributed ledger technology provider Xooa and on top of the Polygon blockchain network. AP Announces NFT Marketplace Launch The 175-year-old news cooperative the Associated Press revealed that the organization is launching an NFT marketplace using the Polygon blockchain network. According to the AP announcement, the NFT market built by Xooa will allow NFT collectors…