DeFi News Today Official TheBitTimes.com

Prices of rare digital collectibles linked to the popular game Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) crashed by up to 70% on Thursday after developers pushed a surprising update. Specifically, prices of some gloves and knives, two of game’s most expensive “skins” (in-game items), plummeted on secondary marketplaces when the game’s creator, Valve Corporation, decided to allow the exchange of five relatively inexpensive “Covert items” for ultra-rare knives. The update also allowed StatTrak Covert items to be exchanged for StatTrak knives. Some of these could have fetched resale prices north of $1,000 yesterday. Moreover, the company introduced the same, 5:1 conversion rate for non-StatTrak Covert items for a regular knife or glove. This new rule similarly tanked the formerly premium prices of knives and gloves. Players recorded themselves exchanging five items worth less than $100 combined for knives that would have fetched hundreds or even thousands of dollars on Wednesday...

As of the close of trading yesterday, David Bailey’s bitcoin treasury company Nakamoto (NAKA) had lost 90% of its share price and its multiple-to-Net Asset Value (mNAV). Increasingly desperate to restore investor confidence, he swore that he was “as all in on bitcoin as you can possible [sic] be.” Bailey’s firm was supposed to somehow create a successful bitcoin treasury company of bitcoin treasury companies after Nakamoto opened for trading at $28.51 on his NASDAQ debut.  Riding the coattails of early success by Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy (MSTR) and Tether’s Twenty One (CEP), Bailey and Nakamoto hoped to take advantage of a springtime mania in the crypto treasury sector. By May 22, his stock reached an all-time high of $34.77. Read more: Trump’s BTC U-turn not about the money, says David Bailey Yesterday, those same shares closed for trading 90% lower at $3.28. KindlyMD’s stock—previously trading under the KDLY ticker and now under NAKA—has yet to di...

In an impressive rally , Bitcoin (BTC) briefly broke the $42,000 barrier on Monday, December 4, marking its highest point since April 2022.  Bolstered by a robust 20% surge over the past month, the cryptocurrency’s rally is fueled by optimism surrounding the potential approval of a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) by US regulators and expectations of Federal Reserve rate cuts in 2024.  Amidst bullish projections, with some anticipating Bitcoin surpassing $100,000 by end-2024, some retained their bearish stance on the maiden crypto asset. Notably, a prominent US stockbroker and economist warns that the current uptrend is transient, saying BTC’s “collapse will be more spectacular than its rally .” Unlike Bitcoin, “gold’s rally is real,” says Peter Schiff Peter Schiff, an American economist, financial broker, and a known gold advocate, said in a December 4 post that Bitcoin’s latest spike has been allowed by a pullback in gold’s price.  Cryptocurrency ...

Bitcoin will be just one of the risk assets which "crater" as the Federal Reserve is forced to abandon quantitative tightening in future, the ex-BitMEX CEO warns. In his latest blog post released on Jan. 19, Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of BitMEX exchange predicted a “global financial meltdown ” thanks to future United States economic woes. Hayes: Crypto will "get smoked" in Fed pivot Bitcoin’s current rally should likely not be taken as the start of a new bull run. That is the opinion of Arthur Hayes, who in a fresh treatise on U.S. macroeconomic policy this week warned that current Federal Reserve behavior would flip from restrictive to liberal, but cause cryptoassets to “get smoked.” With U.S. inflation easing, the Fed is the focus of practically every crypto analyst this year as they estimate the likelihood of a policy “pivot” away from quantitative tightening (QT) and interest rate hikes to flat and then decreasing rates, and potentially even quantitative eas...