A consortium supported by a who’s who of the payments, banking, and crypto industries has launched a new stablecoin, Open USD. The reserve-backed stablecoin is the brainchild of Zach Abrams, founding CEO of Open Standard and co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, which was bought by payment processing firm Stripe in 2024. “Existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to use them at scale, businesses need something that’s open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests,” Abrams said in a statement. Open Standard’s founding users include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Western Union, Blackrock, Standard Chartered, Google, IBM, Coinbase, OKX, Solana, Ripple, and Aave among more than 140 companies.…
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Sam Bankman-Fried Political Donations Were Hardly ‘Bi-Partisan’
Dems got 99.5% of disgraced dough, but GOP got plenty from other FTXers
One of the weird little elements to the Sam Bankman-Fried debacle —and there are so many, and we journalists are quite grateful for them — has been the determined way the media has tried to make his political donations appear bi-partisan. “The FTX scandal is prompting lawmakers from both parties,” wrote Politico, “to symbolically give up campaign contributions from the crypto exchange’s top executives, underscoring the firm’s political toxicity in the aftermath of its collapse.” “[Sam] Bankman-Fried, 30, and his younger brother Gabriel donated lavishly to members of both political parties,” the New York Post noted. In fact, SBF was the seventh largest donor of the entire 2022 cycle, according…
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With $8.7 trillion in its piggy bank, BlackRock's "dabble" could be everyone else's "jump in head first" (Photo: Twitter)‘We’ve started to dabble in’ Bitcoin: BlackRock’s Rick Rieder
The chief investment officer at the world’s largest asset manager said Bitcoin is appreciating in reaction to investors looking to protect themselves from inflation
Speaking of Bitcoin in an interview Feb. 17, he said that "the volatility of it is extraordinary, but listen, people are looking for storehouses of value... My sense is the technology has evolved and the regulation has evolved to the point where a number of people find it should be part of the portfolio, so that’s what’s driving the price up.”
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$8.7T BlackRock jumps into bitcoin as JPMorgan analysts say beware
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, opened up to using bitcoin futures as a hedge a day before JPMorgan analysts called BTC ‘the least reliable hedge’
BlackRock revealed in Jan. 20 filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that its BlackRock Funds V and BlackRock Global Allocation Fund have added bitcoin futures to their eligible investments, both for speculation and hedging.
