Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, has signalled dog-themed memecoin creators to bark up another tree, reports CoinDesk. From the report: In a move that captivated the attention of Crypto Twitter on Wednesday, the Ethereum founder re-gifted tokens sent to his public wallet by the creators of Shiba Inu coin (SHIB), Dogelon (ELON) and Akita Inu (AKITA). Notably, Buterin donated 50 trillion SHIB tokens (worth a nominal $1.2 billion at press time) to the India Covid Relief Fund kicked off by Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal late last month. Memecoin creators started sending large amounts of their tokens to the Ethereum figurehead in recent days. Vitalik was sent trillions of SHIB tokens worth over $8 billion dollars at one point. The knockoff tokens are beginning to tank.

An Australian computer scientist who alleges he created bitcoin has launched a London High Court lawsuit against 16 software developers in an effort to secure bitcoin worth around 4 billion pounds ($5.7 billion) he says he owns. From a report: In a case that was promptly labelled "bogus" by one defendant, Craig Wright is demanding that developers allow him to retrieve around 111,000 bitcoin held at two digital addresses that he does not have private keys for. In his second London lawsuit in three weeks, Wright alleges he lost the encrypted keys when his home computer network was hacked in February 2020. Police are investigating.

Wright, who is bringing the case through his Seychelles-based Tulip Trading firm, concedes he is a controversial figure since alleging in 2016 that he wrote the bitcoin white paper -- which first outlined the technology behind the digital assets -- under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. The claim is hotly disputed. The Australian, who is autistic and lives in Britain with his wife and two of his three children, alleges in his latest lawsuit that developers have breached their duties to act in the best interests of the rightful owner of globally-traded assets.

eBay is joining the NFT frenzy, telling Reuters today that going forward it will allow the sales of NFTs on its platform, a mainstream embrace that follows billions of dollars in NFT purchases over the past few months. TechCrunch reports: The e-commerce company seems poised to slowly build up sales of digital collectibles on the platform, starting with a smaller group of verified sellers on the platform. "In the coming months, eBay will add new capabilities that bring blockchain-driven collectibles to our platform," eBay exec Jordan Sweetnam told them. eBay has invested heavily in infrastructure for physical collectibles like trading cards, as well as items like sneakers and watches which they help verify for buyers.

This afternoon Elon Musk tweeted a special URL allowing viewers outside the U.S. to simultaenously livestream his 90-minute appearance on Saturday Night Live for the first time in more than 100 countries, starting at 11:30 p.m. EST. The A.V. Club had a sardonic reaction to the livestreaming on YouTube: Good news for anyone looking at tonight's upcoming broadcast of Saturday Night Live — in which labor-busting vaccine skeptic Elon Musk will be given a platform to broadcast his techno-dystopian brain contents to the world — and thought, "Wow, there's not enough Google involved here." Well, not anymore.
Musk has already appeared in a two promos for the show. (Though CNN quips that the tonight's live show means NBC is "relying on Musk to filter his thoughts in real time, despite little evidence, historically, of him holding back on just about anything he wants to say — even when under scrutiny by federal regulators.") And the rest of the world is getting ready too. While Tesla brought the Cybertruck prototype to its New York City store, Lucid Air made plans to broadcast an ad for its coming 500-mile-range electric car that will compete with cars from Musk's Tesla.

Meanwhile, Bleeping Computer reports that Twitter scammers have been hacking into verified Twitter accounts and changing the profiles to impersonate SNL's, then replying to Musk's tweets with URL's lead to cryptocurrency giveaway scams. "We have determined that the scammers have made at least $97,054.62 over the past two days. The Ethereum giveaway scams also earned them $13,758." And the Dogecoin scammers netted at least $42,456.

And this week Slate also noted a spike in the price of Dogecoin. The joke cryptocurrency based on a shiba inu meme is up — uh, let me check — about 20 percent since this time Tuesday, has just about doubled in price since April 27, and as of this moment is up about 26,000 percent for the year (lol). It's trading around 64 cents as I type this... [I]t's probably not worth overthinking this. We're living in the stonks era. Elon is going on a sketch comedy show and is hinting that he might bring up a dumb digital token that everyone finds inherently funny. Now CNBC is hauling on experts to illuminate what the hell is going on, and members of the financial media are having to write earnest explainers about why you should invest in the dog money with caution, as if a single sane person would think otherwise.

What makes the whole rally uniquely amusing, compared with, say, the rise of Bitcoin, is that it's a willfully dumb affront not just to traditional finance, but also to the broader crypto community — which has, shall we say, mixed feelings about Dogecoin, mostly because they think it makes their project, which they tend to treat with self-righteous seriousness, look very silly... Dogecoin is the, well, underdog of the crypto world, the currency that was looked down upon by much of the Bitcoin- and Ethereum-boosting elite. Except now it has an $82 billion market cap. The dogecoiners — basically the sweet, dumb, bong-ripping frat of the crypto world — find all this hilarious.
So what will happen tonight? Ultimately castmember Michael Che, who co-hosts the show's parody newscast segment Weekend Update, joked that while some of the show's performers objected to Musk's appearance, he saw the selection of Musk as both "polarizing" and "exciting."

"You know, what's funny is that I would say I know about 20 to 25% of the white people that get to host the show anyway. So Elon, I was like, 'Oh, I know who he is at least.'"

Share your own reactions in the comments.

Members of Reddit's WallStreetBets forum were targeted in a probable cryptocurrency scam that could have left its victims with at least $2 million in losses. Bloomberg reports: Using the Telegram messaging service, an account called "WallStreetBets - Crypto Pumps" offered users the chance to buy a new token known as WSB Finance before it was listed on crypto exchanges, in what is referred to as a pre-mine sale. The account isn't affiliated with the infamous stock message board. The account running the sale told users to send Binance Coin, known as BNB, or Ether to a cryptocurrency wallet and then to contact its "token bot" on Telegram to receive WSB Finance coins. Those coins were never delivered. A second message then went out on Telegram telling those that had already sent payment that because of a problem with the bot, they'd have to send an equal amount again or they would lose their initial investment. Now thousands of people are taking to Telegram to voice their regrets and try and track down the person or persons behind the account.

More than 3,451 Binance Coin tokens were removed Tuesday from the wallet listed in the Crypto Pumps messages, according to data from BscScan, a validator on the Binance Smart Chain, a blockchain network that runs so-called smart-contract applications. At Binance Coin's current price of $625, that comes to more than $2.1 million and doesn't account for any Ether the account may have been sent. The "WallStreetBets - Crypto Pumps" account has since been deleted from Telegram, but whoever controlled it left those waiting on their payouts with a clue as to where there funds were going: "Buying lambo now."

The biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, has announced it will close its San Francisco offices for good. SFGate reports: The company -- founded in June 2012 by former Airbnb engineer Brian Armstrong -- has had a speedy rise to the top in the nascent crypto industry, though its practices have also sometimes stoked controversy. [...] Coinbase's 1,200 employees are now decentralizing, and the company will no longer have a physical headquarters at all. The announcement on Twitter on Wednesday that the company's Market Street offices would shutter next year wasn't a total shock. A year ago, Armstrong announced the company would be "remote first" and not have a specific headquarters. Coinbase say they will instead offer some smaller offices elsewhere, but didn't give details. "Closing our SF office is an important step in ensuring no office becomes an unofficial HQ and will mean career outcomes are based on capability and output rather than location," the company said in a statement. "Instead, we will offer a network of smaller offices for our employees to work from if they choose to."

Robinhood's trading app crashed for around an hour this morning, as Dogecoin hit record highs and Ethereum continued to gain ground. The outage is reminiscent of the Robinhood-GameStop fiasco last January, where Robinhood deliberately blocked users from trading GameStop stock as it catapulted in value. The Verge reports: Robinhood ran into issues processing cryptocurrency trades this morning, during a spike in the price of Dogecoin that sent users flocking to the app. The website DownDetector shows the outage starting around 9:30AM ET and reducing in severity about an hour later. Robinhood confirmed that it experienced a "partial outage" in crypto trading and said the issues had been resolved as of 11:15AM ET. The outage was particularly noticeable since it came during a spike (and subsequent dip) in Dogecoin prices. Coins were priced at around $0.40 USD at the beginning of the day. Around 8AM ET, they spiked past $0.50 USD and reached as high as $0.60 USD near 10AM ET.

Users were quick to voice their frustrations with the app on Twitter, seeing it as a repeat of the situation that happened in January when Robinhood limited trading on buzzy, soaring stocks, including GameStop and AMC. In the app this morning, a message told users, "We are experiencing intermittent issues with crypto trading. We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible." Meanwhile, the price ticker on Dogecoin continued its rapid flip up and down.

EBay is open to the possibility of accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment in the future and is looking at ways to get non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on its platform, the company said on Monday. Reuters reports: "We are always looking at the most relevant forms of payment and will continue to assess that going forward. We have no immediate plans, but it (cryptocurrency) is something we are keeping an eye on," eBay said in a statement to Reuters. In an interview with CNBC, Chief Executive Officer Jamie Iannone said that accepting virtual currency was an option the company was looking at.

EBay, which disappointed investors with a weak second-quarter profit forecast last week, said it was looking at a "number of ways" to get into the NFT space. NFTs, a type of digital asset that exists on a blockchain, have exploded in popularity this year, with NFT artworks selling for millions of dollars and musicians such as the Kings of Leon rock group embracing them for their latest album. "We're exploring opportunities on how we can enable it (NFTs) on eBay in an easy way," Iannone said on CNBC. "Everything that's collectible has been on eBay for decades and will continue to be for the next few decades."

Bitcoin's domination of total cryptocurrency market value is declining as its next-biggest rival Ether reaches the $3,000 milestone. From a report: The rise of Ether suggests there's room for more than one winner among digital tokens as the sector evolves. Bitcoin now accounts for about 46% of total crypto market value, down from roughly 70% at the start of the year, and Ether makes up 15%, according to tracker CoinGecko. Bitcoin remains the biggest cryptocurrency but the momentum in other tokens is drawing increasing interest. Proponents argue investors are getting more comfortable with a variety of tokens, while critics contend the sector may be in the grip of a stimulus-fueled mania. Cryptocurrencies were broadly higher on Monday. Bitcoin climbed above $58,000, while Ether jumped 6% to $3,151 as of 8:17 a.m. in New York. "Ethereum is rising and not much seems to be in its way," Edward Moya, a senior market analyst at Oanda, wrote in a note Friday, adding that other tokens were also seeing "fresh interest." The current distribution of market share also reflects an April shakeout in the cryptocurrency sector. Bitcoin has yet to recover all the ground it lost after tumbling from a mid-April record of almost $64,870.

Newsweek writes: Elon Musk has hit back at a critic who claimed he pumped and dumped Bitcoin to "make a fortune" after Tesla reported first quarter earnings that surpassed market expectations... The company appears to have sold 10 percent of its Bitcoin portfolio in the first quarter, which it said had a "positive impact" of $101 million on revenues.

On Monday, Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports, called out Musk, CEO of Tesla, on the Bitcoin sale. He tweeted: "So am I understanding this correctly? Elon Musk buys Bitcoin. Then he pumps it. It goes up. Then he dumps it and makes a fortune." Musk replied: "No, you do not. I have not sold any of my Bitcoin. Tesla sold 10 percent of its holdings essentially to prove liquidity of Bitcoin as an alternative to holding cash on balance sheet."

In a transcript of the Q1 2021 earnings call posted by the Motley Fool, Tesla CFO Zachary Kirkhorn said the company intends to hold its Bitcoin investment long-term and called it "a good place to place some of our cash that's not immediately being used for daily operations".

Bitcoin was worth roughly $40,000 in early February at the time Tesla's $1.5 billion investment was reported.

CNN writes: Bitcoin prices continued their rebound Saturday, rising about 6% to nearly $58,000. But the world's largest cryptocurrency has been overshadowed lately by its younger sibling, Ethereum.

Ethereum, or ether for short, hit a new record high Saturday of just over $2,900. Ether prices have nearly quadrupled in 2021, soaring 290%. Bitcoin has had a great run too this year, doubling in value.

The total value of all Ethereum in circulation is now about $333 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. Bitcoin's market value is nearly $1.1 trillion. While there are thousands of cryptocurrencies — including the Elon Musk tweet-fueled Dogecoin — Bitcoin and ether account for nearly two-thirds of the entire $2.2 trillion global crypto market...

Ethereum has enjoyed an even bigger surge than Bitcoin because it is the cryptocurrency of choice for the purchases of many non-fungible tokens, or NFTs — which have taken the art and broader collectibles world by storm.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The IRS is looking for help to break into cryptocurrency hardware wallets, according to a document posted on the agency website in March of this year. Many cryptocurrency investors store their cryptographic keys, which confer ownership of their funds, with the exchange they use to transact or on a personal device. Some folks, however, want a little more security and use hardware wallets -- small physical drives which store a user's keys securely, unconnected to the internet. The law enforcement arm of the tax agency, IRS Criminal Investigation, and more specifically its Digital Forensic Unit, is now asking contractors to come up with solutions to hack into cryptowallets that could be of interest in investigations, the document states.

"The decentralization and anonymity provided by cryptocurrencies has fostered an environment for the storage and exchange of something of value, outside of the traditional purview of law enforcement and regulatory organizations," the document reads. "There is a portion of this cryptographic puzzle that continues to elude organizations -- millions, perhaps even billions of dollars, exist within cryptowallets." The security of hardware wallets presents a problem for investigators. The document states that agencies may be in possession of a hardware wallet as part of a case, but may not be able to access it if the suspect does not comply. This means that authorities cannot effectively "investigate the movement of currencies" and it may "prevent the forfeiture and recovery" of the funds. "The explicit outcome of this contract is to tame the cybersecurity research into measured, repeatable, consistent digital forensics processes that can be trained and followed in a digital forensics' laboratory," the document says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: For a decade, Bitcoin Fog has offered to obscure the source and destination of its customers' cryptocurrency, making it one of the most venerable institutions in the dark web economy. Now the IRS says it has finally identified the Russian-Swedish administrator behind that long-running anonymizing system and charged him with laundering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins, much of which was sent to or from dark web drug markets. What gave him away? The trail of his own decade-old digital transactions.

US authorities on Tuesday arrested Roman Sterlingov in Los Angeles, according to court records, and charged him with laundering more than 1.2 million bitcoins -- worth $336 million at the times of the payments -- over the 10 years that he allegedly ran Bitcoin Fog. According to the IRS criminal investigations division, Sterlingov, a citizen of Russia and Sweden, allowed users to blend their transactions with those of others to prevent anyone examining the Bitcoin blockchain from tracing any individual's payments. He took commissions on those transactions of 2 to 2.5 percent. In total, the IRS calculates, Sterlingov allegedly took home roughly $8 million worth of bitcoin through the service, based on exchange rates at the times of each transaction. That's before factoring in Bitcoin's massive appreciation over the past decade. Ironically, it appears that the 2011 transactions Sterlingov allegedly used to set up Bitcoin Fog's server hosting are what put the IRS on his trail. Of the $336 million the complaint accuses Bitcoin Fog of laundering, at least $78 million passed through the service to various narcotics-selling dark web markets like the Silk Road, Agora, and AlphaBay over the years that followed. The IRS also appears to have used undercover agents in 2019 to transact with Bitcoin Fog, in one case sending messages to Bitcoin Fog's administrator that explicitly stated that they hoped to launder proceeds from selling ecstasy. Bitcoin Fog completed that user's transactions without a response.

Most remarkable, however, is the IRS's account of tracking down Sterlingov using the very same sort of blockchain analysis that his own service was meant to defeat. The complaint outlines how Sterlingov allegedly paid for the server hosting of Bitcoin Fog at one point in 2011 using the now-defunct digital currency Liberty Reserve. It goes on to show the blockchain evidence that identifies Sterlingov's purchase of that Liberty Reserve currency with bitcoins: He first exchanged euros for the bitcoins on the early cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox, then moved those bitcoins through several subsequent addresses, and finally traded them on another currency exchange for the Liberty Reserve funds he'd use to set up Bitcoin Fog's domain. Based on tracing those financial transactions, the IRS says, it then identified Mt. Gox accounts that used Sterlingov's home address and phone number, and even a Google account that included a Russian-language document on its Google Drive offering instructions for how to obscure Bitcoin payments. That document described exactly the steps Sterlingov allegedly took to buy the Liberty Reserve funds he'd used.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A second cryptocurrency exchange has collapsed in Turkey amid a crackdown on the industry. The platform, Vebitcoin, said in a brief statement on its website that it has ceased all activities after facing financial strain and that it would update clients on the situation as soon as possible. Days earlier, Thodex, went offline with its CEO reportedly leaving the country. Local media reports say Thodex founder Faruk Fatih Ozer flew to Albania, taking $2 billion of investors' funds with him. Turkey has issued an international arrest warrant for Ozer, while 62 people were detained in connection with complaints filed against Thodex.

Turkish authorities have blocked Vebitcoin's domestic bank accounts and detained four people as part of a probe into the exchange, Reuters reported Saturday. According to CoinGecko data, Vebitcoin had almost $60 million in daily trading volumes prior to its collapse. Some Turks have turned to crypto as a way to protect their savings from skyrocketing inflation and the weakening of its currency, the lira. But there have been growing calls for regulation of the market due to concerns around fraudulent activity. Earlier this month, Turkey's central bank banned the use of digital assets for payments. And President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for swift regulation, warning of pyramid schemes emerging in the crypto markets.

An anonymous reader writes: A ransomware gang is threatening to leak sensitive police files that may expose police investigations and informants unless the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia agrees to pay a ransom demand. A group that emerged this year called Babuk claimed responsibility for the leak. Babuk is known for ransomware attacks, which hold victims' data hostage until they pay a ransom, often in Bitcoin. The group also hit the Houston Rockets N.B.A. team this month.

In their post to the dark web, Babuk's cybercriminals claimed they had downloaded 250 gigabytes of data and threatened to leak it if their ransom demands were not met in three days. They also threatened to release information about police informants to criminal gangs, and to continue attacking "the state sector," including the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The information already released appeared to include chief's reports, lists of arrests and lists of persons of interest.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Jalopnik: On Monday after the close of business, Tesla announced its Q1 2021 financial results in its quarterly earnings call. The company turned a surprisingly large profit this quarter, but it didn't do it by selling cars. Q1 net profit reached a new record for Tesla, at $438 million. Revenue for the electric car company was up massively to $10.39 billion. Unfortunately, all of that profit is accounted for in the company selling $518 million in regulatory credits, and $101 million was found in buying and then later selling Bitcoin. That second point is particularly interesting, as Tesla purchased $1.5 billion worth of BTC, announced that the company would begin accepting BTC as payment for its cars, which drove up the value of BTC, then sold enough BTC to make a hundred million in profit.

Without the $619 million in credits and BTC sales, Tesla would have actually managed to lose $181 million in Q1. In that time, the company shifted 184,800 3/Y units, and while it didn't build a single X or S in Q1, it sold 2020 units from previously-built inventory. That means the company lost around $970 per car sold in Q1. The company has indicated it expects to see a 50 percent growth in 2021 year-over-year, which implies at least 750,000 vehicles shipped out to customers this year. Musk was later reported to have said he believes the Model Y will be the best selling vehicle in the world next year "more likely than not." Which would mean something like 1.5 million Model Ys sold in 2022. I'm inclined to doubt such a claim.

CNBC writes: A copyright lawsuit brought by Craig Wright — the man who has claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the creator of bitcoin — could finally put to bed the years-long mystery over who actually invented the multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency. That's because the success of the lawsuit would likely depend on Wright proving that he did, in fact, author the white paper that originally laid out the technology behind bitcoin. And the case could force the U.K. court to weigh in on whether or not Wright is the actual inventor of bitcoin, according to Reuters.

And in fact, Wright says he has evidence that can prove he is the author of the white paper.

London's High Court ruled on Thursday that Wright, the Australian computer scientist who first said in 2016 that he created bitcoin eight years earlier, could serve his copyright lawsuit against the anonymous operator and publisher of the website bitcoin.org, according to Reuters. Wright's lawsuit accuses bitcoin.org of copyright infringement for displaying a copy of the infamous bitcoin white paper, which he claims he wrote in 2008 outlining what bitcoin is and how it works. He's asking the court to force bitcoin.org to remove the white paper from the website.

Bitcoin.org has refused to remove the white paper from the website, and posted a statement in January saying Wright's "claims are without merit."

Bitcoin "fell dramatically in late April," writes The Street, "sinking from its mid-month high of around $64,000" to Sunday's current price of $47,600 — a drop of over 25% in less than two weeks.

So this week the Street spoke to Bobby Ong, the chief operating officer at the cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinGecko, asking "Was that just par for the course — normal volatility — of something else?" Ong: The recent bloodbath on April 18 saw a record of approximately $9.77 billion worth of futures contracts liquidated in just 24 hours. There was already a massive amount of leverage in the market in anticipation of the Coinbase initial public offering. The excitement of having the first crypto company IPO also led bitcoin's price to hit a new all-time high of $64,804.

However, the direct listing of Coinbase also had a lukewarm reception from stock investors. More recently, there was a lot of fear and uncertainty spreading on social media due to various factors, including (rumors of) the U.S. Treasury taking legal action against certain financial institutions for money laundering, which turned out to be false information. Other than that, CNBC was recirculating news about the crypto ban in India, Turkey banning crypto payments, President Biden proposing a higher capital gains tax, and China bitcoin miners losing power.

The selloff happened during the weekend when there were thinner order books. With high leverage and thin order books, even a small decrease in price will trigger a sharp drawdown and cause a downward spiral in price.

Naturally, the market also needs to correct itself, because there were many over-leveraged traders. It is also important to note that bitcoin options expire towards the end of every month, which usually causes increased volatility in the last week of each month.

TheStreet: Do you see the decline as a chance for people to get into it at a cheaper price?

Ong: It depends on that person and their goals. The profiles of buyers today are very different before, when it was mostly libertarians. Today. it's U.S. institutions, and soon it will be governments.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, tweeted Wednesday that bitcoin "incentivises renewable energy." And Elon Musk responded "True."

The BBC adds that the tweets came "despite experts warning otherwise." The cyrptocurrency's carbon footprint is as large as some of the world's biggest cities, studies suggest. But Mr Dorsey claims that could change if bitcoin miners worked hand-in-hand with renewable energy firms.

One expert said it was a "cynical attempt to greenwash" bitcoin. China, where more than two-thirds of power is from coal, accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world...

The tweet comes soon after the release of a White Paper from Mr Dorsey's digital payment services firm Square, and global asset management business ARK Invest. Entitled "Bitcoin as key to an abundant, clean energy future", the paper argues that "bitcoin miners are unique energy buyers", because they offer flexibility, pay in a cryptocurrency, and can be based anywhere with an internet connection. "By combining miners with renewables and storage projects, we believe it could improve the returns for project investors and developers, moving more solar and wind projects into profitable territory," it said.

Author and bitcoin critic David Gerard described the paper as a "cynical exercise in bitcoin greenwashing".

"The reality is: bitcoin runs on coal," he told the BBC.... "Bitcoin mining is so ghastly and egregious that the number one job of bitcoin promoters is to make excuses for it — any excuse at all."

Bitcoin and other digital currencies plunged on Friday as a proposed capital gains tax hike from U.S. President Joe Biden led to a wave of selling. From a report: At around 9:30 a.m. ET, bitcoin was down 7.6% in the last 24 hours at $49,000, according to Coin Metrics data. It's the first time bitcoin has traded below $50,000 since early March. Ether fell to $2,255, down 10.7%. XRP, the fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, plunged 16%. This wiped out more than $200 billion of value from the entire cryptocurrency market, according to data from CoinMarketCap. "The market has run up quite a bit overall, and it's probably cooling off before the next leg up," Vijay Ayyar, head of business development at cryptocurrency exchange Luno, told CNBC by email. President Biden is expected to raise long-term capital gains tax for the wealthiest Americans to 43.4%, including a surtax. That would be higher than the top federal tax rate on wage income. The new tax rate would apply to returns on assets held in taxable accounts and sold after more than a year. This triggered a sell-off in stock markets overnight, with all three major U.S. indexes ending Thursday's session in the red. Analysts said fears over Biden's capital gains tax proposal may be extending to crypto investors, who have had a great year with the price of bitcoin having climbed more than sixfold in the last 12 months.