The Bitcoin mining difficulty, a metric that tracks the relative challenge of adding new blocks to the ledger, climbed to a new all-time high of 142.3 trillion on Friday. Mining difficulty hit successive all-time highs in August and September, driven by an influx of freshly deployed computing power over the last several weeks. Bitcoin’s hashrate, the average…

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said revenue from low-risk decentralized finance protocols could give the network economic stability — much like Google Search supports Google — while letting nonfinancial apps uphold Ethereum’s cultural values. Low-risk DeFi could address “important tensions” in the Ethereum community over whether apps that bring in enough revenue to economically sustain the…

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has said his company’s most ambitious vision is to replace traditional banks by turning Coinbase into a full-service crypto “super app.” Speaking during a recent interview with Fox Business, Armstrong confirmed the company’s plans to offer a full suite of financial services, from payments to credit cards and rewards, all powered by crypto…