“Riot’s core business is Bitcoin mining, and the scale of our vertically integrated operations and financial strength allowed us to execute on our power strategy at unmatched scale this quarter, driving our average cost to mine to $8,389 per Bitcoin in the second quarter, compared to an average Bitcoin price of $28,024,” said Jason Les, CEO of Riot, in a statement.

“Moreover, the Republican bill undermines the Fed’s role as our central bank, making it harder to protect the economy against inflation or support maximum employment if stablecoins are broadly adopted,” she added.

“After a strong start to the year, we accelerated our progress in the second quarter by significantly growing our hash rate and improving our efficiency,” said Fred Thiel, Marathon’s chairman and CEO, in a press release.

Salame, a prominent Republican donor who also handled FTX’s political donations, could enter a plea as soon as September to charges including campaign finance law violations, according to Bloomberg’s sources. It was not known whether he would cooperate with prosecutors and testify against FTX co-founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

Transaction revenue came in at $327 million, compared to $375 million in the first quarter, while total trading volume fell to $92 billion, compared to $145 billion in the first quarter. Interest income fell to $201 million from $241 million in Q1. Of that interest income in Q2, $151 million came from its holdings of USDC.

The SEC charged Draper, Utah-based DEBT Box, as well as the company’s four principals and 13 other defendants, with operating a scheme that began in March 2021 to sell unregistered securities called “node licenses.” Defendants told investors that the licenses would mine cryptocurrency that would increase in value, when in reality, defendants were creating the crypto instantaneously using code on a blockchain, according to the SEC.

In June, Robinhood ended support for all tokens named as securities in the SEC lawsuits against crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase. Those tokens were Cardano (ADA), Polygon (MATIC) and Solana (SOL). The trading platform currently offers trading for 15 different crypto currencies, including bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), dogecoin (DOGE) and avalanche (AVAX).

“Our bitcoin holdings increased to 152,800 bitcoins as of July 31, 2023, with the addition in the second quarter of 12,333 bitcoins being the largest increase in a single quarter since Q2 2021,” said Andrew Kang, Chief Financial Officer, in a statement. “We efficiently raised capital through our at-the-market equity program and used cash from operations to continue to increase bitcoins on our balance sheet. And we did so against the promising backdrop of increasing institutional interest, progress on accounting transparency, and ongoing regulatory clarity for bitcoin.”

Sequoia told investors earlier in the year that it would shrink the fund to reflect a changed market, with the crypto fund focusing more on backing newer startups following the crypto downturn that has reduced chances to invest in larger companies, according to the Journal.

The net value of its digital assets at the end of the quarter was $184 million, the same as it’s been for the past three quarters. At the end of the second quarter, the price of bitcoin was roughly $30,400, up from about $28,500 at the end of the first quarter. However, current accounting rules don’t allow the valuation of digital assets to be increased when prices rise unless the assets are sold, but they can be reduced when prices decline, even before a sale.

Crypto exchange Coinbase is pausing its retail staking service in California, New Jersey, South Carolina and Wisconsin after those states said they would require changes to those services while its proceedings against such staking services move forward.

Perella Weinberg, the investment bank handling FTX’s bankruptcy, told bidders this month about the pause, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. The move followed months of due diligence on the stake in the creator of ChatGPT rival chatbot Claude being done by the bidders, the people said.

Ethereum scaling solution Polygon (MATIC) will be revealing the blueprint for its 2.0 version over the coming weeks, addressing “topics like the future of the Polygon PoS chain, the utility and evolution of the Polygon token, and the transition to greater community governance of the protocol and treasury,” it said in a blog post Monday.

“America is in a position to lead in crypto and help update the global financial system,” Coinbase said in a letter to shareholders. “We need crypto specific rules, rather than regulation by enforcement, to help this innovative technology flourish and for America to maintain its leadership position.”

“The need for better crypto infrastructure is growing ever clearer,” Anchorage said in a statement to Bloomberg. “For us, that means focusing resolutely on our status as an unequivocal qualified custodian, among other safe and regulated ways for institutions to participate in the digital asset ecosystem.”

Grant Butler, an attorney at the K&L Gates law firm, told CoinDesk the SVB receivership is structured differently from the Signature Bank receivership. SVB has been structured to try and liquidate its assets, while Signature was set up with the apparent expectation of a buyer, which allowed for operations to remain uninterrupted.

FDIC examiners were authorized to go to Silvergate’s La Jolla, Calif. headquarters last week by the Federal Reserve, which is Silvergate’s main federal overseer, according to Bloomberg.