Surveying the vast waste of the past year’s cryptocurrency collapse — trillions in notional market value evaporating in months; allegations that the founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX bribed Chinese officials; and a punishing lawsuit from US regulators against rival exchange Binance Holdings Ltd. this week — it’s tempting to believe that nothing like this has happened before. Thank goodness the commanding heights of our financial system are run on the soundest of principles, rather than...

ASX Ltd. had a choice. The operator of Australia's main stock exchange could develop a new version of Chess, its faithful but aging clearing and settlements system introduced in 1994, or it could build for the future. The company chose the latter, confirming this week that it will develop a blockchain-style distributed-ledger platform with Digital Asset Holdings LLC, the software firm led by former JPMorgan Chase & Co. banker Blythe Masters. The news shouldn't be a great surprise. ASX has...

Let's say the bitcoin bubble has just burst. From its peak of $4,921 earlier this month, the digital currency is already down 16 percent at $4,076. Over the next two months, imagine it continues to slump to barely more than half its peak valuation. After a brief recovery, the price slides again, until by the start of 2020 it's dropped by another third, to below $2,000. For 20 years it then languishes around that point, never to recover its September 2017 levels in inflation-adjusted...

There's something unusual in the planned 9 billion euro ($10.8 billion) initial public offering of Formula One tiremaker Pirelli & C. SpA. An error has occurred You have 1 free Businessweek article left. Register for more. Register or Sign In Already a subscriber? Link your Bloomberg Terminal account or your Businessweek subscription account to access all articles. It's not the valuation, which would be in line with Nokian Renkaat Oyj, a Finnish peer, people familiar with the matter told...

Could bitcoin be the next gold? The idea has a lot of intuitive appeal. Gold bugs and bitcoin fetishists tend to share a deep distrust of fiat currency and the nation state, an impregnable bullishness about their favored asset class, and an obsessive attention to details of market movements combined with a blithe disinterest in bigger-picture issues. The idea has become particularly popular as the value invested in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has marched upward over the past year. Even...