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"[INST] Worldcoin tightens privacy checks, allows users to unverify World ID [/INST] Worldcoin, the digital identity and cryptocurrency project built by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is adding new features to increase the protection of personal data and improve age verification.

On April 9, Worldcoin announced two updates: The ability to unverify World IDs via permanent iris code deletion and in-person age verification checks.

World ID holders can now unverify their World ID, which serves as a digital passport that verifies an individual’s humanness using “orbs,” which are devices that scan users’ eyeballs to confirm that they are real humans.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman being scanned for Worldcoin. Source: Vulcan Post

Unverifying the World ID includes permanently deleting the user’s iris code, a numeric representation of their unique iris texture. The iris code ensures that individuals can only verify one World ID.

Once deletion is requested, the individual‘s World ID will become invalid. To protect against fraud, the procedure will require a six-month “cool-off” period to ensure that individuals cannot immediately re-verify humanness.

By the end of the cool-off period, users will have their iris code permanently deleted and made unrecoverable.

Worldcoin’s new unverify option was developed in consultation with third-party privacy and security experts, including the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision (BayLDA).

According to the startup, BayLDA is Worldcoin’s lead supervisory authority in the European Union.

The second update — Worldcoin in-person age verification checks — are introduced to help ensure that the platform is available only to humans above the age of 18 years old.

The update includes an on-site age verification check at all orb locations before World ID verification. Third-party personnel will perform the check before entering the venue, the announcement notes.

“Worldcoin has always required that individuals be a minimum of 18 years old to obtain a World ID,” a spokesperson for Worldcoin told Cointelegraph, adding:

“Individuals have always been asked to confirm they meet this requirement in the app, similar to other apps in wide use today.”

Altman, the creator of OpenAI — the firm behind the natural language processing chatbot ChatGPT — launched Worldcoin in July 2023 with the goal of providing a “global financial and identity network based on proof of personhood.”

Worldcoin received mixed reactions from the community as many questioned its centralization, privacy and security.

Related: TON’s $5M incentive program aims to drive digital ID verification

Some governments have also been skeptical about Worldcoin’s security and privacy. Worldcoin’s European Union supervisor, BayLDA, reportedly began an investigation into Worldcoin due to privacy concerns months before its official launch.

In late 2023, Worldcoin paused the offline orb verification function for users in India and aims to reinstate the service later in 2024.

In August 2023, Worldcoin was banned in Kenya, with the government halting all local activity associated with the platform, including biometric identification. Worldcoin has been working with the Kenyan government to resume operations.

In March 2024, Worldcoin declared that it operated lawfully in all of the locations in which it is available and fully complies with related laws.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Hedera’s HBAR token pumps 96% on misinterpreted BlackRock announcement [/INST] Shares of a BlackRock money market fund have been tokenized on the Hedera blockchain sending the Hedera (HBAR) token on a 96% rally in the last 24 hours — but the world’s largest asset manager confirmed it has no relationship with Hedera despite many believing it was actively involved.

The widely misinterpreted April 23 HBAR Foundation X post — an organization working with the Hedera community — shared that blockchain trading and infrastructure firms Archax and Ownera tokenized BlackRock’s ICS US Treasury Fund on its network.

The video shared with the announcement seemed to suggest Ownera, Archax, and BlackRock were partnered on the venture and HBAR claimed it was “bringing the world’s largest asset manager on-chain.”

A BlackRock spokesperson confirmed to Cointelegraph it “has no commercial relationship with Hedera nor has BlackRock selected Hedera to tokenize any BlackRock funds.”

""As we have in the past, BlackRock will communicate directly with the public on the evolution of our digital asset strategy,” the spokesperson added.

Some crypto influencers with large X followings shared a misinterpretation of the post — which had amassed over 1.6 million views and 2,700 reposts over the last 15 hours — believing it to mean BlackRock was responsible for the $22.3 billion fund’s move onto the blockchain or had partnered with Archax and Ownera.

Cardano Ghost Fund DAO founder Chris O’Connor posted that BlackRock had “no involvement” with Hedera’s development and slammed the HBAR Foundation for the way it framed the announcement.

“What did happen was a HBAR project through the secondary market tokenized shares of a BlackRock fund. Much like I can buy a Rolex take a pic and post it on my X account. Doesn’t mean Rolex ‘partnered’ with me.”

Archax co-founder and CEO Graham Rodford replied to O’Connor, saying “it was indeed an Archax choice to put [BlackRocks fund] on Hedera” and added that “everyone involved was aware.”

Related: Envision partners with HBAR and UN on new digitization platform for carbon markets

HBAR’s 96% rally in the past day has pushed its price to $0.175 — a two-year high, according to CoinGecko.

HBAR’s price over the last three months. Source: CoinGecko

Despite the price pump, HBAR is still down over 69% from its September 2021 all-time high of $0.57.

The announcement came as the Hedera Global Governing Council — which oversees the Hedera network — recently approved allocating 4.86 billion HBAR ($408 million at the time) for further network development.

The funds are part of the HBAR Foundation’s plans to strengthen its user base in 2024, following 2023’s performance, which saw 33 billion transactions processed on the network, the foundation claims.

Magazine: Is measuring blockchain transactions per second (TPS) stupid in 2024? Big Questions

Update (April 24, 7:30 am UTC): This article has been updated to add an X post from Graham Rodford.

Update (April 25, 12:55 am UTC): This article has been updated to add comment from BlackRock."
"[INST] Wealth management firms to boost Bitcoin ETF holdings — Bitwise CEO [/INST] Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley has predicted that wealth management firms will increase their holdings of Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The prediction comes at a time when Bitcoin ETFs are expected to gain even more traction after the halving.

Horsley’s prediction aligns with the broader market belief that there is increasing demand for ETFs, given that Bitcoin investments in the United States ETF market recorded a net positive inflow right before the Bitcoin halving day following five consecutive days of drain.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) is closing the gap with Grayscale’s, standing just $2 billion shy. This positions BlackRock to potentially surpass Grayscale as the world’s largest Bitcoin fund. Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) experienced a 68-day period of value decline, shedding nearly $16 billion and reducing its assets to $19.4 billion.

In contrast, IBIT saw continuous asset growth, reaching approximately $17.3 billion in total assets. However, notable capital outflows have been observed from Grayscale’s spot Bitcoin ETF. Over the last five days alone, investors withdrew $89.9 million, contributing to a net outflow of $1.6 billion since January.

Despite its early lead, Grayscale’s supremacy in the Bitcoin ETF market seems to be diminishing. Fidelity and BlackRock quickly gained substantial market shares from the onset of trading. For instance, Fidelity and BlackRock Bitcoin ETFs experienced net inflows of $37.3 million and $18.7 million, respectively, in the same week, providing relief to some of the market’s liquidity issues.

Related: Bitcoin mining stocks saw spikes across the board ahead of halving event

Bitwise’s CEO describes the adoption of Bitcoin ETFs by registered investment advisers (RIAs) and multifamily offices as “stealthy but significant.” He notes that major financial entities are discreetly conducting thorough assessments of the Bitcoin market.

According to Farside data, GBTC saw outflows of $17.5 million on April 10, a significant decrease from the $154.9 million outflows recorded on April 9. The previous low was on Feb. 26 when GBTC outflowed $22.4 million. The daily GBTC outflow average since January is $257.8 million.

GBTC launched in 2015 and converted to an ETF in January, alongside the launch of nine other spot Bitcoin ETFs after Grayscale won a lawsuit against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, forcing it to review a GBTC conversion bid it previously denied.

Bankrupt crypto lending firm Genesis recently offloaded approximately 36 million GBTC shares to acquire 32,041 BTC.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Prisma Finance exploited in $10 million breach [/INST] Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Prisma Finance was exploited for around $10 million worth of cryptocurrencies on March 28.

On-chain security alert provider Cyvers were the first to detect the anomaly, according to a March 28 X post:

“Our system has detected multiple suspicious transactions with @PrismaFi and still ongoing! Total loss so far is around $9M. The attacker has been funded by @FixedFloat! Our system has detected the malicious contract 2 min earlier than hack transactions!”

Shortly after the initial alert, Cyvers detected another $1 million fraudulent transactions, bringing the total amount of exploited funds near $10 million.

Prisma Finance said that its core engineers and contributors will pause the protocol and investigate, according to a March 28 X post.

Prisma is a decentralized liquid staking token protocol with over $222 million in total value locked (TVL) according to DefiLlama.

Related: Funds hacked in 2024 increased by 15.4% vs. the same period in 2023 — Immunefi

Hacked funds surpass $11.6 million

Following the initial exploit, the attacker has already started swapping the stolen funds to Ether, according to Cyvers.

The attack is still ongoing, according to on-chain security firm PeckShield, which wrote in a March 28 X post at 12:28 p.m. UTC:

“The attack is ongoing, with the total loss now increased to ~3,257.7 $ETH (worth ~$11.6 million). To vault owners, please follow up on notifications from the official source and be cautious about scams.”

Peckshield Alert. Source: PeckShield

As shown by PeckShield’s above image, other scammers are trying to benefit from the exploit. Under the official Prisma Finance announcement, a scam Prisma Finance account with a golden badge is trying to redirect users to a suspicious link. On closer inspection, it can be seen that the fraudulent account has no connection to Prisma Finance.

Crypto hacks continue to erode the legitimacy of the industry. Over $200 million worth of crypto has been lost to hacks and rug pulls in 2024 across 32 individual incidents up to Feb. 29, according to blockchain security firm Immunefi.

The over $200 million loss represents a 15.4% increase compared to January and February 2023, when $173 million of digital assets were stolen.

A total of $1.8 billion was lost to crypto hacks and scammers in 2023, of which 17% can be attributed to the North Korean Lazarus Group, according to a Dec. 28 report by Immunefi.

Related: Max pain $51K? Bitcoin options worth over $9.4B set to expire Friday"
"[INST] El Salvador: Hackers leak code of state Bitcoin wallet [/INST] The saga of El Salvador’s state-operated Bitcoin (BTC) wallet, Chivo, continues to unfold as hackers expose more sensitive information related to the wallet.

The hacker group known as CiberInteligenciaSV released part of the source code on the black hat hacking crime forum BreachForums on April 23.

“This time I bring you the code that is inside the Bitcoin Chivo Wallet ATMs in El Salvador, remember that it is a government wallet, and as you know, we do not sell, we publish everything for free for you,” the hacker group wrote.

Source: BreachForums

The move follows a series of Chivo hack-related events, including the public exposure of personal data of 5.1 million Salvadorans — or almost the entire adult population of the country — which was reported in early April.

Local cybersecurity project VenariX took to X on April 22 to warn the public about the upcoming leak. It referred to CiberInteligenciaSV’s Telegram channel, which posted about plans to release the source code.

“Tonight we will publish part of the source code and VPN access that belongs to Chivo Wallet, for free as always, unless one of you nosy government people wants to talk,” CiberInteligenciaSV’s Telegram post reads.

CiberInteligenciaSV also published the file Codigo.rar, which includes a compilation of code and VPN credentials from the Chivo Wallet ATM network.

In September 2021, El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, with the government promoting Chivo as the official BTC wallet for citizens. The platform allows users to buy and sell Bitcoin, as well as store and withdraw BTC from ATMs.

Related: El Salvador’s newest Hilton hotel to tap into tokenized debt on Bitcoin

The Chivo wallet had a bumpy start, with users subsequently reporting multiple bugs and technical glitches.

Despite reports of a personal data hack on Chivo surfacing in early April, the Salvadoran government has not addressed the issue.

According to industry reports, El Salvador authorities have not released any official statement related to the hack, causing more confusion about the situation.

Magazine: How to protect your crypto in a volatile market — Bitcoin OGs and experts weigh in"
"[INST] DAO acquires rights to the image behind the Doge meme [/INST] Own The Doge, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) associated with the Shiba Inu meme behind the Dogecoin (DOGE) token, announced that it had secured legal rights to the iconic image.

Speaking to Cointelegraph on April 17, Own The Doge project leaders John Monarch and ‘Tridog’ said they had negotiated a deal with Sato Atsuko, the owner of the 18-year-old Shiba Inu Kabosu that became popular for her confused expression while sitting on a couch. The group purchased exclusive licensing and rights for the Doge image, seemingly giving them control over merchandise and other uses for the meme in the crypto space.

“I think [the deal] unlocks a lot for corporations, where there’s confusion around copyright,” said Tridog.

Own The Doge said that with more clarity around the doge image copyright — which had seemingly been a free-for-all for years — there were opportunities for partnerships with big brands. The project said they reached out to Sato roughly three years ago and were able to negotiate a deal to purchase the rights to Kabosu’s image by working with legal experts in Japan and the United States.

Working with Sato and others, the project has already released a documentary on the history of doge and the evolution of the image in and out of the crypto space. According to Tridog, the group was not “looking to enforce” its copyright claim on users and certain brands already using the image to spread its ‘doing only good everyday’ mantra.

“We want to unify the whole doge community,” said Monarch. “We feel like Dogecoin and a lot of the others, like NFT [nonfungible token] side of things, and people who are into memes and the Reddit world, have always kind of diverged [...] it’s all about bringing the tracks together under one cultural umbrella.”

Related: Coinbase to launch DOGE futures, says it ‘transcended’ meme origins

The basis for the Doge image dates back to 2010 when Sato took a casual picture of Kabosu sitting on a yellow sofa in her home in Japan. Monarch suggested he had been the first person to use the term ‘Doge’ on social media, eventually leading to additional memes, the Dogecoin token, and various crypto-themed merchandise.

Tridog said the purchase of the licensing rights likely wouldn’t impact the Dogecoin Foundation or the meme token, which continues to use the image. Kabosu will celebrate her 19th birthday on Nov. 2 at a celebration in Japan. Though old for a dog, she has some catching up to do: the world’s oldest Shiba Inu lived to be more than 26 years old.

Magazine: Real-life Doge at 18: Meme that’s going to the moon"
"[INST] Starknet explains reasons for 4-hour block outage [/INST] Ethereum layer-2 protocol Starknet suffered a block reorganization that led to a backlog of transactions. The protocol’s block monitoring tool, Starkscan, showed an outage of four hours in block production.

Starkscan shows a gap between the creation of blocks 630028 and 630029 on April 4, while Starknet’s status page did not reflect any outages on the network on the same day.

Starkscan’s block monitor reflects a four-hour gap between locks 630028 and 630029. Source: Starkscan

Starknet subsequently released a statement on X, explaining that a rounding error bug led to a reorganization of blocks. The company said block production continued as usual, but the reorganization caused a transaction backlog that prevented it from reaching full capacity.

“Consequently, there were a few minutes during which new transactions could not be accepted for processing and were therefore rejected. Moreover, some transactions were reverted due to changing parameters (e.g., timestamps),” the post explains.

Cointelegraph contacted Starknet to confirm the details of the incident but has not received additional information and if block production was halted as per block data.

Starknet’s status page last reflects a major outage on March 13 when its network experienced slow block creation due to Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade.

Starknet’s status page shows the last major incident on March 13 during Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade. Source: Starknet Status

Starknet’s outage is the latest in a series of hiccups for some of the ecosystem’s largest blockchain networks.

Solana suffered a significant outage in early February 2024. Downtime in block production on its mainnet halted the network’s block progression for over five hours.

It was not the first time Solana had gone down. Since January 2022, Solana has seen around half a dozen significant outages and 15 partial or major outage days.

Solana-focused software development firm Anza released a postmortem report of the recent outage on Feb. 9.

The report revealed that Solana’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache, which compiles all programs before executing a transaction, encountered a bug.

Related: Starknet anticipates significant impact from Ethereum’s Dencun hard fork

Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, told Cointelegraph that a process was underway to replace the old loader system with a new motor system, but it was scheduled to be disabled with an updated version.

“It looks like someone intentionally called that old instruction set, which hadn’t been used in quite a long time but was still around in the codebase. The JIT compiler ran into issues where it couldn’t find what it was looking for. And that’s what created the infinite loop,” Federa told Cointelegraph.

Solana encountered problems again in early April, with close to 75% of all transactions on the network failing amid a deluge of activity brought by the recent memecoin mania.

Analysts suggest that these failed transactions are mainly due to bot activities on Solana, which look to carry out arbitrage trades.

Magazine: Ethereum’s ERC-20 design flaws are a crypto scammer’s best friend"
"[INST] El Salvador’s newest Hilton hotel to tap into tokenized debt on Bitcoin [/INST] Investors will soon be able to own a slice of a new 4,500-square-foot Hampton by Hilton hotel in El Salvador by buying tokenized shares issued on the Bitcoin layer 2 Liquid Network.

The country’s first-ever tokenized asset raise will be facilitated by Bitfinex Securities, the first licensed and registered digital asset provider in El Salvador, while the debt issued from Inversiones Laguardia S.A. de C.V.

The hotel will be constructed at El Salvador’s international airport, with Inversiones Laguardia looking to raise $6.25 million from crowdfunders in exchange for a 10% coupon over a five-year term.

“[This] represents an important step forward in developing its nascent capital market as well as introducing a major new asset class into the market,” said Paolo Ardoino, chief technology officer of Bitfinex Securities, in an April 11 statement.

“For the first time, investors who do not usually have the opportunity to invest in such assets have the opportunity to do so, while issuers in markets which have less access to capital, are able to tap into a new asset class to raise finance.”

Investors will need to make a minimum $1,000 investment to purchase the token under the ticker HILSV on the Liquid Network. Liquid was built by Blockstream in 2018, a Bitcoin-focused infrastructure firm led by long-time cypherpunk Adam Back.

Related: El Salvador’s Bitcoin treasury is now $85M in profit amid BTC rally

The hotel project will have five levels, 80 rooms, five commercial spaces and other hotel amenities, including a swimming pool, restaurants, a gym, gardens and multipurpose rooms, Bitfinex noted.

HILSV tokenholders will also be offered some free night accommodations at the hotel based on the size of their investment.

El Salvador, widely known for its Bitcoin investment and adoption strategy, decided to expand into the real-world asset tokenization space in April 2023 when it granted Bitfinex a digital asset service provider license.

Prior to Bitcoin (BTC), many locals in El Salvador were stuck between no investments and buying an entire house, said Jamie Robinson, chief strategy officer of The Bitcoin Hardware Store, in a recent interview with Cointelegraph.

But Bitfinex’s expansion marks a “new era of capital markets” on Bitcoin in El Salvador, noted Bitcoin commentator Stacy Herbet, which will offer the local population a new way to access financial markets.

“This capital raise not only marks our first venture in El Salvador but also stands as a testament to the transformative power of Bitcoin-based capital markets,” said Jesse Knutson, head of operations at Bitfinex Securities.

Magazine: Should you ‘orange pill’ children? The case for Bitcoin kids books"
"[INST] Binance and its detained US exec face more charges in Nigeria [/INST] Troubled global cryptocurrency exchange Binance is facing more issues in Nigeria as its United States-based executive Tigran Gambaryan remains detained in the country.

Nigeria has introduced more charges against Binance despite the exchange trying to find dialogue with local regulators, The Wall Street Journal reported on April 3.

Binance has been actively working with authorities in Nigeria since local regulators blamed the crypto exchange for helping crash its fiat currency, the naira, in February 2024.

Bayo Onanuga, the presidential adviser on information and strategy, suggested banning platforms like Binance in the country.

In response to the threat of the ban, two senior Binance executives, including Gambaryan and Nadeem Anjarwalla, came to Nigeria to attempt to find a dialogue with local authorities.

However, both were detained even after Binance urgently delisted all naira transactions and stopped peer-to-peer naira transactions in February.

Binance's Tigran Gambaryan at a 2023 conference. Source: WSJ

The WSJ’s report on new charges comes amid Binance releasing a new statement urging Nigerian authorities to let Gambaryan go.

The exchange argued that the executive has “decision-making power” at the company and should not be held responsible while discussions are ongoing between Binance and Nigerian government officials.

While Gambaryan remains arrested in Nigeria, Anjarwalla, another co-accused Binance exec, reportedly escaped the country using a fake passport in March.

According to local reports, Anjarwalla fled detention on March 22 after he was taken to a nearby mosque for prayers.

Related: Binance exec seeks redress over Nigeria detention, demands apology

Nigeria’s law enforcement authority, the Economic Financial Crime Commission (EFCC), is preparing to charge Gambaryan and Anjarwalla with five counts of money laundering of over $35.4 million on April 4, the local online newspaper Nairametrics reported on April 2.

According to the report, Gambaryan and Anjarwalla are listed as first to third defendants, respectively, with the EFCC planning to arraign Anjarwalla in absentia.

Although the crypto exchange firm, Gambaryan and Anjarwalla are listed as first to third defendants respectively. Justice Emeka Nwite of the Federal High Court in Abuja will reportedly preside over the arraignment of Gambaryan, Anjarwalla and Binance.

Cointelegraph reached out to Binance for a comment regarding the new charges but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Magazine: SBF gets 25 years in prison, Fidelity eyes ETH staking, and Coinbase’s court loss: Hodler’s Digest, March 24-30"
"[INST] Hong Kong Bitcoin, Ether ETF structures revealed ahead of April 30 launch [/INST] Hong Kong spot Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) will be remarkably different from their United States counterparts, with the city’s regulator having greenlit them for an April 30 launch.

According to a report by one of the issuers, ChinaAMC, its spot Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) ETFs will track the performance of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s crypto indexes. Redemptions will be available in both fiat money and crypto funds. In addition, ChinaAMC’s crypto ETFs will be denominated in three currencies: the U.S. dollar, Hong Kong dollar and Chinese yuan. Investment asset manager BOCI-Prudential and crypto exchange OSL will act as the custodians for the ETFs.

The aforementioned two firms will also custody spot Bitcoin and Ether ETF assets for issuer Harvest Global. BOCI and OSL ""effectively solves problems such as excessive margin requirements, price premiums caused by missing short positions, and roll losses, thereby more accurately reflecting the real-time value of Bitcoin and Ethereum,” said Harvest Global staff in a statement.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong-based HashKey Capital will jointly launch its spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs with Bosera Asset Management. Regarding the future of the crypto ETFs, its staff wrote:

“The approval of the virtual asset spot ETF and the innovative introduction of a currency-holding subscription mechanism (which allows investors to directly use Bitcoin and Ethereum to subscribe for corresponding ETF shares) are expected to further promote the development of the virtual asset market in Hong Kong and even Asia., attracting more global capital inflows.”

On April 24, Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas mentioned that Hong Kong Bitcoin ETF management fees will range from 0.3% to 0.99%. This is much higher than U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, where some issuers charge less than 0.25% per annum. “A potential fee war could break out in Hong Kong over these Bitcoin & Ethereum ETFs,” commented Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart.

The structure of Hong Kong spot crypto ETFs (Source: Bloomberg)

All three ETF issuers will create and redeem ETF shares on Hong Kong's regulated crypto exchanges, OSL and HashKey. Each day, investors will have until 11:00 am local time to redeem their shares for cash or until 4:00 pm for crypto withdrawals. BOCI Prudential will serve as the custodian for all issuers, while market makers include Vivienne Court, Virtu Financial and others.

Related: Hong Kong approves first Bitcoin and Ether ETFs"
"[INST] SEC’s closed-door policy stifling crypto innovation — Hester Peirce [/INST] United States Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Hester Peirce has taken another swipe at her agency, criticizing the regulator’s guidance on crypto custody while calling for more interaction with the public.

Speaking at the annual SEC Speaks Conference on April 2, Peirce — also known by crypto enthusiasts as “Crypto Mom” — said that a “particularly pernicious weed” had sprung up in the SEC’s “secret garden” of policy guidelines. Her comments were made in response to the controversial Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 (SAB 121).

In March 2022, the SEC issued SAB 121, which outlines the regulator’s accounting guidelines for institutions looking to custody crypto assets. Notably, SAB 121 prevents many banks from custodying crypto assets on behalf of clients.

Peirce noted that SAB 121 — issued without input from the banking sector — does not protect investors; instead, keeps out experienced banks and broker-dealers from the crypto custody business due to its capital implications.

“It is driving broker-dealers to allocate significant capital to their crypto custody businesses or to avoid the business altogether. SAB 121 arguably does not protect investors.”

Additionally, if the custodian fails, these assets could be treated as if they belong to the failed entity, not the customers of that entity, she added.

On March 1, the House Financial Services Committee voted in favor of a resolution that sought to overturn the bulletin. Republican Congressman Tom Emmer described SAB 121 as an “illegal” example of SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s “unrelenting prejudice towards the digital asset ecosystem.”

Hester Peirce speaking at SEC Speaks 2024. Source: SEC

Additionally, Peirce said the SEC had become closed off to productive engagement with the public, especially when it came to emerging technologies such as crypto.

“The culture at the top of the SEC has changed, which in turn has changed the way the agency interacts with the public,” she said.

Related: SEC’s Hester Peirce wants more decentralization in the financial system

Peirce added that both investors and companies are hesitant to meet with the SEC out of fear of enforcement actions, especially in areas like crypto, which the regulator has identified as priorities for ramped-up enforcement.

“People have told me that they desperately want to have substantive discussions with the staff but worry that the inevitable result of such a meeting would be a call from enforcement.”

The commissioner called for the SEC to restore open communication with the public, provide clear guidance, and facilitate — rather than impede — responsible innovation, including in areas such as crypto custody.

In an April 3 post to X, Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal shared his support for Peirce’s remarks, throwing his weight behind her suggestion to create an advisory committee to better understand how rules “actually operate.”

Magazine: Does SEC Chair Gary Gensler have the final say?"
"[INST] Filecoin Foundation launches Chinese legal inquiry into STFIL incident [/INST] Filecoin Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes the development of Web3 storage protocol Filecoin, “has a lawyer in China” and is investigating the reported detention of Filecoin Liquid Staking (STFIL) team members, according to an April 13 social media post from foundation senior fellow Danny O’Brien.

Withdrawals from the STFIL protocol stopped working in early April after a developer wallet made several unscheduled upgrades and moved $23 million worth of Filecoin (FIL) tokens to an address whose owner is unknown. On April 8, the STFIL team announced that core technical members was detained by local Chinese police and that the mysterious upgrades and transfers had occurred during these detentions. This announcement left many users of STFIL wondering how they could recover funds.

In the post, O’Brien stated that “FF has a lawyer in China who has been looking into the incident,” adding that the foundation has “high confidence” that members of the STFIL team are in police custody. The foundation has not been able to confirm whether the police possess the funds, but they expect to know this information in “upwards of a week.” The foundation plans to allow its attorney to represent all staking providers and leasers in any court proceedings related to the incident.

O’Brien promised to share more information once the plan's details are finalized. He also asked staking providers who lost funds to provide contact details through a Google Doc or Slack Channel set up for this purpose.

Source: Filecoin Foundation senior fellow Danny O’Brien.

Filecoin is a decentralized storage protocol that allows PC owners to rent out their hard disk space to users with data storage needs. It requires storage providers to provide FIL tokens as collateral to guarantee that they store data per their agreements.

FIL holders can lend out their tokens to the storage providers, in which case they earn a portion of the fees collected. This process is called “FIL staking.”

STFIL is a protocol that pools FIL tokens and stakes them through a network of trusted storage providers. When users deposit FIL into the STFIL protocol, they receive STFIL tokens in exchange. When the protocol is functioning correctly, these STFIL tokens can be redeemed for their underlying deposited FIL plus accumulated staking rewards. However, this redemption process stopped functioning in April, after the unauthorized upgrades and transfers were made.

Related: What is Filecoin and How Does it Work?

STFIL is not the only Web3 protocol to encounter criminal legal action in China. Users of the Multichain cross-chain bridging platform saw more than $1.5 billion of their crypto frozen after Chinese police arrested the protocol’s development team. The funds have still not been recovered.

Fantom Protocol, one of the biggest depositors to Multichain, filed for bankruptcy in March in an attempt to pursue at least some of the lost Multichain funds through litigation. According to Fantom co-founder Andre Cronje, it may take “years” for investors to obtain a court order that can force police to hand over the funds."
"[INST] Argentine government passes registration requirements for crypto firms [/INST] Argentina’s government has begun implementing requirements for cryptocurrency exchanges to operate legally in the country.

In a March 25 announcement, Argentina’s Comisión Nacional de Valores (CNV) — the country’s equivalent of a securities regulator — said virtual asset service providers would be operating in accordance with recommendations from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Certain companies offering crypto-related services must register with the Argentina government as part of reforms to the country’s Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combatting the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) laws.

The implementation of the law affecting crypto providers in Argentina moved forward on March 14, when the country’s senate approved modifying laws aimed at preventing money laundering and the financing of terrorism. CNV President Roberto Silva said virtual asset service providers that are not registered “will not be able to operate in the country.”

The proposed modification to Argentina’s laws affecting crypto users reportedly came before Javier Milei won the country’s presidential election in November 2023. Many crypto proponents lauded the ascension of Milei at the time for his seemingly pro-Bitcoin (BTC) views, but the implementation of the FATF requirements seems to have many concerned for for the future of digital assets in Argentina.

Related: Bitcoin demand in Argentina reaches highest point in nearly 2 years

Many users on Strike, popular in Argentina for facilitating Bitcoin payments via the Lightning network, reported the app no longer allows locals to send fiat to bank accounts. It’s unclear how the requirements may affect businesses operating in Argentina or customers seeking to use their services. In December 2023, Argentina’s minister of foreign affairs said contracts could be settled in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Milei spoke publicly on April 2 as part of a Malvinas Day ceremony recognizing the loss of life during the Falklands War in 1982.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments: Trezor CEO"
"[INST] Software engineer sentenced to three years in prison for Nirvana hack [/INST] Computer security engineer Shakeeb Ahmed was sentenced to three years in prison followed by three years of supervised release in Southern New York District (SDNY) Court. Ahmed was found guilty of flash loan attacks on the decentralized Crypto Exchange and Nirvana exchanges in 2022.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement that Ahmed’s conviction was the first for hacking a smart contract. Ahmed was also ordered to forfeit $12.3 million as well as “a significant quantity of cryptocurrency” and to pay the exchanges $5 million in restitution.

Ahmed had offered to return all the funds stolen from Crypto Exchange except for $1.5 million if the exchange did not contact law enforcement. Nirvana offered him $600,000 for the return of funds, but Ahmed demanded $1.4 million, out of the $3.6 million he hacked, and no agreement was reached.

Related: Stolen crypto worth $674M successfully recovered in 2023

Nirvana’s NIRV stablecoin depegged from the U.S. dollar, and its native ANA coin fell by 85% on the news of the hack and closed shortly afterward. According to the SDNY statement, Ahmed laundered the hacked funds:

“Using token-swap transactions; ‘bridging’ fraud proceeds from the Solana blockchain over to the Ethereum blockchain; exchanging fraud proceeds into Monero […]; using overseas cryptocurrency exchanges; and using cryptocurrency mixers, such as Samourai Whirlpool.”

It has also been observed that a third exchange, Crema, was subject to an attack in July 2022 using the same methods, but the federal charges did not link him to that hack.

Ahmed was employed as “a senior security engineer for an international technology company” at the time he carried out the attacks, according to the statement. According to Bloomberg, Ahmed was the technical lead of Amazon’s bug bounty program.

According to Inner City Press, Ahmed, who was released on bail, now works for a mental health care startup. That publication quoted him as saying, “I witnessed hacks, I found a way to exploit an exchange's smart contracts. I went into therapy” at his trial.

Ahmed was arrested in New York and charged in July with wire fraud and money laundering in connection with the hacks. He went on to plead guilty to a single charge of computer fraud in December.

Magazine: Pink Drainer creator defends his wallet draining crypto scam kit"
"[INST] ParaSwap DAO votes to compensate hack victims [/INST] The community behind the decentralized finance (DeFi) aggregator ParaSwap has agreed to compensate hack victims using funds from its treasury.

On April 4, the ParaSwap decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) pitched the idea of refunding the victims of the AugustusV6 contract vulnerability. After a three-day voting period, 96.81% of ParaSwap voters agreed with the DAO’s proposed method of compensating users.

The Paraswap community voted to refund victims using DAO treasury funds. Source: vote.paraswap.network

The ParaSwap AugustusV6 contract, which momentarily went live on March 18, aimed to improve swapping efficiency and reduce gas fees. However, the contract contained a critical vulnerability, allowing hackers to drain funds from users who approved the upgrade.

While a swift rollback prevented a potential $3.4 million loss, roughly $864,000 of assets were lost in the process. ParaSwap collaborated closely with blockchain analytics and security firms Chainalysis and TRM Labs to identify the hacker addresses and trace the movement of the funds. The foundation said:

“The (ParaSwap) Foundation will cover the remaining costs linked to the vulnerability, including the refunds, the engagement of security analysts, conducting thorough contract re-audits, communication with authorities, and the formulation and execution of the refund process.”

On April 4, ParaSwap announced the recovery of roughly $500,000 worth of assets. “Thanks to this rescue, the amount of funds still unaccounted for — which comprise users drained after depositing to a still compromised account — has been reduced by 63%,” it said.

According to ParaSwap, providing full refunds to affected users is a step toward the project’s long-term sustainability.

Related: Crypto hacking losses decline in Q1 2024 — Immunefi

According to data compiled by blockchain security firm PeckShield, nearly $100 million in digital assets stolen in March hacks were recovered.

Total hack losses in 2024 by month. Source: PeckShield

While the losses ran into the millions, 52.8% of the hacked funds were returned. Most recovered funds were from the security incident involving the nonfungible token (NFT) game based on the Blast network called Munchables.

Magazine: AI didn’t kill the metaverse, it will build it — Alien Worlds, Bittensor vs Eric Wall: AI Eye"
"[INST] Grayscale’s Mini Bitcoin ETF ‘cheap’ fees are ‘hypothetical’ — analysts [/INST] Grayscale Investments has declared its upcoming “mini” version of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) will be almost a tenth cheaper than the current GBTC fees, making it the most cost-effective option among the approved spot Bitcoin ETFs.

However, investors shouldn’t get their hopes up yet, according to Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas.

“This is pro-forma financials and as such hypothetical,” Balchunas explained in an April 20 post on X, arguing that while changes are possible before launch, the fees were intended to catch investors’ attention.

“The good news is they had to pick a number for this and knew ppl would be watching, and they decided on 15bps,” he wrote.

Grayscale has proposed fees for its new Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (BTC) to be set at one-tenth of the current 1.5% fee for GBTC, according to a recent filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

With a suggested fee of 0.15%, it is positioning its ETF to have the lowest fees among the 11 approved spot Bitcoin ETFs introduced in January, closely followed by trillion-dollar asset manager Franklin Templeton at 0.19%.

Following behind are the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) and VanEck Bitcoin Trust (HODL), both at 0.20%.

CEO of crypto-focused reviews portal Apollo, Thomas Fahrer, told his 42,900 X followers in an April 21 post that Grayscale “offering cheap” alternative fees was necessary to compensate for the large GBTC outflows.

“Grayscale has lost 315K BTC in outflows since launching, and they needed to plug the leak,” he said.

Related: Bitcoin halving hype breaks week-long ETFs outflow streak

This comes amid many investors withdrawing funds from the GBTC product since the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in January, which offer a more competitive fee for Bitcoin exposure.

Since spot Bitcoin ETFs were introduced on Jan. 11, GBTC has seen approximately $16.73 billion of outflows, as per Farside data.

Cointelegraph recently reported that the shares of the new Bitcoin trust are planned to be distributed to existing GBTC shareholders, as GBTC will also contribute an undisclosed amount of Bitcoin to the new trust.

Magazine: a16z snubs crypto, Mango Markets exploiter found guilty and Worldcoin launches blockchain network: Hodler’s Digest, April 14-20"
"[INST] Lummis-Gillibrand bill will ban algorithmic stablecoins: Law Decoded [/INST] United States Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cynthia Lummis have introduced legislation establishing a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins.

The legislation aims to prohibit “unbacked, algorithmic stablecoins”— likely a nod to TerraUSD (UST) depegging from the U.S. dollar in 2022 — and requires issuers to maintain one-to-one reserves.

It will also “create federal and state regulatory regimes for stablecoin issuers that preserves the dual banking system.”

According to the text of the 179-page bill, state non-depository trust companies would be allowed to issue up to $10 billion in payment stablecoins, with authorized institutions able to issue stablecoins “up to any amount” under a limited-purpose state charter.

The legislation also aimed to uphold the current system of state and federal charters and established rules on custody for non-depository trust companies.

Advocacy group Coin Center has expressed concerns about the bill, claiming it would be “bad policy” and unconstitutional for its proposed prohibition on algorithmic stablecoins.

The group argued that banning algorithmic stablecoins targets code, which could be an unconstitutional act under the protections of the First Amendment.

Coin Center suggested that the Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act — a bill set for a full floor vote in the U.S. House of Representatives — had a “not unreasonable” approach to algorithmic stablecoins by proposing a two-year moratorium rather than an outright ban.

Canada transits to international crypto tax reporting standard

Canada expects to apply the international Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) for taxation by 2026. The country is getting an early start on the new standard, expected to be observed by 47 countries by 2027.

The CARF would impose new reporting requirements on crypto asset service providers (CASPs), such as cryptocurrency exchanges, crypto asset brokers and dealers and crypto-asset automated teller machine operators, whether they are individuals or business entities.

CASPs would be required to report transactions between crypto assets and fiat and crypto assets for other crypto assets to the Canada Revenue Agency. Crypto asset transfers carried out by CASPs, including payment processing where the value exceeds $50,000, would also need to be reported.

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Arkansas wants to restrict crypto mining

An Arkansas Senate committee has passed two bills that could restrict cryptocurrency mining within the state. The bills lay the groundwork for further discussions.

In a Senate hearing on April 17, lawmakers sought to address general concerns such as noise reduction, foreign ownership and the proximity of crypto mines to residential areas.

The committee will continue to discuss the issue and hear more public comments. The discussion of whether and how much crypto mines should be regulated at the state level arose from the Arkansas Data Centers Act, which limited local government’s ability to regulate crypto mines.

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Binance returns to India, gets Dubai license

Binance crypto exchange is set to return to India after a four-month ban after paying a $2 million fine for noncompliance.

It will be the second overseas exchange after KuCoin to mark a return to the country after India’s financial regulatory body blocked access to crypto exchanges for noncompliance.

Binance reportedly accounted for more than 90% of Indian crypto trading volume before its ban in January.

The company has also received its Dubai Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) license after co-founder Changpeng Zhao gave up his voting power in the exchange’s local entity.

The Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority’s final requirement for granting the VASP license was for Zhao to give up his voting power in Binance FZE, the Dubai-based unit of the exchange, according to unnamed people familiar with the matter.

While Binance’s current CEO, Richard Teng, confirmed receiving the license, he said that Zhao giving up his voting power was “pure speculation.”

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"[INST] Fidelity’s Bitcoin ETF draws $40M in largest single investment from advisers [/INST] Fidelity’s Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) has achieved a new record as the largest single investment in a Bitcoin fund, attracting $40 million from two traditional United States financial advisers.

According to Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas, financial advisers Legacy Wealth Management and United Capital Management of Kansas have each recently invested $20 million in shares of the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC), joining the fund’s top shareholders.

Legacy Wealth Management oversees more than $359 million in assets under management, while United Capital Management of Kansas manages over $436 million. The figures are part of recent 13F form filings submitted by asset managers to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the first quarter of 2024.

Source: Eric Balchunas

According to data from investment research firm Fintel, Bitcoin (BTC) represents 6% and 5% of the funds’ portfolios, respectively.

Bloomberg’s Balchunas believes the figures indicate a growing adoption among traditional investors. “This is as Boomer as it gets,” he noted on X in reference to United Capital Management of Kansas.

“Likely a wonderful sight for those hoping to see long-term adoption and an absolute nightmare for the RIA Skeptics Branch of the Underwhelmers Club,” he added.

However, the recent disclosures have prompted some to express concerns regarding the limited mainstream participation in BTC ETFs.

Jim Bianco, founder of macro research firm Bianco Research, described the first-quarter allocation data as a “disappointment.” “Unrealized gains are shrinking fast,” he added, referring to ETF investor gains versus current Bitcoin prices.

Fidelity’s BTC fund is the second-largest Bitcoin ETF in terms of assets under management, with over $10 billion at the time of writing, just behind BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), which holds more than $18 billion.

Despite newcomers and growing adoption among traditional investors, Bitcoin ETFs are experiencing a slowdown in demand. CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju noted on X that the demand for BTC funds has stagnated since its peak in March.

On April 15, Bitcoin ETFs experienced net outflows of $36.7 million. According to Farside Investors, only Grayscale and BlackRock recorded positive flows on April 12 and April 15, while all other funds saw outflows.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Dencun is a big step towards mass adoption: Metis CEO [/INST] Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade is a big step for mass blockchain adoption that could also bring benefits for traditional financial (TradFi) companies in the crypto space, the CEO of layer-2 (L2) network Metis said.

Tom Ngo told Cointelegraph in an interview:

“It’s a big step for mass adoption for companies to have more predictable transactions on their balance sheets. Even for TradFi, all this slippage matters in their trades, how they manage assets, and if they have to bridge or transfer to different parties. So in general, this is one of the biggest upgrades also for L2s as it reduces the gas fees.”

Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade went live on the mainnet on March 13 as the biggest upgrade since the Merge transitioned the mainnet to a proof-of-stake consensus model on Sept. 15, 2022.

The anticipation around the upgrade was due to Dencun’s aim of reducing transaction fees on L2 blockchain networks and increasing Ethereum’s scalability.

High transaction costs associated with Ethereum are some of the biggest challenges for mainstream user adoption, for whom even a few cents matter, Ngo said.

“The mainstream users are used to free messaging and free internet. I think blockchain is the same and will keep lowering the barrier of entry for the user as a whole and [enable] organizations and companies where they have to take an account for the fluctuation and gas transaction.”

Some L2 protocols saw a significant drop in transaction fees following the upgrade. Median fees declined as much as 99% on Starknet, from $6 to just $0.04 after the upgrade.

Related: Dencun is about fee stabilization, not reduction — Fuel founder

Despite transaction fees on L2s falling, the Dencun upgrade hasn’t addressed the issue of high gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet, which could be part of the reason L2s will attract increasingly more users and capital. According to Ngo:

“There's a lot of capital flowing into L2s as more users and more projects become familiar, have more secured ways to transact, and more trusted names are building on L2s. L2s are meant to build up and scale Ethereum. So L2s will continue to grow year over year.”

The total value locked in L2 solutions is at $39.48 billion, up % from $10.3 billion a year ago, according to L2beat data.

Combined TVL of L2s. Source: L2beat

When asked about the challenges of mainstream decentralized finance (DeFi) adoption, Ngo said that user experience and interoperability are two of the most pressing concerns.

Tom Ngo, CEO of Metis, talks about the importance of interoperability.

Related: Key Ethereum price metric targets $5.4K ETH in 2024"
"[INST] FTX saga ends as Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison: Law Decoded [/INST] Judge Lewis Kaplan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York sentenced Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried to a total of 25 years in prison following his conviction on seven felony charges.

SBF is the first person tied to FTX and Alameda Research to face prison time following the collapse of the exchange in November 2022.

“Kaplan weighed all of the sentencing factors, including the magnitude of the crime, his conclusion that SBF lied on the witness stand and tampered with a witness, and handed down a serious sentence,” Mark Bini, a former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, told Cointelegraph.

“While less than the prosecutors’ request for 40–50 years, it is a very significant sentence and sends a message that people convicted of crimes in the crypto space will face serious consequences.”

Gary Wang, Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh and Ryan Salame — four other individuals associated with FTX and Alameda charged in the same case as SBF — pleaded guilty and accepted deals.

Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, was the only one who did not testify at Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial. He will likely be the next to face sentencing on May 1.

Immediately following the New York courtroom announcement, crypto users jumped onto social media to express their thoughts. Many suggested that 25 years wasn’t enough prison time, given longer sentences for seemingly less severe crimes.

Philippines will block Binance

The financial regulator of the Philippines will block local user access to Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, citing concerns over the firm’s unlicensed operations in the country.

The country’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it received the assistance of the National Telecommunication Commission to block access to Binance’s website and online trading platform.

The Philippines’ financial watchdog alleges that Binance offers investment products such as leveraged trading services and crypto savings accounts without the required licenses, which violates the Securities Regulation Code.

According to the SEC, the ban will take effect within three months to allow investors to exit their positions held through Binance. The agency also asked Google and Meta to block Binance-related advertising from showing up on their platforms for Filipino users.

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Worldcoin blocked for three months in Portugal

The Portuguese data regulator, the National Data Protection Commission (CNPD), announced the decision to temporarily limit Worldcoin’s biometric data collection through its Orb devices within the country.

According to the CNPD, the decision was made to protect the rights of its citizens, particularly minors. The measure will take effect immediately and until the conclusion of an investigation.

The CNPD said these measures were taken after receiving “dozens of reports” on the collection of data from minors without the proper authorization of parents or legal authorities.

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Coinbase Wallet wins over SEC in court

Crypto lawyers are hailing a recent decision by a United States judge to dismiss allegations against Coinbase Wallet as a win for self-custody wallets and decentralized finance (DeFi) apps.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Failla denied Coinbase’s bid to dismiss a Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) lawsuit, finding the SEC “sufficiently pleaded” Coinbase was unlicensed and its crypto staking offering was unregistered securities.

The judge also determined the SEC failed to allege that Coinbase conducted brokerage activity through Coinbase Wallet, its self-custody crypto wallet app that gives users full control of their assets.

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"[INST] Tether boosts Bitcoin reserves with latest acquisition [/INST] Tether, the company behind the Tether (USDT) stablecoin, acquired 8,888 Bitcoin (BTC) worth $618 million on March 31.

Following the acquisition, Tether’s wallet now holds 75,354 Bitcoin, bought at an average price of $30,305, worth around $5.2 billion at the time of writing, according to on-chain data.

The wallet is up over 128%, with a current unrealized profit of $2.94 billion, according to CoinStats data.

Tether BTC wallet overview: Source CoinStats

The acquisition came during a time of heightened institutional interest in Bitcoin due to the approval of United States-based spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds and the incoming Bitcoin halving, which is set to reduce the block supply issuance in half in just 19 days.

Related: Is the Bitcoin halving the right time to invest in BTC?

Following the acquisition, Tether is now the seventh-largest Bitcoin holder in the world, according to Bitinfocharts data. Binance’s cold wallet is the largest Bitcoin holder, with over 248,597 Bitcoin worth $17.31 billion at publication.

The firm said it would invest 15% of its net profit into Bitcoin to diversify the stablecoin’s backing assets.

Tether’s USDT reached a record $100 billion market cap on March 4, posting a 9% year-to-date growth.

Related: Tether plans major expansion into BTC mining with $500M investment: Report

Bitcoin trades above $69,000, suggesting end of pre-halving correction

Bitcoin price fell 1.23% in the 24 hours leading up to 8:45 am UTC to trade at $69,523. The world’s first cryptocurrency has been trading above the $69,000 support line since March 25 despite the market experiencing the largest quarterly options expiry event on March 29.

Bitcoin’s pre-halving correction could be over since Bitcoin flipped its old all-time high of $69,000 into support, said pseudonymous crypto analyst Rekt Capital in a March 26 video analysis:

“Bitcoin is now peaking beyond this old all-time high, potentially positioning itself for this pre-halving retracement to be over.”

Bitcoin reached a new all-time high before the halving event for the first time in the cryptocurrency’s history. Despite its strong price action, the halving is still not priced in to “full extent,” Basile Maire, the co-founder of D8X decentralized exchange and former UBS executive, told Cointelegraph.

Bitcoin has just closed seven monthly green candles in a row for the first time in history.

BTC/USDT, 1-month chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Related: How high can Bitcoin go? New BTC price prediction sees cycle top at $180K"
"[INST] John Deaton’s crypto backers help outraise Warren in Senate race [/INST] Pro-crypto lawyer John Deaton has outraised Senator Elizabeth Warren over the first quarter of this year for his bid to seize her Senate spot — bankrolling $1.36 million compared to Warren’s $1.09 million.

A who’s who of crypto backers make up Deaton’s top donors, including Ripple executives Chris Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse, Gemini founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci, Cardano and Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson and Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell.

In total, Deaton’s contributors have given him nearly $360,700 for Q1 2024, plus the $1 million he loaned to his campaign, preliminary filings to the United States Federal Election Commission (FEC) show.

Deaton’s top Senate campaign donors between January and March 2024. Source: FEC

In comparison, Warren reported raising just under $1.09 million — all from donors alone.

Deaton rose to prominence defending XRP (XRP) holders’ interests in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s legal fight against Ripple.

He announced his bid for Warren’s Senate seat representing Massachusetts in February, running as a Republican against the 11-year Democratic Party incumbent.

Warren has long campaigned against crypto and introduced bills she claims are to “level the playing field” between crypto and traditional financial markets, which her detractors claim would drive innovation and investment out of the United States.

Related: Crypto users could ‘make a difference in a close election’ in the US — CoinFlip CEO

Among Deaton’s largest individual contributors were Ripple’s Larsen and Garlinghouse, Scaramucci and the Winklevoss twins.

Each made the maximum donation of $6,600 — the max of $3,300 each to the primary and general election bids.

Cardano’s Hoskinson, Kraken’s Powell and Casa wallet founder Jameson Lopp each threw in $3,300 to Deaton’s primary campaign challenge, as did Ripple legal chief Stuart Alderoty.

The U.S. Senate elections are set to be held on Nov. 5 with 34 of the 100 total seats up for contestation alongside all 435 seats in the House alongside the presidency — with it likely that former President Donald Trump will again face off with President Joe Biden.

Magazine: Pro-XRP lawyer John Deaton ‘10x more into BTC, 4x more into ETH: X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] What to expect at Changpeng Zhao’s sentencing on April 30 [/INST] Former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao is scheduled to appear before a federal judge more than 160 days after pleading guilty to one felony count as part of a settlement agreement with United States authorities.

On April 30, Judge Richard Jones will hear from prosecutors and CZ’s attorneys in United States District Court for the Western District of Washington for one of the most anticipated legal proceedings in the crypto space since the conviction and sentencing of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Zhao’s sentencing hearing has already been pushed back once, but at the time of publication, it was expected to be held by the end of the month.

In November 2023, Zhao pleaded guilty to one count for failure to maintain an effective Anti-Money Laundering (AML) program while at Binance, violating the Bank Secrecy Act. He resigned as CEO as part of the plea deal, in which the crypto exchange and Zhao agreed to pay $4.3 billion to settle “civil regulatory enforcement actions” in the United States — which did not include a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Under U.S. sentencing guidelines, Judge Jones could put CZ in federal prison for up to 10 years, but there is a recommended sentence of 12 to 18 months for the charge he's facing. Bankman-Fried received a 25-year sentence on March 28, but other than the fact both cases involve high-profile members of the crypto space, there are few similarities. Some have suggested that given his guilty plea and cooperation with authorities, Zhao could face no prison time.

“I would say [these cases] are not comparable from a charges perspective, but they are extremely comparable from the perspective that the [Justice Department], the SEC and the federal government are making it very clear that they are not going to tolerate nefarious behavior,” Moe Vela, a former Director of Administration for then-Vice President Joe Biden, told Cointelegraph.

Vela added that U.S. authorities may be trying to “send a message” to illicit players in the crypto space, regardless of whether the judge imposes a harsh sentence on CZ. However, he speculated that the former Binance CEO could “see some leniency” from the judge due to Zhao's cooperation and guilty plea.

Related: What to expect at Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing hearing

Mark Bini, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, told Cointelegraph that, unlike Bankman-Fried’s criminal case, CZ’s felt more “like a regulatory offense.” However, he said there was a risk that events around Hamas’ attack on Israel could potentially influence the judge overseeing CZ’s sentencing.

In the wake of the Hamas attack, many reports have surfaced alleging connections to crypto being used to fund terrorist organizations. The allegations may not be entirely unrelated to the former Binance CEO’s charge for failure to maintain an AML program and the exchange’s civil case.

“The wild card and where public sentiment might line up with what the government feels about the case is that there is that case out there against Binance [...] accusing them of having laundered funds related to Hamas,” said Bini. “Something like that [...] might be framed in some way as showing how serious that what looks like a regulatory offense has real-world consequences that prosecutors might argue should be taken into account.”

Bini added:

“The facts of the case may be so compelling to the judge in some bad way for CZ that the judge feels that a more significant sentence is called for.”

Since his guilty plea, Zhao has remained mainly free to travel within certain areas of the United States on a $175 million bond. His legal team has made several requests for the former Binance CEO to travel to the United Arab Emirates to visit family before his hearing, all of which the judge has denied.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime"
"[INST] FTX estate to unload $7.6B locked Solana balance at 68% discount [/INST] The estate of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX will sell its balance of 41 million Solana (SOL), worth $7.65 billion at the time of publication, to institutional investors at around $60, or a 68% discount to its current market price.

As told by FTX creditor Sunil Kavuri during FTX co-founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) sentencing on March 28, not all customers have been made whole by the exchange's bankruptcy. “Sullivan & Cromwell [FTX bankruptcy counsel] has trampled over our property rights,” Kavuri alleged. “They have liquidated billions of dollars of crypto assets. There’s a token S&C sold at 11 cents; it’s now trading at two dollars. FTX had $10 billion [misprint] in Solana tokens — they sold it at 70% discount.""

In an earlier victim impact statement filed by Kavuri, the FTX creditor claimed that the FTX estate “owns 41.1 million Solana tokens which should be distributed to FTX creditors. They were planning to sell them for $60, the price today is $187."" Despite the creditors’ claims, presiding Judge Lewis A. Kaplan reiterated that the March 28 hearing was solely for sentencing SBF, and not for raising issues with creditors’ claims. “I accept your assertion the claim customers will be made whole is inaccurate,"" said Judge Kaplan.

At least one investor seems to have confirmed the discounted sales. On March 27, Canadian blockchain firm Neptune Digital Assets announced it had acquired 26,964 SOL at $64 per token, a 67% discount to its then-market price. Although the firm did not specify its counterparty, the terms of the sale match the offer conditions provided by the FTX estate.

As per a March 7 Bloomberg report, the vesting period for the purchase of discounted SOL tokens is four years. Simultaneous to the bankruptcy proceedings, FTX creditors have filed a class action against Sullivan and Cromwell, alleging that the firm participated in the FTX fraud before it became the exchange's bankruptcy counsel. Before its collapse, FTX was an early investor in the Solana ecosystem.

Related: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison"
"[INST] Ethereum’s next hard fork could make lost private keys a thing of the past [/INST] Ethereum users may no longer need to worry about losing their seed phrases ever again after the Pectra hard fork — thanks to a new “social recovery” feature part of the planned Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 3074 upgrade.

EIP-3074 was confirmed as a new addition to the Pectra hard fork by Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko in an April 11 X post.

The upgrade will see a “supercharging” of ordinary Ethereum wallets (externally owned accounts) with several new smart contracts capabilities, including the ability to recover assets, Ethereum Foundation researcher “Domothy” explained in a March 25 blog post.

However, to leverage the social recovery tool, users must first have transferred ownership of their assets to an invoker contract via a digital signature, which will perform future transactions and function calls on the user’s behalf.

While ownership is delegated, the message in the digital signature will enable the user to retrieve their assets if they lose or forget their seed phrase.

The feature will be made possible by the implementation of the “AUTH” and “AUTHCALL” opcodes, cryptocurrency commentator Cygaar explained in an April 11 X post.

AUTH will take a user’s signature and intended action and verify it was signed properly. AUTHCALL will then call the target contract to carry out the transaction but will assign the user as the caller instead of the invoker contract.

Domothy, however, shared concerns that funds could be drained if users delegate their assets to a malicious invoker contract, though he also expects a few formally verified and fully audited invoker contracts to become available after the Pectra upgrade.

It has been estimated that billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency have been lost over the years due to users forgetting or losing their private keys.

Related: Key elements to watch on the Ethereum network roadmap

Meanwhile, another key advantage of EIP-3074 is that users won’t need any Ether (ETH) in their wallet to send transactions, as the entity behind the invoker contract can pay for that upfront.

“This could be huge for gaining mass retail adoption,” Cygaar noted.

It will also enable multiple actions to be taken in one transaction.

“Right now in order to swap tokens on Uniswap, you have to first approve Uniswap to use your tokens, and then run the actual swap. Not great.”

“[But] with 3074, these two actions can be batched into a single tx,” Cygaar added.

The Pectra hard fork is reportedly expected to occur in late 2024 or early 2025.

Magazine: ‘Account abstraction’ supercharges Ethereum wallets: Dummies guide"
"[INST] Manchester City to release digital collectibles through multi-year partnership with Quidd [/INST] The Premier League’s Manchester City Football Club has entered into a multi-year partnership with Animoca Brands subsidiary Quidd to develop and launch digital collectibles alongside new promotions and fan experiences.

Quidd will create and launch “special edition” digital collectibles including cards that will unlock real-world experiences.

Tom Boyle, Vice-President, Global Partnerships Marketing and Operations at City Football Group announced the partnership in a blog post adding:

“We’re excited to help transform the traditional football pastime of cards and collectibles in a new digital age alongside Quidd, enabling us to further connect with our fans across the globe. We look forward to working together on creating new digital experiences and games for our fans to enjoy.”

Related: Animoca Brands raises $5M for NFT marketplace, Quidd

The inaugural product for the partnership will be a series of 200 bespoke digital player cards which will launch or purchase on May 2. The first 10,000 “Cityzens” (the colloquial term for Man City fans) to purchase packs will receive two exclusive “For the Fans” packs.

Cityzens who unlock digital rewards through the Quidd packs will also have the opportunity to participate in real world events and purchase opportunities including official Manchester City merchandise and hospitality tickets as well as winning “money-can’t-buy experiences, including an exclusive opportunity to watch a first team training session at the City Football Academy.”

Image source: Club News

As Cointelegraph recently reported, Man City has been active in the NFT space as of late with the launch of its “Unseen City Shirts” NFT collection on the OKX blockchain on April 22. A limited number of Unseen City Shirts NFTs are tied to physical, limited-edition jerseys featuring hand painted artwork.

The club also partnered with Sony in 2022 to build a virtual version of Etihad Stadium, Man City’s iconic home field, reportedly the first officially-licensed football stadium to be built in the metaverse.

Meanwhile, other clubs are turning to cryptocurrency for their long-term futures. The Winklevoss twins recently bought into Bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack’s Real Bedford Football Club, investing $4.5 million towards the club’s Bitcoin treasury. Evidently they’re bullish on both BTC and the club’s chances to one day make it to the Premier League."
"[INST] UK to propose clearer crypto regulations by July [/INST] The United Kingdom Treasury intends to present a regulatory framework for crypto assets and stablecoins by July, with the aim of encouraging local innovation in digital assets and blockchain technology.

The U.K.’s economic secretary to the Treasury, Bim Afolami, revealed the government’s ongoing drive to lay the groundwork for revamping the country’s payments landscape while speaking at the Innovate Finance Global Summit (IFGS) 2024.

Alongside the U.K.’s focus on fiat payment innovation, Afolami highlighted the importance of crypto regulations to remain globally competitive:

“Speaking of true change, I know that the cornerstone of our position as a world leader in fintech is the delivery of our regulatory regime for crypto assets and stablecoins.”

Afolami further highlighted the British government’s perspective on regulations, which aims to find the right balance between allowing firms to innovate while protecting the consumers.

IFGS 2024: Keynote Address from Bim Afolami, economic secretary to the Treasury. Source: YouTube

The U.K. Treasury is working on the final proposals that “deal with stablecoin and (crypto) staking” and plans to deliver them by June or July. The minister added:

“Once it goes live, a whole host of crypto asset activities, including operating in exchange, taking custody of customer assets and other things, will come within the regulator perimeter for the first time.”

Afolami also announced the formation of an open finance task force during the conference.

“The task force will craft a clear set of recommendations, pinpointing the data sets of commercial incentives necessary to drive forward CFIT’s SME lending use case for open finance,” he explained.

Related: Controversial UK legislation creates ‘positive frictions’ for crypto users

From April 26, U.K. authorities will be able to retrieve crypto assets directly from exchanges and custodian wallet providers.

The law comes into effect after amendments were made to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, which expands the power of the National Crime Agency to confiscate and seize crypto assets the agency suspects are linked to suspicious illicit activities without needing to go through extensive legal procedures.

The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. Source: U.K. Parliament

While it didn’t outline its process, the most common way to destroy a crypto token is by burning it, transferring the tokens to a burn wallet address and taking them out of circulation.

Magazine: The real risks to Ethena’s stablecoin model (are not the ones you think)"
"[INST] Paradigm leads $225M funding round for new ‘Solana killer’ L1 [/INST] Crypto-focused venture capital (VC) firm Paradigm is leading a $225 million funding round into a new layer-1 blockchain network, which is set to compete for market share with Solana and other top networks.

Monad Labs completes the funding round, which aims to build a new layer-1 smart contract network with faster speed and lower costs than Ethereum.

The funding round was announced after two years of development, according to Keone Hon, the founder of Monad Labs, who told Fortune in an interview:

“We’re emerging from roughly two years of development […] At a time when a lot of the research community was focused on roll-up, data availability, and other directions of scaling, Monad basically went really deep on the pure execution side.”

The new L1 will be 100% compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), capable of up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), according to a March 14 X post by Monad.

Despite being the home of decentralized finance (DeFi), Ethereum has significant shortcomings, including notoriously high gas fees during network congestion. Monad Labs aims to improve on its shortcomings with its execution-focused L1. Hon told Fortune:

“We realized there was a huge need for a more performant EVM, and that in spite of this need, no one was really working on this problem.”

Related: With 10 days to the halving, analysts predict $150K Bitcoin top

Crypto VC funding continues to rise

The new investment round was announced during a period of increased VC interest in crypto firms.

Bitcoin layer-2 network Mezo announced the completion of a $21 million Series A funding round led by Pantera Capital on April 9. Mezo enables investors to earn yield based on the time they hold their tokens. They describe it as a “Bitcoin Economic Layer.”

On April 3, reports emerged about Paradigm negotiating to raise up to $850 million for a new fund, which would make it the largest raise in the crypto industry since May 2022, when Silicon Valley-based VC firm Andreessen Horowitz raised a record-setting $4.5 billion.

Crypto VC funding turned positive in the first quarter of 2024, breaking a two-year slump, with the funds invested rising 38% compared to the previous quarter, according to data analysis platform Crypto Koryo.

Related: Frax Finance dives into DeFi liquidity with $250M USDe allocation"
"[INST] UK court freezes over $8M of Craig Wright’s assets [/INST] A United Kingdom court has approved the freezing of 6.7 million British pounds ($8.4 million) of Craig Wright’s assets to prevent him from evading court expenses.

The decision was made after Wright transferred some of his assets outside of the U.K. after a court verdict debunked his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin (BTC). According to a U.K. court document, this prompted him to shift shares of his London firm, RCJBR Holding, to a Singaporean entity on March 18. Judge James Mellor stated:

“Understandably, that gave rise to serious concerns on COPA’s part that Dr Wright was implementing measures to seek to evade the costs and consequences of his loss at trial.”

The judge endorsed a “worldwide freezing order” by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) to address its total court expenses amounting to 6.7 million British pounds ($8.4 million).

COPA was founded in 2020 “to encourage the adoption and advancement of cryptocurrency technologies and to remove patents as a barrier to growth and innovation.” Its 33 members include Coinbase, Block, Meta, MicroStrategy, Kraken, Paradigm, Uniswap and Worldcoin.

An Australian computer scientist, Wright falsely claimed he was Nakamoto to file copyright assertions concerning the Bitcoin network. He demanded two websites remove the Bitcoin white paper in January 2021.

Related: Bitcoin price retraces 30 days ahead of halving in historical pattern

In April 2021, COPA filed a lawsuit against Wright, contesting his claims. On March 14, Mellor ruled that Wright is not Nakamoto.

In 2023, Wright sued 13 Bitcoin Core developers and a group of companies, including Blockstream, Coinbase and Block, for copyright violations relating to the Bitcoin white paper, its file format and database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain.

The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund responded, highlighting the trend of abusive lawsuits against prominent Bitcoin contributors, deterring development due to the associated time, stress, expenses and legal risks. Wright filed for United States copyright registration for the Bitcoin white paper in 2019.

The Bitcoin white paper is now subject to an MIT open-source license, allowing anyone to reuse and modify the code for any purpose.

Magazine: China will intensify Bitcoin bull run, $1M by 2028: Bitcoin Man, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Morgan Stanley wants to beat UBS to become first Bitcoin ETF bank [/INST] The launch of spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETF) in the United States has fueled rivalry between investment banks over which will be the first wirehouse to add the products.

Morgan Stanley is hoping to beat UBS in becoming the first wirehouse to fully approve the Bitcoin ETF, crypto enthusiast Andrew (AP_Abacus) reported on X on April 3.

Citing internal Morgan Stanley notes, Andrew said that the bank “may announce a few days before” its move into Bitcoin ETFs.

He also mentioned that global banks have been actively talking about the Bitcoin ETF addition as a race.

Bloomberg ETF expert Eric Balchunas added to Andrew’s X thread, noting that neither Morgan Stanley nor UBS have added Bitcoin ETFs, citing a “solid source.”

“Still in a holding pattern, in a compliance game of chicken, waiting for one of them to go first, then gives rest cover. So probably will be an all-at-once type moment when that is the question,” Balchunas suggested.

Prior to posting the new update, Andrew reported that UBS plans to add Bitcoin ETFs to its platform between April 8 and April 12 next week.

Follow Bitcoin Halving coverage in full, presented by M2

The latest speculation about Morgan Stanley’s potential rival move against UBS comes a few weeks after Andrew reported that the bank is set to approve Bitcoin ETFs.

“Several sources confirm that Morgan Stanley is set to approve Bitcoin ETFs on its platform in the next two weeks,” the poster wrote on March 26.

Cointelegraph approached Morgan Stanley and UBS for a comment regarding the potential addition of spot Bitcoin ETFs to their platforms but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs made a historic trading debut in the United States on Jan. 11, after many years of efforts to launch one in the country. Customers of major banks like UBS and Citi subsequently reported not being able to access spot Bitcoin ETFs, with banks citing different reasons to not list those investment products.

Related: SEC calls for comments on Fidelity, Grayscale and Bitwise spot Ether ETF applications

A spokesperson close to UBS told Cointelegraph in January that spot Bitcoin ETFs can only be offered in a brokerage account and are only suitable for “aggressive investors.”

“It remains to be seen if the issuers will be able to distinguish themselves in terms of ability to manage the product during turbulent markets,” UBS wrote in an official statement about spot Bitcoin ETFs on Jan. 29.

Some other major banks in the U.S. have continued to maintain skepticism about Bitcoin even after the ETF approval.

“We do not think it is an investment asset class,” Goldman Sachs’ chief investment officer and known Bitcoin skeptic Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani said in an April 2 interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We’re not believers in crypto,” she stated.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments: Trezor CEO"
"[INST] Vietnamese tech company to build $200M AI factory with Nvidia [/INST] The Vietnamese IT company FPT and Nvidia, a global leader in semiconductor chip production, said they would be collaborating to finance and build a $200 million artificial intelligence (AI) factory in Vietnam.

In a joint statement on April 23, the companies said their initiative aims to create a “one-stop shop” for all things AI and cloud computing in Vietnam. Its targets include AI products, GPU infrastructure, tech experts and domain expertise for local clients.

FPT plans to invest funds in the AI factory, which will serve as a “sovereign cloud,” while Nvidia will supply its latest tech. This will include its AI enterprise software and frameworks, along with Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs.

According to the statement, FPT aims to establish Vietnam as an “AI hub of the world” and turn the country into an AI nation while accelerating the adoption of AI applications in neighboring countries such as Japan and Korea.

Keith Strier, the vice president for Worldwide AI for Nvidia, said that AI has the potential to “improve lives and strengthen the economies of every nation” through accelerating innovation in various fields such as healthcare, agriculture, climate and manufacturing.

The factory will provide cloud GPU services to corporate customers of FPT to accelerate the capabilities and speed of AI applications, as well as offer end-to-end generative AI services.

Related: Vietnamese Web3 coalition Ninety Eight launches $25M ecosystem fund

Additionally, Nvidia’s programs will be incorporated into the educational curriculum and activities, training programs, and lab facilities at universities and high schools around the country. The statement said that over the ne at least 30,000 students will be reached by the initiative.

In December 2023, the CEO of Nvidia announced that the company had plans to expand partnerships in Vietnam with the intention of attracting local talent in the AI industry.

Before that, in September 2023, the United States and Vietnam entered into business agreements and partnerships worth billions of dollars to further AI-related cooperation, focusing on strengthening the semiconductor supply chain.

During this meeting, heads of major tech companies working in the AI space were present, including Nvidia, Microsoft and Google.

Magazine: AI didn’t kill the metaverse, it will build it — Alien Worlds, Bittensor vs Eric Wall: AI Eye"
"[INST] Ernst & Young taps ZK-proofs on Ethereum to automate contracts [/INST] Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young has launched an Ethereum-based solution using zero-knowledge proofs aimed at helping its private business clients facilitate complex contracts.

Called the EY OpsChain Contract Manager (OCM), the solution will help private businesses execute complex business agreements in a timely, confidential and cost-effective manner, the firm explained in an April 17 statement.

Among the types of contracts that can leverage EY’s Ethereum-based solution are purchase agreements, standardized rate cards, volume discounts, rebates and strike prices.

EY said it chose Ethereum — a public blockchain — instead of a private network as it would prevent a party from gaining a “strategic advantage” over another and reduce the risk of sensitive business information being leaked.

The firm built OCM as it realized through past client work that accuracy in contract terms could be improved while also cutting cycle times and administration costs by around 90% and 40%, respectively, noted Paul Brody, EY Global Blockchain Leader.

“With our zero-knowledge privacy technology, we have industrialized this capability, and we can now get these benefits at a fraction of the up-front cost.”

The solution was launched at the annual EY Global Blockchain Summit on April 17.

In a recent interview with Cointelegraph, Reed Smith’s On Chain cryptocurrency group leader Celisa Morin noted that TradFi institutions have started to prefer using public blockchains instead of private ones in recent months, with BlackRock’s BUIDL being a textbook example of that.

Related: Bitcoin ETF to trigger massive demand from institutions, EY says

OCM has been in the works since at least September 2021, when the accounting firm chose Polygon to help build its blockchain enterprise product. Polygon helped EY build Nightfall — an Ethereum-based enterprise solution to orchestrate private transactions — a few months later, in December 2021. However, no mention of Polygon was made in EY’s latest product information sheet for OCM.

EY first started experimenting with ZK-proofs in April 2019 for the purpose of building a blockchain-based platform for audit, tax and transaction monitoring. Ethereum has long been its chain of choice to build on.

The firm revealed it invested $1.4 billion into AI technologies for its new EY.ai platform late September, aimed at helping companies adopt AI through its in-house built large language model, EY AI EYQ.

Magazine: Ethereum is eating the world — ‘You only need one internet’"
"[INST] Lido’s Ethereum staking market share dips below 30% [/INST] The recent influx of Ether (ETH) stakers brought the market share of liquid staking solution Lido down to 29.57% from 32% in December 2023, helping reduce concerns around Lido’s growing influence on the ecosystem.

Lido’s popularity in ETH staking, coupled with the lack of competition in the space, allowed the platform to earn the lion’s share of the ETH staking market.

The community feared that any entity representing over 33% of the market could influence various aspects of the Ethereum blockchain.

As of April 4, data from crypto analytics platform Dune shows that Lido’s market share for staked ETH dipped below 30%.

ETH stakers overview. Source: Dune Analytics

Other prominent entities contributing to the ETH staking ecosystem are crypto exchanges Coinbase (14.04%) and Binance (3.75%) and Ethereum staking platform Kiln (3.5%).

However, the second-largest entity in ETH staking is marked as “unidentified,” which currently represents 16.9% of the market.

ETH stakers ranking and overall contribution. Source: Dune Analytics

There are 26 known entities that contribute to ETH staking in total, including crypto exchanges Kraken (2.4%), Bitcoin Suisse (1.6%), OKX (1.2%) and Upbit (1.1%).

According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, stake pools should not have more than 15% control and should choose to “keep increasing its fee rate until it goes back below 15%.”

The Lido decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) community previously tried to solve the ETH staking dominance issue by proposing a hard limit in May 2022. However, the DAO rejected the proposal with a 99.81% vote in June 2022.

The Lido DAO community voted against adding a hard limit on staking contribution. Source: snapshot.org

Increasing competition among ETH staking service providers is expected to play a major role in further decentralizing the staking ecosystem.

Related: Ethereum earnings tripled in Q1 2024, reaching $370M

In a recent Coinbase report, in-house analysts noted the possibility of several risks around Ether restaking and the issuance of so-called liquid restaking tokens (LRTs).

Using the Ethereum restaking protocol Eigenlayer as an example, the analysts said, “While this (restaking) can increase earnings, it can also compound risks” as it allocates the same funds to similar validators for increased yield.

“As such, LRTs may be incentivized to maximize their yields in order to gain market share, but these could come at the cost of a higher (albeit hidden) risk profile,” they added.

Magazine: Ethereum’s ERC-20 design flaws are a crypto scammer’s best friend"
"[INST] DeFi’s ‘unknown and unpredictable’ risks curb institutional use — Fireblocks VP [/INST] Institutional investors have a “growing interest” in decentralized finance (DeFi) but are held back by the risks of on-chain transactions, says a Fireblocks executive. The company aims to address these concerns by introducing new features to its platform.

“For institutional investors navigating DeFi transactions, the risks are significant,” Fireblocks security and trust products vice president Shahar Madar told Cointelegraph. “They manage significantly more funds than the average consumer trader.” Madar added:

“The risks of unknown and unpredictable DeFi engagements is something they have to consider within their risk portfolio, which is what essentially holds them back.”

Despite the risks, Madar said institutional DeFi trading on Fireblocks rose 75% in the first quarter of 2024, reaching “nearly $4.5 billion.”

With DeFi having $95 billion in total value locked, according to DefiLlama, it has “attracted attention from sophisticated attackers” said Madar.

Around $336.3 million worth of crypto was stolen in hacks and scams in Q1, down from $437.5 million stolen in Q1 of 2023.

Fireblocks added two new tools to its institutional DeFi suite: “Transaction Simulation,” which allows its users to see what a smart contract will do to a wallet before it is signed, and “DApp Protection,” which analyzes contracts for malicious elements and alerts users of “suspicious smart contracts.”

For DeFi to attract institutions, Madar said it “must prioritize security, user-friendly interfaces, and effective risk management,” which he thinks could “transform perceptions of DeFi and the entire industry.”

Related: Crypto sleuth warns of scammers behind DeFi protocol

Institutions, for their part, are increasingly drawn to staking, restaking and tokenizing real-world assets, said Madar.

He added that Fireblocks users are actively “swapping, lending, staking and bridging” on decentralized applications, including Uniswap, Aave, Curve, 1inch and Jupiter.

Meanwhile, the interest of traditional finance players leans toward real-world asset tokenization and using DeFi’s infrastructure to “establish a safer financial ecosystem without counterparty risks.”

Magazine: Synthetix founder Kain Warwick: It’s DeFi that’s wrong, not the market"
"[INST] Token2049 Dubai preview — tuxedos optional, lifejackets obligatory [/INST] Token2049, the annual Web3 conference, opens its doors on Thursday, April 18, but those doors may well be barricaded with sandbags as the desert city has been inundated with a wall of water.

The city, which typically gets just 9.5 centimeters (about 4 inches) of rain in a year, has seen close to 15cm (about 6 inches) fall in just 24 hours between Monday and Tuesday evening, throwing the tinder-dry metropolis into chaos.

Social media is awash with videos and clips of the unlikely situation, with streets turned to rivers, cars submerged, planes spraying water on flooded runways, and tales of diverted flights and visitors to the conference trapped in their hotels.

The city’s international airport, the second busiest in the world with 87 million passengers, told travelers this morning not to come — a first for the desert nation.

Source: Dubai International Airport

The event itself is still scheduled to go ahead despite the inconveniences visitors are experiencing. The hope is that the return of the kind of weather the Emirates expects for this time of year — blue skies and temperatures around 30 degrees Celsius — will be sufficient to get the city back on its feet and wheels again.

Cointelegraph's reporter Ezra Reguerra is in Dubai to report on the event and has sent some eye-popping videos of the city after the storms.

TOKEN2049 will run from April 18-19, 2024, at the Madinat Jumeirah Hotel in Dubai. Considered by some as one of tthe leading global Web3 and crypto community events of the year, 2024 marks the first time the event is taking place in Dubai.

Tickets sold out well in advance, and 10,000 attendees are expected over the two days. It will bring together founders, executives, and decision-makers from over 4,000 companies and 100 countries.

The agenda will cover a range of topics, including decentralized AI, Web3 gaming, DeFi, and blockchain scalability. And, as one would expect from the city of Dubai, the event will be accompanied by exhibitions, live DJ sets, and high-class hospitality.

TOKEN2049 actually began on April 15, with a week-long series of meetups, workshops, and parties. The second TOKEN2049 event of the year will take place in Singapore in September."
"[INST] US Justice Department charges KuCoin and two founders with violating AML laws [/INST] United States Justice Department officials unsealed an indictment against cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin and two of its founders for “conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business” and violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, or BSA.

In a March 26 announcement, the U.S. Department of Justice said KuCoin founders Chun Gan and Ke Tang had willfully failed to maintain an Anti-Money Laundering program at the exchange, leading to the platform being used for “money laundering and terrorist financing.” The company itself was charged with operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business and violating the BSA.

“KuCoin and its founders deliberately sought to conceal the fact that substantial numbers of U.S. users were trading on KuCoin’s platform,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. “Indeed, KuCoin allegedly took advantage of its sizeable U.S. customer base to become one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency derivatives and spot exchanges, with billions of dollars of daily trades and trillions of dollars of annual trade volume.”

Williams added:

“In failing to implement even basic anti-money laundering policies, the defendants allowed KuCoin to operate in the shadows of the financial markets and be used as a haven for illicit money laundering.”

The DOJ criminal charges were announced in parallel to a civil enforcement case from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which charged KuCoin “with multiple violations of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) and CFTC regulations” on March 26. According to the Justice Department, KuCoin received more than $5 billion and sent more than $4 billion of “suspicious and criminal funds.”

Related: KuCoin responds to claims of user funds being locked

Gan and Tang helped launch KuCoin in 2017. According to its website, KuCoin’s operational headquarters was in Seychelles. The two founders, Chinese nationals, remained at large at the time of publication.

U.S. officials have pursued similar criminal charges against crypto exchanges and their executives doing business in the country. On March 28, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried will be sentenced following his conviction on seven felony charges. Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is expected to be sentenced on April 30.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime"
"[INST] Base asset tokenization protocol loses $1.7M due to private key leak [/INST] Real-world asset tokenization protocol Grand Base (GB), which operates on Coinbase’s native layer-2 blockchain, has suffered $1.7 million in losses after a private key compromise.

“On April 15 at 03:01:27 AM +UTC, an exploit happened on our contracts,” wrote an admin in the protocol’s Telegram chat. “For this specific reason, we urge all our community members to stay away from this contract as it is not safe anymore.”

According to blockchain analytics firm PeckShield, the private key leak resulted in the theft of $1.7 million in tokens from its liquidity pools, which have since been swapped on-chain for Ether (ETH) and sent to an external address. Simultaneously, the protocol’s native token lost 99% of its value in the past 24 hours due to the incident.

The Grand Base Telegram admin reiterated that “this token contract is NOT safe anymore and you should NOT swap or interact with it, stay safe. We will update you asap on the next step.”

In a follow-up analysis by blockchain analytics firm CertiK, it appears that the hacker gained control of Grand Base deployer contracts and subsequently minted an excess number of GB tokens without authorization before withdrawing them.

A subsequent post from Grand Base staff claims that developers have “tracked all the wallets of the hacker” and are awaiting the next move. “We are in talks with CEXs [centralized exchanges] to freeze any funds that he might move,” Grand Base staff added.

Grand Base’s description of the attack. Source: Telegram

Users were not impressed with the news of the Monday hack.

“I’m very sorry for everyone involved here,” one user wrote in Grand Base’s Telegram chat. “Please, don’t lose more money here. Abandon this and don’t deposit a single dollar more into this thing, whatever happens.”

“There are hidden loopholes in this contract,” another user alleged. “The total balance does not show any changes, and it belongs to hidden loopholes. Do you know if it was intentional by dev or not?” they added. Before the minting attack, Grand Base had a maximum GB token cap of 50 million.

The Grand Base tokenization protocol was launched less than five months ago. It allowed users to deposit collateral to mint real-world assets in the form of ERC-20 tokens and provided liquidity for the tokenized assets to earn rewards.

Related: This platform aims to make seamless RWA tokenization possible"
"[INST] Unharmonized regulation threatens stablecoin usability — BIS report [/INST] The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has found that despite their promise, the use of stablecoins is hindered by international regulatory fragmentation, in a survey of 11 jurisdictions. The publication said the need for stablecoin regulation is “urgent,” but diversity in regulation poses risks for their integration into the international financial system.

Most regulatory approaches are similar in their authorization of issuers, reserve requirements, risk management and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) measures, the report noted. Differences in the structuring of stablecoin issuances can cause them to be regulated under banking, securities, commodities or payment system frameworks, however.

Licensing regimes across jurisdictions. Source: Bank for International Settlements

There are also differences in the details of regulations, redemption policies and the definition of a stablecoin. For example, some jurisdictions regulate algorithmic stablecoins, which are not pegged to external assets, identically to fiat-pegged stablecoins, but the United Kingdom, Japan and Singapore regulate them separately, and jurisdictions in the United Arab Emirates ban them altogether. The report said:

“Differences appear to be largely driven by the variety of stablecoin design features, perceived risks associated with their issuance and the nature of the issuing entity. […] The resulting fragmentation may pose significant challenges for an integrated financial system.”

Reserves may have to be segregated in different ways, placed in the hands of custodians subject to differing requirements or, in the case of the U.K., placed in a statutory trust. Audit and liquidity requirements also vary greatly.

Related: ‘Primitive’ stablecoin lacks mechanisms that maintain fiat stability: BIS report

Technological and cybersecurity requirements tend to be more uniform. The interaction of stablecoins with central bank digital currency, tokenized deposits and other digital assets needs to be explored more thoroughly.

Source: Bank for International Settlements

The report follows BIS recommendations on stablecoin regulation released in February. BIS urged governments to cooperate and address disclosure, risk management, redemption and other issues.

Numerous international bodies, such as the International Monetary Fund, Financial Stability Board, Financial Action Task Force, Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and International Organization of Securities Commissions, also have policies on stablecoins that they hope to advance.

Magazine: The DeFi bots pumping Solana’s stablecoin volume"
"[INST] Binance restricts unverified sub-accounts on Exchange Link program [/INST] Crypto exchange Binance announced mandatory Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements for its Exchange Link account holders under the Binance Link Program.

On April 5, Binance said that only verified and compliant users will be given access to their sub-accounts. The rule also applies to subaccounts created for deposit purposes and are not used in trading.

The exchange said it had been applying restrictions to noncompliant sub-accounts since March 20 and giving an ultimatum to unverified sub-account holders.

The exchange noted that by May 20, sub-accounts that have not submitted the necessary KYC information will be “fully restricted” from accessing the Binance Link Program services.

Binance restrictions on unverified sub-accounts. Source: Binance

Accounts with incomplete KYC information will have their deposits restricted. However, they will be allowed to withdraw their funds.

When it comes to trading, the restricted accounts will not be able to place new orders in spot trading and will have all of their existing orders canceled.

In futures and margin trading, the restricted accounts will not be able to place new orders but will be allowed to reduce their existing positions.

Binance said that the Exchange Link account holders should be the ones to provide any additional information on behalf of their sub-account holders. This includes their source of funds, wealth and proof of address.

Binance also added measures to determine whether a sub-account user is involved in politics. If the user is politically exposed, Binance requires them to provide their position and employer details.

Those related to politically exposed persons (PEP) must also provide details of their relationship with the PEP.

The exchange also noted that they could freeze the funds in a sub-account and restrict access for legal and compliance reasons. The exchange wrote:

“In such cases, Binance may sometimes not be able to provide the Exchange Link account holder or their sub-account users with a detailed explanation for legal and compliance reasons.”

The exchange also highlighted that it could restrict access to Exchange Link account holders who are unresponsive or uncooperative. This could lead to accounts being downgraded and their sub-accounts fully deleted.

Related: Binance exec’s legal case in Nigeria adjourned until April 19

Meanwhile, Binance’s nonfungible token (NFT) arm announced that it will cease support for Bitcoin Ordinals trades and deposits on April 18.

The exchange said this is part of its efforts to streamline its offerings on the Binance NFT marketplace. Binance will also cease to offer Bitcoin NFT-related airdrops, benefits and utilities after April 10.

Magazine: KuCoin’s desperate $10M airdrop, 1 tweet raises $37M for memecoin: Asia Express"
"[INST] Indonesian NFT ‘selfie guy’ makes $1.8M, CryptoPunks sells for $16M: Nifty Newsletter [/INST] In this week’s newsletter, read about how an Indonesian man who sold nonfungible token (NFT) selfies in 2022 is making a comeback through memecoins. Check out how asset manager BlackRock’s crypto wallet received memecoins and NFTs after depositing a stablecoin in the wallet. In other news, find out how the CEO of Pixelmon is betting on fractionalized NFTs, and learn about a new CryptoPunk transaction taking the second-largest sale record for the collection.

Indonesian NFT “selfie guy” makes $1.8 million in memecoin comeback

Sultan Gustaf Al Ghozali, who gained popularity from selling selfie NFTs in 2022, is making a comeback with a hybrid project combining NFTs and memecoins. Ghozali announced the project, its details and a presale address on March 24.

Days after the announcement, the presale address had 527 Ether (ETH), worth about $1.8 million. Despite this, Ghozali said he would refund the amount exceeding the 400-ETH cap he set for the project.

Continue reading

BlackRock receives memecoins, NFTs after depositing $100 million USDC on-chain

Asset management company BlackRock received at least $40,000 worth of memecoins and NFTs after on-chain sleuths found out about one of its wallets connected to a new tokenization fund. After BlackRock made a filing to offer its BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, a $100-million USD Coin (USDC) deposit was flagged.

Because of this, unnamed crypto users sent at least 40 different tokens and 25 NFTs to the BlackRock labeled address on Etherscan. This ranged from Bitcoin Ordinals’ Pepe coin to a “CryptoDickbutts S3” NFT.

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Pixelmon CEO bets on fractionalized NFTs for its huge comeback

Crypto project Pixelmon, once mocked as the “worst NFT project,” has tapped into fractionalization to make a comeback. CEO Giulio Xiloyannis told Cointelegraph in an interview that they would redo the artworks of the project apart from “Kevin,” a popular NFT piece in the Pokemon-inspired project.

Xiloyannis said that Pixelmon will be free to play but will have Web3 elements. By owning an NFT, holders could earn royalties when the likeness of the NFT is used outside the game. Traders can also own fractions of an NFT and earn according to the percentage they own.

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CryptoPunks record another $16-million NFT sale in March

Blue-chip NFT collection CryptoPunks saw another $16-million transaction in March, becoming the collection’s second-largest NFT sale. On March 20, CryptoPunk #7804 sold for 4,850 ETH, worth about $16.4 million at the time of the transaction.

Peruggia, the long-time owner of the NFT, bid farewell and described the sale as the “end of an era.” The NFT owner purchased the CryptoPunk for 4,200 ETH in 2021 (worth about $7.5 million).

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Thanks for reading this digest of the week’s most notable developments in the NFT space. Come again next Wednesday for more reports and insights into this actively evolving space."
"[INST] Advocacy groups warn of ‘adverse repercussions’ for crypto in case against Tornado Cash co-founder [/INST] Representatives of three United States-based cryptocurrency advocacy organizations have filed amicus briefs in support of a motion to dismiss the charges against Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm.

In April 5 filings in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Blockchain Association, Coin Center and DeFi Education Fund argued that Tornado Cash did not have control of the funds or messages users sent through the cryptocurrency mixer. The advocacy groups separately claimed that the three felony counts Roman faces should be dismissed, citing First Amendment issues regarding the Tornado Cash co-founder allegedly violating sanctions and the U.S. government “misunderstand[ing] the basic relationship between smart contract protocols and their developers” regarding allegations of money laundering.

“Adoption of the government’s legal theory would not only have adverse repercussions for the digital asset industry but also raise serious concerns regarding fintech more generally,” said Blockchain Association Head of Legal Marisa Coppel. “We urge the court to hold the government up to its burden and dismiss the unfounded charges, safeguarding both the defendants’ rights and the integrity of the burgeoning digital asset sector.”

The U.S. Justice Department announced charges against Storm and co-developer Roman Semenov in August 2023. Storm pleaded not guilty to all three charges and is free on a $2 million bond, largely restricted from traveling. Semenov’s whereabouts were unknown at the time of publication, but Storm is set to go to trial in September.

Related: Here are the next biggest crypto court cases with the SBF saga over

In the Netherlands, Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev was arrested in August 2022 but released after roughly nine months in jail. Dutch authorities alleged he played a role in North Korean hacking groups using the crypto mixer to launder roughly $1 billion in illicit funds.

All three cases are connected to the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control adding crypto addresses associated with Tornado Cash to its list of Specially Designated Nationals — sanctioned entities. The decision prompted some crypto advocates to sue the U.S. Treasury, but both cases await appeal after losing summary judgment motions.

Magazine: Lawmakers’ fear and doubt drives proposed crypto regulations in US"
"[INST] Etherscan ads behind massive phishing campaign [/INST] Several Ethereum blockchain explorer Etherscan advertisements have been identified as part of a major phishing campaign targeting Etherscan users.

On April 8, X community member McBiblets identified some advertisements on Etherscan as wallet drainers, warning users against being redirected to phishing websites when clicking on such advertisements.

Further investigations revealed that the phishing advertisements appearing on Etherscan were also displayed on various known phishing websites.

Picking up on McBiblets’ lead, Web3 anti-scam platform Scam Sniffer found that the phishing advertisements spread beyond Etherscan and were showing up on popular search engines such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, as well as social media platform X.

Scam Sniffer suspected the lack of oversight from advertisement aggregators as the root cause of the large-scale phishing campaign:

“Etherscan aggregates ads from platforms like Coinzilla and Persona, where insufficient filtering could lead to exposure to phishing attempts.”

The wallet drainer scam involves luring users to fake websites and prompting them to link their crypto wallets. Once linked, the scammer can withdraw funds into their personal wallet addresses without user authentication or permission.

Blockchain security firm SlowMist’s chief information security officer, 23pds, also issued a warning about the phishing advertisements on Etherscan:

“Be careful, there are phishing ads on etherscan.”

The infamous and seasoned cyber phishing organization Angel Drainer is suspected of running the phishing attack campaign against Etherscan users. However, no concrete evidence about the scammers’ identity has yet been discovered.

Read Cointelegraph’s guide to learn more about phishing attacks and how to prevent them.

Related: Crypto phishing attacks reached ‘alarming levels’ — CertiK co-founder

In 2023 alone, crypto phishing scams stole nearly $300 million from over 324,000 victims through wallet drainers.

Notable wallet drainers active in 2023. Source: Scam Sniffer

Scam Sniffer also reported that even when drainers close down, “phishing gangs” just take their business elsewhere, as there seems to be no lack of platforms providing services for scammers.

Magazine: AI didn’t kill the metaverse, it will build it — Alien Worlds, Bittensor vs Eric Wall: AI Eye"
"[INST] Fake Ethena Labs token exploited for $290K on Binance Launchpool [/INST] Update March 29, 09:50 am UTC: This article has been updated to clarify the token in question is a fake bearing the same name as Ethena Labs' ENA token.

A fake token with the same name as Ethena Labs's ENA token has been exploited for 480 BNB (BNB) tokens worth $290,000 on the Binance launch pool for farming.

The vulnerability behind the exploit is still unknown. On-chain security firm PeckShield reported the incident at 8:31 am UTC on March 29 in an X post, mistaking the fake token for the real ENA token.

Ethena Labs’s ENA token was announced on the Binance Launchpool on March 29. The exploit of the fake token, which is unrelated to Ethena Labs, occurred a few hours after the announcementing listing, causing widespread confusion.

Ethena Labs launched its USDe synthetic dollar on the public mainnet on Feb. 19. Ethena became the highest-earning decentralized application (DApp) in crypto on March 8, when it offered investors an annual percentage yield (APY) of 67%.

In terms of total sum, the exploit is on the smaller side of crypto hacks. The attack occurred a day after the over-$11-million Prisma Finance hack on March 28.

Crypto hacks are a long-standing issue in the industry, eroding investor trust. Over $200 million worth of crypto has been lost to hacks and rug pulls in 2024 across 32 individual incidents up to Feb. 29, according to blockchain security firm Immunefi.

The over-$200-million loss represents a 15.4% increase compared to January and February 2023, when $173 million of digital assets were stolen.

A total of $1.8 billion was lost to crypto hacks and scammers in 2023, 17% of which can be attributed to the North Korean Lazarus Group, according to a Dec. 28 report by Immunefi.

Related: Funds hacked in 2024 increased by 15.4% vs. the same period in 2023 — Immunefi

Amount of crypto funds stolen fell 54% in 2023

The biggest year for crypto hackers was 2022, which saw over $3.7 billion in funds stpo, a decrease of 54.3% to $1.7 billion in 2023, according to the “2024 Crypto Crime Report” by Chainalysis.

Despite the value of funds falling, the number of incidents grew from 219 in 2022 to 231 in 2023.

Total value hacked. Source: Chainalysis

Chainalysis attributed the significant yearly drop to a decrease in decentralized finance (DeFi) hacking, according to the report:

“Hacks of DeFi protocols largely drove the huge increase in stolen crypto that we saw in 2021 and 2022, with cybercriminals stealing more than $3.1 billion in DeFi hacks last year. But this year, hackers stole just $1.1 billion from DeFi protocols. This amounts to a 63.7% drop in the total value stolen from DeFi platforms year-over-year.”

Related: Marc Andreessen, Galaxy Digital, Accolade, back new $75 million crypto fund: Report"
"[INST] ‘Disable iMessages’ ASAP to avoid crypto zero-day exploit: Trust Wallet [/INST] Crypto wallet provider Trust Wallet is urging Apple users to disable iMessage, citing “credible intel” of a zero-day exploit that could allow hackers to take control of users’ phones.

“Alert for iOS users: We have credible intel regarding a high-risk zero-day exploit targeting iMessage on the Dark Web,” the firm posted to X at 7:53 pm UTC on April 16.

The firm stressed the zero-day exploit can infiltrate and take control of iPhone users without clicking a link and that high-value account holders are most at threat.

A zero-day exploit is a cyberattack vector that takes advantage of an unknown or unaddressed security flaw in computer software, hardware or firmware.

Trust Wallet stressed that all crypto wallets held on an iPhone with iMessage switched on are at risk.

The firm’s CEO, Eowyn Chen, shared a screenshot of which she claims to be a potential zero-day exploit, showing an asking price of $2 million for the exploit.

However, the so-called threat was met with skepticism from several industry pundits.

“If this is your ‘credible intel’ it’s embarrassing. You don’t have evidence of a iOS exploit you have a screenshot of a guy claiming to have an exploit,” pseudonymous blockchain researcher Beau said in response to Chen’s screenshot.

Asked whether it’s better to be “safe than sorry,” Beau stressed Trust Wallet’s alert could cause panic-induced harm.

More than 1.2 million X users viewed Trust Wallet’s alert on X over the first four hours.

Another skeptical comment from crypto analyst Foobar later led the firm into revealing its intel was sourced from its “security team and partners” that constantly check for threats.

Cointelegraph reached out to Apple but didn’t receive an immediate response.

Related: WinRAR patches zero-day bug that targeted stock and crypto traders

It comes as Apple released emergency security updates to fix two iOS zero-day vulnerabilities that were exploited in attacks on iPhones last month.

Apple’s iMessage application has also been used as an attack vector for hackers in previous events, according to security researchers at Kaspersky.

Meanwhile, more than 280 blockchain networks are at risk of zero-day exploits that could put at least $25 billion worth of crypto at risk, cybersecurity firm Halborn claimed last month.

Magazine: Should crypto projects ever negotiate with hackers? Probably"
"[INST] Bitcoin surpasses 65 million Ordinals inscriptions days before halving [/INST] The Bitcoin network has surpassed 65 million Ordinals inscriptions just days before the much-anticipated Bitcoin halving.

Ordinals inscriptions surpassed the 65 million mark on April 11, less than one year and three months since their launch in January 2023, according to Dune data.

Ordinals Inscriptions chart. Source: Dune

Ordinals are the first iteration of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on Bitcoin, the world’s first blockchain network. Ordinals live solely on the Bitcoin blockchain, unlike most of today’s popular NFT collections that host their metadata on centralized servers, creating additional points of vulnerability.

The milestone comes just before the Bitcoin halving, which will happen on or around April 19, reducing block rewards from 6.25 Bitcoin (BTC) to 3.125 BTC.

To date, Ordinals have generated over $458 million worth of network fees for Bitcoin miners, according to Dune, which is a significant lifeline for mining firms as the halving approaches.

Related: With 10 days to the halving, analysts predict $150K Bitcoin top

Ordinals signal demand for BTCFi

The 65 million milestone shows the increased demand for block space on Bitcoin and the need for additional Bitcoin layer-2 networks, according to Mithil Thakore, CEO of Velar, who told Cointelegraph:

“As ordinals become more prevalent, the need for utility around them through lending, derivatives markets, becomes evident. This trend will likely drive the rise of Bitcoin L2s, offering the programmability needed to support smart contracts to bring these ordinals as well as BTC to DeFi [decentralized finance]. It’s an exciting time for the Bitcoin ecosystem as we witness its evolution and expansion into new realms of functionality.”

BTCFi, short for Bitcoin decentralized finance, is a new paradigm aiming to bring DeFi capabilities to the Bitcoin network.

Provided that the current adoption rate continues, BTCFi could match the innovation of Ethereum-based DeFi in the future, Nash Lee, co-founder of MerlinSwap, who told Cointelegraph:

“[Market appetite] is seeking expansive platforms capable of accommodating the surging volumes and expectations. DeFi stands out as the only sector with the potential to leverage this narrative, providing a sustainable ecosystem for Bitcoin’s evolving use cases. This dynamic sets the stage for Bitcoin DeFi to potentially match, if not exceed, the innovation and complexity seen in Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem.”

Related: 10 days until halving: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall"
"[INST] Aave contemplates fee distribution in DeFi shake-up [/INST] A proposal may be in the works at the decentralized lending platform Aave as deliberations about the activation of a “fee switch” to distribute fees to holders is set to get underway, according to Aave Chan Initiative founder Marc Zeller.

Zeller said, “Temp check to activate ‘fee switch’ next week,” after noting that Aave DAO — the community-driven decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) behind the Aave platform — current net profits total about $60 million per year.

Aave is a crypto lending platform primarily based on Ethereum. It allows borrowers to take out loans in one cryptocurrency and depositing another as collateral. It is governed by holders of the Aave (AAVE) token, who collectively form the Aave DAO.

In a prior post on X, Zeller hinted at the possibility of implementing fees for Aave stakers. On March 16, he wrote, “A new iteration of the safety module will suggest distributing fees to stakers.”

A “fee switch” typically refers to a feature or mechanism within a system or platform that allows for activating or deactivating specific fees or charges. In decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols like Aave, a fee switch might enable the distribution of fees collected from transactions or other activities to tokenholders or participants.

Related: Restaking could introduce ‘hidden risks’ to Ethereum — Coinbase

The fee switch will allow governance to control and adjust fee-related policies based on the platform’s needs and objectives. Aave DAO recently greenlit alterations to staking fees for its stablecoin GHO to maintain the token’s peg. If Aave DAO proceeds with fee activation, it will emulate Frax Finance, which recently endorsed a proposal to reintroduce its fee switch.

However, on April 5, the AaveDAO discussed Dai (DAI) collateral restrictions. Risk management advisers from Chaos Labs presented a fresh proposal advocating a 12% decrease in Dai loan-to-value ratios (LTV) against Marc Zeller’s proposed 75% reduction.

Prior to this, Aave launched a new proposal to set DAI’s loan-to-value ratio to 0% across all Ave deployments. Additionally, the proposal recommends removing sDAI incentives from the Merit program starting from Merit Round 2 and onward. The move counters MakerDAO’s rapid D3M plan, raising the DAI credit line to about 600 million DAI a month.

Meanwhile, decentralized exchange Uniswap is in the final stages of preparation for its own fee switch proposal, expected to come in mid-April following a successful temperature check.

Magazine: ‘Crypto is inevitable’ so we went ‘all in’ — Meet Vance Spencer, permabull"
"[INST] Binance to return to India after paying $2M fine for non-compliance: Report [/INST] Binance crypto exchange is set to return to India after a four-month ban by paying a $2-million fine for non-compliance, according to a report published in The Economic Times.

Binance will be the second overseas exchange after KuCoin to mark a return to the country after India’s financial regulatory body blocked access to crypto exchanges for non-compliance.

The Indian Ministry of Finance’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) blocked access to nine foreign crypto exchange’s URLs and mobile applications, including Binance, in the first week of January for failing to adhere to the country’s Anti-Money Laundering Act.

Binance reportedly accounted for more than 90% of Indian crypto trading volume before its ban in January earlier this year.

Indian users flocked to foreign crypto exchanges like Binance to bypass the severe tax impositions, which prompted the government to ban overseas exchanges not registered with FIU.

Now, with FIU registration, foreign crypto exchanges like Binance have to adhere to the same rules and regulations as Indian exchanges.

KuCoin has started a 1% tax deduction at source (TDS), and other foreign crypto exchanges looking to mark an entry into India will have to follow the same.

Related: Taxman: India’s new tax policies could prove fatal for crypto industry

A person with knowledge of the matter told The Economic Times that it is “unfortunate that it took (Binance) more than two years to realize there is no room for negotiations, and (that) no global powerhouse can command special treatment, especially at the cost of exposing the country’s financial system to vulnerabilities,” reported ET.

Binance has a long history in India. It was believed to have acquired the local crypto exchange WazirX in 2019 but later claimed the deal never went through.

Binance claimed it only provided wallet services for WazirX as a tech solution and that WazirX was responsible for all other aspects of the exchange, including user sign-up, Know Your Customer (KYC), trading and initiating withdrawals.

While KuCoin and Binance have decided to become FIU-registered entities in India, OKX, another leading crypto exchange among the nine blocked crypto exchanges, shut its operations completely, citing the regulatory burden.

Cointelegraph has approached Binance for comment but has yet to hear back.

Magazine: Bitcoin Halving will pump games, Shrapnel’s ‘simple’ secret revealed: Web3 Gamer"
"[INST] How acclaimed composer Hans Zimmer got to write a crypto theme song [/INST] Hans Zimmer, the iconic movie composer, can now add the wild world of crypto to his expansive list of compositions after collaborating with Tron to create a theme song for Web3.

On April 16, the Tron blockchain announced that it would have its own anthem, composed by Zimmer, brought to life through a lengthy collaboration and exchange of ideas and Web3 values with founder Justin Sun.

The track, titled “The Tron Anthem — a song for the Web3 generation,” has classic Zimmer touches. It’s a musical world of epic and dramatic proportions that blends electronic music with traditional orchestral arrangements.

Zimmer has composed music for some of the biggest contemporary blockbusters, including Interstellar, Dune, The Dark Knight and Gladiator.

But what exactly does it take to compose an anthem for a living and evolving digital community? Cointelegraph talked to Sun about creating music with Zimmer that reflected the values of the Web3 space and received an exclusive quote from the composer about his vision.

According to the announcement, this theme song has been in the works since the beginning of 2022, when the Tron founder and Zimmer opened discussions for the project. Sun said that a joint endeavor of leveraging music as a “catalyst for communication and collaboration” was at the heart of the talks.

“Hans’ unparalleled creativity and influence make him a natural ally in our quest to harness the power of music to not only showcase who we are but also to attract diverse talents and capabilities to the Web3 ecosystem.”

Related: Hollywood union deal with music giants guards against AI use

Sun said the overall mission was to help foster mutual understanding within the Web3 community, catalyze industry-wide collaboration, and propel the community toward an innovative future.

Music as a medium to showcase ideas, and represent themes or communities is one of the most accessible ways to bring in audiences.

“Blockchain technology has unlocked a new frontier of digital collaboration, transcending geographical boundaries, time zones, languages and cultures,” Sun said. “In pursuit of these goals, we recognize the transformative power of music. It serves as a universal language capable of bridging gaps and fostering connection.”

In an exclusive quote for Cointelegraph, Zimmer described a sense of what Web3 can invoke and how we can even approach it:

“Everything that the Western world certainly is built on is a legacy code of the Industrial Revolution. Our education systems are built around that, our government is built around that etc. And once the internet happened, I don’t think we really knew how to use it. I think we need to free ourselves from those philosophies and those restrictions.”

This is not the first instance of music being used as an instrument to unite communities and foster inclusivity in the Web3 space.

In the past, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have been used as a form of micro-philanthropy to open up new funding avenues to classical musicians outside the limiting legacy institutions.

Web3 has also been able to bridge genres together through new musical collaborations through NFTs and metaverse performances, in addition to creating new means of connecting musicians to their communities.

The musical collaboration is yet another connection between the worlds of music and Web3 and points toward a more mainstream understanding of the importance of the emerging decentralized space.

Magazine: Synthetix founder Kain Warwick: It’s DeFi that’s wrong, not the market"
"[INST] Frax Finance dives into DeFi liquidity with $250M USDe allocation [/INST] Decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Frax Finance has recently passed a community governance proposal that greenlights a $250 million allocation of Ethena Labs’ USDe to a new liquidity pool.

As part of Frax’s Singularity Roadmap, the proposal enables the creation of an automated market operation (AMO) that will allow the minting of new FRAX tokens backed by overcollateralized debt. The proposal was approved on April 5.

The proposal will create one of the deepest liquidity pools in the DeFi space and enable Frax to diversify its backing yield, according to Ethena Labs, which wrote in an April 8 X post:

“As of yesterday, FRAX has begun adding USDe POL which will create one of the deepest pools of dollar liquidity on-chain, and enable FRAX to diversify their source of backing yield.”

According to Curve Finance data, the new Curve-based liquidity pool held $44.9 million worth of liquidity as of 10:45 am UTC, with $30.6 million worth of FRAX coins and $14.6 million worth of the USDe synthetic dollar.

FRAX/USDe liquidity pool. Source: Curve Finance

Related: Largest Ethena airdrop recipient gets nearly $2M

Ethena Labs surpasses $2 billion in TVL

Ethena Labs surpassed the $2 billion mark in total value locked (TVL) on April 6, less than two months after USDe was launched on the mainnet on Feb. 19, according to DefiLlama data.

According to its homepage, the protocol is currently offering a 37.1% annual percentage yield (APY) on USDe to over 125,300 investors.

Ethena Labs made headlines last week after it announced it was adding Bitcoin backing to its USDe synthetic dollar in an effort to further scale from its current $2 billion supply.

Ethena Labs became the highest-earning decentralized application in crypto on March 8 when it offered a 67% APY on USDe, prompting widespread community concerns about the protocol’s financial sustainability.

Following its success, Ethena also caught the attention of large investment funds, becoming the highest-conviction bet for Delphi Ventures for the current cycle.

USDe could become the largest dollar-backed asset after Tether’s (USDT) and Circle’s USD Coin (USDC), according to José Maria Macedo, the CEO of Delphi Labs and the founding partner of crypto investment firm Delphi Ventures, who wrote in an April 2 post:

“sUSDe will offer the highest dollar yield in crypto at scale. USDe will become the largest stablecoin outside of USDC/USDT in 2024. Ethena will become the highest revenue-generating project in all of crypto.”

Related: Ethena Labs founder clarifies USDe stability amid high yield worries"
"[INST] Crypto community triumphs: Token2049 attendees brave Dubai storms [/INST] Despite the difficulties faced by crypto community members who flew to the United Arab Emirates for Token2049, the number of attendees who persevered surprised leaders and executives who came to the event.

Bus stuck in the middle of the road. Source: Cointelegraph

On April 18, attendees were met with blocked roads and challenges that could have made many people simply turn around and leave the country.

Various leaders in the space who were scheduled to have interviews with Cointelegraph wound up stuck in different airports and had to turn back because of the situation.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino had to wait an extra two hours in the sky because his plane was unable to land due to the storm. “I was quite lucky because I only spent two more hours in the sky,” he said.

However, after witnessing the number of people who still made it to the event, Ardoino expressed gratitude for the type of people crypto community members are. He said:

“It’s a good sign that this industry is made by people who are willing always to gather, to discuss and keep pushing the industry forward. I’m grateful to see many people around.”

Ava Labs founder Emin Gün Sirer also shared the challenges his team went through as they went to the event.

“It was very difficult to come here. We were landing in the middle of the biggest storm ever. We spent five hours on what should’ve been a 20-minute landing,” he said.

Fully packed main stage of Token2049. Source: Cointelegraph

Despite this, Sirer believes that attending was the right choice and that it was worth it. He said:

“We ended up going through a lot of water. My luggage and clothes were wet, but it was so worth it because the energy I see in the room right now is amazing.”

Among the attendees, almost everyone faced their own difficulties. Still, since the tickets were sold out three weeks in advance, many crypto enthusiasts flocked to the event.

Crypto community members indulged in the various activities available at the event, including various content-packed talks, project booths and networking.

Ultimately, the crypto community showed resilience amid a historic storm that made attending the event difficult."
"[INST] Hong Kong spot Bitcoin ETF approval draws praise and caution from industry players [/INST] The much-anticipated approval of spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Hong Kong earlier this week represents a significant industry milestone for some experts. However, others warn that greater market forces, such as persistent inflation and geopolitical risk, could overshadow the bullish event.

“We are delighted to witness the historic moment of the launch of Asia’s first Bitcoin spot ETF and the world’s first Ethereum spot ETF,” said Livio Wang, chief operating officer of Hong Kong-based HashKey Group, in a statement. “This will serve as a significant milestone for traditional financial institutions in Hong Kong to enter the market and provide retail users with a more convenient purchasing gateway.”

At the same time, Wang explained that, unlike U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, which were approved in January, Hong Kong spot Bitcoin ETFs have several unique features, such as subscription and redemption both via fiat money and via Bitcoin and stablecoins themselves. In addition, Wang spoke highly of Hong Kong regulators approving a spot Ether (ETH) ETF, which has seen greater regulatory hurdles in the U.S.

Similarly, Patrick Pan, CEO and chairman of OSL Exchange, told Cointelegraph that “the initiation of these ETFs is expected to significantly boost capital inflow into the digital asset market in Hong Kong.” Pan also praised Hong Kong spot ETFs’ ability to allow in-kind settlement, explaining that such a structure will result in ""uninterrupted trading flows"" and ""enhanced market liquidity.""

Crypto exchange eToro is also bullish on the prospects of Hong Kong spot ETFs. ""Hong Kong would become the first Asian jurisdiction to have a bitcoin spot ETF, positioning itself as a rising crypto hub in Asia, as well as potentially paving the way for other neighboring countries and jurisdictions to follow suit with their own ETFs,"" the exchange wrote in a statement, continuing:

""More potential investors and integrations into the traditional financial system could bode well for the bitcoin price.""

However, eToro also noted after the Hong Kong ETF news, all eyes now rest on Bitcoin's Halving event. ""The question on every Bitcoin investor’s mind now is if we will see the price rally again to fresh all-time highs given the immediate supply shock from the halving, or will the price fall even lower, with the halving becoming a sell-the-news event after all the build-up, similar to the Bitcoin spot ETF approval earlier this year?” the exchange stated.

Others are not as enthusiastic about the prospects of the Hong Kong spot Bitcoin ETF.

""Mainland China investors probably won’t be eligible to buy Hong Kong-listed spot bitcoin and ether ETFs as they are barred from buying virtual assets,"" commented Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas. Due to such demand constrictions, Balchunas predicts that Hong Kong spot Bitcoin ETFs will only attract ""$1 billion within two years,"" far less than the approximately $50 billion currently managed by U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs.

Meanwhile, Markus Thielen, founder of Singaporean blockchain analytics firm 10x Research, said that the firm “sold everything last night,” just one day after Hong Kong spot ETFs were approved. “Our growing concern is that risk assets (stocks and crypto) are teetering on the edge of a significant price correction,"" wrote Thielen, adding:

""The primary trigger is the unexpected and persistent inflation. With the bond market now projecting less than three cuts and 10-year Treasury Yields surpassing 4.50%, we may have arrived at a crucial tipping point for risk assets.""

Bitcoin has lost nearly 20% of its value since achieving its all-time high of $73,750 apiece last month. On April 13, the digital asset took a nose-dive due to escalating tensions in the Middle East.

Source: Eric Balchunas (X).

Related: 'China is about to start bidding' — Will Hong Kong Bitcoin ETFs spark the halving rally?"
"[INST] Casa's multi-key solution for tackling self-custody Bitcoin inheritance [/INST] Bitcoin self-custody firm Casa is rolling out an inheritance feature aimed at streamlining the transfer of assets to benefactors from deceased estates.

The inheritance of cryptocurrencies can be a complicated process, even more so if the owner of the digital assets has not made any provisions for their families or designated recipients to take control.

Nick Neuman, co-founder and CEO of Casa, tells Cointelegraph that the inheritance of cryptocurrencies has long been an issue for crypto-natives looking to ensure that their digital holdings are passed on accordingly.

“It’s not overlooked. Many people recognize it as a big problem they want to solve but they haven’t had good tools to solve it yet, so most people either don’t have a solution, or have cobbled together something that they hope will work but don’t feel good about,” Neuman said.

Casa has offered an inheritance feature to its highest membership tier in the U.S. for the past few years. Neuman said the new offering will be available to all Casa members and differs from the existing high-tier feature, allowing users to transfer Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Tether (USDT), and USD Coin (USDC) holdings to benefactors.

Related: Casa Releases Self-Custody Bitcoin Wallet Focused on Privacy

The offering aims to ensure that the process of managing cryptocurrency holdings of deceased individuals is straightforward, secure and resistant to malicious actors. Neuman said that instances where inheritance plans have not been made have been “precarious and stressful,” adding:

“When we’ve tried to help recover assets for people who don’t have an inheritance plan and have passed away, it has taken anywhere from 6-12 months to figure everything out. Even then, the chance of actually recovering the assets is low.”

The offering hinges on a Casa’s user designating a recipient to a specific token vault in its proprietary app. The recipient then creates a free Casa account and scans a QR code provided by the vault owner, which contains an encrypted version of the owner’s mobile key.

Related: Casa launches multisignature Ethereum self-custody vault

The key can only be imported by the specified account and the recipient can’t initially use it or see the vault balance as Neuman explains:

“If the vault owner passes away, the recipient can request access to the vault in their Casa app. This starts a six month timer, and sends a ton of notifications every month to the owner.”

If the owner is still alive, they can reject the request in their app. If the timer runs out after six months, the recipient can use the shared mobile key and request a signature from the Casa Recovery Key for the shared vault. This will give them 2 out of 3 signatures required to access the asset.

Casa's inheritance feature allows a vault owner to assign encrypted keys to benefactors to access assets after their death. Source: Casa

Casa will also offer a five-key vault, where one hardware key is shared with the recipient. The small increase in friction for recipients adds increased security and resilience of a five-key vault for larger holdings.

Best guess estimates pin the value of lost Bitcoin at around $140 billion, of which misplaced keys are often a cause.

Since its inception in 2016, Casa has promoted multisignature self-custody in the crypto industry. Its flagship Bitcoin vault allows users to store the cryptocurrency using up to five keys for more distributed security.

Casa’s service originally catered to Bitcoin “whales” willing to spend $10,000 a year on custody before opening its service to a broader base of users. The company has now added an Ether vault to its platform, with ETH holders also able to use up to five keys to secure their holdings.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Canada to begin implementing international crypto tax reporting standard [/INST] According to a supplement to the 2024 annual budget, Canada expects to apply the international Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) for taxation by 2026. The country is getting an early start on the new standard, which is expected to be observed by 47 countries by 2027.

The CARF would impose new reporting requirements on crypto asset service providers (CASPs), such as cryptocurrency exchanges, crypto-asset brokers and dealers and crypto-asset automated teller machine operators, whether they are individuals or business entities. The supplemental report listed “stablecoins, derivatives issued in the form of a crypto-asset, and certain nonfungible tokens” as examples of crypto assets.

CASPs would be required to report to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) transactions between crypto assets and fiat and crypto assets for other crypto assets. Crypto asset transfers carried out by CASPs, including payment processing, when the value exceeds $50,000 United States dollars, would also need to be reported. In addition:

“Crypto-asset service providers would be required to obtain and report information on each of their customers, including name, address, date of birth, jurisdiction(s) of residence, and taxpayer identification numbers for each jurisdiction of residence.”

CASPs resident in Canada or doing business in Canada would be subject to the requirements. Transactions by Canadian residents and nonresidents, whether individuals or entities, would be reported.

Related: Crypto industry tops all Canadian fintech investments 2 years in a row

Central bank digital currency and “digital representations of fiat currencies” (such as stablecoins) would not be reported under the CARF, as they are accounted for under amendments to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Common Reporting Standard (CRS) for the sharing of information among international tax authorities.

Source: Luke Belmar

Information collected under the CARF would also be shared internationally. Like the CRS, the CARF was developed by the OECD. The creation of the CARF was motivated by the fact that the CRS did not capture transactions that did not go through traditional financial intermediaries.

The OECD introduced the CARF at a meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in October 2022. In November 2023, 47 countries pledged to incorporate the CARF into domestic law by 2027. The OECD has 38 members, mainly in Europe.

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"[INST] Australia's securities regulator appeals loss in Finder Wallet case [/INST] The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has filed to appeal its court loss against Finder Wallet, a sister company of Australian fintech firm Finder.com, over its “Earn” product which was found to be compliant with Australia’s financial laws by a federal court last month.

ASIC previously argued that Finder Wallet’s yield-bearing product operated without an appropriate license or authorization. But Federal Court Justice Brigitte Markovic dismissed the case on March 14, ruling ASIC failed to establish that Finder Wallet’s Earn product constituted a “debenture” — a debt security where companies promise to pay back borrowed money with interest — under the Corporations Act.

In the April 10 filing, ASIC argued Justice Markovic “erred” in this finding because there was no depositing of money or a loan to Finder Wallet when an investor used the Finder Earn product.

Additionally, “there was no undertaking by Finder Wallet to repay money as a debt,” the securities regulator argued.

“ASIC has appealed this decision because it is concerned that the Finder Earn product was offered without the appropriate license or authorization and therefore without the benefit of important consumer protections,” ASIC argued in a separate statement on April 10.

The appeal will be heard by the Full Federal Court on a date to be determined. The court hears appeals from the Federal Court on matters of “sufficient importance.” It is the second highest court behin the High Court of Australia.

A Finder spokesperson told Cointelegraph the firm is “disappointed” with ASIC’s decision not to accept the Federal Court ruling but is prepared to diligently defend its product in the Full Federal Court.

Offered between February and November 2022, users of the Finder Earn product could convert Australian dollars into TrueAUD (TAUD) — a stablecoin pegged to the Australian dollar, which could then be transferred to Finder Wallet in exchange for receiving a yield between 4-6%.

ASIC filed the lawsuit against Finder Wallet in December 2022, arguing it was an unlicensed financial product.

Related: Former Blockchain Global director restricted from leaving Australia

ASIC also claimed Finder Wallet ""sunset"" the product one month earlier because it notified the firm of its concerns. However, a spokesperson told Cointelegraph at the time that it was “a strategic business decision” due to increased interest rates and “not brought on by regulatory review.”

Last month, a Finder spokesperson told Cointelegraph the firm doesn’t have any intention to relaunch Finder Earn despite the court victory.

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"[INST] Bitcoin miner CleanSpark plunges 10% after $800M share offering [/INST] Bitcoin miner CleanSpark plunged 10% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the firm amended its at-the-market (ATM) offering agreement to sell up to $800 million of its stock.

CleanSpark initially inked a deal for a $500 million ATM offering with New York investment banking firm H.C. Wainwright & Co on Jan. 5, 2024, where CleanSpark said it may, from time to time, offer and sell shares of its common stock at $0.001 per share, a March 28 SEC filing reveals.

CleanSpark’s at the market agreement with H.C. Wainwright & Co. LLC. Source: SEC

Primary stock dilution is a common strategy for publicly-listed companies to raise additional capital.

CleanSpark isn’t the only Bitcoin miner to enter into an ATM agreement for this reason either — with Riot Platforms and Marathon Digital Holdings, both entering into $750 million ATM agreements last August and October.

With a market capitalization of $4.2 billion, a $800 million stock offering would effectively dilute CLSK shares by 19%.

CLSK started the trading day at $23.20 but is now down 16% to $19.1 in after-hours — which included an 8.2% fall during trading hours, according to Google Finance.

CleanSpark’s change in stock price over the last trading day. Source: Google Finance

Despite the stock plunge, CLSK is up 95% in 2024 and 685% over the last 12 months.

Related: Bitcoin halving ‘blood bath’ could push US miners offshore

CleanSpark is one of many Bitcoin miners preparing for the upcoming Bitcoin halving event, expected to occur on April 20, which will see Bitcoin mining rewards reduced from 6.25 BTC ($441,000) to 3.125 BTC ($220,500).

The firm boasts the lowest cost production to mine one Bitcoin post-halving at $26,900, a Jan. 12 CoinShares research report found.

On Feb. 6, Cleanspark said it expects its hash rate to double in the first half of 2024 on the back of a recent agreement to purchase four new mining facilities in Mississippi, worth $19.8 million, which produced an immediate 2.4 exahashes per second (EH/s) for the firm.

It also agreed to buy an additional mining facility in Dalton, Georgia, for $6.9 million, which will produce 0.8 EH/s. However, that facility is under construction and won’t be ready until April 2024.

Cointelegraph reached out to CleanSpark for comment but didn't receive a response by the time of publication.

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"[INST] Grayscale fund drops ADA and ATOM after quarterly rebalancing [/INST] Grayscale has removed Cardano’s (ADA) token from its Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund (GDLC) and Cosmos’ (ATOM) token from its Grayscale Smart Contract Platform Ex-Ethereum Fund (GSCPxE).

The removal of the tokens was part of Grayscale’s quarterly fund rebalancing, the world’s largest crypto-focused asset manager announced in an April 4 X post. The proceeds generated from selling the tokens were used to buy existing fund components.

Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund. Source: Grayscale

Following the removal of the ADA token, Grayscale’s large-cap fund now consists of 70.96% Bitcoin (BTC), 21.84% Ether (ETH), 4.52% Solana (SOL), 1.73% XRP (XRP) and 0.95% Avalanche (AVAX).

Grayscale Smart Contract Platform Ex-Ethereum Fund. Source: Grayscale

As for Grayscale’s smart contract platform fund, it now holds 58.41% Solana, 14.56% Cardano, 12.25% Avalanche, 8.53% Polkadot (DOT) and 6.25% Polygon (MATIC) tokens, after removing ATOM from the fund.

No new assets have been added or removed from Grayscale’s DeFi Fund, which currently holds 48.74% Uniswap (UNI), 20.41% Maker (MKR), 13.17% Lido (LDO), 9.99% Aave (AAVE) and 7.69% Synthetix (SNX) tokens.

Related: Google sues alleged China crypto app racketeers: Report

Grayscale is the world’s largest crypto-focused asset manager. At the end of March, it announced a crypto investment fund prioritizing cryptocurrencies with staking rewards.

The new Grayscale Dynamic Income Fund is only available to clients with more than $1.1 million assets under management or a net worth of more than $2.2 million.

ADA and ATOM deliver negative returns year-to-date

Cardano’s ADA token fell 8.1% year-to-date (YTD) while ATOM fell over 3.3%, significantly underperforming both Bitcoin — the world’s first cryptocurrency — and Ether.

BTC, ADA, ATOM, YTD chart. Source: TradingView

In comparison, Bitcoin is up 59% since the beginning of the year, while Ether has rallied over 40%, TradingView data shows.

ADA is down over 10% on the weekly chart, after falling below the $0.6 psychological mark on April 2, and is currently 81% away from its previous all-time high of $3.10 reached in September 2021.

ATOM is also down over 10% during the past week, trading at the $10.8 mark, 75% away from its record $44.7 reached in September 2021.

Related: BTCFi innovation to match Ethereum DeFi in the future: MerlinSwap co-founder"
"[INST] DeFi hub Chainage seeks tokenholder approval for $13M capital raise [/INST] Decentralized finance service provider Chainage, with around $100 million in total value locked, is seeking to raise $13 million for protocol expansion, contingent on tokenholders’ approval within its native decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

According to the April 1 snapshot proposal, the $13 million raise, led by an unknown venture capital firm, will result in the issuance of 50 million additional XCHNG protocol tokens, representing approximately 10% of Chainage’s circulating supply. The issuance price of $0.26 is roughly at par with XCHNG’s token price at the time of publication.

Users are able to vote in the proposal by staking their native XCHNG tokens in exchange for “vXCHNG,” which represents voting rights tokens. “We are set to implement numerous strategies to enhance usage and profitability, as a result enabling us to assure vXCHNG holders a minimum of $1 Million in profit generation for Q2,” Chainage wrote, adding:

“As previously stated, 80% of this profit will be allocated to vXCHNG holders, distributed according to our profit-sharing mechanism, as a direct advantage of the capital investment.”

Global expansion and visibility are the two main goals of the $13 million raise. The project also seeks to recruit “top-tier talent to fuse AI with cutting-edge technology” to position Chainge as a “leader in AI-powered crypto innovators.”

The new capital, if approved, would also be used to incentivize Chainage’s liquidity, alongside supporting new partnerships, marketing ventures and rewards for tokenholders. The proposal has received 186 million XCHNG votes in favor and 7.2 million XCHNG votes against at the time of publication, against a backdrop of a 474 million circulating XCHNG balance.

The move marks a stark contrast to the venture capital scene of crypto startups, which typically solicit new investments based on the approval of shareholders, who are typically the company’s co-founders. Recently, more and more Web3 startups are turning to accelerator programs as crypto enters a new bull market and investors look to cash in on the craze.

Related: Marc Andreessen, Galaxy Digital, Accolade, back new $75 million crypto fund"
"[INST] Australian Monochrome spot Bitcoin ETF expected to launch within 2 months, says CEO [/INST] Australian asset manager Monochrome plans to launch its flagship spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) on the global listing exchange Cboe Australia. Monochrome filed for the spot Bitcoin ETF in July 2023.

The Monochrome Bitcoin ETF, if approved, will become Australia’s first spot Bitcoin ETF to permit direct Bitcoin (BTC) holding.

Australian regulators have already greenlighted two exchange-traded products (ETPs) that give exposure to spot crypto assets on Cboe Australia, but these ETPs do not directly hold Bitcoin; instead, they invest in investment products with exposure to spot Bitcoin ETF.

To list their spot Bitcoin ETF in Australia, asset managers must first get approval from the securities regulator and then apply for an exchange listing.

FOLLOW BITCOIN HALVING COVERAGE IN FULL HERE

Monochrome has already received approval from the Australian Securities regulator ASIC and expects Cboe Australia to clear its application by June.

The asset manager was earlier slated to launch its spot Bitcoin ETF via Cboe rival ASX; however, Jeff Yew, Monochrome Asset Management CEO, told Cointelegraph that the selection of Cboe Australia as the listing venue for the Monochrome Bitcoin ETF aligns more “closely with our strategic vision, market reach and time frame.” Yew added:

“We anticipate a decision from Cboe Australia about the Monochrome Bitcoin ETF before the middle of 2024. The Monochrome Bitcoin ETF stands to be the first Bitcoin ETF in Australia authorized to hold Bitcoin directly.”

Yew explained that the key difference between existing ETPs and the Monochrome spot Bitcoin ETF is it provides investors with a straightforward, transparent pathway to exposure. It is identical to “how spot Bitcoin ETFs are structured in the United States.”

Related: Blockchain Association files support in suit to lift Tornado Cash sanctions

Spot Bitcoin ETFs have become a focus of major governments worldwide ever since the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved 11 spot BTC ETFs on Jan. 11.

The successful launch of spot BTC ETFs in the U.S. has prompted other countries to consider the possibility of introducing similar products in their own markets.

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"[INST] Elon Musk’s AI spinoff is seeking $4B that could level up Grok: Report [/INST] Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is seeking to raise up to $4 billion for his artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI, the inventor of the X-linked AI chatbot Grok.

Select investors are reportedly being offered the chance to participate in funding rounds for the AI startup through special purpose vehicles (SPVs), according to an email sent to potential investors.

SPV structures allow different venture capital firms and individuals to invest together through a single entity. However, there are upfront fees of up to 5% and management fees and interest to be added on, according to reports.

Reports also reveal that Musk is looking to raise $3 billion–$4 billion in a deal that could value the company at $18 billion following the completion of the funding round, and the firm “expects to raise the funds in the next 2–3 weeks on a first-come, first-served basis.”

XAI was founded by Musk in March 2023 and launched in July of that year and is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. The firm has the lofty ambition of “understanding the true nature of the universe.”

The firm launched its first product in November, claiming that its X-linked chatbot Grok can outperform ChatGPT.

The email pitch reportedly highlighted potential selling points for investors, including Musk’s track record at Tesla and the training of the AI model on data from Musk’s microblogging network X.

Entrepreneur and angel investor Mario Nawfal commented on the news, stating that as AI investments skyrocket with billions flowing into startups, “concerns about an AI bubble grow amid soaring valuations and high development costs.”

XAI’s in-house AI tutors hail from a wide array of fields and are tasked with creating and curating high-quality data for training and evaluating its models, according to the official website.

Related: Groq AI chip system goes viral and rivals ChatGPT, challenges Elon Musk’s Grok

In March, Musk said that xAI was making the AI chatbot open-source to challenge OpenAI’s closed ChatGPT model.

However, xAI remains a small startup despite its multibillion-dollar valuation, with just 10 full-time engineers and between 5,000 and 10,000 GPUs, according to reports.

Cointelegraph reached out to xAI for further details but did not receive an immediate response.

Grok is part of a crowded AI chatbot marketplace with competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Antropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini and Meta AI from the company formerly known as Facebook.

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"[INST] Holding Bitcoin now profitable 99.92% of all days [/INST] Bitcoiners maintained a profitable portfolio for 99.92% of all days, leaving just six days when investing in Bitcoin (BTC) did not turn out to be profitable since it launched over 14 years ago, on Jan. 3, 2009.

Bitcoin recently marked an all-time-high price of $73,600 in mid-March, ensuring that BTC holders across all price points saw their investments appreciate.

Since then, Bitcoin has continued to hold a price close to the $68,000–$70,000 range, according to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView.

Bitcoin (BTC/USD) price chart from February 2024 to date. Source: TradingView

As a result of the market volatility-induced price fluctuations, only a handful of Bitcoin hodlers remain unprofitable. According to crypto financial services firm Blockchain.com, Bitcoin purchased between March 9–13 and March 25–29 is currently at a loss.

In other words, 0.16% or six days of the last 3,732 tradable days did not turn out to be a profitable investment.

Number of days in which holding bitcoin has been profitable, relative to current price. Source: blockchain.com

Zooming out, the price chart solidifies the strategic importance of holding Bitcoin during the bear markets. CoinMarketCap estimates that 86.28% of all Bitcoin wallets hold up to $1,000, 13.03% hold anywhere between $1,000 to $10,000 and 0.69% hold $100,000 in Bitcoin.

Additionally, Bitcoin’s consistent comebacks from bear markets and subsequent price retention allow the mining community to thrive, contribute to the hash rate and inadvertently increase the security of the Bitcoin network.

As the Bitcoin halving event approaches, institutions and private investors are accumulating BTC, anticipating a price surge.

The fourth Bitcoin halving is expected to commence at the block height of 840,000, expected on April 20, 2024.

Related: Memecoin madness is breaking the Bitcoin halving cycle

The mining community is also strategizing a game plan to remain profitable post-Bitcoin halving despite rewards being slashed in half to 3.125 BTC.

Canadian Bitcoin mining firm Bitfarms pledged nearly $240 million to upgrade its fleet of mining equipment.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Bitfarms chief financial officer Jeffrey Lucas gave his reasoning behind the ongoing fleet upgrade:

“The transformational fleet upgrade propels Bitfarms in scale and profitability amid the Bitcoin halving. This is a game changer that triples our hash rate to 21 EH/s, increases our targeted operating capacity by 83% to 440 megawatts (MW), and improves fleet efficiency by 40% to 21 w/TH.”

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"[INST] Tether issued on TON blockchain at a ‘great start,’ says CEO — Now at $60M [/INST] $60 million worth of Tether (USDT) has already been issued on The Open Network (TON) since it began supporting the blockchain on April 19, making it the 11th-largest blockchain for Tether out of 16.

On April 19, the stablecoin issuer announced a collaboration with the TON Foundation at the Token2049 crypto conference in Dubai that would see Tether begin to be minted on TON.

The firm also revealed it has launched the gold-pegged Tether Gold (XAUT) stablecoin on TON as well.

The Open Network team said that cross-border payments were instant, free and as easy as sending a text message to Telegram’s 900 million users in a post on X.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino commented in a post on X on April 21 that Tether had made a “great start” with $35 million USDT issued on TON.

However, according to the Tether Transparency report, the authorized supply issued on TON has grown to $60 million as of 11:30 pm UTC on April 21.

The collaboration allows Telegram’s users to send transfers freely and instantly among all platform users. “All you need to do is send a DM [direct message], no need for a blockchain address, and no need to download a new app,” the messaging company stated.

USDT on TON will be accompanied by fully integrated on-ramps from most fiat currencies globally at launch, it added before stating that soon, integrated global off-ramps will enable users to withdraw supported fiat currencies directly to bank accounts or cards.

However, the majority of Tether’s $109.8 billion circulating supply is on the Tron network, which has $57.8 billion. Ethereum has $51 billion USDT in circulation, a number that has been dwindling as more Tether is deployed on different blockchains to alleviate high network fees on Ethereum.

USDT issuance on various blockchains. Source: Tether Transparency Report

Solana is the third-largest network supporting Tether with $1.9 billion issued. The stablecoin has also been issued on Avalanche, Omni, Cosmos, Tezos, Near, EOS and Celo, among others.

Related: Binance’s $1B emergency ‘SAFU’ fund now makes up 3% of UDSC supply

Tether has a market share of 69% of the entire stablecoin market capitalization, which is around $159.5 billion, according to CoinGecko.

Its closest rival, Circle, has a share of 21% for its stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC), of which there are $33.7 billion in circulation.

Toncoin (TON) prices reacted to the announcement with a 22% spike but quickly returned to previous levels. The asset is trading down 1.6% on the day at $6.13 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko.

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"[INST] Bitcoin halving: Why it’s important for BTC scarcity [/INST] The fourth-ever Bitcoin halving occurred a few hours ago at the 840,000th block. The halving is considered the most important economic mechanism influencing Bitcoin (BTC) supply and creating scarcity for the asset.

The Bitcoin network’s fourth halving event, reduced block issuance rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per mined block, effectively slashing Bitcoin’s issuance rate in half.

The halving is a crucial mechanism for Bitcoin’s scarcity and market valuation, according to Karim Chaib, the CEO of crypto platform Dopamine App. Chaib told Cointelegraph:

“Scarcity is a fundamental economic principle that affects the value of an asset. By programmatically ensuring that the supply of Bitcoin increases at a slower rate over time, the halving events underscore Bitcoin's scarcity.”

The halving is hard-coded in Bitcoin’s code base, which happens every 210,000 blocks mined, which equates to roughly every four years.

The Bitcoin network witnessed its first halving in 2012 when the Bitcoin’s issuance rate was reduced from 50 BTC to 25 BTC per mined block. The last two halvings occurred in 2016 and 2020, significantly slashing Bitcoin’s issuance rate to the current 3.125 BTC.

This hard-coded scarcity makes Bitcoin stand out from traditional store-of-value assets, according to Chaib, who told Cointelegraph:

“This programmed scarcity is a key feature that differentiates Bitcoin from traditional assets like gold, which can become less scarce as new means of extraction and production are developed. Bitcoin, by contrast, has a capped supply of 21 million coins, making it fundamentally inflation-proof.”

Related: Bitcoin supply to run out on exchanges in 9 months — Bybit

Is Bitcoin the next gold?

Bitcoin’s economic design and halving mechanism are effective mathematical methods to make Bitcoin a deflationary asset, which makes it the first reliable alternative to gold, according to Jonas Simanavicius, co-founder and CTO at Syntropy. He told Cointelegraph:

“Gold has served for thousands of years as the primary store of wealth because it is difficult to increase its supply and it is global... Nothing else came close to having a predictably slow-growing supply—until Bitcoin.”

Bitcoin price rose 122% during the past year, while Gold price rose 19%. During 2024, Bitcoin is up over 51% year-to-date (YTD), while Gold price increased 15% YTD, according to TradingView.

Precious metals and real estate were considered the best store of value assets throughout the years. But the digital age is seeking more liquid assets for faster movements, which will ultimately benefit Bitcoin, said Simanavicius:

“Over time, Bitcoin has not only survived, but its backing power of extensive computation and decentralization has also grown so strong that more people and institutions recognize this security, and the benefits such as immediate transactability, geopolitical decentralization, and ease of carry outweigh those of other asset classes.”

Related: Top five BTC miners not selling despite Bitcoin halving"
"[INST] History of Crypto: Ethereum’s entry and Bitcoin’s expansion [/INST] Welcome to History of Crypto, a Cointelegraph series that brings readers back to the most significant events in the crypto space. Powered by Phemex, the timeline allows crypto community members to explore and look back at the important events that shaped the industry into what it is today.

This article explores the pivotal period from 2013 to 2015 in the cryptocurrency world — a time of significant advancements and notable challenges. During this period, the increasing mainstream adoption of Bitcoin (BTC) marked a critical shift toward recognizing digital currencies. However, this era also witnessed the dramatic fall of Mt. Gox, underscoring the risks and volatility in the burgeoning crypto market.

This epoch also saw the emergence of the first memecoin and the first nonfungible token (NFT), innovations that expanded the crypto landscape’s creativity and functionality.

Explore the History of Crypto

Most importantly, this is the time period when the Ethereum network was conceived. This groundbreaking development promised to leverage blockchain technology for more than just currency, paving the way for smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps). This period was crucial in shaping the trajectory of the cryptocurrency movement, setting the foundation for future innovations and challenges.

Bitcoin continues its expansion

Shortly after the first Bitcoin halving in 2012, BTC reached a notable milestone a few months later. On March 28, 2013, the price of Bitcoin climbed, beginning to trade at around $92. This price increase led its market capitalization to hit the $1 billion mark for the first time, marking a significant moment in the cryptocurrency’s history.

In an event that sparked widespread attention, Bitcoin achieved a remarkable milestone by reaching a new all-time high of $190 on April 10, 2013, during the Cyprus banking crisis. This crisis highlighted the potential benefits of decentralized currencies, leading many to view Bitcoin as a viable alternative to the traditional financial system’s vulnerabilities. Despite the initial surge, Bitcoin’s value experienced a significant drop to $68 just a week after reaching its peak.

Bitcoin price. Source: CoinMarketCap

Later in the year, Bitcoin continued to captivate market observers by surpassing expectations and reaching $1,000 on Nov. 19, first on the BTC China exchange (now known as BTCC) and subsequently on Mt. Gox. This achievement underscored Bitcoin’s growing relevance and the increasing interest in its role as an alternative asset within the broader financial landscape.

An old titan falls, new exchanges start to rise

During this critical period, Mt. Gox, the largest crypto exchange at the time, faced significant challenges. On June 20, 2013, it announced a temporary halt of U.S. dollar withdrawals, setting off two weeks of uncertainty. Although withdrawals eventually resumed, the exchange encountered difficulties processing them efficiently, underscoring the operational hurdles it grappled with.

In a significant development within the cryptocurrency community, Mt. Gox announced the suspension of U.S. dollar withdrawals, followed by a stop to Bitcoin withdrawals on Feb. 7, 2014. This series of events culminated in the suspension of trading on Feb. 24, 2014, and a bankruptcy filing in Tokyo shortly after.

The situation escalated when Mt. Gox sought bankruptcy protection in the United States in March 2014, revealing that 750,000 BTC belonging to its customers and 100,000 of its own coins had been compromised, amounting to a loss valued at around $473 million at that time.

While the downfall of Mt. Gox marked a turbulent period in the cryptocurrency sector, it coincided with the emergence of several platforms that would become major players in the future. Okcoin, which would later rebrand to OKX, launched its operations on June 1, 2013. Close on its heels, Kraken’s trading platform became operational on Sept. 10, 2013.

In the meantime, Coinbase, established in 2012, secured a $25 million Series B funding round in December 2013, led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, showcasing the growth and resilience of new entrants in the cryptocurrency exchange landscape during a period of upheaval.

Ethereum’s arrival

In 2013, Vitalik Buterin introduced the Ethereum network through a white paper, positioning it as a versatile platform for developing DApps. Buterin outlined how blockchain technology could serve purposes beyond just monetary transactions.

In January 2014, Ethereum co-founders Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson and Anthony Di Iorio unveiled Ethereum at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami with Buterin.

Follow History of Crypto!

These exchanges now offer users access to a broad array of cryptocurrencies, with Ethereum’s native coin, Ether (ETH), securing its position as the second-largest digital asset by market capitalization. Ethereum has fulfilled its promise by evolving into a central platform for DApps.

EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF CRYPTO

The next piece in Cointelegraph’s History of Crypto series will delve into the initial coin offering boom and the ongoing evolution of Ethereum. Be sure to follow Cointelegraph for insightful updates on the most pivotal developments in crypto history."
"[INST] Stablecoin competition crucial for regulatory engagement — Tether CEO [/INST] Ripple’s move to launch its own stablecoin could add further legitimacy to the stablecoin landscape, according to Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino.

Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph during Paris Blockchain Week, Ardoino said the stablecoin ecosystem needs healthy competition between big players to further legitimize the utility of fiat-backed tokens in the eyes of regulators.

“First of all, competition is great. I always believed that Tether cannot be alone. The stablecoin ecosystem is an industry because there are many players,” Ardoino said.

Stablecoins have become an increasingly important cog in the wider cryptocurrency space. With a total market capitalization of over $130 billion in April 2024, stablecoins provide a wide range of utilities, from centralized exchange to decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols.

The top 10 stablecoins by market capitalization. Source: CoinMarketCap

Ardoino said that having multiple credible players with viable and thriving businesses offering stablecoins reflects the growing importance of the sector:

“Being multiplayer helps in discussions with the regulators. If you are all alone and you have one single product, regulators will never take you seriously. If you have a group of great companies, then you are more effective.”

Ardoino also believes that Ripple’s intent to launch a stablecoin later in 2024 is indicative of the amount of room for more players to offer legitimate fiat-backed tokens.

Related: Tether’s USDT stablecoin hits historic $100B market cap

“I believe that there is space for everyone. Considering that the United States is printing around $1 trillion every 100 days, the space could probably be 30 times bigger than it is,” Tether’s CEO said.

Tether’s market dominance

Tether (USDT) is the leading stablecoin by market capitalization, valued at $108 billion on April 17. USD Coin (USDC) trails USDT as the second biggest stablecoin by market cap at $32 billion.

Tether’s latest attestation of circling USDT tokens across 15 different blockchain protocols. Source: Tether

Ardoino believes that the growing adoption of stablecoins like USDT and USDC is a direct result of rampant inflation and devaluing national currencies around the world.

“Think about Argentina, Turkey, Venezuela, Vietnam or Brazil. All these countries are looking for an alternative to the national currency. The inflation in these countries and nations has been going through the roof,” Ardoino said.

He added that more than 2 billion people remain unbanked, living off less than $300 a month. This leaves a large number of people without bank accounts and unable to transact in conventional economies.

Related: Tether boosts Bitcoin reserves with latest acquisition

The growing accessibility of digital wallets means that people are becoming increasingly able to save in digital forms of money like USDT or USDC. As Ardoino said, the simplicity of these offerings reflects a bleak reality of the global economic landscape:

“USDT’s digital dollar is nothing fancy. It simply moves on a blockchain. The sad reality is that the success of stablecoins is also directly proportional to the macroeconomic issues happening in this world.”

Ardoino maintains that circulating USDT is overcollateralized by 106%. Tether also intends to move toward 100% reserves in U.S. Treasury bills. It currently holds an estimated $90 billion of Treasury bonds.

Magazine: The real risks to Ethena’s stablecoin model (are not the ones you think)"
"[INST] Marc Andreessen, Galaxy Digital, Accolade, back new $75 million crypto fund: Report [/INST] Prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Galaxy Digital, and Accolade Partners are among the top contributors to crypto venture capital (VC) firm 1kx’s latest fund.

1kx raised $75 million, with Chris Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, as one of the limited partners, Lasse Clausen, the founding partner of 1kx, told Bloomberg on March 28.

Private equity firm Accolade is the anchor investor in the new fund, according to Clausen.

1kx’s new fund is targeting crypto-based consumer applications. The new fund has already made around five investments, said Clausen, without naming the companies. Clausen founded 1kx in 2018, along with Christopher Heymann.

The announcement of the new fund comes during a period of increasing institutional interest in crypto, bolstered by the approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States.

Related: Hong Kong’s in-kind ETF creation could be a significant market opportunity: Analysts

Venture capital funding in crypto startups saw an uptick in Q4 2023 to $1.9 billion, which is 2.5% higher than the previous quarter, according to a report from PitchBook. This is the first time VC investments have risen since March 2022.

February’s VC investments also suggest renewed institutional confidence in the blockchain space, after a diverse group of crypto startups announced recent funding raises, including Lava Protocol, Analog, Helika, Truflation, and Omega, among others.

More notably, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced a $100-million funding round for EigenLayer, Ethereum’s largest restaking protocol by total value locked.

Avail closed a $27 million seed funding round, led by Founder Fund and Dragonfly, at the end of February. The Web3 data availability and consensus layer aims to use the funds to develop its products and accelerate Web3 unification.

In the wider crypto space, blockchain game publisher Immutable launched a $100 million fund to invest in blockchain games, in partnership with Venture capital firm King River Capital and Polygon Labs.

The new fund called “Inevitable Games Fund,” or IGF for short, raised $30 million during its first close.

The IGF kicked off with investments in seven blockchain game titles all native to ImmutableX or Polygon, including the Pokémon-reminiscent Pixelmon, fantasy role-player Guild of Guardians and shooter games Metalcore and My Pet Hooligan.

Related: SEC can proceed with Coinbase lawsuit: Court ruling"
"[INST] Solana validators pass ‘Timely Vote Credits’ plan to speed up transactions [/INST] Solana validators have voted in a proposal aimed at decreasing the latency of consensus “votes” — which could speed up transactions on the blockchain.

The proposal calls for a “Timely Vote Credits” mechanism on Solana and was passed on April 9 with 98% votes in favor.

It would change how validators are incentivized to make “votes” — a key part of Solana’s consensus mechanism that confirms transactions.

Solana Timely Vote Credits voting results. Source: Dune Analytics

According to Solana Labs, up until now, validators are given a flat one vote credit whenever they submit a consensus vote on a block that becomes finalized by the network.

Over time, validators have found they can maximize earnings by delaying their votes just long enough to ensure they’re voting on the correct fork — at no penalty.

The proposal, floated on March 14 by “zantetsu” from Solana validator Shinobi Systems, would implement a variable number of vote credits that are awarded for votes — with more credits given to votes that have less latency.

“This will discourage intentional ‘lagging,’ because delaying a vote for any slots decreases the number of credits that vote will earn,” Solana Labs explained.

Solana users have raised concerns with the vote credit system in the past. Source: Reddit

Currently, Solana Compass shows the blockchain is producing approximately 1,000 “non-vote,” or user transactions per second and nearly 2,000 “vote” transactions per second.

Related: Paradigm leads $225M funding round for new ‘Solana killer’ L1

It’s not yet known what the impact of the new mechanism will be, as it’s expected to be implemented sometime after Solana’s v1.18 upgrade slated this month — which includes patches to fix priority fees and network congestion issues on the chain.

Meanwhile, Solana has been battling a string of failed transactions which has been blamed on an “implementation bug” from QUIC, a Google-developed data transfer protocol that loops all nodes in on the current state of the network.

A bug fix — which involves a reconfiguration for QUIC — is now slated for April 15, should no additional issues come about in testing.

Magazine: Is measuring blockchain transactions per second (TPS) stupid in 2024? Big Questions"
"[INST] Woo X exchange launches world’s first tokenized T-bills for retail [/INST] Woo X cryptocurrency exchange has launched tokenized United States Treasury Bills (T-Bills), claiming to be the first protocol to offer tokenized T-Bills for retail investors.

Woo X launched its real-world–asset (RWA) tokenization vaults, RWA Earn Vaults, enabling users to earn yield by holding Circle’s USD Coin (USDC), according to an April 22 X post:

“With the RWA Earn Vaults, all @WOO_X users can now earn stable, predictable yield on their USDC holdings backed by U.S. Treasury Bills without having to jump through any extra hoops.”

Backed solely by U.S. T-bills, RWA Earn Vaults offer between 4.5% and 4.7% annual percentage rate (APR) to USDC holders. According to the announcement:

“User subscriptions accumulate real yields, fully backed by U.S. Treasury Bills, with current APRs for 7-day and 28-day terms at ~4.5% and ~4.75% respectively.”

Related: Hashing It Out: Are RWAs the future of crypto?

The yield-earning product was launched in partnership with OpenTrade, a London-headquartered tokenization platform backed by Circle.

Circle is the issuer of the world’s second-largest stablecoin, USDC, which has a $34 billion market cap, behind Tether’s (USDT) with an over $109 billion market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Related: USDT aims to offer a lifeline to inflation-stricken nations: Tether CEO

RWAs were the second most profitable crypto narrative in Q1 2024

RWAs were the second most profitable narrative in the crypto space during the first quarter of 2024, according to a recent report by CoinGecko. CoinGecko analyst Lim Yu Qian said:

“The memecoin narrative was 4.6 times more profitable than the next best-performing crypto narrative of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) and 33.3 times more profitable than the layer 2 narratives with the lowest returns in Q1 this year.”

Showcasing the growing institutional interest in the RWA sector, the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, launched a USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund on March 20, tickered “BUIDL,” worth over $298 million at the time of writing, according to Etherscan.

Over $1 billion worth of U.S. Treasurys have been tokenized through 17 tokenization products by March 28, which rose to $1.15 billion by April 22, according to Dune data.

Tokenized government securities. Source: Dune

Franklin Templeton’s Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) remains the largest treasury tokenization fund, worth over $390 million at the time of writing, according to Dune.

How tokenization will transform traditional finance | Interview with FTX US president Brett Harrison. Source: Cointelegraph

Related: EigenLayer on the brink of potential yield crisis"
"[INST] ‘Buy Bitcoin’ sign that photobombed Janet Yellen sells for $1M [/INST] A yellow notepad with “Buy Bitcoin” written on it, which was flashed behind then-United States Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen during a 2017 congressional hearing, has sold at auction for 16 Bitcoin (BTC) — over $1 million.

The buyer, identified as “Justin” — also known as “Squirrekkywrath” — was the winning bidder on the Bitcoin auction platform Scarce City. The auction ran for a week, ending on April 24, just after 11:00 pm UTC.

The sign was offered up by Christian Langalis, who wrote it out and flashed it to the camera after nabbing a seat behind Yellen at a televised House Financial Services Committee hearing in July 2017.

Langalis was escorted out after photobombing Yellen, as signs are not allowed to be displayed during hearings.

CNBC reported at the time that after the sign was flashed, Bitcoin traded 3.7% higher, reaching over $2,418.

After Scarce City takes its 15% fee, Langalis is set to pocket around $875,000, or 13.6 BTC.

In a statement under the listing, Langalis said it was “good to finally liberate this number from my sock drawer and offer it back to the Bitcoin public.”

Related: $1M Bitcoin price still in play amid ‘macro liquidity surge’ — Arthur Hayes

The listing notes the page with the handwritten sign “was removed from the notepad shortly after the hearing” but was since “reattached with clear archival wire.”

The yellow legal pad also contains “an unseen rough draft” of the now-iconic scrawl, along with notes on the hearing monetary policy and Bitcoin.

Langalis’ draft of the sign was part of the sale. Source: Scarce City

In 2019, Langalis created and sold 21 replicas of the sign, which sold for an average price of 0.8 BTC, worth about $51,300 today.

The listing claims the replicas are displayed in the offices of venture firms Paradigm, Blockchain Capital and Castle Island Ventures, along with the crypto think-tank Coin Center.

Bloomberg reported that Langalis planned to use the money from the latest sale to help fund a Bitcoin software project.

Magazine: Recursive inscriptions — Bitcoin ‘supercomputer’ and BTC DeFi coming soon"
"[INST] Bitcoin ETF demand turns negative around BTC halving [/INST] Demand for the newest Bitcoin investment products is slowing down as the world’s first cryptocurrency went through its fourth “halving” event.

Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) became a benchmark for institutional investments in Bitcoin (BTC) after launching in January 2024.

The 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs approved by United States regulators in January collectively managed over $13 billion in inflows within a couple of months of launching. Gold ETFs took years to accomplish the same feat.

At their peak, spot BTC ETFs saw up to $1 billion in daily net inflows — the result of institutional investors reallocating investments from the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) to the new ETFs.

The Bitcoin halving is considered an important event in the Bitcoin timeline, which occurs roughly every four years and reduces the block reward for miners by half. Thus, the amount of new BTC added to the market daily is reduced by half. The halving has now reduced the block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.

Reduced rewards and high demand for BTC via ETFs led many market pundits to predict a supply shock after the April 20 halving.

However, after weeks of consecutive net positive inflows to Bitcoin ETFs, demand for the products appears to be slowing down.

Are geopolitics to blame for BTC ETF outflows?

While many market analysts predicted that GBTC outflows would soon dry up as institutions ran out of GBTC shares to sell, inflows to ETFs have now turned negative.

Ahead of the Bitcoin halving, spot BTC ETFs recorded several consecutive days of net outflows ranging in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

However, despite the current downturn, Jag Kooner, head of derivatives at Bitfinex, believes the demand for ETF will catch up after the halving.

“The reduction in inflows and significant outflows is not correlated to the halving event but rather to the current SPX and Nasdaq decline and geopolitical tensions. Bitcoin ETFs are an ‘alternate investment’ or a smaller part of large TradFi [traditional finance] investment portfolios. The current situation is likely a product of rebalancing risk on those portfolios and reducing exposure to high-risk assets,” he said.

Recent: Bitcoin halving puts focus on crypto education initiatives

Kooner added that BTC’s impressive rally since January 2024 was thanks not only to ETF approvals but also to market participants speculating on the impact of spot ETFs on the Bitcoin price.

Thus, “we expect a stabilization of flows to result in a return of speculation on a bullish tipping of flows while we return to bullish trending market conditions.”

Bitcoin supply shock theory takes a backseat

The first three months of spot BTC ETF inflows ranged from three to 10 times the daily mining supply of 900 BTC. The high ETF demand and heavy buying from institutional giants such as MicroStrategy led many market analysts to predict a post-halving supply shock.

A Bybit report predicted that BTC reserves on exchanges could dry up within nine months of the BTC halving, while other analysts predicted a six-month time frame. According to data shared by crypto analytics firm CryptoQuant, BTC supply on centralized exchanges fell to a three-year low of 1.94 million BTC by April 16.

Ki Young Ju, CEO of CryptoQuant, made a similar prediction, saying BTC could face a severe supply shock “within six months” of the halving.

But, by the third week of April, ETF demand has slowed to consecutive net daily outflows. The demand for ETFs stagnated at the end of March when BTC saw its first week of net outflows.

Bitcoin ETF historical netflow. Source: CryptoQuant

Young stated that the demand for ETFs may rebound if the BTC price approaches critical support levels where new whales — mainly ETF buyers — have a $56,000 on-chain cost basis. The cost basis of an investment is the total amount initially invested plus any commissions or fees involved in the purchase.

Kooner added that people often ignore the long-term holders with a significant amount of supply. He said that there could also be a major distribution from long-term holders during the later stages of the current cycle, explaining:

“The demand for spot Bitcoin ETFs is unprecedented by all accounts, but a single metric cannot measure demand for BTC itself. However, the market decline is evidence enough that the demand doesn’t currently outstrip BTC supply on an absolute basis.”

While ETF demand has slowed, open interest in BTC options has increased, implying that buy-and-hold investors are waiting on the sidelines while volatility-focused investors are taking their place.

Josef Tětek, Bitcoin ambassador at hardware wallet maker Trezor, told Cointelegraph that ETFs don’t necessarily signify institutional demand.

Recent: Memecoin sector’s continued growth hinges on long-term utility

Under U.S. regulation, ETFs are available to both institutions and retail investors. Thus, It’s impossible to speculate on the impact and relative influence of various demand drivers in the short term.

“Taking a longer-term view and turning away from U.S. markets, there is rising demand for Bitcoin in countries across the globe as fiat currencies fail as a reliable store of value and even in some countries as a viable medium of exchange.”

The post-halving supply shock notion was prevalent for most of February and March owing to heavy inflows into the spot ETFs despite GBTC outflows and new BTC price highs. However, just days before the halving, the ETF flows turned passive, and the BTC price also slid nearly 10% from all-time highs, prompting many to reconsider their supply shock theory in the short term.

However, some experts are optimistic that BTC ETF demand will reach new highs as market conditions improve after the halving."
"[INST] Base and SOL memecoin market caps plummet 19% and 12% in 24 hours [/INST] The total market capitalizations of memecoins on Solana and Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 Base have witnessed a significant drop in the last 24 hours, plunging 12% and 19% respectively across the two networks.

The memecoin sell-off arrived around the same time as a sharp decline in the price of Bitcoin (BTC), with the cryptocurrency falling 4.94% in the last 24 hours, per CoinMarketCap data.

Bitcoin saw a sharp decline of 4.94% over the past 24 hours. Source: CoinMarketCap

One crypto analyst said it’s common for memecoins to plummet when the price of BTC falters, however, another analyst linked the bearish trend to the humor simply running its course.

“I guess it stopped being funny,” crypto analyst and founder of Quantum Economics Mati Greenspan told Cointelegraph.

“Pretty fitting that the top came in on April Fool’s day,” he added. “There is too much value on memecoins, it’s gotta end at some point, it can’t keep going forever.”

Solana's memecoin market cap stands at $8.29 billion, marking a 12% decrease within the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

The leading Solana-based meme token by total value — dogwifhat (WIF) — saw a 9% market cap decline on the day, amounting to a loss of $3.9 billion. Notably, WIF still accounts for nearly half of the total memecoin market share on Solana.

Across eight major crypto exchanges, WIF currently touts a total of $484 million in open interest (OI). However, $2.76 million in leveraged positions have been liquidated over the last 24 hours, including $1.89 million in short positions and $872,460 in long positions, per CoinGlass data.

WIF saw $2.29 million in liquidations, while Bitcoin had $172.54 million within the same 24-hour period Source: CoinGlass

Base's total market cap dropped 19% over 24 hours to $1.47 billion. The native token of a new Layer 3 network dubbed “Degen” (DEGEN) on Base, suffered the most, witnessing a 26.14% drop in market cap to $436.5 million.

The total crypto market cap — the value of all assets across the entire crypto sector — has also taken a 6.14% hit over the past 24 hours, currently standing at $2.45 trillion, per CoinMarketCap data.

Greenspan suggested that while Bitcoin is finding strong support levels, memecoins are seeing fluctuations beyond critical key price points.

“Bitcoin retracement is minuscule at the moment, memecoins are getting slaughtered,” Greenspan added.

Bitcoin dropped 4.94% over the past day to trade at $65,910. Meanwhile, WIF’s price has dropped 10.3% to $3.67.

Related: Base TVL doubles in a month as pundits tip memecoins to drive adoption

Greenspan attributes this to the leading correlation that Bitcoin commands over other cryptocurrencies in the wider crypto market.

“It has directional correlation, when Bitcoin is up, they go up more, and when Bitcoin is down, they go down more than Bitcoin. This will hold up for a very long time,” Greenspan says.

Charles Edwards, the founder of quantitative Bitcoin and digital asset fund Capriole shared a similar sentiment, telling Cointelegraph that it's typical for memecoins of this nature to experience up to double the impact of Bitcoin's downturns.

“Altcoins like this are high beta on Bitcoin, so if Bitcoin drops 7-10% as it has over the last day or two, expect coins like this to drop at least 1.5 -2x more,” Edwards told Cointelegraph, adding that excitement has been driving much of the prices for Solana and Base in recent times:

“There’s just generally been a lot of hype for SOL and Base ecosystems, but I would argue that they have a lot less tangible value than BTC and Ethereum.”

Crypto analyst and Crypto Banter podcast host Ran Neuner said in an April 2 X post that the memecoin market is nearing an oversaturation point.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] US Bitcoin miner Giga Energy to launch facility in Argentina [/INST] Texas-based Bitcoin (BTC) miner Giga Energy has expanded its operations into Argentina as part of a move to utilize wasted energy from ""natural gas flaring"" on the South American nation's oil fields.

Giga co-founder Brent Whitehead described the expansion as a “significant milestone” for his firm in a March 26 post on LinkedIn.

“This move not only broadens our operational landscape but also aligns with our vision to mitigate flaring globally.”

Gas flaring is the burning of the natural gas associated with oil extraction. Methane is released as part of the process, which Giga then converts into electricity to power its Bitcoin mining rigs.

The expansion will see Giga place a large shipping container with thousands of Bitcoin miners on top of an oil well, divert the excess gas into generators, and then harnessing that energy to power Bitcoin mining rigs, according to a March 26 CNBC report.

Giga’s Argentina mining site — based in the province of Mendoza — has been in a test phase since December and has already mined between $200,000 and $250,000 worth of Bitcoin, the firm’s other co-founder, Matt Lohstroh, told CNBC.

However, the firm is still waiting to import all necessary equipment before it can fully scale the operation. Until then, the firm doesn’t expect to turn a profit.

Argentina boasts the second-largest shale gas reserve in the world, according to a recently published academic paper from the University of Michigan.

The firm’s Bitcoin mining operation will also reduce methane emissions, Whitehead told CNBC.

“By capturing stranded natural gas to power modular data centers for energy-intensive computing, Giga is actively contributing to reducing global methane emissions.”

IT services company Exa Tech will help Giga handle operations onsite, while oil and gas firm Phoenix Global Resources will provide the gas needed to power the Bitcoin miners.

Giga first launched its Bitcoin mining operations in 2019 and has 150 megawatts worth of containers installed in its facilities in Texas and Shanghai, according to CNBC.

Related: Riot, TeraWulf and CleanSpark best-positioned miners for Bitcoin halving — CoinShares

The move comes as Bitcoin mining firms prepare for the upcoming Bitcoin halving event currently slated to occur sometime around April 20.

The halving event will see the Bitcoin reward paid to miners sliced from 6.25 BTC ($439,000) to 3.125 BTC ($219,500).

Notably, the event could see global hashrate shift from the United States to countries with cheaper electricity rates, according to Hashlabs Mining’s founder and chief mining strategist Jaran Mellerud.

Mellerud told Cointelegraph that Argentina and Paraguay are the most promising countries for Bitcoin mining in South America.

Magazine: Wolf Of All Streets worries about a world where Bitcoin hits $1M: Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Bitfinex launches volatility futures on Bitcoin and Ether [/INST] Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex is expanding trading tools in response to a volatility spike in crypto markets by introducing new Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) volatility futures.

Bitfinex’s derivatives platform Bitfinex Derivatives, provided by iFinex Financial, launched trading of two new perpetual futures contracts, the firm announced to Cointelegraph on April 3.

The new contracts are based on the Volmex Implied Volatility indexes, the Bitcoin Implied Volatility Index (BVIV) and Ethereum Implied Volatility Index (EVIV). The indexes track 30-day expected volatility or the implied volatility of BTC and ETH options contracts.

The Bitcoin Implied Volatility Index all-time chart. Source: TradingView

“The creation of these indices allows our customers to not only monitor but actually trade the implied volatility of Bitcoin and Ether in a simple perpetual format,” Bitfinex’s head of derivatives, Jag Kooner, told Cointelegraph.

Perpetual futures, also known as perpetual swaps or perpetuals, are a type of derivative contract that allows traders to speculate on the future price of an asset without an expiration date.

According to Kooner, perpetual futures make the “most tradable format in the crypto space,” as other contracts rely on a dated structure. He noted:

“Tracking the 30-day implied volatility in Bitcoin and Ether options contracts without the need to roll — i.e. dated futures — opens up the product to both retail and institutional investors alike.”

The new contracts join over 60 perpetual futures contracts available on Bitfinex, including not only cryptocurrencies but commodities like precious metals and oil, FX and equities. “These new contracts will allow us to add implied volatility as another asset class,” Kooner stated.

Related: Crypto derivatives firm Deribit moves to Dubai after winning VARA approval

In options trading, implied volatility is a metric indicating how much the market expects the value of an asset to change over a certain period of time.

If investors expect a lot of movement, the volatility rises, but if the expectation is that an asset’s price movement will be muted, then volatility contracts.

Kooner mentioned the new trading tools are introduced in response to cryptocurrencies hitting new all-time-high prices. He noted:

“With many crypto prices reaching new ATHs, the likelihood of increased volatility and significant drawdowns means there is more utility for these indexes than ever.”

The news comes after cryptocurrency volatility broke all-time highs in March 2024. The Crypto Volatility Index (CVI), which tracks 30-day future volatility and serves as a “market fear index” to the crypto market, topped at 85 points on March 11.

The Crypto Volatility Index all-time chart. Source. CVI Finance

The CVI’s all-time high came just two days before Bitcoin reached its historic highs above $73,000 on March 13. At the time of writing, the implied crypto volatility measured by CVI values around 76.

Magazine: NFTs are like nightclubs, crypto is a volatile religion: NFTStats, NFT Collector"
"[INST] OpenSea enables support for ERC-721C programmable earnings standard [/INST] Nonfungible tokens (NFT) trading platform OpenSea has added support for the ERC-721C token standard that allows creators to set and enforce royalties.

According to the April 2 announcement, creators on OpenSea can now enforce earnings via one click. Invented last May by blockchain gaming company Limit Break, ERC-721C solves the problem of NFT wash trading by standardizing token transfer conditions, such as royalties, across all channels. Before their invention, users could easily bypass creator royalty commissions on secondary markets, such as OpenSea and Blur, by transferring NFTs through self-custody wallets or even other NFT marketplaces that did not honor creators' royalty requirements.

""In the long-run, this allowed for the incentivization of zero-fee, royalty-optional trading with airdrops, effectively turning tokens intended to be non-fungible into proxies for fungible tokens,"" Limit Break explained in a Medium post, adding that ""traders were incentivized to farm tokens by wash-trading NFTs among their own wallets, which is bad for the NFT industry.""

As told by OpenSea developers, compatibility for ERC-721C was only enabled by the March 13 Dencun upgrade on the Ethereum network. ""If you enforce your creator earnings according to the steps above, sales will only be supported on OpenSea and other marketplaces powered by LimitBreak’s Payment Processor,"" the platform stated. After ERC-721C contract deployment on OpenSea, creators can still manually list their digital artwork on other marketplaces, but OpenSea will also match the lowest royalties available on other platforms set by the creator.

The feature is also compatible with OpenSea's Seaport 1.6, which programs NFTs to be sold only under certain conditions, such as a changing metadata in reaction to sale volume. Although largely at the discretion of its creator, NFT royalties typically range between 2.5% to 10% per sale. The top 10 NFT collections have earned over $345 million in royalties since their inception.

Related: NFTs are like nightclubs, crypto is a volatile religion"
"[INST] Base sets record high DEX volume day, surpassing $1B [/INST] Coinbase Ethereum layer-2 network Base has shattered its trading volume record within a 24-hour on decentralized exchanges (DEX), jumping approximately 25% compared to the previous day and surpassing the $1 billion mark.

On March 30, Base recorded $1.21 billion in DEX trading volume, up 25% from the previous day’s $959.63 million, according to Dune data.

Most of the trading activity occurred on Uniswap, which accounted for 64.3% of the volume, followed by Aerodrome Finance at 9.7% and SharkSwap at 7.8%.

DEX volume (%) across exchanges. Source: Dune

Daily active users (DAU) also saw a spike of around 12.4%, climbing from 153,000 to 172,000. Over the past six weeks, there has been an average of 667,765 weekly active users.

There is speculation within the crypto community that the growing network could become the next hub for memecoins.

Crypto trader Wizard of SoHo told his 97,000 X followers that Base reminds him of an “early Solana,” predicting “several billion dollar memecoins on Base.”

Meanwhile, Base contributor Jesse Pollak polled his 73,200 followers, asking how long until Base becomes the “largest non-Ethereum on-chain economy.” Of the respondents, 49.4% responded with “3 months,” while another 28.6% predicted “within 12 months.”

DEX volume, base DEX metrics. Source: Dune

At the time of publication, there are currently no tokens on the network with a market capitalization at or above $1 billion.

Degen (DEGEN) and Brett (BRETT) are among the largest Base memecoins, boasting market caps of $709.9 million and $654.6 million, respectively, according to CoinGecko.

Only a week prior, on March 25, Cointelegraph noted that DEGEN’s market cap stood at $143.4 million, marking an almost five-fold increase in the span of seven days.

Related: Ethereum Dencun upgrade lowers transaction fees for L2s

On March 27, Cointelegraph reported that Coinbase will start moving more of its customer and corporate USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin accounts to Base.

Coinbase vice president Max Branzburg stated in a post on social media that the move would allow the crypto exchange to “manage and secure customer funds with lower fees and faster settlement times.”

The change will only affect Coinbase.com accounts, not Coinbase Wallet, as those users are responsible for their own private keys.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Visa Token Service reaches 1B tokens served in Asia-Pacific market [/INST] Visa announced on March 26 that its payment services in the Asia-Pacific region have served more than 1 billion tokens while bringing an “uplift” to the market of more than $2 billion last year.

Visa Token Service (VST), launched in 2014, serves as a bridge between traditional banking account information and digital payment services such as Google Pay and Apple Pay.

Essentially, VST replaces the traditional 16-digit credit/debit card number used by consumers to make purchases with a secure numeric token. This allows consumers to share financial information without exposing their private details or banking information.

VST operates on VisaNet, the company’s proprietary network that, according to company documentation, is capable of handling more than 56,000 transaction messages a second.

One of the more common use cases for tokenized payment methods is for cross-border payments and international travel. Exchanging cash or conducting wire transfers across currency types comes with myriad friction points. The use of tokenized assets such as cryptocurrency or tokenized payment services such as VST can avoid much of the hassle involved in these transactions.

A recent study by Visa found that 97% of travelers to the Asia-Pacific region prefer to make payments by means other than cash. In 2023, this led to an average spend of $2,525 per trip.

The “tokenization” of traditional assets into digital currencies and payment facilitators has grown significantly in the wake of COVID-19. As travel continues to flourish as the world recovers from the pandemic, the need for international payment methods with low fees and friction has become increasingly cited by consumers as driving factors in how and where they make purchases.

Visa’s head of products and solutions for the Asia-Pacific region, TR Ramachandran, said in a press release that tokens “pave the way for the future of commerce.”

“The innovation possibilities are immense with tokenised payment credentials that can unlock new and more personalised consumer experiences beyond physical Visa cards. We continue to build on the capabilities that modern credentials offer, together with our partners, to bring more value to the entire payment ecosystem.”

Previn Pillay, head of merchant sales and acquiring for Asia Pacific at Visa, added that the company encourages “more merchants to adopt tokenised payments as this technology can make a direct impact to their top and bottom lines.""

Related: Visa, Mastercard could be key drivers for crypto in the year ahead"
"[INST] New Bitcoin whales, ETFs are up only 1.6% in unrealized profit — Is the BTC bottom in? [/INST] Institutional investors and Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) holders are barely up in unrealized profits, suggesting that this cohort is likely not to produce much selling pressure in the short term. So, was the dip below $60,000 the local bottom for Bitcoin (BTC) price?

Bitcoin ETF holders only up 1.6% in unrealized profit

Short-term Bitcoin whales, or investors holding at least 1,000 BTC for up to 155 days have an unrealized profit of just 1.6% on their holdings, according to CryptoQuant data.

BTC unrealized profit ratio for whale and miner cohorts. Source: CryptoQuant

In contrast, the cohort of old whales holding at least 1,000 BTC for over 155 days has a 223% unrealized profit, according to Ki Young Ju, founder and CEO of CryptoQuant. Ju wrote in an April 19 X post:

“Not enough profit to end this cycle, imo [in my opinion].”

Unrealized profits for small miners are at 131%, while the cohort of big mining firms is up 81%. Despite the significant unrealized profit, the five largest mining firms have not been selling in anticipation of the Bitcoin halving.

Bitcoin selling by the top five mining firms slowed to a two-year low in the first quarter of 2024, when the five largest miners sold a total of approximately 2,000 BTC, according to an April 10 report by Bitwise.

Bitcoin mined vs. Bitcoin sold by top 5 miners. Source: Bitwise

Bitcoin price fell below $60,000 on April 16 and April 19, before bouncing back toward $65,000. Some technical analysts are anticipating that the BTC price may have formed a “double bottom” pattern.

BTC/USDT, 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView

Following this week’s dip, key technical indicators have also reset from overbought territory. Bitcoin’s relative strength index (RSI) on the daily chart, for example, is 46, which means that the asset’s price is neutral, down from 76 on March 17, when Bitcoin was overbought.

BTC/USDT, 1-day chart. Source: TradingView

The RSI is a popular momentum indicator used to measure whether an asset is oversold or overbought based on the magnitude of recent price changes.

Related: With 10 days to the halving, analysts predict $150K Bitcoin top

Is the Bitcoin bottom in?

Bitcoin’s retrace to below $60,000 earlier this week may have marked the local bottom for the market, argued Arthur Cheong, founder and chief investment officer of DeFiance Capital. Cheong wrote in an April 19 X post:

“Very high chance that was the local bottom.”

Additionally, Bitcoin price broke out from a significant channel on the four-hour chart. This suggests that $72,000 could be up next, according to popular crypto trader Satoshi Flipper’s April 19 X post.

BTC/USDT, 4-hour chart. Source: Satoshi Flipper

Institutional net inflows from the 10 U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs have turned negative on the week of the halving. The Bitcoin ETFs saw over $147 million worth of cumulative net outflows on April 18, according to Dune.

Bitcoin ETF net flows. Source: Dune

The slowing ETF inflows were the main reason behind Bitcoin’s downward price action, which is set to turn bullish with the upcoming halving, according to Denis Petrovcic, CEO and founder of Blocksquare. He told Cointelegraph:

“While some might anticipate a drop post-halving, the sustained institutional interest and decreased block rewards should keep BTC prices stable or slightly bullish, avoiding the typical ‘sell the news’ fallout.”

Related: BRC-20 tokens bleed ahead of Bitcoin halving as trader focus shifts to Runes

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] UK regulator scrutinizes Big Tech's role in AI industry [/INST] Regulators in the United Kingdom are keeping a watchful eye on the local artificial intelligence (AI) scene as Big Tech companies continue to dominate the space.

On April 24, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it is in the process of collecting information from major market players to understand if the increasing collaboration between Amazon.com and AI developer Anthropic threatens local competition.

In September 2023, Amazon announced an agreement to invest $4 billion into Anthropic in an effort to support its development of high-performing foundation models.

Later, in March 2024, the web services giant said it fulfilled its $4-billion investment commitment, revealing a minority ownership stake in the company and the implementation of AWS as Anthropic’s cloud service provider.

Now, both companies are facing a potential in-depth antitrust probe from U.K. regulators. This comes a week after the agency highlighted Big Tech’s “interconnected web” of deals and partnerships in the market.

It also said it will be looking into a partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI, one of Europe’s leading AI startups. This is in addition to an investigation by U.K. regulators over Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar collaboration with OpenAI, which was opened in December 2023.

Related: Coca‑Cola pours $1.1B into generative AI experiment with Microsoft

Joel Bamford, the executive director of mergers at the CMA, commented on the development:

“We will assess, objectively and impartially, whether each of these 3 deals fall within UK merger rules and, if they do, whether they have any impact on competition in the UK.”

However, back in January, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called its deal with OpenAI “pro-competition,” saying that partnerships are an avenue to having competition in the AI space against some of the players who are completely already integrated.

The scrutiny from the CMA comes after its findings revealed a pattern of Big Tech companies funneling money into AI companies that could allow them to shape markets, creating concern for competition.

The agency said it is trying to avoid past mistakes that have led to the rise of a select number of dominating platforms.

Nonetheless, companies like Microsoft and Google have been pouring billions of dollars into AI development in countries around the world, including, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, Germany and France.

Magazine: How to get better crypto predictions from ChatGPT, Humane AI pin slammed: AI Eye"
"[INST] Worldcoin will increase WLD supply by up to 19% in the next 6 months [/INST] Digital identity project Worldcoin will increase the supply of its WLD token by as much as 19% over the next six months through a swathe of private sales to non-United States institutions.

In an April 23 blog post, Worldcoin shared that World Assets — a subsidiary of the Worldcoin Foundation in charge of token issuance — will sell up to 1.5 million WLD, about $8.2 million worth, every week through a series of “private placements to a select group of institutional trading firms” operating outside of the U.S.

Worldcoin will be increasing the supply of its WLD token over the next six months. Source: Worldcoin

“World Assets expects to sell between 0.5 million and 1.5 million WLD per week on average,” Worldcoin wrote. “The circulating supply of WLD will thus increase correspondingly.”

An increase of up to 1.5 million WLD tokens per week for six months equates to a supply increase of 36 million new tokens hitting the market — currently worth around $197 million, per CoinGecko data.

With a current circulating supply of 193 million WLD tokens, the private sales represent an 18.6% increase in the total available supply within the same time frame.

Worldcoin noted it would negotiate with individual trading firms — especially those engaged in competition with each other — to execute private placements as close to “prevailing [WLD] market prices” as possible, to help minimize potential price impact on the token.

At current prices, Worldcoin touts a market capitalization of $1 billion. However, this pales in comparison to its fully diluted value (FDV) of $54.5 billion — its total value if all tokens were circulating.

Worldcoin is ranked as the 6th largest cryptocurrency by FDV. Source: Coingecko

Related: Portuguese data regulator bans Worldcoin operations for 90 days

Launched out of beta in July 2023, Worldcoin was founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, current Wolrdcoin CEO Alex Blania, and Max Novendstern who also serves as the CEO of biometrics research firm Mana.

Worldcoin is a crypto-based digital identity project that markets itself as providing a solution to identity issues brought about by rapid developments in AI as well as ushering in a novel universal basic income model by way of its native WLD token.

Worldcoin users register a unique identity with the company’s “World App” by scanning their irises at machines referred to by the company as “Orbs.” Once users verify themselves at an Orb, they are then able to op in to claim free WLD tokens — depending on the country they signed up in.

Buoyed by a wider rally in the price of AI-linked crypto projects, Worldcoin soared 435% from a launch price of $2.17 on July 24 to a peak of $11.74 on March 10.

Worldcoin grew more than 450% in six months. Source: CoinGecko

However, its price has tumbled more than 53% from its all-time high in the last few weeks and is currently changing hands for $5.49.

AI Eye: How to get better crypto predictions from ChatGPT, Humane AI pin slammed"
"[INST] Will DOGE reach $1 this cycle? It's a 'crapshoot,' say analysts [/INST] With the rising number of memecoins entering the market, Dogecoin’s (DOGE) strong community could keep the cryptocurrency from fading into obscurity, but analysts are skeptical of traders' hopes that it could reach a price of one-dollar this cycle.

A one-dollar price tag would represent a 36% increase from Dogecoin’s May 2021 all-time high of $0.73 and a 525% increase from today’s price of $0.16.

DOGE has seen a 2.58% rise over the past 7-days. Source: CoinMarketCap

Over the last week, DOGE posted a 2.58% gain — significantly less growth when compared to other large-cap memecoins within the same timeframe, per CoinMarketCap data.

The next three largest memecoins by market capitalization all experienced notable upside price action in the last seven days, with PEPE (PEPE) up 43%, Shiba Inu (SHIB) up 17.42%, and Dogwifhat (WIF) gaining 14.43%.

“DOGE is one of the most cyclical altcoins in the space,” pseudonymous trader Rekt Capital told Cointelegraph, adding that the rising popularity of other memecoins shouldn’t have a major impact on investor sentiment towards the largest memecoin.

“Other meme coins launching doesn’t mean DOGE will suffer,” Rekt added.

Pav Hundal, the lead analyst for Australian crypto exchange Swyftx offered a more skeptical position, saying that while DOGE has a “huge community of users,” any sharp spikes in price may lead to a significant sell-off from long-term holders.

“A lot will depend on the decision-making of the millions of minnow investors who bought DOGE in 2021 and right now are sitting on paper losses,” Hundal told Cointelegraph, suggesting it’s uncertain whether the price will hit a dollar before the potential sell-off:

“It’s a crapshoot. If most of these people decide to take quick profits during the cycle, you could start to see selling pressure ratchet up.”

Hundal added that Dogecoin is not “seeing the deep books of the last cycle.” In the derivatives market alone it has seen a 56% drop in Open Interest (OI) since the beginning of April.

OI in Doge— which measures the total value of all outstanding or unsettled DOGE futures contracts across exchanges — has declined from $2.15 billion on April 1 to its current level of $928.72 million, per CoinGlass data.

Related: Is Dogecoin copying the 2020 fractal that sent DOGE price soaring 15,800%?

Despite the decline in derivatives activity for the memecoin, Rekt Capital argued that the “cyclicality in DOGE’s chart,” suggests that Dogecoin will still “most probably” reach a price of one dollar this cycle.

He reiterated that Dogecoin comes packed with “historical heritage” and has largely predictable cycles, which traders point out frequently on social media.

Pseudonymous trader Blockchain Mane told his 15,300 X followers in an April 24 post that looking at past data, DOGE usually sees price growth during the month of May.

Rekt also looked to potential social media posts from billionaire Elon Musk as a price catalyst, asserting that Musk is still “very interested in Dogecoin.”

Since April 17, Musk has been interacting regularly with the well-known DOGE influencer DogeDesigner on X.

In April 2023, Musk requested a United States judge to dismiss a $258 billion lawsuit brought against him by investors alleging he operated a pyramid scheme to promote Dogecoin. Although, Musk has recently hinted that his interest in crypto may have waned slightly.

“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about cryptocurrency. Hardly any at all,” Musk told Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood in an X space on Dec. 2023.

Magazine: ChainLinkGod was in High School when he started the account! X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] PayPal proposes ‘cryptoeconomic’ rewards for sustainable Bitcoin miners [/INST] International payments giant PayPal has proposed to make sustainable Bitcoin (BTC) mining more economically attractive by rewarding miners through incentives layered on top of the Bitcoin network.

PayPal’s Blockchain Research Group, in collaboration with Energy Web and DMG Blockchain Solutions, has proposed using “cryptoeconomic incentives” to encourage Bitcoin miners to use low-carbon energy sources, according to an April 22 blog post.

The firm hopes that the experimental incentive contributes to further discussion and innovation around Bitcoin and is seeking industry feedback on potential improvements.

Under the proposal, “green miners” that use sustainable energy sources would be accredited with special “green keys,” which are associated with their public keys.

Bitcoin transactions would be preferentially routed to these green miners by attaching lower fees but with an additional locked BTC reward in a multisig payout address that only the green miners can claim.

“Green miners will be incentivized to mine these transactions since they will be the only ones eligible for the additional ‘locked’ BTC reward,” it explained.

This incentivizes rational profit-driven miners to operate with low-carbon sources to get the extra BTC rewards.

Green miner transactions. Source: PayPal Blockchain Research Group

According to the paper, the proposed solution will leverage Energy Web’s “Green Proofs for Bitcoin” platform for miners to get certified based on their clean energy and grid impact scores.

The green miners can register and share their green keys on the platform as participants of the incentive program.

PayPal BRG said that it has successfully tested the proposed solution with Bitcoin miner DMG Blockchain Solutions Inc.

During the test, it broadcasted multiple low-fee transactions to observe effectiveness under different levels of on-chain transaction volume.

Depending on transaction volume, “these transactions would either take a long time to confirm or eventually be dropped by the network,” it observed before adding, “This would increase the chances for green miners to pick up these transactions.”

Related: Biden is asking Congress to kill the American Bitcoin mining industry

An alternative approach would involve exploring private channels such as the Lightning Network or smart contracts, but there would be trade-offs such as more complex implementation, it added.

“The solution outlined here aims to achieve a good degree of decentralization, ease of implementation and trust independence while distributing incentives,” PayPal BRG concluded.

Cointelegraph contacted PayPal for further details on potential implementation but did not receive an immediate response.

Magazine: Jameson Lopp: Skeptical of spot Ether ETFs, BTC price prediction dilemma: X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] BlackRock ETF close to overtaking Grayscale, despite second-lowest daily inflows [/INST] BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), is slowly approaching the market share of Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust ETF (GBTC).

BlackRock’s IBIT recorded the second-lowest daily inflows of $24.9 million on April 17, compared to its lowest day of $20.4 million worth of inflows on April 9, according to Dune data.

Despite the second-lowest daily inflows, IBIT’s current market share of 32.6% is quietly approaching Grayscale’s GBTC market share of 36.8%, which is the largest spot Bitcoin ETF, holding $19 billion worth of Bitcoin (BTC).

BlackRock’s ETF is currently holding $16.8 billion worth of Bitcoin, which is $2.2 billion short of GBTC’s holdings.

Top Bitcoin ETFs by market share. Source: Dune

IBIT flipping GBTC for the first place is not unfeasible, considering that GBTC’s Bitcoin holdings fell by 50% ahead of the Bitcoin halving — from 619,220 BTC on the first day of trading on Jan. 11, to the current 308,105 BTC.

Looking at accumulation patterns, BlackRock’s Bitcoin accumulation has slowed down since its record day on March 13, when IBIT saw $866 million worth of net inflows. However, BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF holdings surged over 10,200%, from 2,621 BTC at launch, to the current 272,550.

Grayscale’s Bitcoin selling has also been slowing down since March 19, when GBTC saw $607 million worth of outflows, as its fourth-largest day of outflows since inception. In comparison, GBTC outflows stood at $79 million on April 17, according to Dune.

IBIT and Grayscale, Bitcoin ETF Flows. Source: Dune

Cumulative ETF inflows have been slowing down since March. Last week saw over $199 million worth of net inflows into the ETFs, down from $2.58 billion in the week beginning March 11.

Bitcoin ETFs weekly net flows. Source: Dune

Bitcoin price has also been subdued due to the slowing ETF inflows. It fell 10.7% during the previous week to trade at $62,971 as of 12:30 pm UTC, according to CoinMarketCap. Bitcoin slipped below $60,000 on April 17, days before the halving.

Related: Bitcoin supply to run out on exchanges in 9 months — Bybit

Grayscale’s GBTC has been experiencing a massive sell-off since it was launched for trading, introducing significant selling pressure for Bitcoin.

The massive outflows can be attributed to GBTC’s high trading fee of 1.5%, which is the highest among all U.S. Bitcoin ETF issuers. In comparison, Grayscale’s IBIT has a 0.25% trading fee, while Franklin Templeton’s ETF only charges a 0.19% fee.

Breaking Down ETF's Impact on Bitcoin Price with Cory Klippsten. Source: Cointelegraph

Related: Top five BTC miners not selling despite Bitcoin halving"
"[INST] Crypto derivatives firm Deribit moves to Dubai after winning VARA approval [/INST] Deribit, one of the world’s largest exchanges offering options and futures for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC), is relocating to Dubai after securing new local regulatory approval.

The Dubai subsidiary of Deribit group, Deribit FZE, has received a virtual asset service provider (VASP) license from Dubai’s Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA), Deribit announced on April 2.

The new license allows Deribit to offer crypto trading services in Dubai, covering both spot and crypto derivatives trading, such as futures and options.

Deribit’s VASP license will remain non-operational until the company fully satisfies all remaining conditions and selects localization requirements defined by VARA.

According to the announcement, the exchange will soon share launch plans, terms and the exact timing to start operating under the new licensed entity.

Once operational, Deribit will serve institutional and qualified investors in Dubai. The exchange will also continue to serve its retail clients from its broker affiliate in Panama, which is a member of Deribit FZE in Dubai, until further notice.

In addition to winning the license, Deribit will be relocating its global headquarters from Panama to Dubai, appointing its former chief commercial officer Luuk Strijers as the new CEO.

Related: Bitcoin trades above $69K following largest quarterly options expiry in history

According to Deribit co-founder John Jansen, the obtaining of the conditional VASP license from VARA is “not just a regulatory milestone” but rather a sign of the company’s commitment to providing a secure and transparent platform.

“As we anchor our operations in Dubai, we’re not only extending our reach but also reaffirming our resolve to remain the platform of choice for trading,” Jansen noted.

Cointelegraph approached Deribit for a comment regarding the VARA license but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Deribit is a major cryptocurrency exchange that is focused on derivatives trading. The exchange was founded in 2016 and has emerged as one of the largest crypto derivatives platforms alongside giants like Binance and Bybit.

As of April 2, Deribit is ranked the fifth-largest derivatives exchange, with $1.9 billion traded daily, according to CoinMarketCap.

Top 10 largest crypto derivatives exchanges. Source: CoinMarketCap

Established in March 2022, VARA is the primary regulator of crypto-related activity in all zones across the Emirate of Dubai, including Special Development Zones and Free Zones, but excluding the Dubai International Financial Centre.

Since launching the regulatory framework, VARA has issued multiple crypto trading licenses to companies like Binance and OKX.

Magazine: SBF gets 25 years in prison, Fidelity eyes ETH staking, and Coinbase’s court loss: Hodler’s Digest, March 24-30"
"[INST] Prisma Finance $11.6M hacker claims it was a ‘whitehat rescue’ [/INST] The hacker behind the $11.6 million exploit of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Prisma Finance is claiming it was a “whitehat rescue” and is enquiring about returning the funds, according to on-chain messages.

“Hi, this is a whitehat rescue, who can I contact to refund,” the exploiter said on March 28, around 6 hours after the attack. The message came from the address “0x2d4…7507a” — which was earlier identified as being one of three addresses linked to the attack.

“Please contact us at negotiations@prismafinance.com,” the DeFi firm said in response about two hours later.

On-chain messages were sent between Prisma Finance and the hacker. Source: Etherscan

A white hat hacker refers to a person who uses their hacking ability to find security vulnerabilities in software code. In the broader cybersecurity world, these security experts often notify the creator of the attack vector rather than exploiting it themselves.

However, in the cryptocurrency industry, it is more common for hackers to exploit the protocol and then ask for a white hat bounty in exchange for immunity, though there have also been cases where they’ve returned funds without asking for any reward.

The first batch of malicious transactions occurred at 11:29 am UTC on March 28. Prisma Finance is still investigating the root cause of the attack.

Blockchain security firm PeckShield estimated about $11.6 million was stolen and sent to three separate addresses.

The hacker then started swapping the stolen funds to Ether (ETH), according to blockchain security firm Cyvers. PeckShield later observed about 200 Ether was transferred to OFAC-sanctioned cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash.

Prisma Finance engineers have since halted the DeFi protocol.

Prior to the exploit, Prisma Finance had about $220 million in total value locked on its protocol, but that figure has plummeted to $115 million, according to DeFiLlama.

Total value locked on Prisma Finance. Source: DefiLlama.

Meanwhile, the Prisma Governance Token (PRISMA) plummeted 30% to $0.244 on the news but has since rebounded to $0.289, according to CoinGecko.

Cointelegraph reached out to Prisma Finance for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

Related: Ethical hacker retrieves $5.4M for Curve Finance amid exploit

Cryptocurrency hacks continue to hamstring the developments in the DeFi industry.

Over $200 million worth of cryptocurrencies have been lost to hacks and rug pulls across 32 individual incidents over the first two months of 2024, according to Web3 security firm Immunefi.

A total of $1.8 billion was lost to cryptocurrency hacks and scammers in 2023, of which 17% have been attributed to the North Korean Lazarus Group, according to a Dec. 28 report by Immunefi.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Nifty News: PayPal removes NFT protections, Adidas NFT sneakers and more [/INST] PayPal removes protections for NFT buyers and sellers

Multinational payment services firm PayPal is silently taking down protections for purchases related to nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

On May 20, amended policies will take effect, removing buyer and seller protection coverages for NFT purchases. In its upcoming policies page, PayPal said that it has revised its Purchase Protection Program to exclude NFTs from eligibility.

Excerpt from PayPal’s revisions on NFT protections. Source: PayPal

Apart from this, the company also highlighted that it’s also changing its Seller Protection Program to exclude NFT transactions worth $10,000.01 or above.

This means that PayPal’s guarantee will no longer cover NFT sales over $10,000 against false claims, chargebacks, or scams that could lead to monetary losses.

Adidas and Stepn release NFT sneakers

Move-to-earn game Stepn announced that it partnered with popular shoe retailer Adidas to release co-branded sneaker NFTs on the Solana network.

Stepn said in the announcement that the collaboration is “long-term” and aims to provide their community with a full experience through multiple activations.

According to Stepn, the collaboration aims to offer digital assets that promote healthier and more active lifestyles.

The sneakers will cost about 10,000 GMT tokens (the project's native coin), worth about $2,500, according to coin information website CoinGecko.

Related: Nifty News: LA’s Bored Ape lovers go hungry, Bitcoiners sell $500 Game Boy dupe and more

Louis Vuitton drops $8,400 phygital varsity jacket

Fashion brand Louis Vuitton announced the drop of a varsity jacket worth around $8,400, which will have both the physical garment and a corresponding digital collectible NFT.

The jacket is designed by the American record producer and singer-songwriter Pharrell Williams and is a part of the fashion brand’s ongoing Via NFT project.

Digital representation of the limited edition varsity jacket released by Louis Vuitton. Source: Louis Vuitton

The jacket is made from suede buckskin and bears an embroidered logo of the brand. Users can purchase the jacket through a token-gated site and will receive its physical version later in November or December.

The jacket is the third product released by the fashion brand exclusively to its Via NFT holders. The first product was a bag worth about $9,000. This was followed by a $6,400 digital mini trunk that was also sold exclusively to token holders.

Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis"
"[INST] Crypto market stumbles amid arrest of Samourai Wallet founders [/INST] Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and major altcoins briefly tumbled amid news of Samourai Wallet founders’ arrest by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) on the backdrop of ongoing Middle East tensions and post-halving volatility.

On April 24, Cointelegraph reported that cryptocurrency wallet Samourai Wallet CEO Keonne Rodriguez and chief technology officer William Hill will each face one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and one count of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.

Within an hour of the DOJ announcement, Bitcoin’s price dropped 3.6%. Its price dipped below key support levels to $63,710 before recovering slightly to $64,546, per CoinMarketCap data.

Bitcoin’s price dropped by 3.6% following the DOJ announcement. Source: CoinMarketCap

Meanwhile, Ether dropped 2.51% within the same time frame but failed to bounce back, declining further to $3,158.

The largest altcoins also took a hit; meanwhile, PEPE (PEPE) saw a brief 6.4% drop, Shiba I (SHIB) experienced a 2.7% decline, and Dogecoin (DOGE) briefly dipped 3.2% following the announcement.

The sharp price drops in the top two cryptocurrencies by market capitalization triggered widespread liquidation of long positions.

Market price drops across the board forced heavy long position liquidations. Source: CoinGlass

In the last 12 hours, Bitcoin saw $33.08 million worth of long positions liquidated; Ether had $29.88 million, and approximately $23 million in long positions were liquidated across the rest of the crypto market, per CoinGlass data.

The crypto market decline also comes in the backdrop of geopolitical tension further escalating in the Middle East.

On April 24, the Israeli military struck approximately 40 locations linked to Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, according to local reports.

The crypto community was already largely anticipating some short-term volatility following the Bitcoin halving event, which happened just days earlier on April 20.

Pseudonymous crypto trader Rekt Capital told their 456,400 X followers on April 24 that they predict the next bull market peak not to occur until late 2025, approximately 546 days after the halving.

Related: Bitcoin analysts agree that BTC has ‘a lot further to run’

The fluctuations came despite overall positive investor sentiment in the crypto market.

According to the Fear & Greed Index, which measures crypto market sentiment, the “greed” score rose to 72 this week, a 15-point increase from last week.

The crypto community criticized the recent arrests, fearing it could be another attempt by the U.S. government to crack down harshly on crypto.

“These developers face up to 25 yrs in prison for writing code. The US is sending a message. No transaction will be private,” crypto analyst Ryan Adams stated in an April 24 post.

Meanwhile, Fred Krueger claimed on the same day in an X post that the arrest was “not a good look for Bitcoin in general.”

Crypto commentator Luke Mikic told his 26,800 X followers that this “attack by the US Government on Samourai wallet is bigger than most people think.”

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Australians wouldn’t value retail CBDC for its privacy or safety, RBA finds [/INST] The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has examined the value the public would place on a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC). It looked at willingness to pay for the use of CBDC in a digital wallet and the privacy benefits that CBDC might offer.

The RBA described its hypothetical CBDC as “a digital currency that is even safer and potentially more private than commercial bank deposits” and used a discrete choice experiment to assess public valuations of goods without markets.

Source: Resist CBDC

The research considered fees for privacy and safety options of up to 5 Australian dollars (AUD), which is equivalent to about $3 U.S. dollars. It added that that users paying 5 AUD per year would generate about 100 million AUD in fees — not a significant enough amount to “overwhelm the range of other considerations relevant to the CBDC issuance decision.”

Related: Aussie federal budget reaffirms BTC won’t be treated as foreign currency

The safety value of a CBDC lies in its lack of credit risk, which is inherent in bank deposits, as banks can fail. Using data from 2022, the RBA was able to demonstrate that willingness to hold an account with the RBA instead of a commercial bank is in the negative — people would be willing to pay (less than an Australian dollar per year) not to do it. According to the RBA:

“This is consistent with bank deposits in Australia already being perceived as a safe form of money, and physical cash issued by the Reserve Bank of Australia continuing to be available as an alternative option.”

Public resistance to CBDC could also color those findings, the RBA said. The survey assumed the use of a disintermediated system in which the RBA would open accounts for members of the public. Most live and trial CBDCs are intermediated and make us of the services of a financial institution to provide services for CBDC users. The report noted that some policymakers expect to design an intermediated CBDC, which would have different privacy options.

Estimates of willingness to pay for CBDC privacy and safety options, Source: RBA

Privacy data were much more complex. Previous research has suggested that people highly value privacy, but frequently forgo privacy measures in practice, making its value hard to assess. The results obtained showed a strong preference for sharing information with the financial crime authority Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre and a commercial bank, which was worth about 5 AUD more than allowing data sharing with the RBA.

In short, the study finds little public support for a retail CBDC. The RBA has made numerous previous studies of CBDC, most of which reached positive conclusions. Those studies mainly looked at wholesale CBDC use cases.

Magazine: Wealthy, isolated, and incredible beaches: Perth Crypto City Guide"
"[INST] Thailand’s biggest crypto exchange goes on hiring spree ahead of IPO [/INST] Bitkub Capital Group Holdings, the owner of Thailand’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, is hiring financial advisers to facilitate its planned initial public offering (IPO) listing.

Bitkub aims to go public on the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) in 2025, CEO Jirayut Srupsrisopa told Bloomberg on April 1. The upcoming public listing aims to raise new capital and boost Bitkub’s profile.

In addition to hiring advisers, Bitkub is now actively expanding staff despite cutting its headcount by 6% in 2022 and 2023.

Jirayut said that the Thai exchange is looking to add 1,000 employees by 2025, doubling the workforce from the current 2,000 people.

Bitkub initially announced plans to launch an IPO in Thailand in a 2023 shareholder letter without disclosing details.

Based in Bangkok, Bitkub is the largest crypto exchange in Thailand, accounting for 77% of the market share as of December 2023, according to data from HashKey. The exchange handles roughly $30 million in daily trading volumes.

Other major Thai crypto exchanges include Upbit — which launched in 2021 — along with Bitazza and Zipmex. However, Zipmex suspended trading activity in November 2023 following a crackdown from local regulators.

Market share of top four Thai crypto exchanges as of 2022. Source: CoinGecko

Thailand has emerged as a major crypto player in recent years. It reportedly had more than 13 million crypto users as of 2023, accounting for roughly 18% of its total population, according to data from Statista. It is projected that this figure will reach 17.7 million users in 2028.

Amid growing adoption, cryptocurrency firms have been moving to grab market share from Bitkub in Thailand.

A major global rival, Binance, officially launched its local subsidiary in January 2024, and is planning to open to the public in 2024.

Thailand’s Kasikornbank — one of the largest in the country — acquired a majority stake in the Satang crypto exchange in October 2023.

Related: Thailand approves personal income tax exemption for token earnings

The new details about Bitkub’s planned IPO come after the exchange sold a 9.2% stake in its crypto exchange unit — called Bitkub Online — to tech holding company Asphere Innovations in July 2023. At the time, the stake was worth 600 million baht, or $16.5 million.

According to Jirayut, Bitkub expects Bitkub Online’s valuation to rise as trading volumes on the platform near levels not seen since the last crypto bull market in 2021. Bitkub Online accounts for roughly 80% of Bitkub Capital’s earnings.

In 2022, SCB X, a financial firm that owns the nation’s largest bank by market value, canceled a 17.85 billion baht plan to acquire a 51% stake in Bitkub Online amid increased regulatory scrutiny.

Magazine: KuCoin’s desperate $10M airdrop, 1 tweet raises $37M for memecoin: Asia Express"
"[INST] Binance’s $1B emergency ‘SAFU’ fund now makes up 3% of UDSC supply [/INST] The world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, is converting its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) into Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin and now holds 3% of its circulating supply.

The company announced the move on April 18, stating that “we are transferring 100% of SAFU’s assets to USDC” but didn’t elaborate on why, other than it was “making use of a trusted, audited, and transparent stablecoin for SAFU,” which further enhances its reliability and ensures it remains stable at $1 billion.

The exchange’s Secure Asset Fund for Users is an emergency insurance fund established in 2018 to protect Binance users in extreme situations, such as exchange hacks, where users could be reimbursed for unforeseen losses.

According to Etherscan, the SAFU wallet address made a transaction of 800 million USDC on Ethereum at 2:35 am UTC for a transaction fee of just $1.88.

There was also a transfer of 1.36 million BNB (BNB) worth around $754 million and a 16,277 BTC transfer as part of the conversion process.

The billion-dollar Binance insurance fund now represents around 3% of the $32.6 billion supply of Circle’s stablecoin.

It is the second conversion of the fund in just over a year. In March 2023, Binance announced that it had replaced the Binance USD (BUSD) holdings in the SAFU with Tether (USDT) and TrueUSD (TUSD).

The move at the time was in response to a regulatory crackdown on BUSD issuer Paxos, which announced that it would stop minting the exchange-backed stablecoin.

Related: Crypto exchange insurance funds surge more than $1B amid bull market

Tether remains the world’s dominant stablecoin, with a circulating supply at record levels of $108 billion, giving it a market share of 69%, according to CoinGecko.

Circle’s USDC is the second largest stablecoin, with a market share of around 20%, with its supply increasing by 33% since December 2023.

Related: 'China is about to start bidding' — Will Hong Kong Bitcoin ETFs spark the halving rally?"
"[INST] Nigeria’s Binance crackdown threatens Web3 industry [/INST] Nigeria is feeling the consequences of actions against Binance executives, with investors withdrawing from deals and partnerships, particularly in the web3 sector. They mention Nigeria’s perceived lack of safety for business and government hostility, citing the Binance case as evidence, according to Lucky Uwakwe, the chairman of Nigeria's Blockchain Industry Coordinating Committee (BICCoN).

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Uwakwe, head of Nigeria’s intercommunity working group involving Blockchain Nigeria User Group (BNUG), Cryptography Development Initiative of Nigeria (CDIN), and Stakeholders in Blockchain Technology Association of Nigeria (SiBAN), expressed investors’ concerns.

According to Uwakwe, investors worry about potential repercussions similar to Binance’s fate when investing in local Web3 companies. He pointed out that already invested parties are gradually divesting.

Binance executives Tigran Gambaryan and Nadeem Anjarwalla came to Nigeria in February following claims that the exchange manipulated the country’s fiat currency, the naira. The executives were detained and slammed with five counts bordering on money laundering after a meeting with the Nigerian government over Binance’s regulatory woes.

Uwakwe stated that the government’s approach to the Binance issue is adversely impacting the entire nation. By pursuing fines against Binance, the government is essentially undermining the entire industry, sacrificing potential growth for short-term measures.

When asked about the possibility of the current trial resulting in an acquittal for the Binance executives, Uwakwe expressed skepticism. He believes the executives face slim chances of acquittal unless certain conditions are met internally by the company, according to the government’s perspective. He said,

“The chances are probably 90-10, 90 for the government,10 for the Binance executives in question…”

Uwakwe emphasized that even in the event of the Binance executive’s acquittal by the judge, there’s a strong possibility that the Nigerian government may disregard the court ruling. This pattern has been observed before, especially in cases perceived to threaten the country’s stability.

Related: Binance executive tracked to Kenya, extradition underway

Uwakwe addressed a potential question from the international community about why the Nigerian crypto community isn’t vigorously advocating for the release of the Binance executives. He suggested that if Binance had engaged relevant associations earlier, they would have garnered support from pressure groups and lobbying efforts.

The Nigerian government has often been at odds with cryptocurrency exchanges. Binance ceased operations using the naira on March 8 after Nigerian government criticism of crypto exchanges singled it out in February.

In August 2022, Nigeria was named the most crypto-obsessed country in the world by the number of Google searches for “cryptocurrency” or “buy crypto.”

Magazine: Bitcoin hits new highs, SEC delays options decision, and stablecoin bill looms: Hodler’s Digest, March 3–9"
"[INST] Restaking could introduce ‘hidden risks’ to Ethereum — Coinbase [/INST] Ethereum restaking could form the “bedrock” for a wide range of new decentralized applications on the blockchain, but it could also introduce several new hidden risks, says Coinbase.

In an April 2 research report, Coinbase analysts David Han and David Duong noted several risks with restaking and the issuance of so-called liquid restaking tokens (LRTs).

Ethereum restaking protocol Eigenlayer allows users to earn extra rewards — LRTs — by securing actively validated services (AVS) by staking derivative tokens, which are given to those who have already staked Ether (ETH) through liquid staking protocols such as Lido (LDO).

When the Eigenlayer protocol is first launched, the analysts explained the restaking process should be “fairly straightforward,” but a feature of EigenLayer is that staked tokens committed to one AVS can again be staked to another AVS’.

“While this can increase earnings, it can also compound risks,” the analysts said, as it allocates the same funds to similar validators for increased yield.

Secondly, the addition of LRTs means restakers could become concentrated into more high-risk providers offering the highest yields.

“As such, LRTs may be incentivized to maximize their yields in order to gain market share, but these could come at the cost of a higher (albeit hidden) risk profile,” they added.

The analysts also warned that the LRT providers and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) would be incentivized to “maximally restake multiple times to remain competitive.”

Related: Vitalik Buterin shares the next steps for Ethereum Purge

Despite the risks, the analysts said EigenLayer’s restaking protocol looks “poised to become the bedrock for a wide range of new services and middleware on Ethereum, which, in turn, could generate a meaningful source of ETH rewards for validators in the future.”

Han and Duong also predicted that despite the amount of restaked ETH continuing to grow in the long term, there could be a reasonable short-term drop in Eigenlayer’s TVL when point farming comes to an end or if early AVS rewards are below expectations.

On March 6, Eigenlayer flipped lending giant Aave to become the second-largest DeFi protocol, commanding a total of $11.5 billion in total value locked (TVL) per DefiLlama — second only to Ethereum liquid staking protocol Lido.

Eigenlayer now holds $11.5 billion in TVL. Source: DeFiLlama

The market enthusiasm for restaking has already been met with controversy and Ethereum developers warn it could create a concerning amount of leverage.

Restaking proponents, meanwhile, say it offers further rewards to those who have already staked their ETH.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Bitcoin ETF activity to remain robust until the halving: Santiment [/INST] Spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) flows are likely to remain high until the Bitcoin halving later this month, according to on-chain analytics firm Santiment.

The blockchain data firm observed that Bitcoin ETF volume hasn’t slowed since the asset hit an all-time high in mid-March, adding, “Trader activity is still notably higher than the turning point that began in late February after an influx of individual trading began” in a post on X on April 8.

Santiment speculated that it is a “likely foregone conclusion” that the high ETF activity will continue leading up to the Bitcoin halving in around two weeks.

The Bitcoin halving event, which happens every four years, is estimated to occur on April 20.

According to Santiment, there has been $3.19 billion daily volume among the top seven ETFs. However, “it will be interesting to see whether a drop-off in ETF volume and on-chain volume will occur directly afterward,” it added.

Lucas Kiely of Yield App recently suggested that the accumulation of Bitcoin via ETFs could reduce the likelihood of large swings after the halving.

Bitcoin ETF volumes. Source: Santiment

Spot Bitcoin ETF volumes soared to $111 billion in March, almost tripling the volume for the previous month, highlighting consistent interest in the products.

According to Farside Investors, Bitcoin ETF inflows picked up at the end of last week, with two days of more than $200 million in net inflow on April 4 and 5.

That followed a couple of low days earlier in the week with an $85.7 million outflow on April 1 in what appeared to be a trend reversal from a strong few days in late March.

Grayscale continues to drag the aggregate figures down with consistent outflows every trading day since it converted to a spot ETF in mid-January. Last week, the firm’s GBTC fund shed $738 million, bringing the total BTC outflow from the product to 294,313 BTC.

Related: Bitcoin ETFs set for ‘even bigger wave’ in next few months: Bitwise

Industry executives remain confident, however. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse predicts that the total crypto market value will double this year, primarily driven by spot ETFs and the Bitcoin halving.

“I’m very optimistic. I think the macro trends, the big picture things like the ETFs, they’re driving for the first time real institutional money,” he told CNBC on April 7.

Magazine: Wolf Of All Streets worries about a world where Bitcoin hits $1M: Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Munchables hacker returns $62.8M Ether without ransom [/INST] It took nearly eight hours for the Munchables hacker — a Munchables developer — to have a change of heart and return $62.8 million worth of Ether (ETH) stolen in an exploit without demanding a ransom.

On March 26, roughly around 9:30 pm UTC, Ethereum-based nonfungible token (NFT) game Munchables reported a hack that drained over 17,400 ETH from the GameFi app.

Munchables, along with blockchain investigators such as PeckShield and ZachXBT, began tracking the movements of the stolen funds in an attempt to intercept them.

ZachXBT claimed the exploit stemmed from the Munchables team hiring a North Korean developer known by the alias “Werewolves0943.”

On March 27, 4:40 am UTC, Munchables identified the hacker as one of its developers. An hour of negotiations led the former developer to agree to return the hacked funds. In an official statement, Munchables said:

“The Munchables developer has shared all private keys involved to assist in recovering the user funds. Specifically, the key which holds $62,535,441.24 USD, the key which holds 73 WETH, and the owner key which contains the rest of the funds.”

The creator of the Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Blast, who uses the pseudonym Pacman, thanked ZachXBT for his support, as he announced that “the ex-Munchables dev opted to return all funds in the end without any ransom required.”

As Munchables was built on top of the Blast blockchain, Pacman will work with the Munchables team to help redistribute the stolen — now recovered — funds.

In the meantime, victims of the hack are advised to ensure they follow only communications from official sources to avoid falling for refund scams.

Related: Hacker moves $10M from 2023 phishing incident to Tornado Cash

The exploit occurred nearly four days after a hacker stole roughly $24,000 from four different decentralized finance (DeFi) aggregator ParaSwap addresses. The protocol managed to recover the funds and began refunding users.

ParaSwap, aided by white hat hackers, successfully resolved the issue and revoked permissions for the vulnerable AugustusV6 smart contract.

In total, ParaSwap revealed that 386 addresses were affected by the vulnerability. However, 213 addresses have yet to revoke allowances for the flawed contract as of March 25.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] AaveDAO debates Dai collateral limit after $600M mint with eUSD backing [/INST] The Aave decentralized autonomous organization (AaveDAO) continued to debate limits to Dai (DAI) collateral on April 5, as risk management consultants Chaos Labs offered a new proposal to reduce Dai loan-to-value ratios (LTV) by 12%. Previously, Aave Chan initiative founder Marc Zeller had argued for a 75% reduction.

Aave is a crypto lending platform that runs on multiple blockchain networks. It allows borrowers to take out loans in one cryptocurrency while depositing another as collateral. It is governed by holders of the Aave token, who collectively form AaveDAO. Dai is an algorithmic stablecoin backed by multiple forms of crypto collateral, including USDC (USDC), Ethereum (ETH), and others. Dai is issued by the Maker protocol, which is governed by MakerDAO.

MakerDAO was criticized on the AaveDAO forums on April 2 after it minted 600 million DAI and deposited it in a vault with decentralized lending protocol Morpho. An April 1 proposal on the MakerDAO forums attempted to increase the vault's minting limit to 1 billion DAI, potentially leading to an even greater supply of the stablecoin.

Morpho vault with 100 million Dai. Source: Morpho.

MakerDAO claims that the newly minted Dai will be lent out to end-users who deposit stablecoin eUSD to the Morpho protocol. Thus, they claim that the new coins will be properly backed by stable collateral. In response, critics claim that eUSD is a risky asset and that MakerDAO is being overly aggressive in using it for collateral purposes.

On April 2, Zeller proposed that the Aave LTV for Dai be set to zero instead of its current 75%, which would essentially ban Dai from being used as collateral for any new Aave loans. Zeller claimed this change is necessary because of “concerns regarding the inherent risk nature of DAI as collateral” after its alleged “aggressive actions.” The proposal is still in the discussion stage and has not been put to a formal vote.

On April 5, AaveDAO’s risk management consultant, Chaos Labs, analyzed the risks posed by the new vault and suggested a 12% reduction in LTV instead. This would still allow borrowers to use Dai as collateral in new loans but would require them to hold a greater collateral-to-loan ratio to compensate for the perceived increased risk. Currently, Dai depositors to Aave can only borrow 75% against the value of their Dai. The proposal from Chaos Labs would lower this amount to 63%.

Related: Aave deploys DeFi protocol on BNB Chain

One of the key issues in the debate is the nature of stablecoin eUSD, which is issued by the Ethena protocol. According to Ethena documents, eUSD is backed by two components: an amount of Lido Staked Ether (stETH) that market makers deposit into the protocol and a corresponding futures short position that hedges the underlying ETH represented by this deposit.

Ethena protocol official website. Source: Ethena.

This backing should be “delta neutral” or incapable of declining or increasing in value, according to the documents. That’s because, if the price of ETH increases, the value of the stETH deposit should increase while the value of the short futures position should decrease, causing gains and losses to net at zero. On the other hand, a decline in the price of ETH should have the opposite effect, causing a loss in the value of the deposit that exactly equals a gain in the value of the short position. Either way, the value of the eUSD token should remain stable regardless of which direction ETH price goes.

In addition, the documents claim that holders can earn a yield from staking eUSD, which purportedly comes from two sources: First, the stETH deposit earns staking rewards from the Ethereum network, which can be captured by eUSD stakers. Second, the futures price for ETH is currently much higher than its spot price, creating a “basis” or spread between them, which can also be captured by stakers. According to the protocol’s official website, eUSD staking pays a yield of approximately 37% as of April 5.

Despite this characterization of eUSD as delta-neutral, critics have claimed that it can become under-collateralized in two different circumstances. First, in a crypto bear market, the price of ETH futures could become lower than the price of spot ETH. If this occurred, the yield on the position would turn negative, implying that stakers would need to pay to hold eUSD instead of receiving payments for holding it. Critics say this would lead to a wave of redemptions, causing bad debt in the system and leading the eUSD value to go below $1.

In an April 2 thread on X, Yearn.finance founder Andre Cronje argued that eUSD must eventually become “unbacked” due to “negative funding rates,” stating:

“while things are going great now (because market is positive and shorting funding rates are positive [because everyone is happy being long]), eventually that turns, funding becomes negative, margin/collateral gets liquidated, and you have an unbacked asset.”

Second, a problem with Lido’s staking network could lead stETH’s value to decline relative to ETH. This could cause the collateral backing each eUSD to be worth less than $1. Decentralized finance educator BowTiedIguana expressed this concern in a reply to Cronje’s post:

“One issue that I've never seen acknowledged or discussed is that ETH is not a perfect hedge for stETH. If something bad happens on the tech side (low probability but very high impact) the unstaking queue becomes very long and the prices of the two assets diverge significantly.”

On April 3, Ethena protocol developers hosted a public discussion on X with MakerDAO founder Rune Christenson and Morpho development team CEO Paul Frambot, along with Zeller from Aave Chan.

In the discussion, Zeller argued that MakerDAO and Morpho did not have adequate guardrails to protect Dai from its exposure. The rest of the participants claimed that eUSD poses some risk to the Maker protocol but that the development teams from all three projects (Maker, Ethene, and Morpho) were managing this risk properly.

Related: Maker’s ‘Endgame’ readies launch, aims for 100B DAI to take on Tether

The proposal to reduce Dai LTV on Aave is still being discussed, and no formal snapshot vote has yet been created or scheduled."
"[INST] Omni Network token falls 55% after airdrop, fake token completely rugs [/INST] The Omni Network’s ERC-20 token OMNI dropped over 55% nearly 18 hours after its airdrop, shaving off over half its market capitalization.

Meanwhile, a fake token sporting the same name has just been “rug pulled,” with its price dumping 100%.

The layer-1 testnet blockchain aiming to connect Ethereum rollups doled 3 million OMNI — 3% of its 100 million token supply — to its community contributors on April 17, starting at 11 am UTC. OMNI, market cap was $560 million.

Within half an hour, OMNI dropped nearly 30% from $53.80 to under $39 and has continued to slide to around $24 — an over 55% drop.

The current market cap is $267.5 million, giving it a fully diluted valuation of about $2.57 billion, according to CoinGecko.

OMNI’s price since its airdrop over 16 hours ago has continued to slide. Source: CoinGecko

The airdrop saw early testnet users, builders and community participants get 50% — 1.5 million OMNI — of the latest airdrop, worth about $36.2 million. Eligibility was determined via a snapshot on April 3.

The remaining tokens were split variously between EigenLayer restakers and some nonfungible token (NFT) projects including Pudgy Penguins, among others.

OMNI’s airdrop split, some tokens went to Pudgy Penguin NFT holders. Source: Omni Network

Omni Network outlined on April 15 that 9.27 million OMNI — 9.27% of the total supply — was being set aside as public launch tokens used for “launch pools and liquidity.”

OMNI’s full token distribution plan. Source: Omni Network

The largest chunk of OMNI — 29.5 million at 29.5% of its supply — will be set aside for “ecosystem development” and handed out initially at the discretion of the blockchain’s backing firm, the Omni Foundation.

Nearly a quarter of all OMNI — 23.3 million — was earmarked for investors and advisers.

Advisers today received 625,000 OMNI worth $15 million — another 875,000 OMNI will come after a year, then 437,500 OMNI every six months for two years.

Investors’ tokens were on a three-year unlock schedule, with nearly 6.7 million tokens — worth almost $161 million today — to come after 12 months, with the rest unlocking every six months until their allocation is exhausted.

Related: Withdrawals from real estate betting platform Parcl hit $74M after airdrop

Meanwhile, the developers of a fake OMNI token using the same ticker have pulled a $398,000 exit scam.

Blockchain security firm PeckShield wrote in an April 18 X post that a fake token dropped 100% after the deploying smart contract dumped over 1.7 quadrillion tokens for 132 Wrapped Ether (WETH).

Magazine: The real risks to Ethena’s stablecoin model (are not the ones you think)"
"[INST] Once unprofitable BTC miners are turning their machines back on — Analyst [/INST] Bitcoin miners have likely put their older crypto-mining machines back to work in the first quarter, contributing to a record-setting hash rate as Bitcoin’s price skyrocketed to a new all-time high in early March.

“Improved market conditions have encouraged miners who were previously unprofitable at lower hashprice levels to come back online,” said Nico Smid, founder of Digital Mining Solutions in the firm’s first quarter Bitcoin mining review, published on April 2.

Smid told Cointelegraph he has spoken with industry players who have observed an uptick in less efficient miners turning back on.

“The fact that the network became less efficient in comparison to the 1st of January (30.4 J/TH) [...] supports the thesis that less efficient machines are coming back online.""

Bitcoin’s hash price level has moved in a similar trajectory to Bitcoin’s (BTC) change in price, which has increased 56.8% in 2024 to $66,280 at the time of publication.

Switching back on these less efficient Bitcoin miners may have contributed to a 14.7% increase in Bitcoin hash rate since the start of 2024.

“This growth is equivalent to adding 375,000 Antminers S21 200 TH/s to the network.”

The deployment of Bitmain S21s and other latest-generation mining equipment also played a role in driving Bitcoin hash rate growth over the first three months.

Bitcoin’s hash rate peaked at 631 exahashes per second (EH/s) on a 7-day moving average on March 11 — a little less than a week after Bitcoin surpassed its previous all-time high price of $68,990.

Bitcoin’s change in hash rate in 2024. Source: Digital Mining Solutions

Bitcoin went on to set a new all-time high of $73,738 three days later on March 14, according to CoinGecko.

Related: Bitcoin miner bankruptcies will be less common this cycle — Hut8 CEO

Interestingly, Smid noted miner revenues reached a new all-time high on March 10 despite a steady decline in transaction fees since the start of March.

“While this is beneficial for individuals seeking to send quick transactions, it presents a less favorable scenario for miners who have grown accustomed to high transaction fees over the past few months.”

Change in total transaction fees on Bitcoin in 2024. Source: Digital Mining Solutions

While less efficient miners are turning back on, the cost of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) machines continues to stabilize as many Bitcoin miners are holding off on new investments as the halving event fast approaches.

“Miners seem to be adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach as the halving event approaches,” noted Smid, who cited an ASIC Jungle survey which found 65% of customers are postponing the purchase of new miners until after the halving.

The Bitcoin halving is currently slated for April 20 when block 840,000 is reached. The event will reduce miner rewards from 6.25 BTC ($414,000) to 3.125 BTC ($212,000) at current prices.

Magazine: This is your brain on crypto — Substance abuse grows among crypto traders"
"[INST] YouTuber Logan Paul argues CryptoZoo ‘isn’t a scam’ in new documentary [/INST] YouTuber Logan Paul has argued that his infamous CryptoZoo project, which resulted in many investors losing money, was not a scam.

In a new documentary, 5 Months with Logan Paul, journalist Graham Bensinger sat down with Paul to get his side of the story on the CryptoZoo nonfungible token (NFT) gaming project.

The duo spoke about the many allegations hurled at the internet celebrity, with Bensinger reiterating the point that the exposure brought by Paul “led people to lose money.”

Logan Paul answering questions about CryptoZoo. Source: YouTube

Paul admitted that there’s an element of truth to the statement. However, the YouTuber argued it was not a scam. Paul added:

“Everything you just said has an element of truth to it. Here’s the problem. What you just described isn’t a scam. I took on a project that I was simply incapable of handling at the time.”

Paul argued that he also lost money in the project, seemingly implying he was also a victim. “I didn’t make any fucking money, bro. I’ve lost half a million dollars on this. Where is the scam?”

The YouTuber also said in the documentary that he’s had suicidal thoughts because of the CryptoZoo project. “For the first time in my life, I was having suicidal thoughts. I was just spiraling,” he said.

Related: YouTuber KSI faces pump-and-dump allegations from ZachXBT and Coffeezilla

Apart from attempts to counter allegations, Paul also said in the documentary that he’s going to “take care” of the people who made CryptoZoo look like it was a scam perpetuated by him. He said:

“The CryptoZoo saga is far from over because it was a one-sided story. He [Coffeezilla] told it how he wanted to tell it and told it a certain way that made me look like the captain of the ship.”

This isn't the first time Paul has promised to act against those who have reported about CryptoZoo. In January 2023, Paul threatened to take legal action against YouTube journalist Stephen Findeisen — also known as Coffeezilla — after Findeisen published a piece on the project.

However, Paul quickly backtracked on the threats and apologized to Findeisen days later.

In the same month, Paul unveiled a $1.5 million recovery plan for those affected by the failed project. However, it took a year and a class-action lawsuit before the buyback plan was implemented.

In February 2023, disgruntled investors filed a class-action lawsuit against CryptoZoo and Paul, alleging that the venture performed a rug pull. The plaintiffs alleged that Paul and the project stole millions of dollars through the venture.

On Jan. 5, Paul announced that the buyback program would begin. However, it included a catch: Users could only get a refund if they waived any current or future claims against the YouTuber.

Magazine: ‘Am I sorry? No’ — 3AC founder. $6B BTC laundered for fast food worker: Asia Express"
"[INST] Crypto users fooled by fake Elizabeth Warren letter proposing crypto tax [/INST] Many social media users appeared to be fooled by an anti-crypto policy proposed by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. The problem is the letter containing the proposal was fake.

On April 21, many on Crypto Twitter erupted in dismay at a seemingly real letter from Senator Warren to United States President Joe Biden. The letter — which misspelled the senator’s first name — proposed a 1% wealth tax on crypto holdings exceeding $500,000.

The letter called for President Biden to support crypto-related legislation from Senator Warren as part of efforts to address issues in the U.S. financial system. Even after many on social media pointed out discrepancies between the letter and reality, some crypto users seemed to refuse to acknowledge the truth.

“Could be [not true] but she’s the type to ask that,” said DonCryptoDraper.

No such letter appeared on Senator Warren’s website at the time of publication. Cointelegraph reached out to her office for comment but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Related: Elizabeth Warren supports enhanced US sanction options for stablecoins

The Massachusetts senator is one of the more vocal anti-crypto voices in Congress, often associating digital assets with illicit activities, including the financing of terrorism. One of her proposed bills, the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act, has been critized by many crypto advocates and lawmakers for being ineffective in stopping illicit financing.

Warren is up for reelection in November and will likely face off against Republican candidate and crypto lawyer John Deaton. He raised roughly $1.36 million for his campaign — $1 million from his own pockets — in the first quarter of 2024 compared to Warren’s $1.09 million. Deaton has also requested to serve as a friend of the court in Coinbase’s civil lawsuit with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Magazine: Opinion: GOP crypto maxis almost as bad as Dems’ ‘anti-crypto army’"
"[INST] Bitcoin drops as dollar eyes ‘best 5-day run’ in 14 months on expected rate cut hold [/INST] The United States dollar is eying its “best 5-day run” since February 2023, while Bitcoin (BTC) has dropped over that time as interest rates are expected to remain high along with volatility leading up to the April 20 halving.

The dollar’s strengthening is likely driven by expectations of sustained higher interest rates, according to trading resource The Kobeissi Letter.

“Less than a month ago, markets were anticipating the Fed to start cutting in June. Higher for longer is now the base case,” The Kobeissi Letter wrote in an April 17 X post.

Higher interest rates typically encourage foreign investors to take advantage of greater returns on bonds and term deposits, increasing the demand for the dollar.

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index (BBDXY), which tracks the performance of a basket of 10 leading global currencies versus the U.S. dollar, has climbed by approximately 2% over the last five trading days, its largest increase in 14 months.

According to the BBDXY, the U.S. Dollar Index score stands at 106.34, an increase from 105.28 five days prior, indicating that it has strengthened against the other nine currencies included in the index, including the euro, British pound and Japanese yen.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has seen a 9% price decrease over the past five days to $63,936, per CoinMarketCap data.

While not always correlated, Bitcoin and the dollar have shown an inverse relationship over the years.

Reuters reported on April 16 that U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the country’s inflation rate — currently 3.5% — is not moving toward the central bank’s 2% goal, meaning it’s “likely to take longer than expected to achieve that confidence.”

Meanwhile, trader Justin Spittler warned in an April 16 X post that each time the U.S. dollar has reached “overbought levels,” it has been swiftly followed by a significant correction.

Bitcoin, which is seen as a more volatile asset, usually sees spikes in demand when the dollar weakens.

However, another factor comes into play with the Bitcoin halving scheduled just three days away, slated for April 20 — a process that reduces the amount of BTC that can be mined per block by 50%.

Related: $70K BTC price by the halving? 5 things to know in Bitcoin this week

Although this is the halving, crypto investors are showing greater confidence in riskier crypto assets compared to the 2020 halving event, according to Bitcoin’s dominance chart.

Three days before the 2020 halving, Bitcoin dominance — a ratio of Bitcoin’s market cap compared to the cumulative market cap of all other cryptocurrencies — stood 15% higher than its current level.

The U.S. dollar was 6% weaker at the time compared to its current strength.

Bitcoin’s dominance is currently 52%, according to CoinStats.

Meanwhile, the five-day rise in the U.S. dollar has also seen the crypto market sentiment tracking the Crypto Fear & Greed Index drop by 11 points since April 10.

Magazine: Jameson Lopp: Skeptical of spot Ether ETFs, BTC price prediction dilemma: X Hall of Flame

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Binance ends support for Bitcoin Ordinals [/INST] Binance is winding down support for Bitcoin (BTC) nonfungible tokens (NFTs) just a few months after introducing it to its marketplace.

In a blog post on April 4, Binance announced efforts “to streamline product offerings” on the Binance NFT marketplace. As part of these efforts, the exchange’s marketplace is ceasing support for trades and deposits of Bitcoin Ordinals on April 18.

“Users are advised to withdraw their Bitcoin NFTs from the Binance NFT Marketplace via the Bitcoin network before 2024-05-18 00:00 (UTC).”

In addition, the Binance NFT marketplace will cease to offer airdrops, benefits, and utilities related to Bitcoin NFTs after April 10, 2024.

Bitcoin Ordinals, also known as Bitcoin NFTs, allow for the inscription of digital content like art, text, or video directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Data embedding has been part of the Bitcoin protocol for some time, but its popularity increased with the advent of Ordinals in late 2022. This protocol, created by Casey Rodarmor, allows unique digital arts to be directly embedded into Bitcoin transactions, similar to Ethereum’s nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

Binance specifically noted that users of Runestone NFT who meet the conditions for the airdrop are advised to withdraw their tokens by April 10.

“Users are advised to withdraw these NFTs by 2024-04-10 10:00 (UTC), to ensure they still have the opportunity to receive any associated tokens, utilities, and benefits after 2024-04-10,” reads the blog post.

The decision came as a surprise to the community. Binance added support to Bitcoin NFTs just a year ago, in May 2023, extending its ecosystem to the Bitcoin network and promising more opportunities to collectors.

The high volume of NFT transactions has clogged the Bitcoin network several times since its inception, increasing fees and slowing processing times as more transactions are validated on-chain.

According to data from Dune Analytics, the network has over 64 million inscriptions to date, and generated over $423 million in transaction fees.

Inscriptions on the Bitcoin network overtime. Source: Dune Analytics.

Magazine: Ordinals turned Bitcoin into a worse version of Ethereum — Can we fix it?"
"[INST] Goldbugs renew mocking Bitcoin as the yellow metal hits all-time high [/INST] Spot gold prices have reached an all-time high, resulting in a resurgence of Bitcoin (BTC) derision from the precious yellow metal’s investors.

Gold hit an all-time high of $2,304 per ounce on April 3, according to the American Hartford Gold Group, posting an 11.5% year-to-date gain for the usually slow-moving asset.

Gold started gaining momentum in mid-February, rising from around $2,000 per ounce to over $2,200 in late March, having held up well alongside other safe-haven assets due to growing global tensions, uncertainty over possible interest-rate cuts and de-dollarization, Hartford Funds investment strategist Nanette Abuhoff Jacobson told MarketWatch on April 3.

Gold’s price in U.S. dollars since Jan. 1. Source: American Hartford Gold Group

Bitcoin is sometimes referred to as “digital gold,” but the real gold’s price peak sparked renewed mockery from goldbugs and Bitcoin belittlers.

Gold bull and Bitcoin detractor Peter Schiff said in an April 3 X post that so far, in the second quarter of 2024, Bitcoin is down 7%, while silver and gold are up 8.7% and 3.4%, respectively, claiming, “The results speak for themselves.”

However, the second quarter began three days ago at the time of Schiff’s post, and BTC has gained 55% this year, eclipsing gold’s gains over the same time by a factor of five.

In a follow-up post, Schiff claimed it might be the “last chance to sell your Bitcoin and buy some gold and silver at favorable prices.”

“If you fail to act, have fun staying poor,” he claimed.

The irony was not lost on some of the respondents. Crypto trader “Quasar” said that they didn’t “have another 60 years to wait for gold to go up another $1,500.”

Related: Bitcoin and gold broke new price records on the same day

ByteTree analyst and researcher Charlie Morris also took a swipe at Bitcoin in an April 3 X post, commenting that gold has reached its all-time high “without electricity consumption,” referring to Bitcoin’s power-intensive mining process.

FOLLOW BITCOIN HALVING COVERAGE IN FULL HERE

However, environmentalist and Bitcoin ESG researcher Daniel Batten was quick to point out that the energy required for gold extraction is mostly from fossil fuels, adding:

“[Gold] has a much higher environmental impact and emission intensity than bitcoin mining, which is fully electrified, and does not leave mercury or arsenic in the local land and water supply.”

Swan co-founder Brady Swenson added, “How can you be a gold bug and not understand the gold mining process[?] I visited a gold mine once, it was apocalyptic.”

Meanwhile, the 14 leading gold-tracking exchange-traded funds (ETFs) had lost $2.4 billion from the start of the year to mid-February, in contrast to spot Bitcoin funds, which had seen $3.89 billion in inflows over the same period.

Magazine: 6 Questions for Illuvium founder Kieran Warwick"
"[INST] South Korea implements tougher rules for crypto exchange listings [/INST] South Korean financial authorities plan to release new guidelines imposing tighter regulations for token listings on centralized crypto exchanges by the end of April or, at the latest, early May.

According to local media News 1, South Korean financial authorities will prohibit listing digital assets with hacking incidents on domestic exchanges unless the root cause is thoroughly determined.

Additionally, foreign digital assets can be listed on domestic exchanges only if a white paper or technical manual is published for the South Korean market.

However, tokens already listed on a licensed exchange for over two years may not need to meet these new criteria.

The directives might also stipulate that exchanges must remove cryptocurrencies from their listings if the issuers fail to adequately disclose essential information, such as discrepancies between the actual circulation and the disclosed amount.

The report further stated that the South Korean government is gathering opinions from local exchanges. Since the latter part of 2023, the Financial Supervisory Service has been formulating listing guidelines by soliciting feedback from stakeholders such as the Digital Asset Exchange Association.

The Financial Services Commission is a government agency responsible for overseeing and regulating financial institutions and financial markets in South Korea.

The South Korean government issued a new update to the Virtual Asset Users Protection Act in early February.

The legislation imposes significant criminal punishment measures and fines for violations, including fixed-term imprisonment of more than one year or a fine of three to five times the amount of illegal profits.

Related: Crypto.com expands in South Korea despite increasing regulatory scrutiny

This legislation was prompted by a significant industry crisis involving Terraform Labs and its founder, Do Kwon, a South Korean citizen. Terra’s collapse in May 2022 resulted in losses of over $450 billion.

The Gyeonggi Provincial Tax Justice Department — in the most densely populated province in South Korea — collected 6.2 billion won ($4.6 million) of non-declared taxes in 2023 after implementing a digital tracking system aimed at the crypto accounts of tax evaders.

The Financial Intelligence Unit of South Korea disclosed that domestic digital asset exchanges flagged 49% more suspicious transactions in 2023 compared to 2022. On Feb. 14, the FIU outlined its 2024 work plan, highlighting critical data and strategic initiatives for regulating the crypto market.

Magazine: Big Questions. How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?"
"[INST] Bitcoin to attract $1T from institutions amid ‘raging bull market’ — Bitwise exec [/INST] Bitwise chief investment officer Matthew Hougan said institutional investors would likely inject as much as $1 trillion into Bitcoin (BTC) through exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as they slowly move into crypto.

In a memo sent to investment professionals, Hougan addressed concerns over Bitcoin’s price volatility. As the asset bounces between $60,000 and $70,000, the executive said the best approach would be to “keep calm and take the long view.”

While the price seems unstable in the short term, Hougan noted many key events to look forward to in the coming months and years.

These include the Bitcoin halving and the spot Bitcoin ETFs getting approved on national account platforms like Morgan Stanley or Wells Fargo.

Furthermore, the executive highlighted that the space has to wait for investment committees and consultants still conducting their formal due diligence on Bitcoin. This is a necessary step they have to take before investing in the asset.

Related: Bitcoin Halving: Latest News and Full Coverage by Cointelegraph

Hougan said that while the space waits for these key events, the BTC price would likely “chop sideways” whenever there are small changes in sentiment; however, the investment officer believes things would be different long-term. Hougan wrote:

“But long-term, we believe Bitcoin is in a raging bull market. Not only is it up nearly 300% in the past 15 months, but there are strong reasons to think that will continue.”

According to Hougan, the spot Bitcoin ETF approvals in January opened crypto to investment professionals in a major way.

Related: 3 theories why the SEC may be eyeing down Ethereum: Crypto lawyer

He also believes that investment professionals who control trillions of dollars are just starting to move into crypto. Hougan highlighted that onboarding more professional investors would “take years, not months.”

The executive also said that the $12 billion flowing into ETFs since their launch is exciting and is “the most successful ETF launch of all time.” However, he believes that once global wealth managers begin to allocate 1% of their portfolio into Bitcoin, this would mean $1 trillion in inflows into the space.

“A 1% allocation across the board would mean ~$1 trillion of inflows into the space. Against this, $12 billion is barely a down payment,” he added.

Magazine: Ether ETFs face Senate opposition, Wright is not Satoshi, and Dencun goes live: Hodler’s Digest, March 10–16"
"[INST] How high can Bitcoin go? New BTC price prediction sees cycle top at $180K [/INST] Bitcoin (BTC) price could gain another 150% during the current bull market cycle, according to Laurent Benayoun, the CEO of Acheron Trading and quantitative trading strategies expert.

Bitcoin price top at $180K?

The executive anticipates a potential cycle top of $180,000 for BTC price, based on a combination of factors, including the spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and the new supply reduction from the upcoming Bitcoin halving.

Benayoun explained:

“If we look at historical performance, with every cycle the multiple on the all-time is getting lower. So if we apply this reasoning it could be 2x to 3x what we saw in the previous cycles, so let's say around $120,000 to $180,000 per unit.”

Improving financial policy in the United States will also contribute to Bitcoin’s price appreciation, according to Benayoun:

“The market is pricing in a reduction in interest rates because they have been flatlining, so it’s reasonable to expect them to go down in the near future.”

Other BTC price predictions

Benayoun’s prediction is in line with several other recent forecasts. Bitfinex analysts, for instance, see price reaching $120,000 by the end of 2024, according to a research report shared with Cointelegraph:

“Our analysis forecasts a conservative price objective of $100,000-$120,000 to be achieved by Q4 2024, and the cycle peak to be achieved sometime in 2025 in terms of total crypto market capitalization. The ETFs have introduced passive demand which means demand is coming from investors that is largely price agnostic.”

Meanwhile, wealth management giant Bernstein expects Bitcoin to break out to around $150,000 following the halving by mid-2025.

Related: Max pain $51K? Bitcoin options worth over $9.4B set to expire Friday

More ambitious targets put Bitcoin price peaking at $337,000 in the bullish case. Willy Woo, Bitcoin analyst and managing partner at CMCC Crest, wrote in a March 11 X post:

“BTC at 71k puts us *here* in visual of the upper and lower bound models. The upper bound right now is $337k. So this bull market is still early, equivalent to 20k of last cycle.”

BTC price model. Source: Willy Woo on X

What's more, seven-figure price targets are also emerging. One of the most well-known is from Ark Invest's Cathie Wood, who now sees a $1 million Bitcoin price as too conservative by 2030.

“Our target is above that; it’s well above that, and with our new expectations for institutional involvement, the incremental price that we assume for institutions actually has more than doubled,” Wood said earlier this month.

Bitcoin recaptured the $70,000 mark on March 25, for the first time in 10 days. BTC price is up over 6.3% on the weekly chart, trading around $70,800.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Polkadot active addresses hit record 600K [/INST] The Polkadot blockchain has reached a new all-time high in active addresses on its network.

Polkadot amassed over 600,000 active addresses on-chain by the end of March, according to data by DotLake, shared in an April 7 X post by Polkadot.

“Activity continues to grow in the Polkadot ecosystem, where many apps use dedicated blockspace to prevent issues like network spam.”

Polkadot: Active addresses chart. Source: Polkadot

Over 41%, or 248,000 of the 605,000 addresses, are attributed to the cross-chain smart contract platform Moonbeam, while 191,000 addresses were created directly on Polkadot, according to DotLake data.

The number of unique accounts with non-zero balances is also on the rise, surpassing 5.59 million accounts at the end of March, up from 5.53 million at the end of February.

Number of unique accounts. Source: DotLake

However, total transactions remain subdued on the network. Polkadot saw a total of 11.58 million monthly transactions in March, slightly up from 10.8 million in April but far below the 31.78 million transactions recorded in December 2023.

Number of transactions. Source: DotLake

Polkadot’s (DOT) token fell 3.3% in the 24 hours leading up to 12:38 pm UTC to trade at $8.95 as the 14th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. DOT is currently down 83% from its all-time high of $55 reached in November 2021, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Related: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall after halving

DED memecoin fails to deliver

In an effort to capitalize on the current memecoin frenzy and bring more participants to the blockchain, the Polkadot community spun up its own memecoin, DOT is $DED (DED), which started trending on X on March 23. Investors holding Polkadot were eligible for 36 DED tokens for every 1 DOT held.

Retail sentiment turned sour after the team reduced the initial airdrop allocation from 100% of the token supply to just 5% to create a longer financial runway for the memecoin, explained one of its pseudonymous developers, Giotto De Filippi, during a March 24 X Spaces.

DED is currently worth a little over $0.001, with seemingly little interest following the airdrop distribution. The DOT/DED trading pair only amassed $20,536 in 24-hour trading volume, according to the liquidity pool on Hydradx.

Related: Google sues alleged China crypto app racketeers: Report"
"[INST] Crypto miners face energy refusal, restriction in Canadian provinces [/INST] The Canadian province of Manitoba has extended a moratorium on new requests to the government-owned Manitoba Hydro agency for electrical service for cryptocurrency operations. British Columbia (BC) had a similar suspension of service in place and has chosen a different but also restrictive path forward.

The Manitoba pause extension applies to crypto miners’ newrequests and “requests for electric service which have not resulted in the execution of an agreement to construct infrastructure.”

In November 2022, the provincial government paused electrical connections to crypto-mining operations for 18 months. Now the pause will last through April 30, 2026. At that time, the province plans to prepare a long-term solution, it said in an announcement, adding:

""Manitoba Hydro continues to expect unprecedented demand for electricity from new or expanding cryptocurrency operations. That demand has the potential to drastically increase our total electrical load.”

In 2022, then-CEO of Manitoba Hydro Jay Grewal said, “If we connected every cryptocurrency operator who’s shown interest in the last 16 months, we’d increase our total electrical load by 4,600 megawatts.” The organization’s total capacity at the time was 6,100 megawatts.

Source: HYDROVISION International

Hydro-Québec proposed reducing electricity provision to crypto operations temporarily in November 2022. New Brunswick banned the provision of electricity to new crypto operations in November 2023.

Related: Bitcoin miner Hut 8 takes stoush with Ontario power supplier to court

In December 2022, British Columbia announced it would stop making connections to new crypto miners for 18 months. That decision impacted 21 projects. On April 11, the BC government said it had introduced amendments to its Utilities Commission Act to regulate electricity service to cryptocurrency miners. Provincial Energy Minister Josie Osborne said:

“We’re working with BC Hydro to ensure we have the electricity we need […] and that includes regulating electricity service for energy-intensive cryptocurrency miners that create very few local jobs.”

The new amendments would make it possible for the BC government to prohibit, restrict or regulate service to crypto miners. BC has some of the lowest commercial and industrial electricity rates in North America.

Magazine: Crypto City: The ultimate guide to Vancouver"
"[INST] Tarantino reportedly wanted to create a metaverse for ‘The Movie Critic’ [/INST] Director Quentin Tarantino wanted to create a metaverse for his 10th film featuring actors and characters from his catalog, including a 16-year-old version of himself.

According to a report from The Hollywood Reporter, this Tarantino-verse would have been set within a fictional movie theatre. The young Tarantino would have acted as the metaverse’s usher, interacting with the filmmaker’s characters and the fictional actors who played them.

The metaverse would have functioned as a fiction within a fiction, complete with the entire concept appearing in The Movie Critic as a film within a film set inside a movie theater. Unfortunately, Tarantino has gone on the record stating that The Movie Critic isn’t happening.

This isn’t the first time Tarantino’s fabled 10th movie has fallen through the cracks. He’s long maintained that he would direct 10 films and then retire. One of the early projects slated to be his final piece was set in the Kill Bill universe and, according to Tarantino, would have featured the daughter of a character slain by the protagonist of the first two films returning to exact her revenge.

Tarantino was also closely attached to a Star Trek film that was reportedly meant to be a gritty, adult-oriented take on the intellectual property. That project has been abandoned, however, reportedly because the director didn’t want to end his career on a big franchise film.

It’s unclear whether the metaverse planned for The Movie Critic will persist. There’s still no confirmation as to what Tarantino’s 10th film will be, but it’s possible that the Tarantino-verse could exist outside of the silver screen.

As Cointelegraph reported back in 2022, Tarantino has dabbled in nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and the metaverse before. He sold NFTs featuring “secrets” from his films, including uncut screenplay scenes from Pulp Fiction.

He was subsequently sued by Miramax, which claimed it had ownership over the intellectual involved. Miramax also noted in the suit that it had been working on its own Tarantino-related NFTs. The two parties eventually agreed to a settlement.

With a career spanning nearly 40 years and featuring everything from an acting cameo on the 1980s TV show Golden Girls as an Elvis impersonator to rewriting the Charles Manson murders in his alternate history tale Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2019, a Tarantino-verse for the fans could be an expansive and genre-encompassing experience."
"[INST] Meta drops 15% on weak outlook and high AI and metaverse spending [/INST] Meta (META) shares dropped 15% in after-hours trading after a weak outlook for Q2 revenue and plans to “aggressively” ramp up spending in artificial intelligence (AI) this year — while its metaverse division is expected to continue to run at a loss.

The tech giant’s financial chief, Susan Li, said in its April 24 Q1 results that its revenue guidance for the Q2 falls between $36.5 billion and $39 billion — below reported Wall Street expectations of $38.3 billion.

Li expects expenses to rise to between $96 billion to $99 billion — up from $94 billion to $99 billion due to “higher infrastructure and legal costs.”

She also bumped full-year 2024 capital expenditures to a top end of $40 billion from its prior $37 billion as it would “invest aggressively to support our ambitious AI research and product development.”

Meta posted Q1 revenues of $36.46 billion — a 27% year-on-year (YOY) jump that surpassed Wall Street analysts’ Zacks estimate of $36.28 billion by 0.48%.

Its earnings per share doubled YOY to $4.71, beating estimates of $4.32 per share.

Its metaverse building Reality Labs lost $3.85 billion in Q1 — down from the nearly $4 billion it lost in Q1 2023; Meta expects these losses to increase YOY as it bankrolls the division’s product development.

Highlighted are Reality Labs’ operating losses, which saw a quarter-on-quarter drop of 17.2%. Source: Meta

“An increasing amount of our Reality Labs work is going toward serving our AI efforts,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg on an earnings call.

He expected a “multi-year investment cycle” before Meta “fully scaled” its AI businesses.

Related: UK watchdog worries about tech giants’ AI market control

“Building the leading AI will also be a larger undertaking than the other experiences we’ve added to our apps and this is likely going to take several years,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta shares slid 15.4% on April 24 to $417.22 following it closing the day down 0.5% at $493.50, according to Google Finance.

Meta slid to a low of $402.98 before slightly recovering. Source: Google Finance

Meta is, however, still up 42.5% year-to-date after hitting an all-time high of $527.34 earlier this month on April 5.

On April 18, Meta launched its Llama 3 AI model, which it rolled out in its Meta AI chatbot, available across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

The Meta AI chatbot is reported to have posted bizarre interactions, telling a Facebook group for New York mothers that it has a child.

Meta AI claiming it has a child. Source: Aleksandra Korolova/X

Meta, however, claimed human evaluators ranked Llama 3 higher than other models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5.

Magazine: How to get better crypto predictions from ChatGPT, Humane AI pin slammed: AI Eye"
"[INST] Solana devs target April 15 for failed TX fix — It’s ‘not a design flaw’ [/INST] Solana developers are targeting April 15 to implement a fix for an “implementation bug” that recently caused the transaction failure rate on Solana to skyrocket.

“Solana’s current issue is not a design flaw, it’s an implementation bug,” stressed Mert Mumtaz, the CEO of Helius Labs, a blockchain infrastructure firm that provides back-end support exclusively to the Solana network.

“It is important to make this distinction because implementation errors are usually trivial [while] design errors are generally serious and more fundamental,” Mumtaz explained to his 108,000 X followers on April 8.

Data showed that over 75% of non-vote Solana transactions failed on April 4 amid the recent memecoin mania on the network, but that figure has since fallen to 64.8%.

Mumtaz said the issue concerns the way in which Solana developers implemented “QUIC” — a Google-developed data transfer protocol that loops all nodes in on the current state of the network.

But this implementation issue shouldn’t be seen as an overall design flaw, according to Mumtaz, using car design as an example to explain the situation.

All cars have four tires and an engine, but “there are many implementations of the car design,” like BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, F1 and Tesla, he explained.

If one BMW model is poor at steering, then “we don’t say that all cars are flawed” — instead, we say that specific model is broken and needs a fix, he added.

Similarly, Solana’s implementation of QUIC has certain deficiencies and bugs in its current state, Mumtaz explained.

“However, that doesn’t mean ‘Solana’ has a design flaw — it means it chose a buggy implementation for this part of its design.”

In other words, Solana needs to change a tire rather than recreate an entirely new model or network in blockchain terms.

Related: Trader turns $13K into $2M within 1 hour as memecoin frenzy continues

Mumtaz also shared a comment by Solana researcher Richard Patel, who believes Firedancer’s implementation doesn’t suffer from the same issues:

The fix will take place on April 15, should no additional issues come about in testing, Mumtaz noted.

A reconfiguration of QUIC will likely take place on April 15 before it is replaced with a superior solution at a later date, Mumtaz told Cointelegraph.

Solana’s network failures have prompted community concern, given Solana’s (SOL) token boasts a market cap of $79.9 billion, while an additional $4.6 billion in value is locked on the network, according to DefiLlama.

Magazine: Memecoins make millionaires, Terraform and Do Kwon liable for fraud, and more: Hodler’s Digest, March 31 – April 6"
"[INST] Fantom CEO defends Solana amid network woes [/INST] Fantom network creator Andre Cronje has expressed support for the Solana network amid recent transaction failures. Cronje is considered one of the most influential thought leaders in decentralized finance (DeFi).

According to a post on X by Cronje, some critics view the ongoing congestion as Solana’s flaw, but it stems from the ecosystem’s rapid growth, which has increased demand for block space. Cronje stated that performance issues are technical challenges, not consensus mechanism flaws.

According to Dune Analytics, amid a surge in activity driven by the recent memecoin craze on Solana, approximately 75% of non-vote transactions failed on April 4. Yet, proponents argue the data is widely misunderstood.

Cronje referred to the Solana network as a victim of success. The uptick in transaction failures was followed by a recent uproar from Solana users on social media, who complained of failed transactions and a degraded user experience.

Meanwhile, other members of the community supported Cronje’s stance, stating that people often laud blockchain technology for its underlying principles and capabilities. However, when increased demand leads to temporary user experience issues, they tend to react negatively despite craving higher usage.

Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko expressed frustration, noting that addressing congestion bugs is more challenging than total liveness failure. While the latter requires identification and patching, congestion bugs entail a lengthy testing process and releasing updates, hindering rapid deployment.

Related: Starknet explains reasons for 4-hour block outage

This is not the first time Solana has gone down. Solana suffered a significant outage in early February. Downtime in block production on its mainnet halted the network’s block progression for over five hours.

Since January 2022, Solana has seen around half a dozen significant outages and 15 partial or primary outage days. Solana-focused software development firm Anza released a postmortem report of the recent outage on Feb. 9.

The report revealed that Solana’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache, which compiles all programs before executing a transaction, encountered a bug. Austin Federa, Solana Foundation’s strategy head told Cointelegraph of plans to replace the old loader system with a new one, set to deactivate upon update rollout.

The price of Solana’s (SOL) token has fallen around 3% in the last week, stumbling slightly after a 45% rally in March. Its recent weekly drawdown has seen it fall back to being the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, according to CoinGecko data.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Germany’s largest federal bank to offer crypto custody services: Report [/INST] Update April 15, 11:30 am UTC: This article has been updated to include quotes from Bitpanda.

Germany’s largest federal bank, the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, will start offering cryptocurrency custody solutions in the second half of 2024.

The bank will start offering crypto custody services to institutional clients in partnership with the Austria-based Bitpanda cryptocurrency exchange.

The German federal bank has been seeing increasing corporate demand for digital asset custody, Jürgen Harengel, managing director of corporate banking at Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, told Bloomberg:

“The demand from our corporate customers for digital assets is increasing.”

The Landesbank Baden-Württemberg will tap Bitpanda’s institutional custody solution for its offering. Bitpanda Custody is a crypto custody platform with decentralized finance (DeFi) capabilities, registered with the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), according to Bitpanda’s homepage.

The partnership will be enable the bank to tap into Bitpanda's digital asset platform, custody services and relevant licenses, Gonzalo Lamas, the head of global communication at Bitpanda, told Cointelegraph:

“As part of this cooperation, LBBW leverages our “Investment-as-a-Service” infrastructure and services, which is used to source and provide custody services for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital assets. The collaboration aims to enhance LBBW's digital asset offerings, ensuring high security and innovative solutions for corporate clients.”

Related: 'China is about to start bidding' — Will Hong Kong Bitcoin ETFs spark the halving rally?

German banks prepare for MiCA regulations by the end of 2024

The Landesbank Baden-Württemberg isn’t the only German bank mulling crypto services. Deutsche Bank has also been working on digital asset custody services since September 2023, tapping Swiss crypto startup Taurus for crypto custody and tokenization services.

In February, DZ Bank, Germany’s second-largest bank, announced its plans to launch a crypto trading pilot later in 2024. The bank unveiled its digital asset custody platform in November 2023

The banks in Europe’s largest economy are preparing for the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation that will take full effect in December 2024 as the first comprehensive legal framework for the crypto industry.

Crypto exchanges will then become fully regulated entities from the end of 2024, Vyara Savova, senior policy lead at the European Crypto Initiative, told Cointelegraph:

“2024 is the year of MiCA, and the whole EU will now have a comprehensive legal framework for crypto-assets, crypto-asset services, and crypto-asset service providers (also known as CASPs). Crypto exchanges are a type of CASP under MiCA and will become fully regulated in December 2024.”

The MiCA bill is still being finalized. The second consultation package for reverse solicitation guidelines under MiCA is set to end on April 29. The outcome of the consultation will be influential for MiCA’s final implementation in December, according to Savova:

“[The consultation will determine] how exchanges and other CASPs from countries outside of the EU might provide services to EU citizens without a license and how these services should be marketed in Europe. The outcomes of this consultation will be critical for MiCA’s implementation in December.”

Related: With 10 days to the halving, analysts predict $150K Bitcoin top"
"[INST] Bitcoin halving impact on altcoins [/INST] Bitcoin’s (BTC) growing dominance over the last 15 years signifies the importance of the mechanisms creator Satoshi Nakamoto devised to overcome the shortcomings of the fiat ecosystem — one of them being halving.

Nakamoto invented the Bitcoin halving mechanism, which reduces the BTC rewards for mining over time to slow down the issuance of the limited 21 million BTC. The Bitcoin halving in 2024—like the previous three halving events—is set to leave a long-lasting impact on Bitcoin as well as the countless altcoin ecosystems it helped create over the years.

Altcoins will react differently to the Bitcoin halving depending on various factors, including tokenomics, value proposition and its overall contribution toward financial freedom. The Bitcoin Halving 2024 will put five key dimensions of altcoins to the test — market sentiment, market price, technology stack, blockchain forks and allocation of reserves.

Changing investor sentiment

The Bitcoin market heavily influences the investment patterns of crypto investors. Given that the Bitcoin price has soared after every halving, investors are eyeing altcoins that have the potential to skyrocket post-halving.

The Fear & Greed Index for Bitcoin and other large cryptocurrencies based on the analysis of investors' online emotions and sentiments. Source: alternative.me

Bitcoin’s stellar price appreciation and retention across 2024 have boosted investors’ confidence. As a result, current market sentiment suggests that many investors are anticipating an altcoin boom.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, the BNB Chain core development team echoed the market sentiment, stating that “The Bitcoin halving is known for triggering shifts in market sentiment within the Web3 ecosystem.”

Related: Is the Bitcoin halving the right time to invest in BTC?

According to the BNB (BNB) developers, projects with solid fundamentals and innovative technologies attract more investors’ attention during Bitcoin halving events. Altcoin projects are prepping new incentive programs and campaigns to attract crypto opportunists.

“On our end, we are seeing more initiatives aimed at fostering ecosystem growth and innovation,” the team added.

Upgrades in technology stack

Bitcoin halvings often serve as a catalyst for innovation and evolution within the broader Web3 technology stack. And for altcoins, this technological catch-up is made possible by consistent and prolonged support from the developer community. Advancements in the Bitcoin network serve as a blueprint for altcoin ecosystems as they cater to the rising public demand for faster transactions, improved utility, and price appreciation, among others.

Source: Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Bitcoin ordinal NFTs

Mo Shaikh, co-founder and CEO of Aptos Labs, told Cointelegraph, ""The Bitcoin halving underscores the exploding global interest in Web3. Across Aptos ecosystem and beyond, we are seeing near webscale utility potential for millions—and soon billions—of people in DeFi, gaming, and entertainment.”

The core BNB developers underscored the importance of updating the underlying technology to address specific market needs and enhance a token’s utility and adoption. In-house initiatives and support programs targeted toward incentivisng builders “encourage technological advancements and ecosystem growth,” which ensure that the ecosystem is primed for long-term success.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Stefan Kimmel, CEO of the M2, revealed that the crypto exchange's strategy aligns with the upcoming halving that is set to permanently reduce the issuance of Bitcoin. Kimmel added:

“Looking at the broader landscape, while halving garners attention, we are cognizant that it’s just a part of a larger narrative. The confluence of ETFs, quantitative easing, and halving will define the future contours of the market.”

Similarly, aspiring future-ready projects must pick and choose the right upgrades in tune with Bitcoin halcving 2024.

Altcoin price movement

The altcoin ecosystem reciprocates the price movements in Bitcoin. However, some tokens will outperform others during the bull market. Investors monitor short-term volatility in altcoins around the time of Bitcoin halving, intending to add altcoins into their portfolio.

The halving has historically impacted Bitcoin’s price dynamics, which has reverberated through the altcoin market. The team added:

“Staying informed and identifying altcoins with strong fundamentals and promising growth trajectories remain paramount for profitable trades.”

Additionally, changes in Bitcoin’s mining rewards and difficulty post-halving may indirectly affect altcoin mining profitability, influencing miners' behavior and potentially impacting altcoin prices.

According to Kimmel, M2 plans to remain focused on delivering solid yield products and fostering cryptocurrency adoption and innovation, irrespective of these cyclical events.

Related: ‘Bitcoin-only’ buy-and-hold investing outperforms altcoins over long term, analysis shows

Consensus-based blockchain forks

The changes accompanying Bitcoin halvings often bring forth particular challenges that require community members of altcoin ecosystems to vote on ‘make or break’ decisions.

Diverging economic incentives for miners, farmers and stakers coupled with community disagreements and governance issues often result in soft and hard forks.

Source: Peter Todd, Bitcoin developer

Consensus-based blockchain forks may be a solution to address disagreements within the community. These forks can create new cryptocurrencies with modified protocols designed to meet the needs and preferences of specific factions within the community.

On the other hand, some communities prefer working on the existing blockchain rather than building one from scratch. For example, BNB Chain core developers revealed they are working on BNB Beacon Chain Fusion, an upgrade dedicated to making the BNB Chain ecosystem more efficient. BNB Smart Chain (BSC) is also introducing a major upgrade, BEP 336, with the mainnet hard fork scheduled for June.

Related: Generation Z and millennials choose crypto over stocks — Report

Bitcoin reserves allocation

Investors looking for greater return on investment (ROI) post-halving often reallocate some of their Bitcoin holdings into various altcoins. Diversification, as an investment strategy, increases one’s chances of higher returns and helps spread risk across different assets.

On the flip side, altcoin projects have been found to increase their Bitcoin allocation in the treasury to minimize volatility. Explaining the intent, BNB Chain core devs added:

“Altcoins with strong use cases, supportive communities, and promising growth prospects may attract a portion of Bitcoin reserves, contributing to increased liquidity and trading volume in the altcoin ecosystem.”

Investors should take a ‘do your own research (DYOR)’ approach when delving into altcoin investments. Background checks about the founder and their team, audit reports, and market credibility are some factors to consider when researching new altcoin projects.

Magazine: Synthetix founder Kain Warwick: It’s DeFi that’s wrong, not the market"
"[INST] Winklevoss twins become co-owners of Bitcoin soccer club, inject $4.5M of BTC [/INST] Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have joined as co-owners of Bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack’s Real Bedford Football Club (RBFC) after investing $4.5 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) to support the club’s plans.

The Winklevoss twins executed the investment and acquisition through their investment firm, Winklevoss Capital, according to a recent statement.

The funding will be used to establish a Bitcoin treasury for the club, with McCormack telling Cointelegraph the treasury aims to safeguard the club “against long-term fiat debasement.”

“The investment helps with the infrastructure. We need to grow this with our ambitions,” McCormack explained.

Additionally, the funds will be allocated toward developing a new training center and ongoing support for girls’ and youth football.

In 2021, McCormack acquired RBFC, which is based in his United Kingdom hometown of Bedford, with a population of just under 200,000.

He holds ambitions for RBFC — which accepts Bitcoin for game day tickets, merchandise, sponsorships and beverages — to compete in the English Premier League alongside well-known U.K. clubs like Manchester United and Chelsea.

Related: Gemini mulled forming a ‘juggernaut’ with Genesis before it went to smoke

“We are a long way from the Premier League. As exciting as that is our ambition, I work on one league at a time,” McCormack stated.

The Winklevoss twins share McCormack’s vision of bringing RBFC to the top league in the United Kingdom.

“We’re not just investing in a football club, we’re investing in a dream to bring Premier League football to Bedford,” Cameron Winklevoss said.

“We share in Peter’s deep conviction in Bitcoin and its ability to supercharge RBFC’s quest to make it into the Premier League,” Tyler Winklevoss added.

This comes after it was recently reported that the Winklevoss twins donated $4.9 million to the crypto-focused Fairshake super political action committee to support crypto-friendly candidates in the upcoming United States elections.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Dmail co-founder says email must be decentralized and protect data sovereignty [/INST] The crypto market is hot, and prices have been in “up only” mode since the start of the year, but looking at the developments beyond Bitcoin and memecoins, the industry’s focus on decentralization remains intact, and for good reason.

Just this week, multiple news outlets reported on a lawsuit against Meta claiming the tech giant allegedly gave Netflix access to Facebook users’ direct messages in exchange for Netflix agreeing to spend up to $150 million in ads in 2017.

A separate incident, brought to light on March 30, involves United States telecom giant AT&T automatically resetting millions of customer account passwords after acknowledging a data seller published 73 million AT&T customer records from a data breach that occurred in 2019.

As usual, the list of data breaches and instances of misuse of customer and user data goes on and on. Just do a quick Google search to see for yourself.

On episode 33 of The Agenda podcast, hosts Ray Salmond and Jonathan DeYoung sit down with Dmail co-founder Daniel James to discuss why everyone needs everything to be decentralized, including email.

Decentralize it!

Spam, phishing emails, and the risk of having one’s personal data either deleted or sold are common concerns shared among email users, and James says that “blockchain really enhances security” as “there’s no central point of failure that hackers can target.”

James added that Dmail prioritizes privacy by encrypting every email, which makes it “harder for attackers to compromise email accounts and intercept communications.” The decentralized nature of the service also gives users data sovereignty.

“It’s a battle world. It’s a more moral world where you are not the product. You are actually gaining something from this platform. And that’s really what attracts most people into Web3 initially, is that you do have data sovereignty. For me, the foray into Web3 was mostly about Big Tech essentially becoming the arbiters of truth and really overstepping the mark, getting political and censoring certain things. To me, that’s not the job for Big Tech, regardless of your political affiliation. That should not be happening.”

James explained that “email solves these kinds of problems, but it also brings something completely different to the table. It brings the Web3, the blockchain layer, and the possibilities are endless.”

When asked how Dmail or any decentralized platform could supplant Gmail’s dominance, James suggested that the ultimate objective is not to replace Gmail but rather to “replicate” their “fantastic user experience and user interface” while circumventing the “ethical concerns.”

Related: Google’s inclusion of Bitcoin wallet balances sparks privacy debate

James said:

“I think it’s a beautiful product, the way that it’s built. And if we can replicate the UI [user interface] and UX [user experience], that’s great. But there are ethical concerns. There is the fact that you can be bombarded with unsolicited emails. Your data is not your own. Your storage is not fully decentralized. The revenue streams are essentially the only trickle-down within the company itself. So, that’s a very good example of centralization. And so I think that with Gmail, the value proposition is altogether different. You own your own data, you own your own drive, everything is your own as well as the data autonomy.”

To hear more — including James’ crypto origin story and future plans for Dmail — listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph."
"[INST] Bitkraft launches $275M gaming fund, bringing total managed assets to $1B [/INST] Bitkraft Ventures, a global investment platform for gaming and media projects, recently announced the launch of a $275 million investment round. Once completed, the added projects will reportedly bring the company’s total assets under management to around $1 billion.

The company’s previous rounds included investments in notable companies such as blockchain developer Jungle and Eve Online creator CCP. Its second funding round, dubbed Venture II, largely focused on Web3 and blockchain games.

The latest round will go toward early-stage gaming projects. Dealstreet Asia also reported that at least 15% of the funds have been earmarked for projects in the Asian sector.

Jens Hilgers, a founding partner at Bitkraft Ventures, told GamesBeat that the company was interested in the next generation of studios, developers and games. Per the article:

“At Bitkraft Ventures, we are as committed to — and optimistic about — the future of the games industry as we were from the inception of Bitkraft in 2016. We’ve seen continued growth across all major game platforms, in metrics including user engagement, activity levels, and monetization. Newly formed game studios have seen substantial break out successes over the last years, and the advent of AI in game production further benefits new upstarts in the space.”

While the gaming industry experienced a notable global decline in revenues in 2023, Web3 projects have seen a substantial recovery since the fourth quarter of 2023 — a bump many analysts credit to the Bitcoin bounce.

Related: Bitcoin’s 2028 halving price target is $435K, historical data suggests

In a recent interview with Cointelegraph, Carlos Pereira, partner at BitKraft Ventures, said, “Web3 gaming has been a strong segment in the Q4 2023 recovery with positive launch activity, both recently and expected for 2024.”

If this latest funding round, Bitkraft Ventures’ largest to date, is any indication, then the private market appears to have recovered. As for publicly traded gaming and media companies, Pereira told Cointelegraph that when capital wasn’t abundant for venture capital deals, it was to be expected that there would be some divergence between the public and private markets."
"[INST] Meta announces VR education metaverse for ages 13 and up [/INST] Meta is bringing its enterprise level Quest services to the education sector, the social media giant announced on April 15.

The company’s Quest virtual reality (VR) headsets have become “by far the most popular extended reality (XR) headsets on the market” according to Statista. The sector is expected to reach an installed user base of more than 34 million units by the end of 2024.

If that prediction remains true, the VR sector will have demonstrated a compound annual growth rate of approximately 27.3% since 2020 when, according to Statista, the installed VR user base was about 14.2 million.

In order to maintain its pole position, Meta recently unveiled a slew of products and services aimed at the enterprise metaverse market. As Cointelegraph recently reported, the pivot showed a shift away from individualized user experiences such as games and one-off immersive environments. The next leg in this pivot appears to be a greater push towards educational products and services.

Per a blog post from Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg:

""Later this year Meta will be launching a new product offering for Quest devices dedicated to education. … It will allow teachers, trainers and administrators to access a range of education-specific apps and features and make it possible for them to manage multiple Quest devices at once, without the need for each device in a classroom or training environment to be updated and prepared individually.”

The new product’s name and details are to be revealed “in the coming months” with a full launch anticipated by the end of 2024. According to the blog post, it’ll be available in the Quest for Business market which includes most territories in Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States.

Meta gave several examples of educational facilities already employing Quest headsets, including a life sciences course at the university of Glasgow that immerses students inside the human body, a criminal justice course at New Mexico State that places users at a virtual crime scene, and a business class at Stanford University that helps prepare students for interviews.

Related: NASA created VR metaverse to prep astronauts for life on lunar space station"
"[INST] Make your code immutable to avoid jail, policy exec advises devs [/INST] Developers building decentralized applications (DApps) should ensure the backing smart contracts can’t ever be changed — that way, they’re less likely to be liable for scams occurring on the platforms, a policy executive claims.

“From a regulatory standpoint, this is actually really important,” Coin Center research director Peter Van Valkenburgh said in an April 9 panel at the 2024 Bitcoin Policy Summit in Washington, D.C.

He said Bitcoin developers looking to build DApps on the blockchain’s layer-2 networks who don’t want to “end up in jail” should ensure immutability is enforced into these smart contracts from the get-go.

On the other hand, those who allow the smart contract to be switched on and off by a multisignature mechanism or via a governance vote are much more likely to be found liable should illegal activity occur on the platform.

Choosing not to open-source the smart contracts isn’t a wise decision either, Van Valkenburgh added.

“In that world, you have very hard questions of whether everybody who’s participating [is] liable for the activities of that smart contract [...] I don’t see those questions having good regulatory outcomes.”

For Bitcoin developers, the Ethereum ecosystem will serve as an “interesting model for avoiding regulatory choke points by virtue of truly building something that [is] not controlled by any human discretion,” Van Valkenburgh explained.

He added the recently dismissed Uniswap lawsuit demonstrated his point. The court ruled that an individual who drafts computer code should not be liable for a third party’s misuse of that platform.

Related: Advocacy groups warn of ‘adverse repercussions’ for crypto in case against Tornado Cash co-founder

The indictment of Tornado Cash’s founding developers, however, shows immutability-enforced contracts haven’t guaranteed developers freedom from prosecution.

Alexey Pertsev, the crypto mixer’s developer, spent eight months behind bars in the Netherlands on suspicion of being involved in using the protocol for money laundering.

Fellow Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm, meanwhile, has pleaded not guilty to United States charges of conspiring to operate a money transmitter or facilitate money laundering and sanctions evasion. The protocol’s other co-founder, Roman Semenov, is at large.

Van Valkenburgh said there will be more clarity in the U.S. when Storm’s case is finalized.

Magazine: Tornado Cash 2.0: The race to build safe and legal coin mixers"
"[INST] Ubisoft teases new blockchain game at Paris Blockchain Week [/INST] AAA game studio Ubisoft is edging closer to releasing its first blockchain-based game after releasing the first gameplay trailer for Champion Tactics Grimoria during Paris Blockchain Week.

The tactical player-vs-player role-playing game’s lead developers gave Cointelegraph an exclusive playthrough at the conference. The RPG allows players to craft blockchain-based figurines with unique features and characteristics that can be combined into a team of three for the turn-based game.

Source: ChampionsVerse Champions Tactics

The game certainly has the polish and feel of a Ubisoft title, with high-end graphics and animations adding to the depth of gameplay. Players will need to learn what combinations of heroes best complement and counter other players’ picks.

Ubisoft Strategic Innovation Lab vice president Nicolas Pouard said the studio had adopted a patient approach to building a blockchain-based title:

“We started development last year on the first real game on blockchain. We felt it was too ambitious to start with a AAA title, so we’re testing the waters with Champions Tactics.”

Pouard said the studio had adopted a different approach to other developers building blockchain games by starting with creating a universe around the assets and nonfungible tokens that form the core of the title.

The game is centered around champion figurines with various skills and abilities. In the vein of DOTA, different champions combine well with certain classes and specs and counter the figurines chosen by opponents in turn-based matches.

Ubisoft and Oasys, the gaming blockchain protocol on which the former has built the title, gave visitors in Paris a first-hand look at the gameplay. They also announced a new whitelist that will enable prospective players to begin crafting figurines for their champions roster.

Pouard added Ubisoft was not necessarily interested in releasing a game that was driven by financial motivations, but to prove that the studio could release a quality Web3 game that gives players true ownership of digital assets.

“We must understand the market and how we launch this kind of game,” he said. “That’s really what we want to achieve here. We want to give the players the power to populate the game with figurines and understand what it means to own your gaming assets.”

Oasys also announced a new integration with the omni-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero. This marks a significant step in the former’s 2024 Dragon Update, which focuses on enhancing interoperability across its gaming ecosystem.

Magazine: ‘Web3 Gaming sucks’ says Ava, 2M Bitcoin Miner players make 13c: Web3 Gamer"
"[INST] Chainlink aims to bolster cross-chain security via Transporter [/INST] Chainlink’s newly launched cross-chain messaging app aims to solve the pressing security concerns around cross-chain crypto transfers, a Chainlink spokesperson told Cointelegraph:

“Chainlink CCIP, which underpins Transporter, is the only cross-chain protocol that achieves level-5 security, a defense-in-depth design to give users true peace of mind.""

Chainlink announced the launch of Transporter, a cross-chain messaging app for bridging tokens, on April 11. Built on Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), Transporter aims to foster more secure cross-chain crypto transfers with a beginner-friendly app interface.

Cross-chain bridges help users facilitate transactions between different blockchain networks. They represent some of the most significant points of vulnerability in crypto.

In 2022, Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge was drained for more than $600 million worth of cryptocurrency, as one of the largest crypto exploits in history. The exploit targeted a private key multi-signature scheme, a security measure that ultimately proved inadequate.

Transporter enables users to track their cross-chain transactions in real-time through Chainlink’s CCIP Explorer, without charging additional transaction fees beyond the CCIP service provider fee.

It currently supports the Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, and WEMIX blockchain networks.

Related: Funds hacked in 2024 increased by 15.4% vs. the same period in 2023 — Immunefi

Cross-chain vulnerabilities account for 50% of DeFi hacks

Since 2016, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols have been hacked for a total of $5.85 billion worth of cryptocurrency. Cross-chain bridges account for over 48%, or $2.83 billion of the total value lost to exploits, according to DeFiLlama data.

Total Value Hacked. Source: DeFiLlama

Transporter aims to reduce these vulnerabilities by facilitating safer cross-chain transfers for both institutions and retail users:

“Transferring crypto across chains has historically been a risky activity, with bridge hacks accounting for nearly 50% of all value hacked in Web3. Transporter leverages Chainlink CCIP’s unmatched levels of security, which include an independent Risk Management Network that continuously monitors and validates the behavior of every cross-chain transaction over CCIP.”

While the amount of cross-chain exploits has fallen since the beginning of the year, hackers are still looking to exploit blockchain bridge vulnerabilities. At the beginning of January, Orbit Chain was hacked for $81 million worth of digital assets, due to a cross-chain bridge vulnerability.

Related: Binance Labs shifts investment focus to Bitcoin DeFi"
"[INST] dYdX Chain halts production following scheduled network upgrade [/INST] Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol dYdX has announced it is investigating a recent halt in block production as the chain underwent a scheduled upgrade.

On April 8 at 5:30 am UTC, dYdX published a status report stating the chain was proceeding with a scheduled protocol upgrade and that functionalities of the dYdX Chain may be disrupted.

However, the chain did not resume block production after the scheduled maintenance.

At the time of writing, the blockchain explorer platform Nodes Guru shows that the latest blocks produced by the dYdX mainnet were from the time of the scheduled upgrade, which was five hours prior.

Blocks produced by the dYdX mainnet (GST timezone). Source: Nodes Guru

DYdX also confirmed that the chain encountered an issue and said at 6:50 am UTC that its team was already debugging it. However, the team said the issue is still being investigated and might not be resolved until later. It wrote:

“The issue continues to be investigated. It’s been agreed to reconvene with the validators around 15:00 UTC. This means that the devs won’t suggest a workaround or a fix until then so that the validators won’t get jailed for not being online when the chain restarts.”

The protocol upgrade was proposed on Feb. 21. It included advancements such as order book features, risk and safety improvements and Cosmos-related enhancements.

The outage comes after a recent development in dYdX when the community approved the staking of 20 million tokens.

On April 6, the dYdX community voted to allow $61 million in treasury tokens to be staked on the liquid staking protocol called Stride.

DYdX highlighted that the move follows the growth in trading activity within the protocol. “The rate of DYDX being staked to validators has plateaued and deposits to the exchange are growing at a tremendous pace,” it wrote.

Related: dYdX founder blames v3 central components for ‘targeted attack,’ involves FBI

The dYdX Chain also suffered a targeted attack in November 2023, which led to $9 million in losses.

On Jan. 3, the protocol said it had already identified the attacker and was considering legal action. It also said it had improved its trading platform to enhance monitoring and alerts.

Magazine: SBF gets 25 years in prison, Fidelity eyes ETH staking, and Coinbase’s court loss: Hodler’s Digest"
"[INST] Biden’s 44.6% capital gains tax proposal likely a ‘nothing burger’ [/INST] United States President Joe Biden’s proposal to increase the capital gains tax rate to 44.6% for certain people — the highest rate in U.S. history — will likely be a “nothing burger” for the average crypto investor.

Matthew Walrath, founder of Crypto Tax Made Easy, told Cointelegraph that Biden’s latest tax promises probably wouldn’t affect most people in crypto, even if they did end up being signed into law.

“For 99.9% of people, it’s a big, fat nothing burger because it’s essentially just a proposal.”

The suggested tax rate — as well as an additional proposal to impose a 25% tax on unrealized gains — has garnered massive attention across social media despite the information being public for more than a month.

The now widely referenced 44.6% figure was introduced in a March 11 Department of Treasury explanation document, which outlined that the figure would only come into effect if two separate proposals — one aimed at increasing the top ordinary tax rate and the other aimed at increasing the investment income tax rate — were approved.

The proposal was suggested in a separate document from the budget. Source: Department of Treasury

“The proposal essentially says they want to raise the long-term capital gains tax rate for people earning over $1 million a year to 44.6%,” said Walrath.

“Really high-income earners could potentially — if this budget proposal goes through — face a much higher long-term capital gains tax rate. But for the most part, it’s unlikely that it’s going to affect the average crypto user.”

Echoing Walrath’s position, pseudonymous crypto accountant SqueezeTaxes said the backlash toward the proposal was just another “headline catfish” before breaking down what the proposed policies mean for U.S. citizens.

SqueezeTaxes explained that the proposals were centered around bringing the highest federal tax bracket to 39.6% and increasing the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT) to a 5% rate. Combined, the figure evens out to 44.6%.

“The average income earner will not be affected by this. Biden’s tax proposals are targeting high-income earners, at least $400,000 or more on one end, and $1 million or more on another end,” SqueezeTaxes told Cointelegraph.

According to data from crypto payment firm TripleA, the annual income for the average crypto investor internationally stands at around $25,000. This figure, however, includes income data from countries with lower average incomes than the United States.

Is Biden coming for unrealized gains?

Notably, Biden’s Federal Budget proposal also included a 25% tax on unrealized gains for ultra-high-net-worth individuals.

In an April 25 post to X, Bitcoin commentator Jason Williams described the 25% tax proposal as “insane,” adding that it could “singlehandedly crush the economy.”

Related: IRS releases draft of 2025 digital asset reporting form for US taxpayers

However, Biden’s proposed 25% tax targeting unrealized gains would only apply to individual taxpayers with more than $100 million in net assets, per a report from tax analysts at taxation advisory firm Grant Thornton.

“It’s the same with the unrealized capital gains tax rate. It’s for ultra-high-net-worth individuals. If it were to go through, it’s not going to affect pretty much anybody on Crypto Twitter,” Walrath jested.

Ultimately, Walrath said that Biden’s tax proposals could be seen as political “posturing” designed to curry favor with a lower-income voter base.

“It’s more of a posturing political play. The Democratic Party has kind of made an enemy out of wealthy people, and that’s one of the ways that they play to a low-income, low-education base.”

Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis"
"[INST] Bored Ape NFT floor price hits lowest point in over two and a half years [/INST] The floor price of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) nonfungible tokens (NFTs) has fallen over 90% from its peak, down to 11.1 Ether (ETH) — its lowest point since August 2021.

BAYC is now approaching a sub-10-ETH floor price after a 50% fall since March 1 alone, according to NFT Price Floor.

BAYC’s change in NFT floor price since August 2021. Source: NFT Price Floor

The Yuga Labs-backed NFT project launched in April 2021 — meaning its NFT price floor is now where it was four months after it launched.

The NFT collection’s fall from a peak of 128 Ether (ETH) set on May 1, 2022, is part of an industry-wide decline in popularity for digital art NFTs.

However, it should be noted that a few BAYC NFTs have continued to sell significantly above their floor price, which is calculated by taking the lowest-priced NFT in a given collection.

For example, BAYC #830 sold for 504.3 ETH ($1.92 million at the time) last month, while several other rare items have sold above 30 ETH in recent days.

Top BAYC sales over the last 90 days. Source: NFT Price Floor

The largest NFT collection by market cap, CryptoPunks, has also fallen from its peak floor price of 113.9 ETH, but only by 64%.

Related: 5 ways to monetize your digital art with NFTs

Meanwhile, industry commentators continue to ponder whether digital art NFTs can make a comeback.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Shi Khai Wei, co-founder and chief operating officer of LongHash Ventures, argued that digital art NFTs “were never meant to exist on their own as projects,” and teams behind them should consider merging them with other verticals in the blockchain industry to be made useful.

“It is very hard to raise things without a clear vision of the brand and actual products behind it,” Wei explained.

However, NFTs can also be a “superpower” for blockchain-based projects that already integrate in-game economies and offer NFT ownership, Wei added.

“It is much easier if you already have a super clear vision. Here’s the game, here’s an infrastructure, here’s a chain, here’s a marketplace, and then you have your early adopter core community adopt [behind it].”

Magazine: Digital artist OSF gives fans a pledge of ‘art until I die’: NFT Creator"
"[INST] Bitcoin miner profits get squeezed as hash price drops to lowest since October 2023 [/INST] After posting record-breaking earnings on the day of the Bitcoin halving, miners now face another reality: a high network hash rate and lower revenues pushing down profits.

The average revenue a Bitcoin (BTC) miner earns per performed hash, known as the hash price, has reached its lowest level since October 2023. According to crypto analytics firm CryptoQuant, the hash price for miners dropped from nearly $0.12 in early April to $0.07 post-halving, following a $0.19 peak on halving day.

Bitcoin’s halving event slashed miners’ block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, while the sector’s operational costs remain steady. CryptoQuant’s CEO, Ki Young Ju, estimated that the cost of mining with Antminer S19 XPs would increase from $40,000 to $80,000 following the halving.

Bitcoin hash price. Source: CryptoQuant

Related: Bitcoin halving will have to battle with ‘weak time of year’ — Coinbase

Despite the reduction in rewards, the total network hash rate has remained stable since the halving event, suggesting that BTC mining is still profitable at Bitcoin’s current prices. Cointelegraph Markets Pro shows Bitcoin holding above the $64,000 mark since April 19.

“Although it is still too early to see any long-term effects of the halving on the network hashrate, miners seem to be running operations at the same rate as before the halving,” CryptoQuant noted in a report. The total network hash rate held flat at 617 EH/s post-halving.

On the day of the halving, transaction fees reached record levels relative to the total revenue generated by miners. Transaction fees represented 75% of total miner revenue on the halving day, which amounted to roughly $80 million. Since then, it has dropped to about 35% of total miner revenue.

While the immediate effects show stability, the long-term impacts on the hash rate and overall miner activity could still change. In the past, post-halving periods have seen miners exit the market due to high operational costs. Factors like Bitcoin price movements and changes in electricity costs are likely to play crucial roles in the mining business.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all — Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Railgun denies being used by North Korea as it nears $1B total volume [/INST] Crypto privacy protocol Railgun has denied being used by North Korea and other United States-sanctioned entities to launder cryptocurrency, arguing its zero knowledge-based tech prevents this and the accusations have “no evidence.”

It comes as the Railgun platform’s total volume nears the $1 billion mark, boosted by a recent X post from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin praising and defending the privacy protocol.

Railgun, founded in January 2021, uses zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography to shield wallet balances, transaction history and transaction details allowing users to use decentralized apps (DApps) on Ethereum or other supported chains while remaining private.

Blockchain security firm Elliptic once labeled Railgun a “prime alternative to Tornado Cash” after the U.S. government imposed sanctions against the crypto mixer.

In January 2023, the FBI stated that North Korean cyber attackers used Railgun to launder more than $60 million worth of Ether (ETH) from the 2022 Harmony Bridge heist.

In an X post responding to crypto reporter Colin Wu, Railgun denied that Lazarus had used the privacy protocol, calling it “false reporting.”

“Firstly, that group is blocked from using the RAILGUN system by the “Private Proofs of Innocence” system, which went live over a year ago,” Railgun wrote on X.

“Secondly, it was a mistaken, false allegation in the first place,” it added.

Private Proofs of Innocence — also known as Private POI — was launched by Railgun’s researchers and contributors in January 2023.

It uses cryptographic assurance to ensure that funds entering the Railgun smart contract are not from a known list of undesirable transactions or actors by requiring users to create a ZK-proof that their funds are not part of a pre-set list of transactions and wallets.

Related: Advocacy groups warn of ‘adverse repercussions’ for crypto in case against Tornado Cash co-founder

Buterin has also since defended Railgun arguing that “privacy is normal” and that the privacy pools protocol makes it “much harder for bad actors to join the pool.”

Railgun hit $962.8 million in total volume, while its total value locked on Ethereum — where most of the protocol’s activity is — also crossed over $25 million, according to Dune Analytics data.

Its token Railgun (RAIL) also rallied on April 15 after it was reported that Buterin had sent 100 ETH worth $325,000 to Railgun earlier that day.

The token is now trading at $1.18 and is up 86.3% over the past seven days.

Magazine: The real risks to Ethena’s stablecoin model (are not the ones you think)"
"[INST] Mystery malware targets Call of Duty cheaters, stealing their Bitcoin [/INST] A new flood of mystery malware has reportedly been targeting video gamers and draining their Bitcoin (BTC) wallets as part of a new info stealer campaign, which also has been targeting cheaters.

Malware information repository vx-underground said in a March 28 X post it was aware of a “currently unidentified Threat Actor” using malware to steal login and other credentials of those using pay-to-cheat video game software.

The attacks target players, including those who buy cheating software, and have compromised over 4.9 million accounts for Activision Blizzard users and its game store Battle.net along with accounts for a game-focused trading site Elite PVPers and cheat software markets PhantomOverlay and UnknownCheats.

“Impacted users have begun reporting being victims of crypto-draining — their Electrum BTC wallets have been drained. We do not have any information on the amount of money stolen,” vx-underground wrote.

In a March 27 Telegram post, PhantomOverlay claimed the number of hacked accounts “are inflated” as over half of the logins in a database it viewed “are invalid garbage.”

It added the malware “seems to be an entire network of free/cheap software” that has originated from “some latency program, VPN, or something that millions of gamers are using.”

“It’s the largest infostealer malware campaign in gaming/cheating community history.”

In a separate post, PhantomOverlay claimed it has “a pretty good idea of where the malware is coming from but the malware gang is aware of suspicions on them [and] has made it increasingly hard to prove anything.”

Activision Blizzard had contacted the cheat-selling site and “will help us assist millions of infected users,” PhantomOverlay said.

An Activision Blizzard spokesperson told Cointelegraph it was aware of claims that credentials “across the broader industry could be compromised from malware from downloading or using unauthorized software.”

Related: Prisma Finance exploited in $10 million breach

It said its servers “remain secure and uncompromised” and recommended users change their password if they want to ensure their accounts are protected.

In its post, vx-underground wrote that PhantomOverlay was “alerted of fraudulent activity when user accounts began making unauthorized purchases.”

PhantomOverlay contacted the alleged victim, and since then, more have been identified, it said.

Magazine: Inside Pink Drainer — Security analyst defends his crypto scam franchise"
"[INST] Galaxy Digital reports $296M net income in 2023 after $1B loss in 2022 [/INST] Digital asset management firm Galaxy Digital has reported a net income of $296 million for 2023, marking a reversal in fortune after a disastrous 2022 with $1 billion in net loss.

The change in fortune for the digital asset management firm comes amid a change in crypto market trends from bearish to bullish.

The firm’s assets under management (AUM) grew from $1.7 billion to $5.1 billion in 2023 and nearly doubled in the first two months of 2024, reaching $10.1 billion by the end of February.

Mike Novogratz, Galaxy Digital’s founder and CEO, reported $302 million in net income for the fourth quarter of 2023, a 421% increase from the previous quarter. The firm also reported $18.7 million in mining revenue for Q4, recording a 31% increase from the previous quarter.

“Our average marginal cost to mine in the fourth quarter increased relative to prior quarters due to fewer opportunities to economically curtail our mining operations and a higher network hash rate,"" the company said in its statement.

“For the full year 2023, Galaxy mined 1,077 Bitcoin from our proprietary mining operations at an average marginal cost to mine of less than $8,000.”

Galaxy Digital highlighted that the change in fortune came with the rising prices of major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC).

The company’s quarterly earning report highlighted that it had already made “approximately $300 million” in before-tax income, “driven primarily by the appreciation of digital asset prices and growth in our operating businesses.”

Related: Is the Bitcoin halving the right time to invest in BTC?

The asset manager reported successfully closing five deals in 2023 on investment banking while highlighting the challenging market conditions. The team completed a restructuring mandate with Prime Trust in the fourth quarter.

The firm also reported realized revenue associated with advising online gaming platform Gamercraft on its seed financing round and serving as the exclusive financial adviser to Securitize on its acquisition of Onramp Invest. The firm reported mandates representing $2.2 billion in potential deal value.

Magazine: ‘Am I sorry? No’ — 3AC founder. $6B BTC laundered for fast food worker: Asia Express"
"[INST] FTX co-CEO Salame's sentencing moved to end of May [/INST] Sentencing for former FTX co-CEO Ryan Salame has been rescheduled for May 28, according to a filing in Southern New York District Court. It is unclear why his sentencing was postponed from the original date of May 1.

Salame was one of the four FTX top managers to be charged by the United States government, along with Sam Bankman-Fried, in relation to the cryptocurrency exchange’s collapse. Salame was the only one of the four — which also included former Alameda Research head Caroline Ellison, FTX co-founder Gray Wang and FTX top engineer Nishad Singh — who did not testify against Bankman-Fried.

All of the four executives reportedly made plea deals with U.S. prosecutors. Salame is free on a $1 million bond.

Like the other executives, Salame has pleaded guilty to federal charges relating to the FTX debacle. In addition, he faces charges of campaign finance violations connected with his girlfriend Michelle Bond’s unsuccessful bid to represent New York’s First District in the House of Representatives. Bond was defeated in the Republican primary.

Source: Ryan Salame

Both charges against Salame could reportedly result in sentences of up to five years in prison. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers argued that he should not face campaign contribution violation charges because they were not part of his agreement on extradition from the Bahamas. Those charges were later folded into the conspiracy to commit fraud charges against him.

Related: Is SBF secretly behind BALD? Crypto Twitter debates latest conspiracy

Bankman-Fried claimed at trial, where he pleaded not guilty, that he did not discuss his political donations with Salame. All four executives charged with Bankman-Fried have pleaded guilty to the charges against them.

Salame’s role in the criminal activities at FTX remains somewhat ambiguous. He was reportedly not part of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle and was so shocked by the news of the exchange’s collapse that he became physically sick. However, Bahamian court records later showed that he informed the country’s Securities Commission of irregularities at the exchange in November 2022, leading to an investigation.

Magazine: YouTuber declines ‘7 figure’ sponsorships after FTX scandal: Brian Jung, Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Sphere 3D’s legal issues escalate as Gryphon seeks to block $10M [/INST] The legal battle between Bitcoin miners Sphere 3D and Gryphon Digital Mining has gotten another chapter on March 25, as a new legal action seeks to block $10 million from a recent settlement.

In a pre-motion letter filed by Gryphon in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the miner requests permission to file a motion for prejudgment attachment, seeking to secure $10 million in equity proceeds that Sphere recently received from a settlement related to Core Scientific’s bankruptcy exit.

Gryphon wants to ensure that the funds are available to satisfy any judgment it may receive due to Sphere’s alleged breach of contract, which has damages amounting to at least $30 million. Sphere is accused of entering into at least four hosting agreements with other providers, violating the exclusivity clause of their agreement with Gryphon.

Gryphon’s letter requesting permission to file a motion. Source: Hogan Lovells/Gryphon.

Behind the pre-motion letter lies Sphere’s financial health. According to Gryphon’s letter based on Sphere’s annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company has publicly acknowledged its potential for bankruptcy, suggesting it may not be able to satisfy future judgments.

“Over the last four months, Sphere has revealed its growing financial troubles. On November 28, 2023, in a filing in the Core Bankruptcy Action, Sphere’s counsel acknowledged that the company was operating with a $200 million net loss and that recent losses had overtaken revenue by a two-to-one margin,” reads the letter.

According to Sphere’s latest earnings report from March 13, the company’s net loss for 2023 was $23.4 million, compared to $192.8 million the previous year, as the crypto winter hit miners.

The companies have been partners since August 2021 and even considered merging under the Gryphon brand. However, in April 2023, Sphere first sued Gryphon after an alleged spoofing attack led to the irregular transfer of Bitcoin.

In January 2023, Gryphon CEO Rob Chang was allegedly scammed into sending 18 Bitcoin (BTC) to a spoofing attacker posing as Sphere 3D’s chief financial officer. A few days later, eight more BTC were sent to the same address. At the time, Gryphon claimed to be a victim of Sphere’s “gross negligence” that allowed activities from malicious actors.

In addition to dismissing allegations related to the transfer of assets, Gryphon has filed claims against Sphere 3D for breach of contract, negligence, and defamation. The partnership was terminated in October 2023.

Cointelegraph reached out to Sphere 3D, but did not receive an immediate response.

Magazine: MakerDAO’s plan to bring back ‘DeFi summer’ — Rune Christensen"
"[INST] TikTok parent company explores on-chain possibilities for Web3 gaming [/INST] BytePlus — the enterprise technology arm of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company — has announced a move into Web3 through a strategic partnership with Mysten Labs, the developers behind the Sui layer-1 blockchain.

In a statement on April 17, BytePlus explained how it plans to use its existing knowledge and experience in data warehousing to empower the Sui ecosystem, with a particular focus on Web3 gaming and SocialFi projects.

The partnership will see BytePlus integrate its cutting-edge solutions, including ByteHouse — a cloud-native data warehouse — with Sui’s full-node data.

According to the announcement, a BytePlus integration could potentially boost Sui’s analytics capabilities by enabling infinite scalability and real-time data processing.

Mysten Labs will benefit from the high-performance, low-maintenance nature of ByteHouse, which could ultimately accelerate data delivery for users on the Sui network.

Evan Cheng, the co-founder and CEO of Mysten Labs, said the partnership could “revolutionize” data analytics in the Web3 sphere.

""Integrating cutting-edge content recommendation and generation solutions into Sui signifies a leap toward enhancing user experience within Web3 game platforms and SocialFi projects.”

Li Long, the general manager MEA of BytePlusAs, told Cointelegraph that the move comes after observing trends of the rise of new social and gaming platforms built on blockchain and web3. He said their aim is to ""elevate the web3 social experience, build close knit communities and more immersive engagements.""

Related: Can blockchain revolutionize digital securities management for stock exchanges?

This is not the first instance of ByteDance exploring Web3 technology. In 2019, it was reported that the company launched a joint venture with a state-owned Chinese media group to develop business arms directed at blockchain and AI.

In June 2020, ByteDance sought out a virtual banking license in Singapore in an effort to enter the digital finance scene.

Sui, on the other hand, is a newer layer-1 network introduced by Mysten Labs in March 2022. However, development in the ecosystem has greatly accelerated over the last few months with new partnerships.

In February, the Sui Foundation partnered with a university in the United Arab Emirates to launch a blockchain academy. A month later, it was revealed that the Greek stock exchange, ATHEX, would deploy its new fundraising mechanism via the Sui blockchain ecosystem.

Magazine: Is measuring blockchain transactions per second (TPS) stupid in 2024? Big Questions"
"[INST] Philippines SEC ‘can’t endorse’ ways to retrieve funds after Binance ban [/INST] In a local news report, Paolo Ong, the officer in charge of the SEC’s PhiliFintech Innovation Office, said that the SEC couldn’t endorse ways to retrieve funds after Binance is blocked by internet service providers (ISP) in the country.

Ong said that the regulator has already given a three-month warning and extended the time before the ban is implemented to give investors enough time to remove their funds from the exchange.

The official hoped that investors would have already transferred their funds to either a local exchange or their wallets within the specified time frame.

When queried about the fate of users unable to withdraw their funds in time, Ong stated that they do not have any suggested means for users to reclaim their money. He said:

“Unfortunately, we can’t endorse any method on how to take out their money now that the blocking order is out.“

On March 25, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) ordered internet service providers (ISPs) in the country to immediately block access to Binance. The NTC gave local ISPs five days to complete the order.

Philippine NTC orders ISPs to block Binance immediately. Source: BitPinas

When asked why the exchange is still somewhat accessible in the country even after the notice, Ong said they are still working to implement the ban fully.

Cointelegraph checked and found that the Binance website was still accessible in the country at the time of writing.

Related: SEC Philippines to investigate Binance over alleged illegal operations

On June 8, 2022, former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said in a press briefing in Manila that the exchange was seeking licenses in the country.

However, Ong noted that the SEC received no applications from the exchange to formally register in the country. Ong said:

“As far as the SEC is concerned, there is no official or formal application to register here in the Philippines.”

The official also noted in the interview that the SEC had warned the public several times before they proceeded with a ban. In 2022, the SEC published a notice warning the public not to invest in Binance. The regulator said the exchange does not possess the authority or license to solicit investments in the country.

Magazine: Memecoins make millionaires, Terraform and Do Kwon liable for fraud, and more: Hodler’s Digest"
"[INST] Bitcoin halving shows new users that ‘code is ultimately the law’ in crypto [/INST] As the Bitcoin halving marked another major milestone in the crypto space, leaders in the crypto community shared different perspectives on how the event would affect the different areas of crypto.

On April 20, the Bitcoin network successfully went through the fourth halving event after the 840,000th block was mined. The occasion reduced mining rewards from 6.25 Bitcoin (BTC) per block to 3.125 BTC, worth about $200,000 at the time of writing.

At the Token2049 event in Dubai, Cointelegraph spoke with community members to get their thoughts on the Bitcoin halving and its potential impact on the crypto space.

Attendees of the recent Token2049 event in Dubai. Source: Cointelegraph

Crypto space could grow tenfold

Avalanche founder Emin Gün Sirer shared two different perspectives regarding the halving. From a technological standpoint, Gün Sirer argued that the halving was not great. He explained:

“As a technologist at my core, I see Bitcoin halving as not a great thing. Why? Because it’s a discrete event. All of a sudden the rewards going to miners go down by half. And suddenly, the security budget of the Bitcoin system goes down by half.”

The executive believes that the halving leads to “hundreds of millions” being paid to miners going down. Gün Sirer argued that this means less money secures the network.

The Avalanche founder believes that the Bitcoin creator was still “alive,” the Bitcoin halving might change. He explained:

“I think if Satoshi were alive today, he would change the way the halvening is happening, not from a discrete function, from a sudden point function to a more continuous function, so that the rewards go down more gradually.”

While the executive thinks that the halving could improve from a tech perspective, Gün Sirer also recognized that the event has had a good effect on crypto.

“This creates a lot of speculation, a lot of buying into the space, a lot of people taking a position in Bitcoin, which in general has been great for the rest of the space as well,” he added.

Gün Sirer explained that it’s also great for renewed interest in crypto and predicted that the space is on its way to growing tenfold. “I see the crypto space growing by at least another factor of 10, if not more so. Bitcoin has a lot of growth ahead of it, in my view.”

No immediate impact

While Gün Sirer highlighted the potential long-term growth of the crypto space, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino told Cointelegraph that the halving might not immediately affect the price. Ardoino explained:

“I think the halving is something that is iconic, is something that is there, but not necessarily will affect immediately the Bitcoin price.”

Even though the executive thinks the halving might not affect the BTC price, Ardoino remains bullish on the potential impact of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

“I don’t expect it. Maybe it will happen, maybe it will not. But I think that the Bitcoin halving was priced already. What was not necessarily priced was the enormous interest in the Bitcoin ETF,” he added.

Related: Here’s how crypto game Notcoin onboarded over 30M users — founder

Ardoino explained that the biggest hedge funds didn’t tap into the Bitcoin ETF yet. When pension funds and other hedge funds start investing, the executive said, “We’ll see big moves.”

Code is law in crypto

With the ETFs bringing in new players to the crypto space, the halving shows how code works as the law in crypto, according to Justin Hyun, the director of investments at The Open Network (TON) Foundation.

Hyun believes that those experiencing the Bitcoin halving for the first time will see how the crypto space works. He explained:

“It’ll be a further validation of. The way that the code is ultimately the law in crypto, as in this thing that was pre-designed from the get-go, takes place without anybody having to push a button.”

The executive hopes that when the larger community outside crypto sees this, they will become more curious about different networks and how they interact with the code and users.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Digital asset inflows recover, but ETF activity is slowing down [/INST] Digital asset inflows into crypto investment products turned positive in the past week, with net inflows of $862 million compared to net outflows of $931 million a week prior.

However, the popularity of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds seems to be cooling down. The daily trading volume of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has dropped to $5.4 billion, 36% less than its peak of $9.5 billion recorded in the first week of March.

Bitcoin (BTC) topped the digital asset flows with $863 million in inflows aided by ETF demand, with spot BTC ETFs recording $1.8 billion in inflows compared to $965 million in outflows from the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC).

Grayscale’s ETF continues to see massive outflows nearly three months on from the approval of the products in the United States on Jan. 11.

Continuous outflows from GBTC have put significant selling pressure on BTC prices over the past three weeks.

Grayscale Bitcoin holdings. Source: CoinGlass

Market pundits had predicted that, over time, outflows from GBTC would slow down and dry up, leading to unprecedented demand for ETFs.

However, the current investor trends indicate that the GBTC outflows are far from over, with GBTC still dominating ETF flows.

The selling pressure from ETFs is visible on the BTC price as the world’s top cryptocurrency dropped by $4,000 over the past 24 hours, trading just above $66,000 at the time of writing.

Many market analysts have called it a routine correction before the Bitcoin halving event scheduled for April 20.

Crypto market sentiment turns bearish. Source: Marcel Knobloch

The BTC price correction saw nearly $500 million in liquidations while the options market heated up with heavy put calls, suggesting a bearish trader sentiment.

Related: Bitcoin exchanges’ BTC balances have dropped almost $10B in 2024

Ether (ETH) recorded its fourth consecutive week of outflows, with $19 million this past week. The altcoin market recorded a net inflow of $18.3 million last week, with Solana’s (SOL) token leading the charge with $6.1 million in inflows.

The U.S. is the region with the largest outflows in the past week, with $897 million, while Europe and Canada combined saw $49 million in outflows.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments — Trezor CEO"
"[INST] Crypto sleuth warns of scammers behind DeFi protocol [/INST] Pseudonymous blockchain investigator ZachXBT issued a warning about a group of scammers attempting to entrap more victims in a new fraud using millions of stolen funds.

In a thread on X, ZachXBT disclosed the findings of an investigation over Leaper Finance, a lending protocol based on Blast. According to the analysis, the group is behind several rug pulls, including those that hit users of Magnate ($6.5 million), Kokomo ($4 million), Solfire ($4.8 million) and Lendora.

“In the past they let the TVL grow to 7 figs before stealing all of users funds deposited to the protocol and falsify KYC documents + use low tier audit firms. They now have launched scams on Base, Solana, Scroll, Optimism, Arbitrum, Ethereum, Avalanche, etc,” noted ZachXBT.

The group is also believed to be responsible for scams on Hash DAO, Glori Finance and ZebraDAO. Losses attributed to the group are estimated at over $20 million.

A rug pull takes place when the developers of a blockchain-based protocol suddenly withdraw all of their funds from a liquidity pool or project wallet, essentially draining the funds invested by others. This usually happens without any warning, leaving investors with worthless tokens or assets.

As part of the latest scam endeavor, the group reportedly funded a Leaper Finance address on the Blast network with nearly $1 million laundered from previous scams, adding further liquidity to lure victims.

Shortly after Leaper Finance’s connection to the scams was revealed, the group replied to ZachXBT, harassing the investigator while announcing a “token launch.”

“Nice work! My comrades here at Lazarus fear you yet admire you!” they said in reference to the North Korean hacker group Lazarus. Leaper Finance and Glori Finance accounts on X have been deactivated, and the projects’ websites have also gone dark.

According to a Feb. 29 research report by blockchain security firm Immunefi, over $200 million worth of cryptocurrency was lost to hacks and rug pulls within the first two months of 2024 across 32 individual incidents.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] BitMEX co-founder must face suit over ‘God Access’ trading desk, judge rules [/INST] Crypto exchange BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo is set to face a class-action lawsuit from exchange users after a United States federal judge determined the suit sufficiently showed he was key to an alleged price manipulation plot.

Delo, a British citizen, had asked to dismiss the suit last May, claiming U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over him, but New York District Court Judge Andrew Carter shot that down in an order signed on April 3 and published on April 8.

“Plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged that Delo has purposely availed himself of the benefits of the forum — the United States,” Judge Carter wrote.

The order — taking facts from the investor suit which Judge Carter “presumed to be true"" — stated Delo “was central” to alleged manipulation efforts and “conceived of and designed” a liquidation system allowing BitMEX “to profit from the manipulation.”

A group of BitMEX users filed the lawsuit in April 2020 against BitMEX and co-founders Delo, Arthur Hayes and Samuel Reed, claiming they had a trading desk with “God Access” to BitMEX customer accounts.

The trio used customer information to determine which market moves would liquidate the highest number of users — which would net the exchange a profit — and would conduct trades to make that happen, the lawsuit claimed.

Highlighted excerpt of Judge Carter’s order stating Delo used a Lamborghini to market BitMEX in New York. Source: PACER

BitMEX revealed the desk in April 2018 after pressure from an independent analyst, the order said. The exchange claimed the desk had a neutral market-making role, but the suit alleges BitMEX continued trading against its customers on burner accounts.

Along with designing BitMEX’s liquidation system, the judge wrote the lawsuit showed Delo’s role at the exchange meant he would approve “key financial and trading decisions,” including the operation of the trading desk.

“Delo personally traded on the platform, benefitting from these same undisclosed advantages,” the order stated.

Related: SushiSwap team treasury takeover looks likely despite heated debate

On April 3, Judge Carter denied a motion to dismiss from BitMEX and its Seychelles-based parent firm, HDR Global Trading, finding the suit “sufficiently alleged” the trading desk operated from BitMEX’s office in Manhattan.

Delo was sentenced to 30 months probation in June 2022 after pleading guilty that February to failing to maintain an Anti-Money Laundering program at BitMEX in violation of the Bank Secrecy Act.

Hayes and Reed also pleaded guilty alongside Delo. Hayes was given two years probation with six months of home confinement, while Reed was given 18 months probation.

Magazine: Deposit risk: What do crypto exchanges really do with your money?

Update (April 21, 11:15 pm UTC): This article has been updated to clarify in the first and second paragraphs that Judge Carter's order used information from the investor lawsuit."
"[INST] Magic Eden passed Blur as leading NFT marketplace in March: CoinGecko [/INST] Magic Eden, a Solana-based nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace, recorded its largest monthly trading volume in March, surpassing industry leader Blur.

Its NFT trading volume spiked 194.4% in March to $756.5 million, while Blur marginally increased to $530.4 million, according to CoinGecko’s Q1 2024 report, published on April 17.

CoinGecko said Magic Eden’s rise up the ranks was partly contributed by its new Diamond reward program and its continued partnership with Yuga Labs — at a time when the NFT studio cut ties with NFT marketplaces that weren’t supporting creator royalties.

It marked the sixth consecutive month that Magic Eden increased its trading volume.

NFT marketplaces by trading volume since October 2023. Source: CoinGecko

March marked the first month Blur had been unseated as the leading NFT marketplace by trading volume since OKX’s NFT marketplace capitalized on a Bitcoin Ordinals craze last December. Prior to that, Blur had led trading volumes for 10 straight months after it surpassed OpenSea in February 2023.

However, OKX has lost a large share of Bitcoin NFT trading volume since then to the likes of Magic Eden and UniSat, and as a result, its trading volume has tanked 73.3% since December to $180 million.

Despite this, OKX still managed to rake in the third-largest NFT trading volume in Q1 2024, with Solana-based Tensor and OpenSea rounding out the top five.

Meanwhile, NFT trading volumes across the top 10 marketplaces amounted to $4.7 billion in Q1 2024 — a 51.6% increase from Q4 2023.

Despite the rise, the floor prices of top NFT collectibles such as Bored Ape Yacht Clubs and CryptoPunks have plummeted more than 91% and 64%, respectively, since reaching peaks in May 2022 and October 2021.

Related: 5 ways to monetize your digital art with NFTs

The enforcement of creator royalties has been a major issue between NFT marketplaces and studios of late.

OpenSea, once the leading NFT marketplace, controversially sunset its on-chain royalty enforcement tool last August. Its CEO, Devin Finzer, said the tool hadn’t had the success it hoped and claimed its competitors, such as Blur, Dew and LooksRare, were circumventing it by integrating the Seaport Protocol to bypass OpenSea’s blacklist and therefore avoid creator fees.

But OpenSea partially backtracked on this position earlier this month, enabling support for an ERC-721C programmable earnings standard.

Magazine: NFTs are like nightclubs, crypto is a volatile religion: NFTStats, NFT Collector"
"[INST] Open-source Bitcoin education aims to spread global financial literacy [/INST] The El Salvador-based Bitcoin education initiative Mi Primer Bitcoin recently announced the launch of its updated Bitcoin Diploma program, with a new open-source approach.

Mi Primer Bitcoin, or “My First Bitcoin,” began as a local education initiative in 2021 and coincided with El Salvador becoming the first country to adopt Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender.

This new update of the program was developed in collaboration with Bitcoin educators and enthusiasts from around the world to provide a comprehensive curriculum covering various aspects of Bitcoin, from its history to its technical workings and everyday applications.

Most notably, the update made the program open-source in nature, meaning all materials, including the Student Workbook, are freely available on GitHub. According to the announcement, this is in the hope of encouraging collaboration and translation efforts worldwide.

John Dennehy, founder and executive director of Mi Primer Bitcoin, emphasized the transformative potential of Bitcoin education. He highlighted how financial literacy in the Bitcoin era fosters creativity, innovation, and long-term planning.

Related: Why the Bitcoin halving matters for the future of decentralized finance

In a comment to Cointelegraph, Dennehy said that this curriculum update marks a “significant step” in the project’s mission to “empower the world through Bitcoin education.”

“We always strive to improve the content with each new edition, but alongside that, we have also built out much better infrastructure to allow people to best use this in their local context — for example, translations had been ad hoc, now there is an organized infrastructure for communication and best practice guidelines.”

He said the previous diploma was translated into nine languages over the course of a year, with 26 translations already underway for this one.

The previous diploma has been taught to more than 25,000 students in El Salvador since the inception of the project and has led to several graduation ceremonies.

Bitcoin Diploma graduation ceremony. Source: Mi Primer Bitcoin

In September 2023, Mi Primer Bitcoin partnered with the Ministry of Education of El Salvador to include Bitcoin in the public school curriculum by 2024.

Since its inception, Mi Primer Bitcoin has expanded its reach beyond El Salvador, collaborating with educational institutions and governments internationally.

Last fall, Bitcoin Cuba also announced its upcoming collaboration with the program to bring Bitcoin education to local communities.

Magazine: SBF gets 25 years in prison, Fidelity eyes ETH staking, and Coinbase’s court loss: Hodler’s Digest, March 24-30"
"[INST] Fraud victims want China to recover $4.3B worth of Bitcoin seized by UK police [/INST] The victims of an investment fraud scheme facilitated by an electronics company in China are looking to recover $4.3 billion in Bitcoin (BTC) bought with their money with the help of the United Kingdom government.

A group representing the scam victims reportedly submitted a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China requesting it to negotiate with the U.K. government to recover the seized Bitcoin.

The funds were taken through a $6.2-billion investment scheme conducted by Tianjin Lantian Gerui Electronic Technology from 2014 to 2017.

The group, which also contacted China’s Ministry of Public Security, said it collected almost 2,500 signatures from victims and plans to submit them to both ministries.

The letter calls for the Chinese government to cooperate with the U.K. and provide evidence demonstrating their rightful ownership of the Bitcoin. The letter said:

“We do not want, and will never accept, a situation where Bitcoins are confiscated by the UK and not returned to us.”

The U.K. government has not said how it would deal with the Bitcoin seized in the case.

U.K. authorities seized the cryptocurrency after former hospitality worker Jian Wen attempted to launder funds by buying a $30-million mansion with BTC. The purchase failed when Wen could not explain the source of the funds.

Image of the property that Wen attempted to purchase. Source: Sky News

This led to an investigation by the authorities, culminating in a raid on a house in 2021. At the time, police found 61,000 BTC in the property rented by Wen and her boss, Zhimin Qian, the suspected mastermind of the investment fraud scheme.

Related: Couple mistakenly sent $10.5M by Crypto.com to face October plea hearing

The BTC was worth $1.7 billion when it was seized in 2021 but is now worth about $4.3 billion as Bitcoin’s price has since risen.

Wen initially claimed that the Bitcoin had been mined but eventually changed her story, saying it was a “love present” from Qian, who had fled the United Kingdom.

Wen was charged with three counts of money laundering between October 2017 and January 2022. While she denied all the charges, Southwark Crown Court found Wen guilty of money laundering on March 20.

Magazine: $308M crypto laundering scheme busted, Hashkey token, Hong Kong CBDC: Asia Express"
"[INST] Bitcoin briefly dips under $60K amid reports of worsening Middle East crisis [/INST] The price of Bitcoin (BTC) briefly dropped below its critical $60,000 support level again on Friday, falling 5.44% in just two hours amid escalating geopolitical tension in the Middle East.

On April 19, Bitcoin’s price briefly slumped down to $59,698 before quickly recovering to $61,352. It’s a crucial breakdown to note, given that if its price falls down to $59,000, then approximately $243 million in long positions will be liquidated, per CoinGlass data.

Over the last four hours, $34.03 million in Bitcoin long positions have been liquidated, data shows.

This comes amid Iranian state media reporting that explosions had been heard at Isfahan airport in central Iran, according to an April 19 ABC News report.

Explosions were reportedly heard at Isfahan International Airport. Source: ABC News

A similar situation occurred on April 13, when Bitcoin’s price experienced similar volatility after Iran launched an attack on Israel, plummeting 8.4%.

At the time, the price decline wiped out over $130 million in market capitalization within minutes following news of the attack.

Related: Crypto market ‘underestimates the long-term impact’ of Bitcoin halving: Bitwise

Bitcoin holders may also be bracing for heightened volatility as the Bitcoin halving event, which slashes miners’ rewards in half every four years, approaches on April 20.

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index, a major tool tracking the market sentiment in cryptocurrency markets, is down 13 points since last week’s greed index of 79.

Bitcoin’s price broke its crucial $60,000 support level amid tensions in the Middle East. Source: CoinMarketCap

Bitcoin’s price has been threading above the $60,000 mark over the past seven days but briefly fell from an opening of $63,814 on April 17, dropping as much as 7.5% to an intra-day low of $59,648, per data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro.

Open Interest (OI) in Bitcoin has also experienced a slump over the past seven days, dropping approximately 17.6% to $28.06 billion.

Meanwhile, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Ether (ETH), also experienced a sharp decline, falling 5% below its critical $3,000 price level, briefly dipping to $2,876, before retesting its support level.

The overall crypto market cap is $2.26 trillion, down 0.53% over the past 24 hours.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] GameFi airdrops are here to stay but won’t save a bad game: Execs [/INST] Despite lingering resistance from some gamers over “tokenomics,” gaming studios will most likely continue to use airdrops and other incentives to attract players, according to industry executives.

“It’s a very easy way to get market share, said Kieran Warwick, founder of gaming studio Illuvium in an interview with Cointelegraph.

However, games that fail to deliver on the fun, or gameplay aspect, are still doomed to fail, said Warwick.

""The problem with that is if you’re using it as a marketing tool and you don’t have a good product to back it up, then your retention is abysmal.""

Shi Khai Wei, founder of venture capital firm LongHash Ventures, also stressed the importance of making the games fun.

“Crypto is very good at acquiring users because of incentives — we have airdrops, play-to-earn mechanics and speculative elements, but to keep the players there, you need to have fun gameplay.”

Axie Infinity was one of the best success stories among blockchain games thus far. However, a $650 million bridge hack, among other things, made it tough for its creator firm, Sky Mavis, to retain users after the last bear market.

“Games that figure out sustainable economics, the right emission schedules, attracting the right kind of players and incentivizing the right kind of gameplay, those are the games that will survive,” said Wei.

Not everyone is looking to make money

Warwick acknowledged that token incentives will inevitably attract airdrop farmers rather than real gamers, but it's a necessary evil to grow the player base.

“It also gets us the attention that we need from people who are gamers in the space,” he added.

His comments come as Illuvium released 200,000 ILV tokens, worth approximately $25 million, for its six-month Play-to-Airdrop initiative last week.

The airdrops will be collectible in Illuvium Arena, Overworld, Zero, and Beyond, which will launch on IMX — an Ethereum NFT-focused layer 2 — at the end of May.

Meanwhile, Gabby Dizon, co-founder of Yield Guild Games argues that while airdrops can play an important role in speeding up GameFi adoption, “not everyone is necessarily looking for a financial return.”

“You could be buying an asset that gives you social status in the same way that you might be buying an expensive car or a watch or clothes.”

GameFi standards still have a way to go

Dizon and Warwick believe GameFi is still about 14-15 years behind where traditional games are now — but they expect that gap to close quickly.

“The rate of innovation in blockchain is much faster than what you see in the traditional gaming space,” Warwick noted, as a lot of people in blockchain studios came from mainstream ones which built games with “millions and millions of players.”

“So we’re not starting from scratch, but also at the same time, we are building IP which is the thing that takes the most amount of time — like having people fall in love with the storyline, with the universe that you’re creating and how the characters interact with each other.”

“All of these elements can’t be created overnight,” he added.

Related: ‘FOMO’ once drove GameFi funding, but VCs say it’s different this time

Building IP can take anywhere between up to six or seven years, noted Warwick, adding that the leading gaming studios are about halfway through that process.

Until then, we’re still waiting for that dominant GameFi project to push the sector forward like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush with traditional gaming in the early 2010s, says Dizon.

Yield Guild Games is hoping it will see a future game of this caliber, having built a decentralized network of gaming guilds aimed at bringing blockchain games and gamers together within a single community.

The future of gaming is all about User-Generated Content. The trend of Players making their own characters, their own levels and expanding their favorite games is not going to stop.



Yet for the Digital Economy to take off, you need technologies that ensure the creators own that… pic.twitter.com/S9guU0IGG5 — Sebastien (@borgetsebastien) March 20, 2024

Wei, however, remains confident that the GameFi industry will finally see a AAA-standard game released in 2024.

Magazine: Web3 Gamer: Games need bots? Illivium CEO admits ‘it’s tough,’ 42X upside"
"[INST] SushiSwap DAO backs transition to ‘Labs model’ in preliminary vote [/INST] Decentralized exchange SushiSwap has received a positive sign to move forward with a hotly debated plan for a less decentralized business model.

According to a signal vote completed on April 10, more than 62% of voters supported the exchange’s proposal to transition to a so-called “Labs model.”

SushiSwap introduced the proposal on March 26, leading to significant debate within its community. According to the plan, the exchange seeks to establish Sushi Labs, an autonomous administrative, technical and operational company that would manage the Sushi ecosystem.

Tokenholders would still decide on treasury allocations, but without getting into operational details. The Labs would receive 25 million SUSHI (SUSHI) tokens, worth nearly $39 million at current prices. In addition, Sushi Labs will be designated as the exclusive recipient of any future airdrops from affiliated protocols and partners.

“We request that Sushi DAO award a grant of 25 million Sushi tokens to Sushi Labs, including assets from the Arbitrum airdrop, business development, and partner grants, Kanpai 2.0, Sushi 2.0, rewards, stablecoins, and ‘Sushi House’ funds.”

The next steps for Sushi’s community include voting on the implementation proposal by April 17. Nearly 7 million tokens support it, representing a 92% approval rate at the time of writing.

A signal vote is an initial step to gauge the community’s interest or opinion on a proposal without implementing any changes. An implementation vote, on the other hand, is a subsequent step where the community decides if the proposal should be executed.

Sushi’ community reacts

On Sushi’s governance forum, several community members expressed their opposition to the proposed plan, voicing concerns regarding the treasury’s financial stability and allegations of voting power manipulation.

“I think it would be important to have a sizable amount of all revenues, airdrops included, going directly the the DAO treasury. This would not interfere with hiring, firing, or other operations [...] Treasury should not be ignored. [...] I suggest a split of revenues between treasury and operations,” noted community member Nick Rishwain in the proposal’s thread.

Another member of the SushiSwap community, Naïm Boubziz, claimed on X that the move was a hostile takeover. According to Boubziz, the core development team created new wallets prior to the vote in order to increase their voting power.

“It appears that Sushi DAO is at the end of its journey,” said another member on the governance forum.

Sushi “head chef” Jared Grey has responded to the criticism. “After consulting our legal counsel, I directed the operations team to execute the YAY vote with the OPs wallet and its holdings due to the threat of a hostile takeover,” he said on X in response to allegations of manipulation. Grey also noted that the Labs model will help Sushi recover lost market share:

“Much of the current product development roadmap’s limitations and delays stem from the DAO’s outsized ambition, unrealistic expectations, and budget constraints endorsed through snapshot votes from when Sushi’s resources were multitudes greater.”

SushiSwap’s revenue has been declining since 2022 despite the current bull market. According to DefiLlama data, the decentralized exchange generated $11.65 million in fees and $1.5 million in revenue in March 2023, compared to $3.5 million in fees and $531,640 in revenue last month.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Weekend Wrap: Berachain raises $100M, Trump NFT sales dump and more [/INST] Berachain gets $100 million in Series B raise

Layer-1 blockchain Berachain — which is yet to announce its mainnet — has raised a $100 million Series B funding round.

Venture firms Framework Ventures and Brevan Howard Digital led the round, with contributions from Hack VC, Animoca Ventures and Polychain Capital, among others, Berachain said in an April 12 X post.

It will use the money to expand in multiple regions, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, Bloomberg reported on April 12.

Some of the contributors to Berachain’s Series B round. Source: Berachain/X

Berachain’s investors backed the blockchain through a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT) — where the investors gave money for a future Berachain token.

The blockchain’s testnet has reportedly processed 100 million transactions, and it is aiming to launch its mainnet in the second quarter of this year, which has been created for compatibility with Ethereum-based applications.

Anonymous Berachain co-founder “Smokey The Bera” said in a funding announcement seen by Bloomberg that the raise was “a major validation of our approach to building a blockchain that’s built on feedback from real users and developers.”

Smokey the Bera onstage at Hong Kong’s Hack Summit on April 9. Source: Smokey The Bera/X

In mid-March, Bloomberg reported that Berachain was raising a $69 million round at a valuation of $1 billion, citing people familiar. The firm didn’t share its new valuation.

Trump NFT volumes drop 99% as criminal trial begins

Trading of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) spruiked by former United States President Donald Trump has tanked 99% as his New York criminal trial begins.

The 45,000-strong Trump Digital Trading Cards NFT collection — the first ever NFTs that Trump licensed his image to — was seeing hundreds of weekly sales in early February, then sank to just a handful of sales since early March, according to OpenSea.

The collection hasn’t seen a sale since April 2. The second version of Trump’s NFTs has fared better, with 966 sales in the past 30 days compared to the original’s 16.

The weekly trading volume (gray) and average price change (blue) of Trump’s original NFT collection over 90 days. Source: OpenSea

Jury selection begins on Monday, April 15, for Trump’s trial — he’s facing 34 felony charges filed by the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg for allegedly faking business records to cover up a $130,000 payment he made to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair.

Trump has pleaded not guilty.

Newsweek reported last month that the NFT collections were pulled from sale until the end of 2024, according to an OpenSea source that didn’t explain why.

The former president doesn’t own or control the NFT collection but instead licenses his image to a company that does called NFT International, LLC.

Ad giant Dentsu makes Azuki NFT anime series

Advertising and creative giant Dentsu partnered with the Chiru Labs, the firm behind the NFT collection Azuki to make an anime series using characters from Azuki’s NFTs.

On April 11, Dentsu said it would help make the three-part anime series called Enter The Garden, with episodes to be released throughout 2024.

The first will drop on April 30, with a trailer for the episode released alongside the partnership announcement.

Azuki is an NFT collection that features anime-style art characters — to which the holders own the intellectual property rights. Some have built businesses off their NFT, including a skateboard and a tea shop.

The series will include cameo appearances of the characters and product placement of the businesses owned by NFT holders, Dentsu said.

Dentsu’s head of anime operations Yusuke Nii said in the announcement that anime has grown into a “global phenomenon” and claimed the firm would “continue to pursue this partnership even further.”

Bitcoin to ‘trend higher’ after weekend flash crash: Novogratz

Bitcoin (BTC) will shake off its slump and is set to “trend higher” after a shaky trading weekend following Iran’s attack on Israel, says Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz.

Cointelegraph Markets Pro shows Bitcoin dropped over 8% to a three-week low of $61,918 on April 13 after Iran launched hundreds of strikes against Israel for the first time, with Israel reporting one serious injury of a seven-year-old.

“After the risk flush, [Bitcoin] will resume its trend higher, Novogratz wrote in an April 13 X post. The price drop saw around $964 million worth of liquidations in the 24 hours over April 13.

“I pray cool heads prevail and this is not the start of a major regional conflict,” he added.

Bitcoin has already started to gain, seeing a 1.5% bump in the past day to $65,407.

Other news

Nigeria traced local Binance executive Nadeem Arjarwalla to Kenya after he escaped custody and is taking steps to extradite him.

Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission could approve the first batch of spot Bitcoin ETFs on Monday, April 15, which market watchers say could spark another post-halving price rally.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Binance sued in Canada for securities law violations [/INST] Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has been slapped with a new class-action lawsuit in Canada, with plaintiffs alleging that the firm has violated local securities laws.

Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice published a certification motion on April 19 for a class-action lawsuit against Binance alleging that it sold crypto derivative products to retail investors without registration.

According to plaintiffs represented by Christopher Lochan and Jeremy Leeder, Binance sold crypto derivatives products in violation of the Ontario Securities Act (OSA) and federal law.

Source: Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice

The lawsuit seeks damages and rescission of unlawful derivatives trades. The plaintiffs argued that tens of thousands of Canadian users of the Binance website invested in its cryptocurrency derivatives products.

“It is noteworthy here that cryptocurrency derivatives traders include a great many retail investors,” the certification motion reads, adding that more than 50% of Canadian crypto owners have at least $5,000 in the market, according to the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC).

Binance is a major global cryptocurrency exchange accounting for 58% of the total spot trading volumes among centralized exchanges as of March 2024. Apart from its leading position as a major spot crypto trading venue, Binance also operates the biggest derivatives market among other exchanges like Bybit and OKX.

According to data from Bybit, the derivatives market for centralized exchanges (CEXs) is “almost entirely dominated” by Binance, OKX and Bybit.

Trading volumes changes of Binance, OKX, Bybit and other platforms between October 2023 and March 2024. Source: Bybit

The latest class action against Binance comes a few years after the crypto exchange announced in June 2021 plans to cease operations in Ontario after the OSC approached the firm with a warning.

Related: SEC seeks $5.3B judgment against Terraform Labs and Do Kwon

“As a result of its failure to adhere to this announced cessation of sales, in early 2022, the OSC notified the defendants of its intention to seek a cease trade order,” the new court document reads.

Even after Binance announced departure from Canada in May 2023, local authorities have continued to crack down on the exchange. “The OSC’s investigation into the defendants is ongoing,” the court motion reads.

Cointelegraph approached Binance for a comment regarding the class action lawsuit in Ontario but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Magazine: Bitcoin Halving will pump games, Shrapnel’s ‘simple’ secret revealed: Web3 Gamer"
"[INST] Ethereum boosts 8% amid ‘ultra-strong’ social and market activity [/INST] Ether (ETH) accelerated 8% in spot crypto markets on Monday amid an uptick in social sentiment and optimism among derivatives traders.

Ether prices have gained around 8% over the past 24 hours, with the asset hitting an intraday high of $3,722 on April 9, outpacing Bitcoin (BTC) and most of its closest peers, according to CoinGecko.

It is the highest price ETH has reached since March 16, just over three weeks ago. The asset is now 9% away from its 2024 high of $4,070 and 24% down from its 2021 all-time high of $4,878.

Comparatively, Bitcoin prices have moved 3% over the past day reaching $71,395 at the time of writing.

Ethereum’s momentum may have been spurred by several factors, including “ultra-strong” social and market activity, according to social intelligence firm Lunar Crush.

“Social activity continues to accelerate, joined by both strong price action and market volume,” it noted in a post on X on April 8.

Ethereum social activity and price. Source: Lunar Crush

Meanwhile, Ethereum derivatives markets are also hinting at bullish sentiment for the asset for the rest of this month.

There is currently around $600 million in open interest (OI) at the $4,000 strike price and $378 million at strike prices of $3,700 and $5,000, according to crypto futures exchange Deribit.

This shows an upside bias and bullish sentiment for the end-of-the-month options expiry on April 26, when around 900,000 Ethereum contracts expire with a notional value of $3.8 billion.

Ethereum OI by strike price. Source: Deribit

Not everyone is so bullish, however. Crypto author and educator Vijay Boyapati opined in a post on X on April 8 that the premise of Ethereum spot ETF approvals is driving momentum, but it could be short-lived if they get rejected.

“All the hot money that flowed into ETH because of ETF hopium is going to go back into Bitcoin once the Ethereum ETFs are all rejected…”

Related: Key Ethereum price metric targets $5.4K ETH in 2024

On April 9, on-chain analytics firm Santiment observed that “powered by Ethereum’s rise to start the week,” ERC-20 assets have been “well ahead of the markets on average,” the sector has grown by 8.1% in the past week.

Meanwhile, Toncoin (TON) has flipped Cardano (ADA) to take the tenth spot by market capitalization following an 18.5% daily gain to hit an all-time high of $6.50 on April 9.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Pi Network reaches 10M KYC’d users, but token is still not tradeable [/INST] The Pi Network app now has more than 10 million users who have verified their identities by completing the Know Your Customer (KYC) process, according to an April 16 announcement.

The Pi team has promised that it will launch a mainnet and that its tokens will become tradeable if a series of milestones are reached, including after 15 million users pass KYC. With 10 million accounts already verified, the KYC goal will be reached when another five million users complete verification.

Despite this achievement, business analytics platform AIMultiple has claimed that Pi may bring “no value to users” since it “can not yet exchange their Pi coins with fiat currency on exchanges.” Pi Network was launched in 2019 as a centralized app. Users produce Pi tokens by pushing a button from within the app each day, and Pi cannot presently be transferred to other users through a wallet.

Pi Network official website. Source: Pi Network

According to the announcement, 10 million users, called “Pioneers,” have completed identity verification through the app’s native identity verification solution, Pi KYC. This solution provides “a unique and proprietary approach that combines machine automation and crowdsourced, hyperlocal human verification to accomplish secure, accurate and efficient KYC,” the announcement claimed.

Nicolas Kokkalis, co-founder and head of technology for Pi, stated that the achievement “proves that the industry doesn’t need to depend on fiat services to succeed.” He also claimed that the new KYC system will “allow other Web3 services involving ownerships of assets to achieve their identity verification needs through Pi.”

In December 2023, the team announced plans to launch an “Open Network” or mainnet in 2024 if certain conditions are met. These conditions include that 100 Pi apps must have been developed in addition to the 15 million users passing KYC. In addition, the team must have completed all “technology, product, business and legal” work needed to launch the network, and there must not be an “unfavorable external environment” that would hinder the network’s success. The team has not yet announced a specific date for mainnet launch.

AIMultiple analyst Cem Dilmegani claimed that Pi Network will probably not benefit users, stating, “[w]e don’t expect anyone except the founders to benefit from PI Network in a significant way.” That’s because it “works like a direct selling or affiliate marketing system, promising future rewards to users for bringing in new users.” Dilmegani claimed that the affiliate marketing system is used to drive traffic to the app, which is, in turn, used to sell advertising for the benefit of the app’s developer. “Founders are already benefitting from the app,” Dilmegani stated, as they “launched optional video ads at launch to monetize the active user base.”

Dilmegani acknowledged that the Pi team could eventually launch a blockchain mainnet. However, he argued that this was unlikely because it would cause the token to rapidly fall in value as users sold into the market. “Then, the coin would not be valuable enough for people to keep on logging in to click,” which would potentially eliminate the value of the app to advertisers.

Cointelegraph reached out to the Pi team for comment. In response, a representative acknowledged that Pi had taken an “unconventional and novel” approach to blockchain development, such as providing “an intermediate Enclosed Network period of mainnet” instead of launching an open network immediately. This novel approach was taken to “enable utilities building on the platform and KYC processing of millions of our community members, to help the community further build a robust network for the benefit of the whole community before we launch the Open Network.”

The representative claimed that Pi has accomplished multiple goals since its launch, including the creation of “Pi mining mobile app, Pi Browser mobile app as the interface of the Web3 ecosystem, Node application, Testnet and Mainnet blockchains, Wallet, developer platform, a novel KYC solution” and more. The representative argued that not launching an open network right away was worth it, stating, “We believe anything worthwhile takes time and patience, and such components are essential for a healthy launch of the Open Network.”

According to a March 3, 2021 report from Vietnamese media outlet vnExpress, Pi Network is the 22nd most downloaded iOS app in Vietnam. In May 2021, a Vietnamese news outlet reported that Pi had inadvertently leaked images of users’ identity cards to a hacker. However, a Pi Network spokesperson stated that the app handled KYC through a third-party and did not store this data on its servers, nor was there any evidence of a data leak.

Related: Vietnam government warns about crypto trading risks as Pi gains in popularity."
"[INST] Samsung secures $6.4B grant to expand Texas chip manufacturing: Report [/INST] Samsung will receive $6.4 billion worth of grants from the United States government to expand its chip manufacturing in Texas.

The South Korean manufacturing conglomerate secured the grants in a broader effort to expand chip manufacturing in the United States.

The funding will come from the 2022 Chips and Science Act, which aims to boost chip production for the automotive, aerospace and defense industries. The aim is to bolster national security, unnamed administration officials told Reuters, according to an April 15 report.

The grants will support two production facilities, including a research center and a packaging facility, while also allowing Samsung to expand its semiconductor manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas, said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“[These grants] will allow the U.S. to once again lead the world, not just in semiconductor design, which is where we do now lead, but also in manufacturing, advanced packaging, and research and development.”

Samsung will reportedly invest another $45 billion in the expansion of its Texas chip manufacturing facility by the end of 2030.

The news comes a month after reports of ChatGPT creator OpenAI planning to produce its own semiconductor chips for its artificial intelligence (AI) applications. OpenAI may be receiving funding from the United Arab Emirates state-backed group MGX.

Related: 'China is about to start bidding' — Will Hong Kong Bitcoin ETFs spark the halving rally?

Chip shortage remains the most pressing concern for miners ahead of the Bitcoin (BTC) halving.

Beyond the emergence of potential climate-focused regulation, chip shortages remain the biggest risk for Bitcoin mining firms ahead of this week’s upcoming Bitcoin halving.

Bitcoin mining firm Riot Platforms outlined 12 continued risks for Bitcoin mining profitability in its 2023 annual report. The shortage of chip supply was among the most pressing concerns, which could impact its mining operations over the long term. According to the report:

“The ongoing global supply chain crisis, coupled with increased demand for computer chips, has created a shortfall of semiconductors.”

In 2023, U.S. Bitcoin miner CleanSpark cited potential “cryptocurrency hardware disruption” and possible difficulties obtaining new hardware in its 10-K filing.

Mining Bitcoin at home — Is it time to start?. Source: Cointelegraph

Related: 10 days until halving: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall"
"[INST] Bitcoin supply to run out on exchanges in 9 months — Bybit [/INST] Bitcoin supply on cryptocurrency exchanges will dry up in nine months thanks to the 50% supply issuance reduction of this week’s upcoming Bitcoin halving.

Provided that demand from the United States Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) continues, Bitcoin’s post-halving supply dynamic will see exchange reserves run out of Bitcoin (BTC), according to an April 15 report by Bybit:

“Bitcoin reserves in all centralized exchanges have been depleting faster. With only 2 million Bitcoins left, if we assume a daily inflow of $500 million to Bitcoin Spot ETFs, the equivalent of around 7,142 bitcoins will leave exchange reserves daily, suggesting that it will only take nine months to consume all of the remaining reserves.”

Bitcoin reserves on centralized exchanges fell to a near three-year low of 1.94 million BTC on April 16, according to CryptoQuant data.

Bitcoin: Exchange reserves on all exchanges. Source: CryptoQuant

The report comes amid a wider market slump that saw Bitcoin fall over 10% during the past week to $62,924 as of 1:36 pm UTC, according to CoinMarketCap.

Bybit, the world’s third-largest exchange, expects Bitcoin prices to start recovering from the current correction, according to the report:

“With this in mind, it’s unsurprising that Bitcoin’s price may continue to climb before the halving, or even afterward, as the supply squeeze propels the price to another new record.”

Related: Korean won becomes world’s most traded fiat for crypto traders: Report

Institutional interest in Bitcoin is on the rise

Weekly inflows to spot Bitcoin ETFs have been slowing down since March. Last week saw over $199 million worth of net inflows into the ETFs, down from $2.58 billion in the week beginning March 11, according to Dune Analytics.

Bitcoin ETFs weekly net flows. Source: Dune

Despite the recent slump, the spot Bitcoin ETFs have amassed over 841,000 BTC worth $52.9 billion, with over $12.7 billion net flows since launch, according to Dune.

Bitcoin investor allocation has also risen since September 2023. Institutions are allocating an average of 40% of total assets to BTC, while retail investors average a Bitcoin allocation of 24%, according to Bybit’s asset allocation report from Feb. 24.

Bybit noted that both crypto-native firms and traditional institutions are gaining increasing exposure to Bitcoin via ETFs or proxy stocks such as MicroStrategy. The exchange expects more institutions to follow suit:

“We believe that not all institutions have been able to gain exposure since the approval of Bitcoin Spot ETFs in January 2024, as their investment mandates restrict them from investing in new products that have been in the market for only a few months.“

Related: Bitcoin halving will lead to more sustainable BTC mining: Report"
"[INST] Shiba Inu memecoin raises $12M from institutional investors [/INST] Canine memecoin project Shiba Inu (SHIB) has raised $12 million from a private token sale of its not-yet-released TREAT utility and governance token.

According to the April 22 announcement, investors include Comma 3 Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Cypher Capital, Shima Capital, Hercules Ventures, Animoca Brands, Morningstar Ventures, Woodstock Fund, DWF Ventures, Polygon Ventures, Stake Capital, Illuminati Digital Capital, Primal Capital, Mechanism Capital, DWF Ventures and Spirit Dao. All investors participating in the private token sale were outside the United States.

The participation of venture capital firms and their partners will help the Shiba Inu project expand its network and “increase what Shiba Inu can truly be capable of for our community,” commented Shytoshi Kusama, the anonymous core developer of Shiba Inu.

Kusama has maintained a low profile this year, with user reports of his sightings in New York, Japan and the Maldives. However, Kusama claims that he is on vacation to enjoy himself “just like everyone else.” That said, the core developer resurfaced on Telegram on April 21. ""I have put my heart in soul to build this, and you are a worthless fudder who is not deserving of the breath God gave you,” wrote Kusama in response to a user’s critique.

Shiba Inu staff explained that “TREAT is the final unreleased token by the popular meme brand that will unlock Shiba Inu’s newly announced blockchain featuring Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).” Two months prior, Shiba Inu partnered with Zama.ai to deploy the FHE technology, which forms the basis of the protocol’s novel privacy layer, Tre.

The fund will be used by Shiba Inu’s Panamian entity, Shiba Inu Mint S.A., to build the Treat platform. The project noted that possible applications of the technology include encrypted lending platforms, tokenized asset exchanges and encrypted machine learning models.

Shiba Inu has been a top-performing memecoin, with a gain of 164% over the past year. Last December, the protocol introduced .shib domains for its tokenholders. Meanwhile, Shibarium, its layer-2 scaling solution, has surpassed over 1 million users since its inception.

Related: Shibarium denies bridge issues, calls it FUD"
"[INST] CFTC commissioner warns against infringing on SEC’s authority in KuCoin case [/INST] Caroline Pham, a commissioner with the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has suggested that a recent “aggressive” crypto enforcement action could put the regulator at odds with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a March 29 statement, Pham said the CFTC appeared to have exerted authority over certain securities in its enforcement case against cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin. The commission charged the firm “with multiple violations of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) and CFTC regulations” on March 26, parallel to criminal charges from the U.S. Justice Department.

“The CFTC’s approach may infringe upon the SEC’s authority and undermine decades of robust investor protection laws by conflating a financial instrument with a financial activity, disrupting the foundations of securities markets,” said Pham. “Owning shares is not the same thing as trading derivatives.”

Related: KuCoin says user assets are unaffected by US SDNY indictment

Pham’s statement echoed concerns from many U.S. lawmakers and regulators about the role the CFTC and SEC should play over cryptocurrencies and how they are judged as commodities or securities. Officials representing both regulators have been at odds over Ether (ETH) recently as crypto firm Prometheum announced it planned to offer custody services as a security.

The KuCoin complaint from the CFTC suggested that Ether was a commodity. However, legal experts said the SEC potentially labeling ETH as a security could impact the commission’s decision on several spot Ether exchange-traded fund applications in the pipeline.

Magazine: KuCoin’s desperate $10M airdrop, 1 tweet raises $37M for memecoin: Asia Express"
"[INST] Pro-XRP lawyer requests to be amicus curiae for Coinbase customers [/INST] Pro-XRP lawyer John Deaton has upheld his pledge to support customers of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase by requesting to serve as a friend of the court in the exchange’s legal battle against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

In an April 19 filing in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Deaton requested to represent 4,701 Coinbase customers by appearing as amicus counsel in the ongoing lawsuit that commenced in June 2023.

“I am admitted or otherwise authorized to practice in this court and I appear in this case as counsel for 4,701 Coinbase Customers,” the filing stated.

During an April 18 podcast interview with Fox Business journalist Eleanor Terrett, Deaton suggested that his motivation for supporting the Coinbase customers was to protect everyday individuals aiming to “build a little wealth” in their lives.

“This isn’t about crypto, this is about freedom. This is about upward mobility, this is about people who want a fighting chance, people who want to build a little wealth. They are not looking to get rich, they’re not crypto bros,” he declared.

This comes after Coinbase filed an interlocutory appeal in its lawsuit against the SEC only days after the court denied its motion to dismiss the entire lawsuit.

The interlocutory appeal revolves around the “controlling question” whether an investment contract requires “something contractual,"" according to Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal.

Related: Coinbase shares slump, but Base revenue signals it’s undervalued — Analyst

Deaton has filed several amicus counsel requests over the past few years in support of the crypto community.

In September 2023, he submitted his notice of appearance as a friend of the court in the LBRY v SEC lawsuit.

Most notably though, was in 2021 when Deaton filed an amicus brief on behalf of over 6,000 XRP (XRP) holders in the lawsuit between the SEC and Ripple Labs.

In more recent news, Deaton has been campaigning for a Senate position, aiming to secure the seat currently held by crypto skeptic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

On April 15, Cointelegraph reported that Deaton outraised Senator Warren over the first quarter of this year for his bid to seize her Senate spot — bankrolling $1.36 million compared to Warren’s $1.09 million.

It comes just over a month after Deaton told his 324,100 X followers that he invested $500,000 of his own money into the Senate campaign.

However, he called on his followers to help raise an additional $500,000.

Magazine: China and the crypto ETFs, Thai NFT music fest, KuCoin’s 1.3M new bots: Asia Express"
"[INST] IRS releases draft of 2025 digital asset reporting form for US taxpayers [/INST] The United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the country’s tax service, has released a draft of its new Form 1099-DA “Digital Asset Proceeds from Broker Transactions” for reporting income from digital asset transactions. The form is expected to come into use in 2025 for reporting in 2026.

A broker will prepare Form 1099-DA for every customer who sells or exchanges digital assets. Brokers include kiosk operators, digital asset payment processors, hosted wallet providers, unhosted wallet providers and others, per the form. Copies of the 1099-DA will be sent to customers and the IRS, which will use them for verification purposes.

The 2025 draft 1099-DA IRS reporting form. Source: IRS.gov

The form asks for token codes, wallet addresses, and blockchain transaction locations. Under the rule proposed in August 2023, cryptocurrencies, nonfungible tokens and stablecoins are reportable. The rule stated:

“With third party information reporting that specifically identifies digital asset transactions, the IRS could more easily identify taxpayers with digital asset transactions that are otherwise difficult to discover.”

The crypto community weighed in on the proposed reporting requirements after they were announced. The Blockchain Association said the rule contains “fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of digital assets and decentralized technology.”

Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal said the proposed rules would set a “dangerous precedent for surveillance of the everyday financial activities of consumers by requiring nearly every digital asset transaction — even the purchase of a cup of coffee — to be reported.”

Commenters were no happier with the reporting rules for 2024.

Related: Study claims 99.5% of crypto investors did not pay taxes in 2022

Tax experts have also posted their comments on the web. According to crypto tax and accounting service Ledgible, reporting decentralized finance, where there may not be an intermediary to fulfill the reporting requirements, will be especially challenged by the new rule. It could also significantly increase brokers’ administrative burden, as many process very large numbers of transactions.

Source: Peter Van Valkenburgh

In addition, brokers will be forced to exchange information on digital asset transfers to determine the cost basis (initial value or purchase price) accurately, according to Gordon Law. They have no mechanism in place for such data sharing. Furthermore, there is no way to differentiate between self-transfers and taxable transfers if a crypto owner transfers assets between exchanges.

Taxpayers who underreported their crypto income in previous years may be caught when they report their taxes in 2025. Users of foreign exchanges that formally do not serve U.S. citizens will not submit the form, but the IRS may be able to detect the offshore activity if the taxpayer transfers assets to a U.S. exchange.

The IRS is continuing to accept comments on the draft form.

Magazine: Crazy outcomes when current laws applied to NFTs and the metaverse"
"[INST] Australia poised for ‘inflection point’ of crypto demand — Kraken Aus MD [/INST] Australia’s crypto industry is in a good spot to benefit from a global “inflection point” for crypto demand as long as its lawmakers make the right decisions, according to a Kraken Australia executive.

Speaking to Cointelegraph on the sidelines of the Formula One Grand Prix in Melbourne, Miller looked to the influx of fresh capital into spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), stablecoin adoption and BlackRock’s recent move to launch a $100 million tokenization fund on Ethereum as reasons to take a bullish outlook on crypto in the coming months.

“We are now at a positive inflection point when it comes to demand. It feels like we’re well and truly back in a positive place for crypto,” said Miller.

“It’s all just proof that this is the financial services infrastructure of the future.”

Miller noted that while institutional demand for crypto had soared in the United States — with fund managers such as Fidelity and BlackRock instructing their clients to invest in Bitcoin — this was yet to make its way to Australia.

“We’re definitely not seeing that level of action in Australia, but it’s certainly a stepping stone toward that,” he said.

However, Miller explained there had still been a drastic uptick in interest from retail investors and crypto-related businesses in the country.

“We‘re still seeing quite an increase in adoption here. People are starting to invest again, and many are building new businesses around crypto as well,” he said.

“We’re seeing a lot of these businesses come to us specifically because they’re after liquidity,” added Miller.

Miller noted that many of the new Australian crypto businesses were focused largely on stablecoins, which he — like many others — described as the crypto industry’s “killer app.”

Related: Avalanche and Chainlink collaborate on Australasian on-chain asset settlement

To Miller, the biggest roadblock to domestic crypto adoption stems from the lack of regulatory clarity and relatively slow progress in legislation.

“It’s very hard to take risk and invest in the crypto space in Australia because there’s just that lack of certainty.”

However, Miller said his firm’s engagement with Australian policymakers had been largely positive so far, and now the main target was ensuring that sensible laws were put in place by the government.

“All of our engagement with [Australian] Treasury has been positive. Our next challenge is to kind of get the government to prioritize legislation. It’s very hard to do that, but I think we’re getting closer,” he said.

In October 2023, the Department of the Treasury released a consultation paper that proposed mandating crypto exchanges to apply for a financial services license from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

On March 21, ASIC head Alan Kirkland said the regulator would focus on solving the “regulatory trilemma” — consumer protection, market integrity and encouraging financial innovation — when releasing the next round of regulatory reforms for the sector in the coming months.

Miller stressed that good legislation would need to take into account the international nature of crypto, and any attempts to make laws too specific to Australia could accidentally “overengineer localization.”

“You really don’t want to pull this fourth-dimensional money into three-dimensional space-time. At the end of the day, you want to keep it in its plane and then make sure the regulations actually mitigate the real risks,” he said.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Solana open interest sheds nearly $440M as price slumps 11% [/INST] Solana open interest (OI) and its price have declined in the past 24 hours, mirroring a broader decline across the cryptocurrency market. However, traders are remaining optimistic, viewing it as a “good opportunity.”

On April 14, OI in Solana’s (SOL) stood at $1.62 billion, approximately 21% down from the previous day, according to CoinGlass data. OI measures the total value of all outstanding or unsettled Solana futures contracts across exchanges.

At the time of publication, Solana’s price is $136.54, down 11% over the past 24 hours, per CoinMarketCap data.

Solana futures open interest reached its peak for the year at the beginning of this month. Source: CoinGlass

The sudden drop in Solana’s price erased $36.55 million worth of traders’ long positions, potentially disappointing those anticipating a price spike leading up to the Bitcoin halving on April 20.

The remaining top 10 cryptocurrencies have seen a comparable decline, with XRP (XRP) experiencing the most significant drop of 12.12% over the past 24 hours. Dogecoin (DOGE) followed closely with a 10.86% decrease, while Cardano’s (ADA) trailed slightly behind at 10.20%.

It’s uncertain how long this downturn will last, yet traders maintain a fairly positive outlook for the overall altcoin market.

The marketwide price decline prompted prominent trader GCR Classic to break their silence on X after over a year, advising his 273,500 followers on April 14 that the current moment presents a “good opportunity to scale into high conviction tokens.”

Meanwhile, in an April 13 X post, crypto entrepreneur Kyle Chasse told his followers that they will “probably see altcoins up like 20-30% by Monday.”

Although on-chain analysis firm Glassnode suggests that might not be the case. It highlighted that Bitcoin drawdowns have been much worse in previous “euphoria phases,” which many traders use as an indicator for the rest of the market.

In an April 12 post on X, it explained that during previous euphoria phases, price retracements have often exceeded 25%. However, in the current market, there have only been two recent drawdowns of around 10% since surpassing all-time highs on March 5.

Related: Solana memecoin frenzy raises questions about crypto utility, reputation

This comes amid multiple network issues with Solana in recent times.

On April 9, Cointelegraph reported that intermittent congestion on the Solana blockchain forced several crypto projects to postpone their launches. Solana developers say they are working on a fix by April 15.

Users of the Solana blockchain reported increasing issues around network congestion and transaction errors over several weeks. New projects, especially those planning token launches, decided to hold off until the technical difficulties were resolved.

Magazine: Altseason on the horizon, SEC targets Uniswap, and BTC halving news: Hodler’s Digest, April 7-13

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Korean won becomes world’s most traded fiat for crypto traders: Report [/INST] The South Korean won became the world’s most-traded fiat currency against cryptocurrencies in the first quarter of 2024.

The won accounted for over $456 billion worth of trading volume on centralized crypto exchanges, topping the $455 billion in U.S. dollar volume, according to an April 15 research report by Kaiko.

Fiat Trade Volume Q1, 2024. Source: Kaiko

The research firm attributes the rising dominance of the won to the “fee war” between Korean crypto exchanges. The report noted:

“The improving macroeconomic environment and fierce competition among Korean exchanges has boosted trade volume on Korean markets which hit its highest level in more than two years in early March. In Q1 2024, the South Korean Won surpassed the US Dollar in terms of cumulative trade volume.”

In comparison, Euro-denominated trading pairs only amassed $59 billion worth of cumulative volume, placing in the third place for the first quarter of 2024.

Related: Bitcoin halving will lead to more sustainable BTC mining: Report

Crypto fee war among South Korean exchanges intensifies, but Upbit remains the top exchange

As the region’s leading crypto exchange, Upbit has dominated over 82% of South Korea’s crypto market share since 2021.

However, the recent bull run intensified the competition among rival exchanges, with both Bithumb and Korbit exchanges launching zero-fee campaigns in late 2023.

While Korbit’s market share remained below 1%, Bithumb’s market share tripled in the months after the introduction of zero-fee policy trading in October 2023. Yet, the aggressive zero-fee policy led to a large revenue drop for Bithumb, according to Kaiko:

“Despite its aggressive zero-fee strategy and the resulting surge in trade volume, Bithumb’s annual revenue dropped by 60% in 2023. The significant decline in revenue may have prompted the exchange to discontinue its zero-fee campaign on Feb. 5, just five months after its launch.”

Market Share Volume, South Korean Exchanges. Source: Kaiko

The research firm also noted that volumes for the Korean Won declined in early April, expecting a significant rebound with the approval of spot Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s financial regulator has reportedly approved three spot Bitcoin ETFs, which are expected to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in approximately two weeks.

Related: ETH price nears 3-year lows vs. Bitcoin — Will an Ethereum ETF stem the tide?"
"[INST] How blockchain-based voting can restore trust in the electoral process [/INST] Blockchain-based voting systems could foster more transparency and public trust in the election process, according to Brian Rose, an independent mayoral candidate in London and the host of the London Real podcast.

Rose told Cointelegraph in an exclusive:

“Wouldn't we all sleep better at night if the voting system was on the blockchain and you could really prove that identity and you could actually prove that vote and there would be an immutable record? This is the future and I think it takes someone like me who comes from a business background who's intimately involved in the blockchain.”

Public trust in the election processes and political parties has taken a significant hit in recent years. In 2023, only 12% of the public in the United Kingdom said they trusted political parties, down from 20% in 2022, according to a report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published in March 2024.

Levels of trust in public institutions, UK, 2023, Source: Office for National Statistics

Rose clarified that he still maintains confidence in the United Kingdom’s election system, but sees great public benefits from introducing blockchain-based voting:

“I’m not implying that the U.K. voting system is not true, but the problem is that when humans are involved, sometimes things don’t go as planned. So we want to put voting on the blockchain.”

Beyond introducing an on-chain voting system, Rose also aims to make London more crypto innovation-friendly, to restore its status as a leading global financial center. He said:

“[London] is not pro-crypto, whereas it used to be the greatest financial center in the world.”

Brian Rose, Interview with Cointelegraph. Source: Cointelegraph

The former Wall Street banker said that financial education is severely lacking in the country, which is why he aims to create a new London cryptocurrency and a financial education platform to empower citizens.

“Financial education is king. But the only way to do it is to do it now with blockchain… I also want to create the London coin and get it into the hands of every man, woman, and child in this city to finally create a system for financial education.”

While the details of the London token are still being finalized, Rose said that it will function as a regular cryptocurrency with price fluctuations and that it could potentially be launched on the Polygon or Avalanche blockchain.

Rose plans to offer day-to-day utilities for the London crypto, including staking, payment of public transport, taxes, and other public services.

Related: Hong Kong Bitcoin and Ether ETFs officially approved to start trading on April 30

Financial institutions would pay a 1% financial education tax for London coin

The independent mayoral candidate is planning to issue the London token to around 10 million people living in the Greater London area, to incentivize users to learn about the intricacies of blockchain and crypto.

To subsidize the costs, large financial institutions headquartered in London would be required to pay a 1% tax:

“We're going to give a 1% one-off financial education tax to any institution that has a global headquarters here behind me in the city of London that will be a liquidity pool that gets injected into The London coin.”

Rose said he invested over $10 million into 40 different Web3 companies, which is part of the reason he is so confident about the potential of blockchain technology.

Related: Bitcoin outperforms Tesla stock for the first time since 2019"
"[INST] IMF recommends stablecoins and CBDCs to boost Pacific Islands’ economies [/INST] The International Monetary Fund (IMF) believes that digital money, both private and public, could help the world’s most remote and dispersed nations in the Pacific Ocean to raise financial inclusion and the quality of financial services.

On March 25, the IMF published a report on the potential role of stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on the economies of the Pacific Islands countries.

In a 58-page text, the IMF’s senior economic experts highlighted the challenges faced by the dozens of countries and microstates located in a Pacific Islands area:

“Limited and unequal access to financial services contributes to persistent poverty and inequality. The countries also are highly dependent on remittance flows, which makes them disproportionately impacted by diminishing correspondent banking relationships.”

The IMF believes these nations can benefit from the digital money revolution by developing payment systems, expanding financial inclusion and mitigating the loss of correspondent banking relationships.

Related: Global policymakers are still pushing CBDCs despite their failures

While the report predictably focuses on CBDCs, a cause heavily advocated by the IMF, it also mentions private stablecoins backed by foreign currencies.

The IMF discourages smaller Pacific Island countries (PICs) from issuing their own sovereign stablecoins due to the lack of oversight capacities. However, the only private stablecoin explicitly mentioned in the report is Tether (USDT).

Overall, the report states that the best option for PICs with existent national currency and mature banks is a two-tier CBDC, whereby the central bank issues but delegates the operation to private intermediaries. As for others:

“Foreign currency–based stablecoins could be a realistic alternative for countries without their own currencies, though only with robust regulation and supervision.”

As the summary of current PICs’ financial systems shows, none of them officially uses private crypto or stablecoins, while only several — Fiji, Palau, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu — are exploring a CBDC.

The IMF remains one of the leading international advocates for implementing CBDCs. In November 2023, its managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, urged the public sector to “keep preparing to deploy” CBDCs.

She believes CBDCs can replace cash and co-exist with “private money,” being its “safe and low-cost alternative.”

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] NASA created VR metaverse to prep astronauts for life on lunar space station [/INST] While most of us spend our time in the metaverse trading assets or bopping around in virtual realities on legless avatars, astronauts working with NASA and SpaceX are using it to prepare for life aboard a lunar space station that hasn’t been built yet.

The first humans to make their homes in deep space, according to NASA, will be the team tasked with operating a space station currently under development called “Gateway.”

NASA, in a recent blog post, described Gateway as a “next-generation science lab, solar-powered spaceship, and home-away-from home” for international astronauts.

Astronauts have traditionally prepared for new missions through the use of physical and computer-based simulators. But the dawn of modern virtual reality headsets and advanced spatial computing technologies has made it possible for those planning to occupy deep space to gain the necessary skills to work and survive in an immersive 3-D environment.

Source: NASA

The United States says Gateway will make its off-Earth debut no sooner than 2025 when its critical power and propulsion systems are set up in orbit around the Moon.

Its mission goes far beyond its humble beginnings in Earth’s backyard. According to NASA, Gateway is being set up as a staging point for the Artemis program, a U.S.-based initiative to build a crewed base on the Moon as the next step in humanity’s quest to put a human on Mars.

According to NASA:

“Gateway is a vital component of the NASA-led Artemis missions to return to the Moon and chart a path for the first human missions to Mars. The small space station will be a multi-purpose outpost orbiting the Moon and providing essential support for lunar surface missions, a destination for science, and a staging point for further deep space exploration.”

The astronauts tasked with maintaining and operating Gateway will face the daunting task of being the world’s first orbital space station crew to live and work in deep space — at a maximum distance of approximately 386,243 kilometers from the Earth. For comparison, astronauts aboard the International Space Station, which launched in 1998, operate at an average distance from Earth of about 400 kilometers.

Related: Lunar colony ‘unlikely’ by 2030, but that’s not the point — MoonDAO"
"[INST] Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital raising $100M to fund crypto startups: Report [/INST] Mike Novogratz’s crypto conglomerate Galaxy Digital is reportedly in the starting stages of raising a $100 million venture fund targeting early-stage crypto startups, with most of the cash set to come from other investors.

Its venture arm, Galaxy Ventures, typically used company money for investments but decided to open up its new Galaxy Ventures Fund I to other venture capitalists last year, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg, per an April 4 report.

The minimum investment it’ll make into startups is $1 million, the person added.

The fund would allow Galaxy to “continue fueling the digital asset ecosystem by backing promising early-stage companies,” Galaxy told Bloomberg.

Galaxy Ventures’ investments in crypto startups include a $2.7 million February round it led for Citrea, a project aiming to bring zero-knowledge rollups (ZK-rollups) to Bitcoin.

Galaxy has raised and contributed to other funds. Its most recent contribution was to a $75 million fund to VC firm 1kx targeting crypto-based consumer apps.

The reported fund comes amid a resurgence of venture money returning to crypto after a flat crypto market last year.

Crypto VC funding jumped over 50% month-on-month in March to $1.16 billion split across 180 publicly announced investments — the highest monthly figure since April 2022.

Crypto VC funding by month since March 2022: orange is the USD amount raised and the gray line is the number of deals. Source: RootData

Para is also reportedly attempting to raise up to $850 million for a fund. Hack VC is similarly putting together $150 million to back crypto startups and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has put aside $30 million for a Web3 gaming-focused fund.

Related: Paradigm’s funding takes Farcaster’s dev to unicorn status

The venture money rush comes as the January-approved United States spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have sent the cryptocurrency’s price on a rally, gaining around 50% year-to-date.

Bitcoin has brought the rest of the crypto market with it. The total crypto market capitalization at the start of the year was around $1.7 trillion, it now stands at $2.61 trillion — edging back to its all-time high of $3 trillion, per CoinGecko.

Magazine: The secret of pitching to male VCs: Helping female crypto founders blast off"
"[INST] DEX adoption needs greater capital efficiency — PancakeSwap product lead [/INST] Decentralized finance (DeFi) needs greater capital efficiency to increase the market share of decentralized exchanges (DEXs), according to PancakeSwap.

Chef Momo, the pseudonymous product manager of the DEX, told Cointelegraph:

“Such initiatives promoting capital efficiency and composability will be pivotal in expanding the market share of DEXs.”

PancakeSwap is a popular multichain DEX that launched concentrated liquidity automated market maker (CLAMM) options trading on Arbitrum on April 8 by merging the DEX platform with Stryke’s options trading protocol.

CLAMM options will introduce a new approach for building on-chain liquidity in DeFi, based on supply and demand mechanics, according to Chef Momo:

“The scarcity of options liquidity persists as a significant challenge not only in DeFi but CeFi [centralized finance] as well. DEXs serve as the fundamental liquidity infrastructure in DeFi. Leveraging this liquidity for option writing presents a substantial opportunity for bolstering on-chain options liquidity.”

The new options are live for the ARB/USDC, ETH/USDC, and wBTC/USDC trading pairs. CLAMM options aim to offer more intricate options trading features for crypto investors along with new opportunities for liquidity providers. According to Chef Momo:

“Liquidity Providers can capitalize on their existing liquidity in v3 pools on PancakeSwap to write options and earn premiums boosting their overall returns.”

PancakeSwap is currently the 10th-largest DEX, with a 3.37% market share on PancakeSwap V2 and a 2.92% market share on PancakeSwap v3, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Top DEXs by market share. Source: CoinMarketCap

Related: Paradigm leads $225M funding round for new ‘Solana killer’ L1

DeFi needs greater capital efficiency

Initiatives similar to CLAMM that promote greater capital efficiency and composability in DeFi will be pivotal in growing the market share of DEXs, according to Chef Momo.

“In TradFi, the options markets dominate the derivatives sector, but its presence in crypto is minimal, presenting considerable growth opportunities. Options bring significant value to DeFi, including hedging investment portfolios and generating income.”

DEXs are far outpaced by their centralized counterparts. Binance, the world’s largest CEX, currently boasts a daily trading volume of $26.4 billion.

In comparison, Uniswap only boasts $1.44 billion in 24-hour trading volume as the world’s largest DEX, according to CoinMarketCap.

Looking at individual traders, Binance averages over 21 million weekly visits, while Uniswap, the largest DEX, was only used by 733,930 unique active wallets during the past week, according to DappRadar.

Uniswap’s weekly volume of $25.5 billion is still short of Binance’s daily trading volume.

Related: 10 days until halving: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall"
"[INST] PAXG hit new high amid Middle East tensions, raising questions about Bitcoin [/INST] The gold-backed digital asset from Paxos spiked to an all-time high over the weekend amid a backdrop of rising tensions in the Middle East, leading to some questioning Bitcoin’s (BTC) value as a geopolitical hedge.

The PAXG gold-backed crypto token hit $2,855 on April 13 as Bitcoin prices conversely tanked $5,000 in a matter of hours from over $67,500 to bottom out at around $62,700 in a 7.5% daily rout, according to data from CoinGecko.

“Bitcoin may be many things, but it is not a geopolitical hedge,” commented Bob Elliott, co-founder and CEO of Unlimited Funds and former executive of Bridgewater, in a post on X.

Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East were ramped up over the weekend following an Iranian drone and missile attack on Israeli targets.

The former Bridgewater Associates research head added that this weekend was another good empirical test as BTC traded with a “near-perfect negative correlation over the last day to PAXG.”

“If anything, it’s becoming an even worse hedge over time,” he exclaimed.

BTC and PAXG prices. Source: Bob Elliott

The PAXG token could not sustain momentum, however, and retreated to its previous spot gold-linked price level of around $2,376 at the time of writing.

The asset has made slow and steady progress since the beginning of March, rising 20% in tandem with prices of the underlying precious yellow metal, which hit a peak of $2,400 per ounce last week.

However, some noted that the Paxos token has very little liquidity, with just $36 million daily volume compared to major high-cap crypto assets that trade in the billions.

Glassnode on-chain analyst “Checkmatey” commented that those who “posted about the price of an illiquid gold token trading higher today as a dunk on Bitcoin are an unserious market commentator.”

Meanwhile, Elliot observed that Bitcoin exhibited similar market action last year when it traded down in the period following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, while gold traded up.

“These correlations look to be getting more negative over time,” added Elliott, who cited the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“BTC largely traded randomly in a relatively tight range in the lead-up and following the invasion,” he added. Gold prices jumped 12% during February and March that year.

Analyst Willy Woo also referred to price action during the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, adding that Bitcoin “recovery happens within days.”

Related: Bitcoin nosedives as political tensions escalate in the Middle East

Elliott concluded that from a geopolitical perspective, Bitcoin is not a store of value asset, and its broader use may link it more closely to aggregate financial assets.

“Along the geopolitical dimension, its pretty conclusive BTC is not ‘digital gold.’”

At the time of writing, Bitcoin had already started its recovery from the weekend dump, topping $65,800 in early trading on April 15.

Magazine: Altseason on the horizon, SEC targets Uniswap, and BTC halving news: Hodler’s Digest, April 7–13"
"[INST] Nigeria launches first multilingual large language model in Africa [/INST] Through the Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, the Nigerian government has launched Nigeria’s first multilingual large language model (LLM) as the country pushes forward to take a leadership position in artificial intelligence (AI) development in Africa.

Nigeria’s Communications Minister, Dr. Bosun Tijani, announced on Friday, April 19, that the LLM launch stemmed from a four-day AI workshop held earlier that week in the country’s capital, Abuja.

According to Tijani, the launch of the AI tool was facilitated by a collaboration involving Nigerian AI firm Awarritech, global tech company DataDotOrg, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), and the National Centre for AI and Robotics (NCAIR). The Minister stated,

“The LLM will be trained in five low-resource languages and accented English to ensure stronger language representation in existing data sets for the development of artificial intelligence solutions. The project will also be supported by over 7,000 fellows from the 3MTT Nigeria program,”

Tijani added that following four days of collaborative work involving over 120 artificial intelligence experts, Nigeria produced an initial draft of its National AI Strategy and unveiled notable advancements and collaborations aimed at propelling the country’s AI development forward.

He mentioned that among the announcements was a collaboration between 21st Century Technologies, Galaxy Backbone, and NCAIR Nigeria to expedite the progress of artificial intelligence projects crucial to the nation.

21st Century Technology will be funding the purchase of GPUs to enhance national computing capacity. These resources will aid local researchers, startups, and government entities in AI projects housed at the GBB Data Centre in the FCT.

Related: Meta launches ‘most capable openly available LLM to date,’ rivaling GPT and Claude

During the workshop, the Minister announced the relaunch of NCAIR, a dedicated entity created to promote research and development in AI, robotics, UAV, and Internet of Things (IoT) and their practical applications in Nigeria’s key sectors. He stated that the enhanced capacity at NCAIR would enable it to more effectively carry out its role as a digital innovation and research center.

Tijani revealed that the National AI Strategy has received $3.5 million in seed funding from interested partners. Foreign and local partners support the funding, including UNDP, UNESCO, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Luminate, Lagos Business School, Data Science Nigeria, NITDA, and other agencies under the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy.

It includes $1.5 million in direct funding and an additional $2 million invested by 21st Century Technologies into the pilot program.

Magazine: How to get better crypto predictions from ChatGPT, Humane AI pin slammed: AI Eye"
"[INST] Reversing layoffs of 2022? Crypto exchanges are adding staff members [/INST] Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek reportedly said the exchange has been adding people to its staff in a move that could increase the number of employees by roughly 1,400.

According to an April 16 Bloomberg report, Crypto.com, Binance, Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken have been hiring team members as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) rally ahead of the blockchain’s halving. Many major crypto and technology companies announced significant layoffs in 2022 and early 2023 amid a market downturn, resulting in firms including FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, and others filing for bankruptcy.

Marszalek reportedly said Crypto.com had already hired 700 staff members since November 2023 and planned to onboard another 700 for customer service and corporate positions. The CEO said the addition of the staff was aimed at “slowly, thoughtfully, and strategically” supporting plans to increase its number of registered users.

According to data from Layoffs.fyi surveying ​​255 companies in the tech industry, there were 7,322 layoffs in March 2024 — a more than 80% decrease compared with 37,963 layoffs in March 2023.

Related: Coinbase to cut another 20% of its workforce in second wave of layoffs

At the time of publication, Coinbase listed 215 open positions on its website. Kraken listed 81, Gemini listed 80, and Binance listed 347. Many crypto firms reduced their headcounts by up to 20% in 2023 amid regulatory scrutiny and falling token prices.

Some of these changes seem to be on their way to reversing amid an all-time high BTC price and approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in 2024. However, many firms in the U.S. still face civil lawsuits brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory concerns at the state and federal levels.

Magazine: ‘AI has killed the industry’: EasyTranslate boss on adapting to change"
"[INST] Web3 developer Community Labs pledges $35M for Arweave ecosystem accelerator [/INST] Community Labs, a company specializing in Web3 software development, is set to launch a 10-week incubator program called AO Ventures focusing on the Arweave ecosystem, with an initial investment of $35 million.

The program, scheduled to begin on April 23, aims to support projects within the decentralized storage network by providing access to funding, mentorship and technical workshops.

This initiative is backed by venture capitalists such as Factor and Distributed Global, among others. It offers selected Web3 entrepreneurs the opportunity to engage with industry veterans and potentially pitch their projects to prominent VCs after the program concludes.

Source: AO Ventures

A notable aspect of the program is its inclusivity, as participation is open to all projects that utilize the AO Computer, a decentralized computing service leveraging the Arweave blockchain.

The AO Computer is highlighted for its ability to address common vulnerabilities found in centralized systems, such as data breaches and censorship, by facilitating parallel processing. This feature enables the support of numerous processes running simultaneously, enhancing scalability.

Furthermore, it allows interaction with the Arweave network to power decentralized applications across various sectors, including artificial intelligence and gaming.

Arweave’s token, AR, has gained over 250% in the past year as part of the ongoing bull market, although the token is still well below its 2021 all-time highs. Last December, an unofficial Arweave forking plan drew controversy after its prominent layer-2 network Irys proposed to “drop the data set and reset the token supply.”

The network stores a wide range of data, from web pages to gaming data and nonfungible token (NFT) metadata, totaling approximately 57.64 pebibytes (about 64.9 million gigabytes).

Arweave is the brainchild of Sam Williams and William Jones from the University of Kent, who wanted to tackle the issue of data being removed from the internet, known as data impermanence, so that information, websites and applications are available for an indefinite period of time.

It uses a unique blockchain variant called Blockweave, whose interwoven structure provides much greater scalability and efficient storage options than traditional blockchains, making it ideal for storing large volumes of data.

Related: NFTs, gaming and storage: The key to Filecoin and Arweave accruing value?"
"[INST] Uniswap price tanks 10% as team vows to fight SEC threat [/INST] Uniswap (UNI), the token for the decentralized exchange of the same name, sunk to a six-week low after Uniswap said it received a proposed lawsuit notice from United States regulators — which it is “ready to fight.”

UNI dropped 10% from $11.21 to $10 in the hour after Uniswap said it received a Wells notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission, a notification that the regulator is planning enforcement action.

UNI is currently trading at $9.66, its lowest point since late February, according to Cointelegraph Markets Pro.

TradingView data shows UNI’s price drop putting it at a 47-day low. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

“I’m not surprised. Just annoyed, disappointed, and ready to fight,” the New York-based Uniswap Labs founder Hayden Adams wrote in an April 10 X post. “This fight will take years [and] may go all the way to the Supreme Court.”

Uniswap didn’t share the exact contents of the Wells notice, but in a blog post regarding the notice, it claimed UNI wasn’t a security, and it doesn’t meet the U.S. legal definitions of securities exchange or broker.

An SEC spokesperson told Cointelegraph it doesn’t comment on “the existence or nonexistence of a possible investigation.”

Consensys senior counsel and regulatory matters director Bill Hughes wrote on X clarifying that SEC staff have to first get the lawsuit approved by the agency’s five commissioners, including Chair Gary Gensler.

“We all know that the Chair wants to sue them, and two commissioners are NOT going to disagree, and two will disagree,” Hughes wrote. “So a suit is a foregone conclusion, but there isn’t a suit yet.”

He urged those “freaked out” to “take a breath and calm down” as it was “extremely doubtful” the SEC would target UNI holders or protocol users.

Former SEC Internet Enforcement Chief John Reed Stark wrote on X that a Wells notice gives the recipient an opportunity to argue why the commissioners should decline a recommended lawsuit.

He said the notice to Uniswap was “not surprising” and is “always amazed” when Wells notice recipients “fight back by throwing stones at the SEC with obnoxious/insulting PR campaigns, like the one Uniswap seems to have begun.”

“Any SEC lawyer will agree that responding to a Wells by berating the SEC, calling them names, etc. is a weak, risky and losing strategy.”

Stark claimed Uniswap was recanting a “tired, anemic, old and failed monologue” by alleging the SEC is abusing its power and “lambasting the SEC’s ‘anti-innovative enforcement paradigm.’”

“Expect the SEC Enforcement staff to lean in and file a voluminous and robust federal complaint, which will inevitably survive the usual motion to dismiss, prevail against the typical motion for summary judgement and win on just about every other litigated issue that follows,” he said.

Related: Make your code immutable to avoid jail, policy exec advises devs

Former Delphi Labs general counsel Gabriel Shapiro wrote on X that his hunch is the SEC “will win on securities issues with UNI” but will lose if it claims Uniswap is a securities exchange.

Paul Grewal, chief legal officer of Coinbase, which is being sued by the SEC, agreed with Shapiro and wrote if the SEC claims Uniswap is a broker, he believes it wouldn’t be able to argue its claim.

He pointed to a judge’s decision last month in the SEC’s suit against Coinbase, which determined the SEC failed to allege Coinbase conducted brokerage activity through its decentralized Coinbase Wallet.

Magazine: Crypto regulation — Does SEC Chair Gary Gensler have the final say?"
"[INST] Solana's mainnet beta update v1.17.31 aims to resolve congestion issues [/INST] Solana developers have released a mainnet beta update, v1.17.31, to deal with the ongoing network congestion on the Solana blockchain.

The update was released on April 12, and now, after three days of testing, it is being recommended for general use by mainnet beta validators.

This patch contains enhancements that will help with some of the ongoing network congestion and will be followed by further enhancements in v1.18.

The current version will help improve the network congestion and issues with the open interest jump. Some of the key upgrades include:

Show staked vs. non-staked packets sent down/throttled

Quic: use smallvec to aggregate chunks, save 1 alloc per packet

BankingStage Forwarding Filter

Tighten the minimal streams per 100ms for staked node

Treat super low staked as unstaked in streamer QOS

Default staked client in LocalCluster

Solana developer Anza asked validators to upgrade the latest patch only when there’s less than a 5% delinquent stake.

Delinquency on Solana refers to inactive validators, and the percentage refers to the total stake for offline validators. Thus, validators are requested to install the updates only when there are less than 5% inactive validator stakes on the network.

Related: Over $1B in US Treasurys have now been tokenized on-chain

Amid a growing network activity and memecoin frenzy, Solana network faced congestion issues for nearly a week with a transaction failure rate as high as 75%. While developers were working on the fix, a co-founder of Solana noted that the ongoing network congestion issues were merely a bug rather than a network issue.

The Solana Foundation attributed current network congestion problems to various factors, including a large demand for Solana block space and a delayed implementation of patches to tackle network-related issues.

Solana Foundation strategy lead Austin Federa told Cointelegraph that developers had been working non-stop to fix the issue, but the network demand has outpaced the timely developer intervention.

Federa added that engineers had “not been sleeping much” as they readied patches and tested features before they hit mainnet.

However, Solana devs have developed a series of patches to tackle the ongoing issue, with the first released for developers on April 15.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments — Trezor CEO"
"[INST] Spot Bitcoin ETFs regain traction, posting $418M net inflows [/INST] Fresh capital is flowing back into United States spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) following a five-day span of consecutive net outflows.

Led by strong inflows into BlackRock’s and Fidelity’s funds, the 10 recently approved spot Bitcoin ETFs saw a combined net inflow of $418 million on March 26, according to Farside Investors data.

Bitcoin ETF flows (USD). Source: Farside Investors

Fidelity’s fund generated its largest daily inflow since March 13, notching $279.1 million on March 26 — as the investment giant snapped up an additional 4,000 BTC. This marked the second consecutive day the fund has seen inflows exceeding $260 million.

Fidelity FBTC flows. Source: HODL15Capital

Additionally, BlackRock’s fund attracted inflows of $162.2 million. However, its daily inflows remain low compared to inflows earlier this month, which averaged over $300 million per day.

Ark 21Shares Bitcoin ETF fund had its best day since March 12, notching $73.6 million in inflows, while Invesco Galaxy, Franklin Templeton and Valkyrie all saw more than $26 million worth of inflows across their respective funds.

Meanwhile, Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) continued to bleed — notching a daily outflow of $212 million; however, it was not enough to outweigh the net inflows of its competitors.

Since converting from a trust to an ETF on Jan. 11, Grayscale has shed a whopping 277,393 BTC worth roughly $19.5 billion at current prices.

Related: Hashdex’s new spot Bitcoin ETF to begin US trading on Wednesday

In a March 26 post to X, Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas noted the presence of Bitcoin ETFs in a chart of the largest 30 asset funds in their first 50 days of trading.

Four Bitcoin ETFs made the list of global funds with BlackRock’s IBIT and Fidelity’s FBTC “in a league of their own,” he exclaimed.

Balchunas noted that even the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) — currently the 18th-largest Bitcoin ETF by assets under management — was larger than the world’s largest SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) fund.

Crypto asset management firm Hashdex claimed its place as the 11th spot Bitcoin ETF issuer in the U.S. on March 26 after announcing the conversion of its futures fund to a spot product, which now trades under the ticker DEFI.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments: Trezor CEO"
"[INST] Binance exec remains in jail as bail appeal fails again [/INST] A Federal High Court in Abuja, Nigeria has once again postponed the bail application hearing for Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan, who remains in custody at the Kuje correctional center.

Originally set for April 18, the court has rescheduled the hearing for April 22, according to local news agency Nairametrics.

During the court session, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) told the court that Gambaryan’s lawyer submitted an additional affidavit to his bail application on April 16.

Senior counsel E. Iheanacho highlighted new points raised by the defense, requiring time for a proper response in the pursuit of justice.

The judge presiding over the case, Justice Emeka Nwite, agreed to postpone the proceedings. However, Gambaryan’s lawyer, Mark Mordi, emphasized that his client has been held in federal government custody for over 14 days.

He criticized the prosecution for failing to file a response to the additional affidavit submitted with his bail application.

Tigran Gambaryan leaving the court as his bail hearing adjourned at the federal high court in Abuja, Nigeria on April 18. Source: Nairametrics

The trial judge remanded the Binance executive after he pleaded not guilty to money laundering charges by the EFCC. The agency accused Binance, Gambaryan and Nadeem Anjarwalla of concealing the source of $35.4 million revenue in Nigeria, alleging it was the proceeds of unlawful activity.

Following the court’s acceptance of the EFCC’s arraignment of the defendants, Mordi requested the court to provide his client bail under lenient conditions.

Related: Nigeria’s crypto reputation will prevail despite recent setbacks — Exchange exec

The court allowed the EFCC to hold the Binance executives for 14 days and ordered Binance to give the government access to data and details of Nigerian traders using its platform.

Binance and its executives are dealing with two distinct lawsuits: one from the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) related to tax evasion and another from the EFCC accusing them of money laundering and foreign exchange violations.

However, Gambaryan is also suing the government for violating his fundamental human rights. Gambaryan’s motion claims that his detention in Nigeria and the confiscation of his passport violates the country’s constitution, which guarantees an individual’s right to personal liberty.

On Feb. 28, Nigerian officials arrested the two high-ranking Binance executives — Anjarwalla, a 37-year-old British-Kenyan overseeing operations in Africa; and Gambaryan, a 39-year-old American — during a visit to Nigeria.

The arrest came after the federal government banned cryptocurrency channels as part of a campaign to curb currency speculation. However, Anjarwalla escaped detention using a fake passport.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime"
"[INST] SEC defers decision on Bitwise, Grayscale Bitcoin ETF options [/INST] The United States securities regulator has delayed its decision on whether to allow the New York Stock Exchange to offer options trading on spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs.

According to the April 8 filing, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s pushback will impact options trading on the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB), the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) and any other trust that holds Bitcoin on the NYSE.

“The Commission finds it appropriate to designate a longer period within which to take action on the proposed rule change so that it has sufficient time to consider the proposed rule change,” the securities regulator said.

The next deadline for the SEC to either approve, deny or delay the proposed rule change on the NYSE is on May 29.

The securities regulator reached the same outcome for Nasdaq last month, which requested options trading on BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).

Options are derivative products that provide traders leverage and let them make directional bets on the market.

If a trader thought Bitcoin’s price would rise, they could pay a premium, buy a “call option,” and agree to buy 1 BTC at today’s price in a month’s time while putting down less money than would be needed to buy 1 BTC.

If Bitcoin rises over the month, the trader could use their option, buy Bitcoin at the lower price, and maybe sell it for a profit. If it sinks, they’d likely just let the contract expire and forfeit the premium paid.

Related: Despite 23% gains, Bitcoin options traders still not bullish

Grayscale’s CEO, Michael Sonnenshein, is one of two people who wrote to the SEC requesting the rule change to be approved.

In a Feb. 28 letter, Sonnenshein argued there’s no reason to knockback options trading on the spot Bitcoin ETFs as the SEC has already approved Bitcoin futures ETFs and spot Bitcoin ETFs on the NYSE.

“The natural next step is the approval of options on spot Bitcoin ETPs.”

The approval of options for spot Bitcoin ETFs would also “contribute to a robust and healthy market,” Sonnenshein also said in a Feb. 5 X post.

NYSE filed a 19b-4 form proposing options trading on Bitcoin ETFs on Jan. 12, while Nasdaq and Cboe made their own proposals on Jan. 19 — nine days after the SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs on several stock exchanges.

Magazine: Wolf Of All Streets worries about a world where Bitcoin hits $1M: Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Microsoft AI to make long-term investments in the UK — CEO [/INST] Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) arm is making a long-term bet on the United Kingdom as it launches its new AI hub in London.

In a blog post, Microsoft AI executive vice president and CEO Mustafa Suleyman said the company plans to invest long-term in the region. He wrote:

“There is an enormous pool of AI talent and expertise in the U.K., and Microsoft AI plans to make a significant, long-term investment in the region as we begin hiring the best AI scientists and engineers into this new AI hub.”

The executive said the company will actively hire “passionate innovators” who want to contribute to their goals in the coming weeks and months. Suleyman said these individuals will work on the “most interesting and challenging AI questions” of our time.

On March 19, Microsoft AI hired Suleyman to lead its AI initiatives as its CEO and executive vice president. Suleyman co-founded the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014.

Suleyman’s statements came as he announced the creation of an AI hub in the United Kingdom. The hub’s goal is to advance AI language models and their infrastructure.

In addition, it would also create tooling for foundation models and collaborate with their AI teams across the globe and its partners like OpenAI.

Community members met the move with enthusiasm. On X, Neil Cameron described the development as a “huge win for the ecosystem” in the United Kingdom.

Tom Tugendhat, a member of the U.K. parliament, said that it’s a vote of confidence in the U.K. as a global hub for AI.

Related: First VR developer integrates with OpenAI, setting stage for no-code VR development

United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has shown positive interest in AI and sees it as one of the pieces that would contribute to his legacy. On Oct. 26, 2023, Sunak delivered a speech expressing his belief in the potential of AI technology. He said:

“I genuinely believe that technologies like AI will bring a transformation as far-reaching as the industrial revolution, the coming of electricity, or the birth of the internet.”

Apart from the U.K., Canada is also getting a boost to its AI sector. On April 7, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled a $1.76 billion budget to boost the country’s AI sector and maintain its competitiveness on the global stage.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Indonesia to implement regulatory sandbox for crypto assets [/INST] The Indonesian Financial Services Authority (OJK) said that local financial services institutions offering new products and services must be included in the regulatory sandbox or leave room for testing upcoming innovations, including crypto asset products.

According to a report by local Indonesian media outlet DetikFinance, once regulated and supervised, crypto assets will also need to go through a regulatory sandbox in the future.

This means crypto firms in the sandbox stage will have to be evaluated by the regulator before being approved to operate in the country.

Regulatory sandboxes are typically tools for businesses to test and experiment with new innovative products or services for a limited period.

Hasan Fawzi, the head of the country’s supervision of the financial sector technology innovation, digital financial assets and crypto assets, said that crypto assets have been included in the regulatory sandbox in an effort to eradicate fraudulent investments.

“I think this is our spirit at OJK, especially in consumer protection and education. We really hope that all of our regulatory mechanisms will be present and have a direct impact on preventing fraudulent investments.”

Related: SBI expands Ripple remittance tech to banks in Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines

As a part of this announcement, the OJK will take over regulation of the crypto industry starting in January 2025. Currently, it is under the jurisdiction of the country’s commodities agency, known as Bappebti.

Indonesia classifies crypto assets as commodities, though when moved to OJK’s governance, it is speculated that they may be reconsidered as financial instruments.

The crypto landscape in Indonesia has been heating up over the last year, with a pro-crypto candidate elected vice president in the most recent presidential elections.

During his election campaign, Gibran Rakabuming Raka vowed to prepare blockchain, crypto, artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity experts that would encourage local youth in the digital space.

In 2023, the country launched its landmark national crypto exchange — the Indonesian Crypto Asset Futures Exchange — monitored by local regulators.

It serves as the country’s sole platform for the legal exchange of digital assets. It has also begun conducting blockchain trials in public services.

Earlier in March, Indonesian officials were reportedly considering changes to its dual taxation on crypto, urging a reevaluation of the country’s current 0.1% capital gains tax and 0.11% VAT on crypto transactions.

Magazine: Owner of seven-trait CryptoPunk Seedphrase partners with Sotheby’s: NFT Collector"
"[INST] $2.7T general insurance industry meets tokenized RWAs: Nayms joins Cointelegraph Accelerator [/INST] Cointelegraph has announced that Nayms, an on-chain insurance marketplace that matches brokers and underwriters with crypto capital providers, has joined the Cointelegraph Accelerator program.

The insurance industry is a major market that can benefit from the blockchain revolution. Faced with many challenges, including costs, discerning customers and fraud, the insurance sector has immense potential for a blockchain-powered disruption.

Blockchain’s potential to revolutionize insurance

According to reports, blockchain can pave the way for a $32.9 billion market for the insurance world by 2031. The distributed and transparent nature of the technology enables a comprehensive, secure and interoperable repository of insurance-related information. This is where the idea of a blockchain-based digital insurance marketplace came to life in Nayms.

Nayms facilitates the connection between capital providers and brokers by utilizing segregated accounts established by third-party Sponsors to tailor specific insurance solutions. Sponsors submit detailed business plans, which, upon approval, lead to the issuance of participation tokens.

Participation tokens represent a contractual interest in the assets and liabilities of a segregated account and are sold only in Nayms’ matching market, allowing investors to fund the accounts with crypto. The capital raised supports the underwriting of blockchain-specific risks, with insurance contracts crafted using Nayms’ Policy Builder. Nayms oversees the management of claims against these accounts, including via designated third-party administrators, ensuring adherence to underwriting guidelines and policy wordings.

Nayms streamlines the process, securely linking capital providers to insurance risks via smart contracts, which automate transactions while maintaining transparency and compliance.

Tokenization to democratize insurance

Tokenization facilitates easy entry and exit for investors, increasing liquidity and enabling a broader base of participants to share in the risk and rewards. Additionally, Nayms targets blockchain-specific risks, such as those associated with cryptocurrency exchanges, custodians and DeFi smart contracts, which represent billions in uninsured value.

Offering crypto-based policies minimizes currency risk for blockchain and crypto businesses while providing traditional coverage types like directors and officers against governance-related liabilities and errors and omissions insurance for professional mistakes.

Nayms operates under the regulatory framework of the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA), the financial watchdog in Bermuda, which was one of the first places to implement a regulatory framework for digital assets. Nayms holds both a Class F license under the Digital Asset Business Act 2018 and a Class IIGB license under the Insurance Act 1978. Registered as a segregated accounts company, Nayms utilizes the legal structure to issue segregated accounts for different risk pools — each insulated from others — allowing for precise risk management and operational efficiency.

The platform integrates the NAYM governance token to align incentives among marketplace participants, enhancing the ecosystem’s functionality by linking rewards to marketplace performance through staking. While the token incentivizes participation and governance within the platform, it’s distinct from participation tokens used for capitalization in insurance operations.

NAYM token offers benefits like staking and voting on governance issues related to the Nayms Liquidity Facility (NLF), which provides primary capital to and liquidity for the secondary market on the Nayms marketplace. The model allows Nayms to blend decentralized finance (DeFi) elements with traditional regulatory compliance, ensuring a secure and innovative insurance marketplace.

Using blockchain tokenization, Nayms is working with over 20 partners and a global team with the aim of bringing liquidity to insurance as an asset class, enabling over $1 trillion of alternative capital in digital assets to access this risk."
"[INST] South African exchange VALR wins dual crypto licenses [/INST] South African cryptocurrency exchange VALR has been granted new crypto asset service provider (CASP) licenses from the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) following new requirements for industry firms.

VALR — which secured $55 million of equity funding from Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures and others — received Category I and II CASP licenses from the FSCA. This makes VALR one of the first cryptocurrency companies in the country to receive both licenses.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, VALR co-founder and CEO Farzam Ehsani said securing a CASP license from the FSCA was a significant milestone for the exchange.

The company has been actively working with South African regulators to draft and implement a regulatory regime that fosters the growth of the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector while ensuring investor protection.

Related: South Africa to mandate crypto exchange licenses by end of 2023: Report

“Our license underscores our unwavering dedication to compliance, security, and providing a trustworthy platform for the crypto community. We welcome this regulatory milestone for South Africa and applaud the regulators for taking this important step for the nation,” Ehsani said.

The FSCA opened license applications in June 2023, giving crypto asset service providers six months to apply for a license to comply with South African regulations. Companies had until Nov. 2023 to apply and would be regulated under the country’s Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act.

Ehsani also explained the difference between the two categories of licenses. A CAT I license is the standard financial service provider (FSP) license required for a CASP in South Africa to provide advice or exchange services to its customers.

“A CAT II license, or discretionary mandate license, enables customers to give VALR and other licensed CAT II FSPs a mandate to use its discretion to structure the customer’s portfolio for example. This allows VALR to explore exciting product categories such as bundled offerings,” Ehsani said.

The act aims to protect customers and investors and enable regulators to take enforcement action for compliance failures. South Africa became the first African country to formally license cryptocurrency exchanges through regulatory frameworks that have been in development since 2021.

Related: South Africa begins licensing crypto exchanges as applications pile up

As previously reported, the FSCA approved 59 license applications from cryptocurrency platforms in March 2024. At the time of the initial Reuters report, the FSCA was processing 262 licensing applications from crypto exchanges out of 355 applicants.

In January 2023, South Africa’s Advertising Regulatory Board also updated its requirements to address the rising popularity of cryptocurrency investing. The rule changes were aimed at protecting consumers from unethical advertising.

A new clause in Section III of the country’s advertising code requires companies and individuals in South Africa to abide by certain advertising standards regarding the provision of cryptocurrency products and services.

Adverts, including cryptocurrency offerings, must “expressly and clearly” state that investments may result in the loss of capital “as the value is variable and can go up as well as down.“

Advertising for particular services and products must be “easily understandable” for intended audiences. Adverts must also give balanced messages around returns, features, benefits and risks associated with the associated product or service. Social media influencers also have to abide by the amended rules.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Crypto liquidity firm GSR secures MPI license in Singapore [/INST] Crypto trading firm and liquidity provider GSR Markets received its full major payment institution (MPI) license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

On April 4, GSR reportedly secured the license after receiving an in-principle approval in October 2023. GSR Singapore CEO Xin Song claimed that GSR is the first of its kind to receive the MPI license in the country.

MPI-licensed companies in Singapore are authorized to conduct multiple payment services and exceed volume limitations for payment firms.

Major payment institution license benefits in Singapore. Source: MAS

Licensed companies can exceed the 3 million Singapore dollars ($2.2 million) volume limit for a payment service and the monthly limit of 6 million SG$ ($4.4 million) for two or more payment services.

In the case of GSR, the license would allow the company to conduct its over-the-counter (OTC) spot and market-making services under the purview of Singapore’s central bank.

The company was founded in the United States in 2013 and facilitates OTC crypto trading, derivatives, market making and venture capital investments. It also holds money service business licenses across several states in the United States.

Singapore’s regulatory efforts allow financial institutions to explore blockchain-based technologies to position the country as a digital asset hub.

As a result, many crypto companies targeting the region have pushed to acquire the MPI license to offer their services within the country.

In 2023, Crypto.com, Coinbase and Ripple received formal approval for their MPI licenses in Singapore. Crypto.com obtained its license in June, while Ripple and Coinbase received an official nod in October.

In 2024, crypto exchange OKX and crypto custodian BitGo received in-principle approvals for the MPI license in Singapore. BitGo received the initial nod in January, while OKX received its initial approval in March.

Related: Singapore police recommend hardware wallets against crypto drainers

While Singapore supports crypto innovation, the country is cracking down on retail speculation and is extending the scope of its laws.

After receiving feedback on its proposed digital payment token (DPT) regulations, MAS laid down measures to discourage retail investors from speculating in crypto investments.

On Nov. 24, MAS published five ways for DPT service providers to discourage retail clients from engaging in price speculation.

More recently, Singapore’s central bank expanded the scope of its Payment Services Act. On April 2, MAS said that it had brought several activities under the scope of the Payment Services Act.

This includes custodial services for DPTs, facilitating token transfers and exchange and cross-border fund transfers.

Magazine: KuCoin’s desperate $10M airdrop, 1 tweet raises $37M for memecoin: Asia Express"
"[INST] US gov’t among states with largest Bitcoin holdings — Arkham [/INST] The United States government is one of the biggest cryptocurrency holders alongside other global states like the United Kingdom and Germany, according to data from Arkham.

Arkham, a crypto intelligence platform focused on deanonymizing entities on the blockchain network, has introduced a dashboard featuring the governments with the largest crypto holdings.

Announcing the news on April 12, Arkham said that the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany are “some of the largest countries” in terms of crypto holdings.

With the new Arkham tracking tool, individuals can observe the real-time balance and transaction history for cryptocurrencies held by governments.

According to the data, the U.S. government is the biggest Bitcoin (BTC) whale among global states tracked by Arkham, holding as much as 212,847 BTC at the time of writing, worth around $15 billion based on the current prices.

In addition to BTC, the U.S. government also holds around $200 million in other cryptocurrencies like Ether (ETH), as well as major stablecoins like USDC (USDC) and Tether (USDT).

Top governments by Bitcoin holdings. Source: Arkham

The U.K. government, ranked second, holds 61,245 BTC at the time of writing, worth around $4.5 billion, according to Arkham’s data. The German government owns 49,858 BTC, equivalent to roughly $3.5 billion at the time of writing.

The government of El Salvador — the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender in September 2021 — holds significantly less BTC than other countries tracked by Arkham.

According to the data, the Salvadoran government holds 5,717 BTC, worth $405 million at the time of writing.

Related: Queensland law enforcement agency calls for more powers to seize crypto

The release of Arkham’s dashboard of top governments by Bitcoin holdings marks an important milestone in transparency of cryptocurrency assets owned by whales like country states.

At the same time, it has been a while since the public found out about massive BTC holdings by the United States government.

The dashboard also points to the fact that the U.S. continued to accumulate Bitcoin in the past few years. Since early 2023, the U.S. government has added at least 5,000 BTC, based on Arkham’s data and previous reports.

A significant part of the U.S. government Bitcoin holdings comes from confiscations related to darkweb market Silk Road, its hacker Jimmy Zhong, as well as the hackers of crypto exchange Bitfinex.

Magazine: Synthetix founder: It’s DeFi that’s wrong, not the market"
"[INST] BlackRock smashes $10.5T record in Q1 managed assets [/INST] Major Bitcoin (BTC) investor BlackRock continues to build momentum, posting another successful quarter of income and managed assets.

BlackRock issued its financial results for the first quarter of 2024 on April 12, reporting a record $10.5 trillion in assets under management (AUM), up $1.4 trillion from 2023.

The company’s diluted earnings per share surged from $7.9 million in Q1 2023 to $9.81 million in Q1 2024.

The increase reflects higher non-operating income and a lower effective tax rate in the current quarter, the firm noted. Net income increased from $1.2 billion in Q1 2023 to roughly $1.5 billion in Q1 2024.

In the report, BlackRock also mentioned that the company issued $3 billion of debt to fund a portion of the cash consideration for the planned acquisition of Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), an infrastructure investment fund focused on equity and selected debt investments.

BlackRock previously announced an agreement to acquire GIP as part of its Q4 2023 report, targeting the creation of a new infrastructure investment platform.

BlackRock’s record-breaking AUM came amid the company handling $76 billion of quarterly long-term net inflows, which already accounts for nearly 40% of full-year 2023 levels.

“BlackRock’s momentum continues to build, with accelerating client activity and line of sight into the funding of significant wealth, institutional, and Aladdin mandates,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said.

The CEO mentioned that BlackRock sees significant growth potential in infrastructure, technology, retirement and whole portfolio solutions, adding:

“Clients are turning to BlackRock to unlock the full potential of their portfolios, reflected in industry-leading total net inflows of $236 billion over the last twelve months.”

BlackRock is a major player in the cryptocurrency industry, operating one of the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).

Related: Circle enables USDC transfers for BlackRock’s first tokenized fund

As of April 10, IBIT has accumulated 266,580 BTC worth $18.5 billion since it started trading in January 2024.

Fink is known in the crypto community as a major Bitcoin bull and industry advocate. In March 2024, Fink reiterated that he was very bullish on the long-term success of Bitcoin in the context of the rapid growth of IBIT.

“IBIT is the fastest growing ETF in the history of ETFs. Nothing has gained assets as fast as IBIT in the history of ETFs,” the CEO stated.

Magazine: Ghostface Killah Ordinals drop today, Women & Weapons… violent? NFT Collector"
"[INST] BlackRock, Grayscale have to wait for SEC’s spot ETH ETF decisions [/INST] The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will delay its decisions on the BlackRock and Grayscale applications for spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The SEC released notices of the delay in the Grayscale decision and the amending of the BlackRock application just hours after the agency pushed back its decision on Franklin Templeton’s proposed spot ETH ETF.

The SEC decision on converting digital asset manager Grayscale’s ETH Trust to a spot ETH exchange-traded product on NYSE Arca was due on April 24, but will now be extended 60 days to June 23.

“The Commission finds that it is appropriate to designate a longer period within which to issue an order approving or disapproving the proposed rule change so that it has sufficient time to consider the proposed rule change, as modified by Amendment No. 1,” the agency wrote in its notice on April 23. It published the notice of Grayscale’s amendment filing on April 2. The amendment strengthened Grayscale’s arguments, but did not materially change its proposal.

Related: Ether ETFs will ‘probably be rejected’ in May — VanEck CEO

The SEC is now expected to make a decision on the Franklin Templeton application by June 11.

Also on April 23, Grayscale filed an S-3 form, which is similar to the S-1 but shorter, for a Grayscale ETH Trust and an S-1 for a Grayscale ETH Mini Trust.

SEC notice of filing of BlackRock amendment. Source: sec.gov

BlackRock filed an S-1 application for a spot ETH ETF in November. The decision on the BlackRock application was delayed in March. Later that month, the SEC pushed back decisions on Hashdex and ARK 21 spot ETH ETF applications by two months to late May.

BlackRock filed the amendment to the application on April 19. The April 23 SEC notice details the changes found in the amendment, which mainly concern the creation and redemption of shares. It also extends the comment period on the proposal for 21 days after its publication in the Federal Register. No new deadline for an SEC decision on it was specified.

Source: Eleanor Terrett

Observers say the SEC is unengaged with spot ETH ETF applications, which many interpret to be a sign of looming rejection.

Grayscale won a victory over the SEC in August when an appeals court partially overturned the SEC's rejection of its application to convert its over-the-counter Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) into a listed Bitcoin (BTC) ETF.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments: Trezor CEO"
"[INST] Blockchain for Good Alliance launches at Blockchain Life Dubai [/INST] The Blockchain for Good Alliance (BGA) announced its official launch on April 15, at the Blockchain Life Dubai event.

Describing itself as a “collaborative network of organizations, projects, and individuals committed to leveraging blockchain technology to solve global social, environmental, and economic challenges,” the BGA has partnered with blockchain-based organizations of nearly every stripe.

These include Bybit Web3, Solana Foundation, Aptos, Moledao, Harvard Blockchain Club, ICP.Hub UAE, American University of Sharjah (AUS), Coineasy, Libera, Edu3Labs, Alchemy Pay, Bu Zhi DAO and XueDAO.

The newly launched organization will work as an incubator for blockchain tech, according to its website. It’ll provide networking opportunities connecting builders with mentors, resources, and events.

A spokesperson named Abbie, a representative of the Harvard Blockchain Club, said in a statement that:

""We are thrilled to be a part of the Blockchain for Good Alliance (BGA) launch. Through our commitment to exploring university initiatives such as establishing a blockchain publication repository and supporting BGA's impactful projects, we aim to foster a culture of innovation and collaboration within our academic community.”

Blockchain social platform Moledao, a BGA partner, described the alliance as a path towards mass adoption in a YouTube video posted on April 14.

The concept of “blockchain for good” was recently studied by Italian researcher Silvia Semenzin, at the GRASIA Research Group, Institute of Knowledge Technology, Complutense University of Madrid, in a research article posted to Sage Journals.

According to Semenzin, many initiatives to “do good” through the use of blockchain technology are either motivated by profit seeking or largely ignorant to the realities of disparate class financial relativities.

The Blockchain for Good Alliance will operate as a non-profit, something that should largely assuage the typical concerns associated with tech-based endeavors to do good.

Related: Over half of U.S. charities now accept cryptocurrency donations

Lily Liu, President of Solana Foundation, said in a statement that this collaboration “enhances our commitment to harnessing blockchain for global benefit.” She added that the platform would drive “impactful change,” by joining the partners together:

“This has opened doors for innovative public infrastructure projects such as Helium and Hivemapper, where users not only contribute but also earn from their participation. Moreover, Solana's technology facilitates accessible cross-border remittances and new financial products, making it a pivotal player in creating a more inclusive financial system.”"
"[INST] US senators introduce new stablecoin bill [/INST] United States Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cynthia Lummis have introduced legislation establishing a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins.

In an April 17 announcement, the two U.S. Senators said they had introduced the Lummis-Gillibrand Payment Stablecoin Act, a bill the lawmakers had been drafting for months and expected to make public in 2024. According to Gillibrand and Lummis, the legislation prohibited “unbacked, algorithmic stablecoins” — likely a nod at TerraUSD (UST) depegging from the U.S. dollar in 2022 — required one-to-one reserves for issuers, created state and federal regulatory regimes for firms and prevented illicit uses of stablecoins.

“Passing a regulatory framework for stablecoins is absolutely critical to maintaining the U.S. dollar’s dominance, promoting responsible innovation, protecting consumers and cracking down on money laundering and illicit finance,” said Senator Gillibrand. “To draft the strongest bill possible, our offices worked closely with the relevant federal and state agencies and I’m confident this legislation can earn the necessary support in the Senate and the House.”

According to the text of the 179-page bill, state non-depository trust companies would be allowed to issue up to $10 billion in payment stablecoins, with authorized institutions able to issue stablecoins “up to any amount” under a limited-purpose state charter. The legislation also aimed to uphold the current system of state and federal charters and established rules on custody for non-depository trust companies.

“Proper custody practices for issuers are essential, especially in light of FTX,” said a one-page document explaining the bill.

In October 2023, Senator Lummis called for the Justice Department to take action against stablecoin issuer Tether for allegedly facilitating funds Hamas used following the terrorist group’s attack on Israel. She has previously worked with Senator Gillibrand to introduce crypto-focused legislation, including one bill to establish a comprehensive framework clarifying the roles of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission in regulating digital assets.

Related: Is a US stablecoin bill just around the corner? Law Decoded

Lummis and Gillibrand had been teasing the legislation amid concerns from many lawmakers and industry leaders about establishing guardrails for stablecoin issuers in the United States. The House of Representatives took one such bill, the Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act, out of committee in July 2023. Though the legislation appears to be ready for a full floor vote, it has seen little if any, movement in months.

Senator Sherrod Brown, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, reportedly said on April 16 that a stablecoin bill would be one of his goals in the legislative session, provided his concerns were addressed. He did not specifically mention Lummis’ or Gillibrand’s efforts at the time.

Magazine: Lawmakers’ fear and doubt drives proposed crypto regulations in US"
"[INST] Is Bitcoin’s pre-halving retrace over? 52K BTC accumulated on Sunday alone [/INST] Bitcoin’s (BTC) pre-halving retrace may already be over following one of the largest accumulation days in years, which saw Bitcoin reclaiming the $71,000 price level.

On March 25, blockchain analytics firm Santiment reported that Bitcoin just “caught traders off guard” with a rebound as “key stakeholders” had a huge accumulation day over the weekend.

Wallets, which it terms “sharks” and “whales,” holding between 10 and 10,000 coins accumulated 51,959 BTC on March 24, worth around $3.4 billion at the time, the firm revealed. It added that this equates to 0.263% of the entire currently available supply being accumulated in one day.

As the Bitcoin halving approaches, three weeks away on or around April 19, “it would be unsurprising to see these wallets continue to grow, resulting in a positive impact on crypto-wide market caps,” it noted.

Source: Santiment

Crypto analysts were concerned about a more sizeable pre-halving retrace, assuming that history would rhyme with previous market cycles. However, BTC only fell around 17% from its March 14 all-time high of $73,738, dipping to $61,494 on March 20, according to CoinGecko.

Technical analyst Rekt Capital said that if this ends up being the end of the pre-halving retrace, Bitcoin will have almost equaled the 2020 pre-halving retrace.

“Bitcoin pulled back -18% in this cycle whereas BTC retraced just over -19% in 2020,” he noted.

The analyst had previously predicted that this pre-halving retrace “would more likely be on the shallower side than on the deeper side” and could also be much shorter than has otherwise been the case historically.

Related: Trading Bitcoin’s halving: 3 traders share their thoughts

Reporting on market volatility and last week’s dip on March 25, crypto research firm Kaiko revealed that after an analysis of buy and sell orders, “selling intensified following the U.S. market close.”

It concluded that “liquidity in the cryptocurrency market is not only fragmented across exchanges but also across trading pairs.”

BTC was trading up 5.2% on the day at $70,252 at the time of writing after hitting an intraday high of $71,000 in late trading on March 25.

Magazine: ‘Am I sorry? No’ — 3AC founder. $6B BTC laundered for fast food worker: Asia Express"
"[INST] Dogwifhat en route to $10? WIF is now the third-biggest memecoin as whales hold tight [/INST] Dogwifhat (WIF), a Solana-based memecoin, became the third-largest memecoin by market capitalization on March 29, surpassing Pepe (PEPE).

WIF price surpasses $4, largest whale not selling

The price of Dogwifhat hit a new all-time high of $4.64 on March 30 before retracing to its current $4.32 mark as of 2:00 pm UTC, according to CoinMarketCap data.

WIF/USDT, 1-day chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Following an over 87% weekly rally, Dogwifhat became the third-largest memecoin with a $4.3 billion market cap, surpassing Pepe (PEPE), which has a market cap of $3.4 billion. This makes WIF the 31st-largest cryptocurrency.

Top memecoins by market capitalization. Source: CoinMarketCap

Despite WIF rising over 431% during the past month, the largest holder is still not selling.

The wallet is holding a total of $139.5 million worth of WIF tokens, bought at an average price of $0.32, with a current unrealized profit of $127.3 million, according to Coinstats.

Largest WIF holder address. Source: Coinstats

Dogwifhat’s price hit its previous peak of $3 on March 14 after fans raised over $700,000 to advertise the token’s logo on the Las Vegas sphere. WIF’s price rose 25% immediately after the crowdfunding effort was announced.

Related: How high can Bitcoin go? New BTC price prediction sees cycle top at $180K

Can WIF price rally to $10?

Shortly before hitting the $3 mark for the first time, Arthur Hayes predicted that the Solana-based memecoin would rally to the $10 mark. Hayes, the former CEO of BitMEX and current chief investment officer at Maelstrom, wrote in a March 14 X post:

“The hat stays on while I count to $10.”

Dogwifhat is not the first dog-themed memecoin to reach multibillion-dollar valuations despite being based on an internet meme. Dogecoin (DOGE) reached a record $75.2 billion market capitalization in May 2021 and is currently worth $30.2 billion.

Dogwifhat price would be $30.8 per token to match DOGE’s market cap, an eightfold increase, which isn’t uncommon in the memecoin world.

During the 2021 bull market, Dogecoin price rose over 892% in the month leading up to its all-time high, from $0.07433 on April 12, 2021, to $0.7376 on May 6.

DOGE/USDT, 1-week chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] ‘Penny hasn’t dropped’ for Australia’s next crypto unicorns — Coinbase APAC MD [/INST] Australia is primed for its next wave of crypto “unicorns” — startups with a billion-dollar valuation — but not until there is more regulatory clarity around crypto, according to Coinbase’s APAC managing director John O’Loghlen.

“I don’t think the penny’s dropped in Canberra or on the high street in terms of just how much great human capital there is in Australia,” O’Loghlen told Cointelegraph — referring to policymakers and large institutional players.

“It’s really important that we get this clarity in legislation around digital assets so that the sector can be properly funded and give the VC community and other investors certainty around it so that we can keep building the next Illuvium or Immutable.”

While O’Logheln acknowledged there while there had been some regulatory advancements — including the Treasury’s October 2023 consultation paper and an informal regulatory meeting with policymakers at the Blockchain APAC Summit in March — he says it’s still lagging behind a huge uptick in retail and institutional demand for crypto.

According to a 2024 investor survey from Australian crypto exchange Independent Reserve, approximately 27.5% of all Australians — 7.15 million people — now own cryptocurrency. The survey found that 35% of all Australian crypto investors put around $500 per month into digital assets.

27.5% of Australians currently own crypto. Source: Independent Reserve

O’Loghlen also pointed to the growing demand for the utility of stablecoins, digital remittances, and a swathe of other capital-efficient applications of crypto in the Australian fintech industry as prime breeding grounds for the next multi-billion crypto company.

“Some of these companies are really going to be next Canva, the next Xero, the next Atlassian, or the next Afterpay,” he said, naming several multibillion-dollar valuation companies in Australia.

O’Loghlen also sees a significant increase in demand for crypto products on the retail side — with two main sectors piquing his attention.

The first is from an increase in interest in self-managed retirement funds divesting into crypto, which O’Loghlen said were considerable, despite being small relative to the size of their portfolio.

“Even if it's [0.5%] or 1% allocation, when that audience invests, the size of that investment is a considerable multiple of the [younger] cohorts, because their assets under management are significantly sized.”

The next most interesting cohort of investors coming into the market is what O’Loghlen called “HENRYs” — an internal acronym that stands for “High Earners Not Rich Yet.”

“These are working professionals who don’t have a whole lot of debt, don’t have a don’t have a large mortgage — they’ve got good earning potential and they’re really taking time to educate themselves on crypto,” he said.

Related: Australians wouldn’t value retail CBDC for its privacy or safety, RBA finds

Looking ahead, O’Loghlen revealed that Coinbase would be looking to expand its Stand with Crypto campaign to Australia later this year.

He said Coinbase plans to fly in members of its senior leadership to host several events to better help regulators and policymakers understand the potential upsides to cryptocurrency in the country.

“It’s important that people in Canberra — government representatives and policymakers — can see the real use cases for entrepreneurs and founders who are saving money and getting utility out of crypto,” he said.

O’Loghlen’s comments echo those of Kraken Australia’s MD Johnathon Miller, who told Cointelegraph that current market conditions mark an “inflection point” for crypto in Australia.

Magazine: Synthetix founder Kain Warwick: It’s DeFi that’s wrong, not the market"
"[INST] Coinbase secures restricted dealer license in Canada [/INST] Update April 4, 14:00UTC: This article has been updated to include quotes from Coinbase.

The United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has secured restricted dealer licenses in Canada, doubling down on global expansion amid regulatory crackdown at home.

Coinbase has obtained a new license in Canada, becoming registered in Ontario as a restricted dealer under the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), the firm officially announced on April 3.

The new authorization officially established Coinbase as a legally operating cryptocurrency firm in Canada. ""The registration is the culmination of months of hard work, starting in March 2023 when we signed an Enhanced Pre-Registration Undertaking that signified our dedication to regulatory compliance and operational excellence,"" the announcement notes

According to CSA’s national registration data, there are two Coinbase-related entities registered in Canada, including Coinbase Incorporated, which is registered as a restricted dealer. The other one, Coinbase Canada, is registered as an international dealer.

Coinbase Canada and Coinbase Inc national registration data. Source: CSA

According to CSA, restricted dealer registration is “a special kind of dealing registration used for firms that do not quite fit under any other category.” Regulators establish individual requirements for firms with this status.

International dealers are not allowed to trade with Canadian customers in equity or debt securities of Canadian issuers other than government issuers, according to legal intelligence source JD Supra.

Coinbase’s new license in Canada is not the first big move by the crypto exchange in the country. The exchange officially launched in Canada in August 2023 and subsequently expanded its services to Canadians through a partnership with the local financial services firm Peoples Trust Company.

Related: Coinbase Wallet triumph over SEC allegations is a ‘giant win’ for DeFi

As of April 2024, Coinbase has a tech hub located in Canada with nearly 200 full-time local employees, the company said in the new announcement.

Some rival exchanges like Kraken have been taking steps to receive registered dealer registration in Canada. Kraken filed in March 2023 a pre-registration undertaking with the Ontario Securities Commission in Canada seeking restricted dealer status as well.

The move aimed to help Kraken comply with the CSA’s new guidance for crypto asset trading platforms issued in February 2023.

According to the new requirements, local crypto trading platforms should comply with stricter custody standards, restrictions on the use of leverage and a ban on trading stablecoins without prior written consent from the CSA.

Magazine: SBF gets 25 years in prison, Fidelity eyes ETH staking, and Coinbase’s court loss: Hodler’s Digest, March 24-30"
"[INST] Aave launches proposal to counter MakerDAO DAI expansion risk [/INST] Lending protocol Aave launched a new Aave Risk Framework Committee (ARFC) proposal to adjust the risk parameters of the Dai (DAI) stablecoin.

The Aave Chan Initiative (ACI) team put forward the proposal, suggesting that DAI’s loan-to-value ratio (LTV) be adjusted to 0% on all Aave deployments.

Part of the proposal released on April 2 suggests that sDAI incentives be removed from the Merit program, effective from Merit Round 2 and beyond.

This action aims to counteract MakerDAO’s recent aggressive D3M plan, which rapidly expanded the DAI credit line from zero to an estimated 600 million DAI within a month, potentially reaching 1 billion DAI soon.

The proposal seeks to reduce potential risks while minimally impacting users, given that just a fraction of DAI deposits serve as collateral on Aave, and users can readily switch to USD Coin (USDC) or Tether (USDT) as alternative collateral options.

Mark Zeller, founder of the Aave Chan Initiative, proposes changes to th Source: Aave

The proposal provides an example of risky minting practices on a smaller scale, such as with Angle’s AgEUR (EURA), which was minted into EULER and was hacked within a week.

Angle, an overcollateralized stablecoin protocol, and AgEUR, a decentralized euro stablecoin, exemplify the dangers of DAI’s stablecoin depegging when utilized as loan collateral on AAVE.

Decentralized finance protocol MakerDAO has started preparing to launch its highly anticipated “Endgame” transformation, which will focus the platform “toward scalable resilience and sustainable user growth,” according to co-founder Rune Christensen.

In forum posts dated March 12, Christensen announced the commencement of “launch season” for the decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol, outlining a five-phase plan.

Phase 1, scheduled for mid-2024, involves engaging an external marketing firm to rebrand the operation into a more straightforward and enjoyable concept.

Related: Floki Inu roadmap reveals plans for regulated bank accounts

The ultimate goal of the Endgame is to scale the protocol’s decentralized stablecoin, DAI, from its current $4.5-billion market capitalization to “100 billion and beyond,” on par with rival Tether’s USDT.

MakerDAO will redenominate each Maker (MKR) token into 24,000 NewGovTokens. Additionally, NewStable tokenholders not residing in the United States can also farm 600 million NewGovTokens annually.

On March 6, Eigenlayer flipped lending giant Aave to become the second-largest DeFi protocol, commanding $11.5 billion in total value locked (TVL), per DefiLlama — second only to Ethereum liquid staking protocol Lido.

Aave, meanwhile, has over 5,700 daily active users, while Lido has under 430, according to Token Terminal data.

Magazine: ‘Crypto is inevitable’ so we went ‘all in’ — Meet Vance Spencer, permabull"
"[INST] Bitget exchange volume topped $1.6T in Q1 [/INST] Futures and spot volume on crypto exchange Bitget topped $1.4 trillion and $160 billion in the first quarter, growing substantially from the $658 billion in futures trading volume and $59 billion in spot trading volume, respectively, in Q1 of 2023.

According to its Q1 2024 report released on April 11, the exchange now has more than 25 million users through its trading platform and Web3 wallet. “Q1 2024 has been notable for several key developments in crypto,” the exchange wrote, adding: “February saw a robust market recovery, with Bitcoin soaring to unprecedented heights. Together with the buzz around Solana and advancements in the AI [artificial intelligence] sector, this underscored the market’s dynamic nature.”

During the quarter, the exchange listed 186 new tokens, with Solana memecoin Dogwifhat (WIF) and rollup utility token Altlayer (ALT) witnessing gains of over 1,000% post-listing.

Bitget’s spot and futures trading volume 2023–2024

At the same time, the exchange’s native token, BGB, surged to an all-time high of $1.38 and a gain of over 400% year-over-year. The exchange is currently valued at $2.6 billion per its BGB market cap. By Q2, Bitget plans to roll out an additional BWB token as the native coin of its Web3 wallet. An airdrop for the event is currently ongoing.

According to research from CCData, the exchange’s derivatives market share grew by nearly 2.5% in March, the highest among all centralized exchanges. “Among the top 12 derivatives exchanges, Binance leads with a market share of 47.0% of total volumes in March,” researchers wrote. This was followed by OKX with a market share of 21.8% and Bitget with a dominance of 12.8%.” Simultaneously, the open interest of futures and derivatives on Binance, OKX and Bitget grew by 37.8%, 34.7% and 104%, respectively, in March 2024. CCData researchers noted:

“Across the three exchanges analyzed, funding rates increased significantly to new highs before falling to levels at the beginning of the month, as the market sentiment remained positive with Bitcoin nearing its all-time high. The funding rate on the exchanges was positive throughout the month, increasing steadily, highlighting the leverage in the market.”

On Jan. 16, Cointelegraph reported that Bitget pledged $10 million to help kickstart women-led startups in the Web3 and blockchain industry. At the time, Bitget staff said that the move was to “elevate blockchain knowledge and open up funding avenues for women” after noting that women-led crypto startups received less than 7% of overall venture funding.

Related: Bitget surpasses 20M users as wallet integration spurs trading volumes"
"[INST] Biden signs ‘terrifying’ bill giving US agencies more spying power [/INST] United States President Joe Biden has signed off on a controversial bill that expands the surveillance powers granted to U.S. government agencies, which critics worry could severely impact the privacy of American citizens.

On April 20, the U.S. Senate voted 60–34 in favor of passing legislation that reauthorizes, extends and amends Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for an additional two years. President Biden signed it into law a day later.

Champions of the bill, including President Biden and a swathe of members from both sides of the aisle, said the bill was essential in aiding counter-terrorism efforts and preserving the national security interests of the United States.

“Allowing FISA to expire would have been dangerous. It’s an important part of our national security toolkit and helps law enforcement stop terrorist attacks, drug trafficking, and violent extremism,” said Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking on the Senate floor.

The bill’s critics, however, said that the reauthorization and amendment of FISA would usher in a new era of surveillance and vastly expand spying powers afforded to government agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In an April 20 post to X, Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, lashed out at members who voted in favor of the bill, saying they had “sold out American civil liberties.”

“The provision effectively grants the NSA access to the communications equipment of almost any U.S. business, plus huge numbers of organizations and individuals. It’s a gift to any president who may wish to spy on political enemies, journalists, ideological opponents,” wrote Goitein.

“This is a shameful moment in the history of the United States Congress.”

Related: NSA ’just days from taking over the internet’ warns Edward Snowden

Currently, U.S. agencies such as the NSA can force internet service providers such as Google and Verizon to hand over sensitive data concerning their targets.

Now that the bill has been signed into law by President Biden, the U.S. government will be able to go far beyond its current scope of surveillance and force a swathe of companies and individuals providing internet-related services to assist with surveillance.

The bill initially received strong pushback from privacy-conscious Republicans and Democrats alike but was passed through the House of Representatives on April 13. An amendment to the bill — requesting that the security agencies require a warrant for all internet-based surveillance — was also shot down by a slim margin in the House.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said the reauthorization of FISA section 702 meant that America had “lost something important” and described the legislation as being unconstitutional.

On April 13, Senator Ron Wyden described the bill as one of the most “dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.”

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all — Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Crypto.com gets green light to trade in Dubai [/INST] Crypto.com’s Dubai-based entity, CRO DAX Middle East FZE, has secured full operational approval from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), making it the first crypto exchange to be allowed to operate with fiat currency in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

According to the April 9 announcement, the operational approval granted by VARA follows Crypto.com’s successful fulfillment of pre-operational conditions outlined in the virtual asset service provider license awarded to CRO DAX Middle East FZE in November 2023.

Crypto.com said its next step is to introduce its exchange for institutional investors. It will cater to institutional clients and qualified retail investors with services including spot trading, staking brokerage and over-the-counter (OTC) offerings around settlements for selected markets.

Eric Anziani, president and chief operating officer at Crypto.com, told Cointelegraph:

“Being the first global crypto operator operational with fiat in the UAE is a significant milestone and reflects our dedication to working closely with regulators to advance the industry responsibly.”

He also said that launching its institutional services exchange will be “fundamental” to the company’s continued growth in the region.

Related: Crypto.com says big money Formula 1, UFC deals paying off as user base expands

Stuart Isted, general manager of Crypto.com’s Middle East and Africa branch, echoed Anziani’s sentiments, emphasizing the company’s dedication to collaborating with VARA to advance the crypto industry “responsibly.”

Crypto.com was founded in Hong Kong in 2016 and operates out of Singapore. However, it has been expanding its global reach over the past year.

In February, Anziani spoke with Cointelegraph about how Europe’s implementation of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) could expedite the expansion efforts of major cryptocurrency exchanges across Europe. The legislation comes into effect this year.

Later that month, it was announced that Crypto.com paired up with Latin America’s biggest investment bank to promote BTG Pactual’s BTG Dol stablecoin by pairing it with digital assets like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) on its trading platform.

On April 2, it announced that it would launch its cryptocurrency trading app to South Korean retail investors on April 29.

The exchange has also faced scrutiny from regulators after the Dutch central bank revealed that it fined Crypto.com for registration violations. The exchange filed an objection to the fine but went on to register and continue operating in The Netherlands.

Magazine: Memecoins make millionaires, Terraform and Do Kwon liable for fraud, and more: Hodler’s Digest, March 31 – April 6"
"[INST] Bybit crypto exchange launches trading platform in the Netherlands [/INST] Bybit, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volumes, is expanding operations in Europe after facing regulatory scrutiny in Hong Kong.

On March 28, Bybit officially announced the launch of its digital asset platform, Bybit.nl, in the Netherlands. The new local trading platform is regulated in the country and designed to provide Dutch users access to cryptocurrency trading and education resources.

Dutch users can immediately deposit, withdraw, trade and use staking through Bybit card on Bybit.nl, a spokesperson for Bybit told Cointelegraph.

The launch of Bybit.nl is enabled through collaboration with Satos, one of the oldest Bitcoin (BTC)-focused companies in the Netherlands. Through the partnership, Bybit’s Dutch users can deposit and withdraw fiat currency and trade over 300 pairs.

""Through a strategic partnership with Satos, a licensed virtual asset service provider recognized by De Nederlandsche Bank, Bybit is allowed to provide crypto services in compliant with local regulatory requirements,"" the Bybit spokesperson stated. The initial partnership was signed in June 2023.

Bybit’s launch in the Netherlands aims to further the company’s commitment to serving users while upholding regulatory compliance, Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou said. He added:

“Through our partnership with Satos, we aim to provide Dutch users with a secure and seamless trading experience, backed by industry-leading security measures and unparalleled support.”

According to some local reports, Bybit was discontinuing some of its services in February 2024. The exchange specifically shut down derivatives services in the Netherlands in compliance with guidelines by the Dutch central bank.

“The first changes to the new regulations will be effective from March 5,” Cryptotag’s head of communications Indy Rottier wrote in a LinkedIn post on Feb. 20.

According to Rottier, other major global exchanges like Binance and Gemini were forced to terminate their operations in the Netherlands to comply with local laws in 2023.

Related: Philippines to block Binance exchange

The news comes a few weeks after Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) issued a public warning against Bybit on March 14. The regulator elaborated that Bybit offered crypto-related products in a number of jurisdictions without holding a license.

“The SFC is concerned that these products have also been offered to Hong Kong investors and wishes to make it clear that no entity in the Bybit group is licensed by or registered with the SFC to conduct any ‘regulated activity’ in Hong Kong,” said the regulator.

Established in 2018, Bybit is one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges. According to data from Kaiko, Bybit’s daily spot trading volume peaked at $4.3 billion on March 4, ranking the second biggest exchange after Binance, which reached nearly $24 billion in volumes on that day.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Crypto exchange insurance funds surge more than $1B amid bull market [/INST] The top crypto exchange insurance funds have surged in value by more than $1 billion amid the ongoing crypto bull market.

As of April 3, the Bitcoin (BTC), BNB (BNB), Tether (USDT) and TrueUSD (TUSD) balances constituting crypto exchange Binance’s Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) surpassed $2.03 billion, compared to their initial balance of $1 billion in January 2022. Similarly, crypto exchange Bitget’s initial $300 million protection fund, launched in November 2022, has since surged to $612 million due to the appreciation of its Bitcoin holdings. In the past year alone, Bitcoin has gained 136% and BNB 79.36% as part of a crypto bull run.

While most exchanges have some form of insurance protection for users, only Binance and Bitget have since disclosed their on-chain addresses. In 2019, crypto exchange Huobi, now HTX, announced a 20,000 BTC ($1.32 billion) reserve in an independent address “to cope with extreme security accidents.” It is unclear if the exchange held the balance until now. In addition, the HTX group of companies suffered several exploits last year to the tune of millions of dollars lost.

Meanwhile, crypto exchange OKX has a $700 million “Risk Shield” program for user protection, although it is unclear if the amount comprises tokens, stablecoins, fiat funds or all three. Some exchanges, such as Coinbase, only offer insurance based on customers' geographical location and whether their funds are in fiat or crypto.

Exchanges may choose not to disclose the on-chain addresses of their holdings for various reasons, such as fear of cybersecurity attacks or, in the case of defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, deception.

Last October, former FTX chief technology officer Gary Wang told law enforcement officials that the exchange’s so-called $100 million insurance fund in 2021 was fabricated and never contained any of the exchanges’ FTX Token (FTT). FTX’s insurance fund was designed to protect user losses in case of huge, sudden market movements, and its value was often touted on its website and social media.

Likewise, on-chain addresses only reveal part of the story and do not contain information such as an exchange’s off-chain liabilities. Some jurisdictions, such as Hong Kong, have since mandated that crypto exchanges provide insurance for users that covers up to 50% of their fiat and crypto assets.

Related: HashKey signs MOU for crypto exchange insurance"
"[INST] Firm behind world’s fastest Bitcoin miner raises another $80M [/INST] Auradine, a tech startup specializing in web infrastructure and cryptocurrency mining hardware and software solutions, announced the successful completion of a Series B funding round worth $80 million on April 10.

Funding was joined by previous investors Celesta Capital, Mayfield Fund, and Marathon Digital and new investors StepStone Group, Top Tier Capital Partners, MVP Ventures, and Maverick Capital. Its previous funding round, completed in May 2023, was led by Celesta Capital and Mayfield.

This Series B round was overbooked, according to a press release, and nearly equaled its Series A funding of $81 million. According to Auradine, the company also reached a milestone of $200 million in bookings. It’s unclear exactly what valuation the funds were raised at.

Rajiv Khemani, co-founder and CEO of Auradine, said in a statement that the funds would be used to increase production further:

“We are very proud of the advancements that our team has made in bringing innovative, energy-efficient, and secure products to our customers. The strong orders and pipeline reflect the confidence our customers have in us. With this new funding, we will ramp up production capacity and accelerate investments in our product roadmaps.”

Auradine’s products and services reportedly run the gamut from web infrastructure support for privacy, security, and artificial intelligence (AI) applications all the way to its “Teraflux” line of Bitcoin (BTC) miners purported to be the “world’s fastest and most energy efficient.”

Per company literature, Auradine’s AI3680 model miners are “capable of achieving an output of 0 to 375 TH/s, with an optimal efficiency of 15 J/TH.” For reference, Bitmain’s Antminer S21 Hydro, among the fastest miners currently in production, is rated at 335 TH/s.

Related: Bitcoin miners may ‘fear’ the halving, but they cherish it too

Auradine plans to ship two “Teraflux” ASIC miners in Q2 2024. The first is an air-cooled miner dubbed model AT2880 that is capable of achieving an output of 0 to 260 TH/s, with an optimal efficiency of 16 J/TH. The second is the aforementioned AI3680. According to the press release, over 30 “leading data-center-scale miners” have received Teraflux products so far."
"[INST] Yuga Labs offloads 2 NFT games amid effort to ‘unshackle’ BAYC team [/INST] Yuga Labs, the firm behind NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), has offloaded the intellectual property (IP) for two of its games, HV-MTL and Legends of the Mara, in line with a previously announced effort to refocus the organization.

In an April 17 post to X, Yuga Labs announced that Web3 gaming studio Faraway had acquired the IP, adding that its chief gaming officer Spencer Tucker would join Faraway as the new chief product officer in a bid to ensure continuity between the games at the new firm.

HV-MTL is a nonfungible token (NFT)-oriented “mech” game where players manage and level up their NFTs as well as local environments. Meanwhile, Legends of the Mara is an adventure game that functions as part of the Otherside metaverse, which was launched on April 30, 2022.

Yuga Labs and Faraway have worked closely together for some time, with Faraway previously developing a Mutant Ape Yacht Club-themed game called Serum City.

Yuga’s move to hand over its gaming IP to Faraway reflects a broader move to “unshackle” the team. It was introduced when co-founder Greg Solano rejoined Yuga and replaced Daniel Allegre as the company’s CEO in February this year.

“We want to unshackle the BAYC team at Yuga as much as possible to execute against its vision. More focus, more agility,” Greg Solano wrote in a Feb. 22 post to X that announced his return to the organization.

Related: Bored Ape NFT floor price hits lowest point in over two and a half years

Wednesday’s announcement comes as NFTs experience a broader downtrend across the market, with its flagship BAYC collection being among the hardest hit of top NFT collections.

As of the time of publication, the floor price of the BAYC collection stands at 11.7 Ether (ETH) — worth $35,400 at current prices. The floor price is down a staggering 92% from its all-time of 153.7 ETH, notched on May 1, 2022.

Bored Ape Yacht Club floor price. Source: CoinGecko

Earlier this year, Yuga Labs sparked outrage among holders and members of the NFT community on Jan. 7 when it announced it would be acquiring the controversial Moonbirds collection and bringing on the project’s creator, Kevin Rose, as an adviser.

Magazine: The real risks to Ethena’s stablecoin model (are not the ones you think)"
"[INST] Billionaire’s suit over scam crypto ads on Meta dismissed in Australia [/INST] A suit filed by Australian mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest against Meta has been dropped by the District Court of Western Australia. Forrest claimed that scam crypto ads on Meta platforms bearing his image led to big losses for innocent people. Prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence.

Forrest, the chairman of Fortescue Metals and the second-richest person in Australia, personally filed criminal charges against Meta in February 2022 under Commonwealth Criminal Code Anti-Money Laundering sections, claiming the social media giant “knowingly profits from this cycle of illegal ads” and failed to remove them. He had to receive the Australian attorney general’s approval to file the suit.

In an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in November 2019, Forrest demanded that Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, among other platforms, take down fraudulent ads and prevent his image from being misused.

Related: Fake Bitcoin Investment Platform From ‘Elon Musk’ Promises 4,000% ROI

Meta pleaded not guilty to the charges in December 2023. A spokesperson for the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions confirmed to Reuters that the suit had been dropped for lack of evidence but did not elaborate further. In a statement provided to The Guardian, Forrest said:

“It shows that Facebook is beyond the laws of Australia, that hardworking Australians are not protected, and that scams will continue to run rampant with no recourse for those who are duped by increasingly sophisticated technology on social media platforms that take no responsibility.”

A Meta spokesperson told Reuters, “Meta doesn’t want scams on its platforms and we will continue to work tirelessly to prevent them and protect our users.”

A scam ad showing Andrew Forrest. Source: Crikey

Forrest filed a civil suit against Meta in California Northern District Court in June 2022, citing six counts and claiming that “Facebook’s self-help advertising interface materially helped scammers develop” ads. Meta filed a motion to dismiss that case in January.

Source: Dylan Lindgren

Scams using Forrest’s image have continued to appear since the billionaire took action against Meta. Cybertrace found deep-fake images of Forrest in ads on Facebook in February.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, sued two people in China on April 4, claiming they were behind scam apps that had been downloaded from the platform over 100,000 times.

Magazine: Wealthy, isolated, and incredible beaches: Perth Crypto City Guide"
"[INST] Crypto traders bet $2.4M on spot Ether ETF decision [/INST] Crypto gamblers are placing bets on whether spot Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) will be approved by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) before May 31.

Polygon-based crypto gambling site Polymarket shows that traders have placed “Yes” or “No” bets on whether a spot Ether (ETH) ETF application will be approved before May ends.

Over $2.4 million worth of bets have been placed, with about 81% pessimistic about the chances of a spot Ether ETF approval before the deadline.

Spot Ether ETF approval’s betting market. Source: Polymarket

Crypto traders buy yes or no shares depending on their predictions of how they expect things to go. The share’s value represents the odds of the bet and changes similarly to how the crypto market goes.

At the moment, the cost of a Yes share is $0.19, while No is worth $0.81, meaning fewer gamblers believe in the chances of spot ETH ETFs being approved by the end of May.

The top trader for Yes holds about $84,000 worth of shares, while the top holder for No has around $127,000 in No shares.

If the SEC approves a spot Ether ETF before the betting market’s deadline of May 31, 2024, at 11:59 pm Eastern Time, the market will resolve, meaning that holders of Yes shares can cash out their earnings. However, the opposite also applies if there are no approvals before the deadline.

Related: Bitwise files with SEC for spot Ether ETF listing

This is not the first time crypto traders gambled on ETF approval results. On Jan. 5, Reddit users criticized Polymarket gamblers for betting on whether spot Bitcoin ETFs would be approved by the SEC before Jan. 15.

One Reddit user described the betting as stupid and said it was like putting up dollars to win dimes. Meanwhile, another joked that they were about to lose their kid’s college fund to place a bet.

The overall bets on the ETF outcomes have reached at least $12 million on the predictions market. The SEC eventually approved the trading and listing of 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs on Jan. 10.

Investment management company Grayscale has expressed confidence in a positive decision by the SEC for spot Ether ETFs by May. On March 25, Grayscale chief legal officer Craig Salm said that the SEC’s perceived “lack of engagement” with applicants does not indicate whether an ETF will be approved or not.

Magazine: KuCoin’s desperate $10M airdrop, 1 tweet raises $37M for memecoin: Asia Express"
"[INST] Hashdex’s new spot Bitcoin ETF to begin US trading on Wednesday [/INST] Asset manager Hashdex is officially joining the spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) market in the United States after completing the conversion of its futures ETF to hold spot Bitcoin.

In a March 26 announcement, Hashdex said it has renamed and converted its Hashdex Bitcoin Futures ETF to the Hashdex Bitcoin ETF with the ticker “DEFI.”

“DEFI’s renaming corresponds to DEFI’s completion of the conversion of its investment strategy to allow the Fund to provide spot Bitcoin holdings and its tracking of a new benchmark index effective March 27, 2024,” it said.

The newly converted fund will invest at least 95% of its assets into spot Bitcoin, while up to 5% of the remaining assets will go into CME-traded Bitcoin futures contracts and cash and cash equivalents, according to the firm.

“Since our founding in 2018, Hashdex has strongly believed that Bitcoin is a generational opportunity,"" said Hashdex co-founder and CEO Marcelo Sampaio.

“We’re excited to invite all investors — whether it be those who already have full conviction in Bitcoin, those who are considering an allocation for the first time, or anyone in between — to join us in our long-term journey of making digital assets accessible,” added Samir Kerbage, Hashdex’s chief investment officer.

Related: SEC pushes Hashdex, ARK 21Shares Ether ETFs as approval hope dwindles

Founded in 2018, Hashdex first joined the U.S. race for an approved spot in Bitcoin ETF in August 2023. Unlike others that depend on a Coinbase surveillance sharing agreement, Hashdex’s fund acquires spot Bitcoin from physical exchanges within the CME market.

Hashdex is already several months late to a competitive spot Bitcoin ETF market. According to data from Farside Investors, spot Bitcoin ETF cumulative inflow — excluding Grayscale’s ETF — is now at nearly $25.5 billion, though 80% of that figure is made up by BlackRock and Fidelity’s ETFs.

A prospectus filed by Hashdex indicates its ETF charges a 0.90% a year management fee, which would sit on the higher end of fees charged by ETF issuers which average around 0.30%, but still under the 1.5% a year fee charged by the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC).

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Coinbase shares slump, but Base revenue signals it’s undervalued — Analyst [/INST] Coinbase (COIN) shares have plummeted 16% over the past five days, mirroring broader volatility in the crypto and stock markets, though one analyst suggests that investors may not be seeing the potential buying opportunity.

“The street isn’t really pricing in the crypto native revenue that I think a lot of the crypto natives understand,” crypto analyst Will Clemente said in a recent Unchained Crypto podcast.

“I think Coinbase is the biggest kind of venture-style bet in public markets since maybe Tesla about five years ago,” Clemente added.

Clemente claimed that traditional investors still view Coinbase “purely as an exchange” despite it making many changes to its business structure over the past 12 months.

“Throughout the bear market, they made a lot of strategic pivots to shift toward what I’m calling a crypto super app,” he declared.

In particular, he noted Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, Base, which now has a total value locked (TVL) of $5.35 billion and oversees 30.81 daily transactions per second.

“Over the last 30 days, Base has done $30 million of top-line revenue for Coinbase just based on the sequencer fees, which annualizes out to like $360 million a year,” he explained while suggesting that traditional investors are overlooking the significant activity taking place on-chain.

“The street doesn’t even know what Base is, and they’re definitely not extrapolating out the potential of a ton of activity taking place there and the sequencer fees that Coinbase may benefit from that.”

At the time of publication, COIN is currently trading at $218.08, down almost 16% over the past five days, per Google Finance data.

COIN has plummeted 15.96% over the past five days. Source: Google Finance

Coinbase is expected to release its earnings report for the first quarter of 2024 in the next few weeks.

Over the past five days, the S&P 500 is down 3.12%, while Bitcoin (BTC) has declined approximately 4.67%.

Meanwhile, more downside is expected for both markets as geopolitical tensions escalate in the Middle East after there were reports of explosions at Isfahan airport in central Iran.

Related: Coinbase cleared in lawsuit over crypto transactions

The news comes amid Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest continuing its selling spree of COIN.

On April 15, it was reported that ARK sold 3,689 COIN shares worth approximately $824,000.

It was only a month ago that ARK sold off a staggering amount of the stock amid its price seeing a year-to-date increase at the time of approximately 54%.

On March 21, Cointelegraph reported that ARK sold 199,526 Coinbase shares from its exchange-traded funds.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Crypto users propose dropping lawsuit against Sam Bankman-Fried to pursue FTX influencers [/INST] A group of cryptocurrency users has reached an agreement with former FTX CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried as part of a class-action lawsuit filed in Florida.

In an April 19 filing in United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, plaintiffs who sued FTX influencers in 2022 announced they had reached a settlement with Bankman-Fried. According to the filing, the plaintiffs recognized the expense and length of proceedings should they continue to pursue judgment against SBF, opting to use some of the information presented at his criminal trial to continue their case against FTX promoters.

“[Bankman-Fried] has knowledge and other information that Class Representatives and Class Counsel believe will be valuable to Class Representatives’ cases against other defendants in the FTX MDL [multidistrict litigation], particularly relating to the underlying actions and their connection to Miami, Florida, where FTX’s U.S. headquarters were based, as well as each MDL Defendants’ knowledge of and assistance with the actions and connections to other states in which jurisdictions over those Defendants is asserted,” said the April 19 filing.

Source: PACER

Subject to court approval, the settlement would resolve the lawsuit between SBF and crypto users seeking recourse for losses during the fall of FTX. The filing suggested that the plaintiffs proposed the settlement on March 28 — the day a judge sentenced Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison for his conviction on felony felony charges.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit proposed that Bankman-Fried assist in prosecuting FTX influencers and aid in victim recovery through documents and testimony provided during his criminal trial. The lawyers specifically cited information related to celebrities and companies responsible for endorsing the crypto exchange before its downfall, including sports stars Naomi Osaka, Tom Brady, Stephen Curry and Shaquille O’Neal.

Related: Crypto lawyer wants to depose Changpeng Zhao for civil case

The lawsuit, first filed in November 2022, shortly after FTX filed for bankruptcy, was consolidated into its present form in June 2023. The Moskowitz Law Firm, behind many crypto-based class-action lawsuits, represented the plaintiffs.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers filed notice to appeal the former FTX CEO’s conviction and sentence on April 11. They also requested SBF remain at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn rather than a federal prison in the San Francisco Bay Area to assist in his defense.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Phishing scam thefts on Base are up 1,900% from January — Scam Sniffer [/INST] Ethereum layer 2 Base has seen an 18-fold increase in cryptocurrency funds stolen from phishing scams in March compared to January figures, recent data shows.

Approximately $3.35 million was stolen from phishing scammers on Base in March alone, according to blockchain anti-scam platform Scam Sniffer.

It marks a 334% month-on-month increase from February’s tally of $773,900 and a massive 1,880% spike compared to January, when Base only lost $169,000 from phishing scams, according to monthly Dune Analytics data compiled by Scam Sniffer.

Binance’s BNB Smart Chain observed a similar surge in phishing scams in March, Scam Sniffer noted in an April 2 X post.

Approximately $71.5 million was lost to phishing scammers across all chains from 77,529 victims — beating out January and February’s tallies of $58.3 million and $46.8 million, respectively.

Source: Scam Sniffer

Scam Sniffer told Cointelegraph it expects even more phishing attacks on Base this month as assets and active users on the chain continues to increase.

Scam Sniffer noted that phishing links from fake X accounts remain a “primary tactic,” detecting over 1,500 incidents in March.

The rise in Base phishing scams comes amid a recent memecoin craze on the Coinbase-backed chain. It has helped push Base’s total value locked above $3.2 billion — marking a 370% increase so far in 2024, according to L2Beat.

Cointelegraph reached out to Scam Sniffer for comment.

Phishing scams may be up, but hacks are down

The surge comes despite crypto hack thefts falling 48% to $187.2 million in March, according to an April 1 X post from blockchain security firm PeckShield.

Related: Crypto hacking losses decline in Q1 2024 — Immunefi

The figure took into account the $98.8 million that was recovered over the month.

Almost all of those recoveries came from the $97million Munchibles exploit. Cryptocurrency sleuth ZachXBT was among those onboarded as a custodian to recover the stolen funds.

Total losses from hacks in March. Source: PeckShield

Meanwhile, Curio’s MakerDAO-based smart contract lost $40 million, according to updated figures from PeckShield and Prisma Finance fell victim to an $11.6-million hack. The firm is currently negotiating with the hacker on-chain to return those funds.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Bitcoin Cash open interest surges past $700M ahead of BCH halving [/INST] Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is currently trading at $574.84, having jumped 9.06% over the past 24 hours as the second-ever BCH halving event is set to take place next week.

Traders appear to be heavily securing their positions in anticipation of the BCH halving, which is scheduled for April 4, according to NiceHash data.

On March 28, $190,140 was liquidated in short positions and $211,870 in long positions.

On the same day, open interest (OI) in Bitcoin Cash futures perpetual contracts reached all-time highs of $708.75 million, spiking 18.26% in 24 hours and 165% over the past 7 days, as per CoinGlass data.

Bitcoin Cash open interest surged to record highs ahead of the halving next week. Source: CoinGlass

The last instance nearing this level was in May 2021, with OI reaching $684.12 million, coinciding with BCH reaching its highest price in the past five years at $1,399.

This is in contrast to the same date in 2020, where futures open interest stood at $63.29 , just before the first-ever BCH halving on April 8, 2020.

At the time, miner rewards halved from 12.5 BCH to 6.25 BCH. However, miners seem to be taking this as a cue to increase their mining efforts ahead of the upcoming halving. A user on X, “DavidShares,” told his 17,900 followers that the Bitcoin Cash hash rate has doubled in the past week.

Hash rate is the measure of the total computational power used for mining and processing transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain, measured by the number of hashes generated.

Related: Bitcoin gears up for a ‘massive’ short squeeze, price could go ‘vertical’

However, while Bitcoin approaches its fourth halving on April 21 amid record highs, Bitcoin Cash remains significantly below its all-time high of $4,355, which it reached in December 2017, as per CoinMarketCap data.

BCH halving occurs slightly earlier than Bitcoin halving due to Bitcoin Cash temporarily using a different algorithm to adjust its mining difficulty back in 2017, therefore speeding up the block creation time.

The Bitcoin halving is scheduled for April 21.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Elizabeth Warren supports enhanced US sanction options for stablecoins [/INST] United States Senator Elizabeth Warren has sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen commenting on Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo’s testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on April 9. She pursued the same line of thought as she did during the hearing — Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT).

Warren expressed her support in the letter for the legislative adoption of more comprehensive AML/CFT measures for stablecoins. Adeyemo appeared at the Senate hearing to discuss Treasury proposals for expanding its sanctions powers to blockchain validator node operators, among other measures. The Treasury listed its enhanced enforcement goals in response to gaps in current regulation in a document Warren calls a “letter to Congress” dated November 2023. Warren wrote:

“Those authorities must be adopted into any legislation Congress advances to create a new regulatory framework around the $157 billion stablecoin market.”

Warren was apparently not referring to the stablecoin bill introduced in the Senate by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cynthia Lummis on April 17, the day after the date of her letter. The 179-page Lummis-Gillibrand bill makes almost no mention of AML/CFT.

Related: Elections may swing Senate Banking Committee toward crypto, Sen. Lummis says

Rather, it seems Warren had in mind a bill that is expected to come out of the House of Representatives from Finance Committee Chair Patrick McHenry and ranking member Maxine Waters. Warren sent them a letter on April 8 voicing much of the same concerns as in her letter to Yellen. Warren concluded her letter to the treasury secretary by saying:

“Stablecoin legislation […] must include the full suite of AML tools that Treasury requested in its November 2023 letter to Congress as necessary to effectively combat that threat [of terrorism financing].”

Digital Chamber Senior Policy Associate Taylor Barr commented on X, possibly with the Lummis-Gillibrand bill in mind: “Would love Sen. Warren’s take on the new bill’s increased consumer protection language, added receivership text, or the Fed/OCC’s enforcement power. All this is conveniently left out of her talking points...”

Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom"
"[INST] Crypto game Munchables on Blast exploited for $63M [/INST] A nonfungible token (NFT) game called Munchables, built on Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Blast, has suffered a $62-million exploit.

Munchables announced it had been compromised in a March 26 X post at 9:33 pm UTC and said it was tracking the exploiter’s movements and “attempting to stop the transactions.”

Blockchain analyst ZachXBT responded to the post with the wallet address of the alleged attacker, which currently touts a balance of $62.45 million in Ether (ETH), per Blastscan data.

The wallet address of the exploiter shows that it interacted with the Munchables protocol at 9:26 am UTC, extracting a total of 17,413 ETH, per DeBank data.

The exploiter’s address with over 17,400 ETH incoming from Munchables. Source: DeBank

The exploiter’s wallet address then transferred $10,700 worth of ETH through the Orbiter Bridge, transferring the Blast ETH back into native ETH. At 10:05 pm UTC, the wallet sent an additional 1 ETH to a fresh wallet address.

ZachXBT claimed the exploit stemmed from the Munchables team hiring a North Korean developer known by the alias “Werewolves0943.”

In a March 27 X post, Solidity developer 0xQuit claimed that the Munchables attack had been planned from the outset, with one of the developers upgrading the Lock contract — which is meant to lock tokens in for a specified time — with a new implementation shortly before launch.

“There were appropriate checks to ensure you couldn’t withdraw more than you deposited. But before upgrading, the attacker was able to assign himself a deposited balance of 1,000,000 Ether,” 0xQuit explained.

“[The] scammer used manual manipulation of storage slots to assign himself an enormous Ether balance before changing the contract implementation to one that appears legit. Then he simply withdrew that balance once TVL was juicy enough,” added 0xQuit.

Munchables is a Blast-based GameFi app revolving around NFT-based creatures. The Munchables protocol allows players to stake Blast ETH and Blast USD to farm Blast points and unlock added in-game perks.

Related: Blast launches Ethereum L2 mainnet unlocking $2.3B in staked crypto

Several X users, including pseudonymous metaverse adviser Cygaar, have called on the Blast team to intervene by forcibly rolling back the chain to before the exploit occurred.

“An invalid state root would need to be forced by the Blast team which would erase the hacked transaction. The chain might need to halt completely to do this,” added Cygaar.

“It wouldn’t set a good precedent for future exploits/issues, but it is possible.”

Others pushed back against calls for centralized intervention, as it runs against the ethos of decentralized networks — Cinneamhain Ventures partner Adam Cochran argued that it would be “on brand” for Blast to intervene.

“Given that, it doesn’t seem off-brand for them to intervene in defense of user experience. Optimism is ethos alignment, but Blast is gamified social user experience,” Cochran wrote, adding:

“While I’m strongly against this action on any other chain, I don’t take Blast as a brand of ‘serious decentralization chain’ but instead as a place for games, experiments, degenry, etc.”

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Arrested Binance exec pleads not guilty to charges in Nigeria [/INST] According to local reports, detained Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan has pleaded not guilty to four money laundering charges in Nigeria.

After being arrested in Nigeria in late February, Gambaryan proclaimed his innocence in a courtroom on April 8, local news agency Peoples Gazette reported.

At the hearing, Gambaryan reiterated that he should not be held responsible for Binance’s activities in Nigeria because he does not have decision-making authority in the company’s business operations.

Gambaryan’s lawyer, Chukwuka Ikuazom, also contested that his client, even though served with charges of his escaped colleague, could not enter a plea on his behalf.

Judge Emeka Nwite rejected Gambaryan’s defense argument and ruled that he acted as Binance’s representative in past trips to Nigeria, citing local laws.

“A person who has no physical presence in Nigeria but has a physical agent in Nigeria can be duly served through that agent,” the Judge reportedly stated.

Tigran Gambaryan sits as he waits to face prosecution for tax evasion and money laundering at the federal high court in Abuja, Nigeria on April 4. Source: Technext24

As previously reported, Gambaryan’s case was adjourned until April 19 last week. As per the new reports, Gambaryan’s hearing on bail consideration is now adjourned until April 18. Some publications also reported that hearings on the substantive charge will begin on May 2.

Related: Philippines SEC ‘can’t endorse’ ways to retrieve funds after Binance ban

According to the Peoples Gazette, Judge Nwite ordered that Gambaryan be remanded at Kuje prison in Abuja until the case is settled.

Gambaryan’s attorney reportedly asked the court to return the defendant to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). However, a counsel for the EFCC disputed the suggestion, saying that people accused of similar offenses as Gambaryan are always sent to the Kuje facility pending the court’s decision.

While Gambaryan remains in custody, Nadeem Anjarwalla, Binance’s Africa regional manager, escaped and fled Nigeria in March.

Escaped Binance Africa regional manager Nadeem Anjarwalla. Source: The Source Magazine

The EFCC’s charges against Gambaryan and Anjarwalla underscore a broader investigation into Binance’s activities in Nigeria. According to local authorities, the exchange allegedly manipulated and crashed the local fiat currency, the Nigerian naira. Additionally, both Gambaryan and Anjarwalla are accused of tax fraud.

Magazine: SBF gets 25 years in prison, Fidelity eyes ETH staking, and Coinbase’s court loss: Hodler’s Digest, March 24-30"
"[INST] AMPL depositors complain of frozen funds on Aave [/INST] Depositors of Ampleforth’s AMPL stablecoin are complaining of frozen funds on popular decentralized finance (DeFi) borrowing and lending protocol Aave due to a lending pool shortfall. The issue, which has left AMPL depositors unable to withdraw their assets from Aave, has persisted since December 2023. Other DeFi pools on Aave are not affected by the problem.

AMPL is a stablecoin designed to track the 2019 value of the U.S. dollar adjusted for inflation. The protocol increases or decreases the number of tokens available based on whether its price matches its dollar target.

In November 2022, Aave became the victim of an alleged market manipulation attack against its Curve (CRV) pool. The attack failed to net any profits for the attacker, but it led to $1.6 million of bad debt for the protocol. In response, AaveDAO voted on Nov. 2, 2022 to freeze deposits and borrows for 17 different tokens, including AMPL.

The freezing did not prevent old depositors from withdrawing at that time, only blocking new deposits and borrows. However, in a December 2023 post on the AaveDAO forums, Bored Ghost Developing Labs (BGD Labs), a development team contributing to the Aave protocol, claimed to have discovered an additional problem preventing withdrawals. According to it, a bug in the pool contract had allowed it to be drained of funds, which meant there was no longer enough liquidity to process withdrawals.

In response to the issue, an Ampleforth representative suggested that AaveDAO should purchase AMPL tokens and distribute them to users as compensation, but Aave developers have countered with their own proposal to pay out stablecoins instead of AMPL. Aave developers have also asked the Ampleforth team to provide 40% of the compensation package from its own funds. At the time of publication, the Ampleforth team has not confirmed whether it will provide these funds, but it has stated it will continue to offer support to help resolve the problem.

On March 31, BGD Labs proposed paying depositors $300,000 worth of USD Coin (USDC). It claimed this was merely an initial distribution and that the remaining amount could potentially be paid out after further debate. Despite not completely resolving the debate, the proposal passed on April 5, with over 99.9% of votes in favor.

BGD Labs’ proposal for $300,000 in compensation. Source: AaveDAO, Snapshot

Related: Aave purchases 2.7M CRV to clear bad debt following failed Eisenberg attack

Aave developers discover liquidity problems for AMPL

According to Aave’s GitHub documents, when tokenholders deposit funds into the lending pool, they should receive an equivalent amount of “aTokens” in exchange. These aTokens essentially function as deposit receipts. As the pool receives interest payments, depositors should receive additional aTokens representing their share of these interest payments.

However, BGD Labs claimed that the AMPL pool contract is not working as intended: It has a flaw that is causing it to pay out more AMPL aTokens (aAMPL) than the amount of underlying AMPL available. As a result, there is not enough AMPL in the pool to allow depositors to withdraw. BGD Labs stated:

“The aToken supply of the asset appeared to be way more than it should, bigger than the sum of the variable debt plus available liquidity. [...] The aAMPL supply is currently not representative of the claims over AMPL underlying. [...] As the utilisation is 100%, no withdrawals can be executed, only repayments and liquidations.”

BGD Labs claimed that Ampleforth developers designed and wrote the contract, not AaveDAO contractors. It claimed to have reached out to the Ampleforth team and asked it to determine how much AMPL was owed to each depositor. BGD Labs asked depositors to be patient while the Ampleforth team attempted to come up with a solution to the problem.

Ampleforth proposes token buyback by Aave collector

On Jan. 31, Ampleforth developer Ahmed Naguib Aly, known simply as “Naguib” on the Aave governance forum, said the team was aware of the problem and working to solve it. “We have been coordinating with [AaveDAO risk managers] Chaos labs and Gauntlet to get to an effective resolution,” he wrote. On March 8, Naguib gave a detailed assessment of the problem and proposed a solution. According to him, the pool was facing a shortfall because some depositors had withdrawn before the excessive interest payments were detected. As a result, these early withdrawals had drained the pool of funds:

“More interest was credited to depositors than was charged from borrowers. This discrepancy has led to situations where some depositors were able to withdraw more than what should have been possible under normal circumstances. As a direct consequence, we’re now facing a liquidity shortfall, preventing current depositors from withdrawing their funds.”

According to Naguib, Ampleforth was unable to determine the proper amount of AMPL that should be paid out to each depositor at that time. However, he expected the team to determine these values by March 22.

Naguib noted that the Aave protocol owns some tokens within its “Aave collector” contract. Once the correct amounts of AMPL owed to each depositor became known, these tokens could be used to reimburse users, he suggested. An “upper bound” of 715,335 AMPL (approximately $1.3 million at the March 8 price) would be needed to fully compensate users. Naguib proposed that AaveDAO purchase AMPL on the open market using these reserves, which should then be distributed to depositors through a contract to be built in the future.

On March 17, Naguib withdrew his proposal, stating BGD Labs had disagreed with it. “BGD labs reached out to us that they don’t find the proposal to swap AMPLs and release it to holders to be an effective method to resolve the situation and they want to propose a different resolution,” he stated.

Aave developers propose stablecoin compensation

On March 21, BGD Labs and Aave risk management consultant Chaos Labs introduced a joint proposal to compensate depositors. The two teams estimated the shortfall at 533,973 AMPL (approximately $1 million at the March 21 price).

According to them, this amount of AMPL represented over 30% of the circulating supply. Buying this much AMPL would “be inefficient, given its relatively illiquid status and effectively altering the underlying economics of the asset.” Instead, they proposed that depositors should be compensated based on the average U.S. dollar value of AMPL over the four-month period that has passed since the Nov. 22 freeze. This would equate to $1.198 per AMPL or $639,700 total, which could be paid out in stablecoins such as USDC.

Chaos Labs and BGD Labs also suggested that Ampleforth should provide 40% of the funds to compensate depositors, with AaveDAO footing the bill for the other 60%:

“Considering that the problem is on a contract of Aave, but that the implementation was done by the Ampleforth team, we propose a 60% (Aave) 40% (Ampleforth) split on the total to be deposited on the smart contract for the distribution.”

This new proposal was criticized by many of the forum participants. Some critics claimed that it was unfair for depositors to receive stablecoins as compensation. “Aspects of the proposed resolution include paying aAMPL holders a below market rate amount of USDC instead of actual AMPL,” user Fiddlekins stated in a post. This is unreasonable, they claimed, because “repaying them [depositors] in USDC just transfers the burden of price impact to them if they wish to then rebuy AMPL with it, and denies them the ability to sell the asset they should have for its current elevated price if they don’t.”

Fiddlekins mentioned that AaveDAO sold 283,500 aAMPL of its reserves on Jan. 23, receiving $363,000 in exchange, which the user considered to be inconsistent with the view that AMPL is too high of a price to buy back. “Put bluntly: the DAO seems happy to sell low but not to buy high, and argues that lenders should bear the brunt of that,” they said.

Other critics took issue with the idea of a 60%/40% funding split between AaveDAO and Ampleforth. “Why would Forth DAO pay out it if there are issues on AAVE’s smart contract?” RomanPope asked. In response, QuantumEvolver argued that both sides were to blame. “The AMPL developers made a mistake in the smart contract from start, and they still cannot determine what exactly the mistake was. And AAVE is also responsible since they should have audited the smart contract before integrating it into the AAVE platform to make sure it would work fine.”

Related: Aave deploys DeFi protocol on BNB Chain

BGD Labs proposes $300,000 compensation plan

On March 31, BGD Labs made a new proposal: AaveDAO would pay out $300,000 in stablecoins to depositors, which it would obtain from its reserves held in the Aave collector contract. It said the proposal was necessary because “we don’t have any type of news from the Ampleforth team.” If Ampleforth wants to contribute to the compensation plan at a later date, “we expect communication in this forum,” BGD Labs stated, adding that such a contribution “technically will be perfectly doable.”

The proposal was confirmed by a vote of over 99% on April 5.

In its post revealing the proposal, BGD Labs claimed that the amount owed to depositors “will be more than 300’000 USD,” implying that even after passage, at least one more distribution will be needed to make depositors whole.

Ampleforth’s response

On April 7, Naguib posted a statement that attempted to explain Ampleforth’s position on the matter. He claimed the team became aware of the incorrect interest payments in May 2022. However, at that time, “the discrepancy was small, well below the AMPL reserve balance.” Aave was also planning to transition to Aave version 3 at the time, and the two teams agreed that the pool should be frozen until this transition was completed.

According to Naguib, they also agreed that AaveDAO should use its AMPL reserves to cover any shortfalls if it becomes insolvent before all depositors withdraw.

After this discussion, deposits and borrows were frozen for the AMPL pool on Nov. 22, 2022. But on Nov. 25, deposits were reenabled, leading to a greater shortfall for the pool over time. Then, AaveDAO sold its AMPL reserves on Jan. 23, 2023, which made covering the shortfall much more difficult for AaveDAO. According to Naguib, Ampleforth was initially unaware of both of these events.

When the Ampleforth team became aware that the shortfall had grown much larger, it suggested what it saw as a “simple and non-controversial resolution,” which was “to pick a date before the discrepancy started growing exponentially, and assume lenders were holding AMPL since that point.” This calculation would have allowed a compensation package to be produced quickly, and it could have been covered by some combination of AaveDAO reserves and Ampleforth funds. Naguib claimed that this proposal was made privately to the BGD Labs team.

BGD Labs reportedly rejected Ampleforth’s suggestion and instead asked it to calculate the amount owed based on off-chain simulations of AAVE platform behavior. This simulation process took longer but eventually led to the Ampleforth team’s March 8 proposal for AaveDAO to buy back AMPL to repay depositors.

Naguib stated that the Ampleforth team “will continue offering the necessary support for investigation and for BGD Labs in reaching a proposal that satisfies the community,” but also argued that BGD Labs should “take the lead to a resolution,” as the team believes “they [BGD Labs] are best positioned to perform this work.”"
"[INST] Lower ETF demand, unrealized gains may weigh on BTC selling pressure post-halving [/INST] A slowdown of inflows to spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) combined with a high volume of unrealized gains from traders could lead to bearish pressure on the Bitcoin price after the upcoming halving event.

According to Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, unrealized profits from Bitcoin’s recent rally are driving up selling pressure. An eventual slowdown of inflows to spot Bitcoin ETFs in the coming months could result in further pressure on Bitcoin (BTC) prices.

CryptoQuant’s net unrealized profit and oss (NUPL) indicator supports the analysis. The indicator’s warning sign is the 0.7 mark, indicating that Bitcoin investors may be ready to take profits, further driving prices down and increasing selling pressure.

On March 17, the NUPL indicator reached 0.606, up 0.41% from the previous 24 hours, despite recent BTC price corrections.

“For a bearish outlook for price: 1. Slowdown in ETF Bitcoin purchases and 2. Getting into the halving at a high level of unrealized profits for traders, as highly likely traders would sell to take profits,” Moreno said about possible price-depressing events.

NUPL indicator. Source: CryptoQuant

The Bitcoin ETFs recorded one of their lowest net inflow days on March 14, with just $132 million in net activity, their lowest level in eight trading sessions and an 80% decline from the previous days.

A possible downward trend, however, may not be as severe as previous bear markets, as institutional investors typically engage in portfolio rebalancing strategies, which could temper volatility rather than increase it, James Butterfill, head of Research at CoinShares, told Cointelegraph.

“Volatility in the last bull market in 2021 was 120%. It is now only 45%, and prices have risen above all-time highs. We believe this is due to the dampening effect of portfolio rebalancing,” he said.

Bitcoin ETFs have so far been in high demand. The cumulative net inflows into the crypto products surpassed the $12 billion mark on March 15, while industry insiders anticipate further demand as brokerage firms speed up due diligence to offer clients Bitcoin ETFs.

Miners brace for impact

Capital flowing through Bitcoin ETFs is counteracting the negative price effects of miners sales ahead of the halving — Bitcoin’s deflationary mechanism.

The halving cuts the reward for mining new blocks by 50%, thus reducing the rate at which new Bitcoin are generated. This year’s reduction will slash Bitcoin miner rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block.

The cost of mining, however, remains the same or may even increase as miners usually improve operations to remain profitable after the event. CoinShares anticipates the average cost of production post-halving for crypto miners to be at $37,856.

“Looking at price performance of the miners year to date highlights investor concerns for the miners around the halving, but I believe many are being tarred with the same brush, so to speak, as average costs to mine Bitcoin vary greatly, but those with higher costs to seem to have been hit harder,” said Butterfill.

Miners cost production per Bitcoin post-halving. Source: CoinShares.

Historically, miners have sold more of their BTC reserves before the halving to maximize profits, and 2024 is no exception. Data from CryptoQuant shows miner reserves at their lowest level in two years, with 1.81 million Bitcoin held by miners on March 15.

The Bitcoin halving takes place every four years, with the next expected to happen around April 19, 2024.

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"[INST] SEC calls for comments on Fidelity, Grayscale and Bitwise spot Ether ETF applications [/INST] The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is soliciting comments from the public on proposed rule changes allowing the listing and trading of shares of three spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, on exchanges.

In separate notices filed on April 2, the SEC said the public had 21 days to respond upon publication in the Federal Register to spot ETH ETF proposals from asset managers Bitwise, Fidelity and Grayscale. The proposed ETF filings from Bitwise and Grayscale for listing and trading on NYSE Arca and from Fidelity on the Cboe BZX Exchange came ahead of the commission’s final decision on the investment vehicle, which is expected in May.

“Nothing in the filings signal to me that anything has changed,” said Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart in an April 2 X post. “Silence from the SEC isn’t a good thing here.”

He added on April 3:

“Asking for public comments on a 19b-4 is standard procedure. Every single 19b-4 ETF filing goes through the same process (whether approved or denied). It’s not ‘bullish’ in any capacity for Ethereum ETFs.”

The SEC approved several spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs for the first time in January following scrutiny from investors and media outlets, with Chair Gary Gensler casting the deciding vote. However, many analysts have speculated the odds of the commission making a similar decision on Ether ETFs have steadily dropped in 2024.

Related: Ether ETF is less likely than Bitcoin ETF was — Recharge Capital Managing Partner

A spot Ether ETF application from VanEck, with a final deadline set for May 23, will likely be the first filing the SEC addresses. Several other asset managers have similar filings in the pipeline, including those from Hashdex and ARK 21Shares.

A reported investigation by the SEC into the Ethereum Foundation could challenge the commission’s decision to approve or deny a spot ETH ETF by classifying the digital asset as a security. Blockfirm firm Consensys submitted a comment letter to the SEC in March claiming that the regulator’s concerns about potential fraud and market manipulation for a spot ETH ETF were baseless.

Magazine: Ether ETFs face Senate opposition, Wright is not Satoshi, and Dencun goes live: Hodler’s Digest, March 10-16"
"[INST] Technical charts suggest a roaring altseason may be just ahead: Analysts [/INST] Crypto’s famed “altseason,” a time during bull markets when smaller-capitalization cryptocurrencies skyrocket in value, could be coming very soon, according to market analysts.

On April 11, trader and analyst Rekt Capital observed that the altcoin market cap “has been the only constant” despite Bitcoin’s (BTC) price whipsawing over the past few weeks. It has been consistently retesting the $315 billion level as support for weeks now, he added.

Crypto traders have been keenly observing altcoin markets as they represent higher risk-to-reward returns, with many expected to surge during the next phase of the bull market.

Historically, altcoin price appreciation lags Bitcoin, and charts such as the altcoin market capitalization and Bitcoin dominance can provide traders some signals for when altcoins may be moving into a bull season of their own.

Altcoin market cap excluding top 10. Source: Rekt Capital

However, altcoins aren’t there yet. Following highs in mid-March, most altcoins have corrected, while BTC remains close to its all-time high of over $70,000.

Analysts are now looking at the Bitcoin market dominance chart with renewed interest, though, which has remained over 50% since September 2023 and is currently at 54.5%, according to TradingView.

Analyst Crypto Nova said that the shift between Bitcoin dominance rising and dropping is “when altcoins truly start shining.”

This hasn’t happened yet, but the “higher highs and higher lows with strong-up candles aren’t there anymore,” she said before adding, “The chart is moving sideways, which is almost always an occurrence before a reversal.”

Bitcoin dominance. Source: Crypto Nova

Technical analyst Titan of Crypto echoed the sentiment in a post on X last week, stating, “I personally believe there will be another altseason.”

The analyst referred to the Ichimoku technical indicator, which they claimed “will play a big role in blocking Bitcoin dominance, initiating the altseason.”

Meanwhile, analyst Kevin Svenson told his 140,000 followers in a post on X earlier this week that the altcoin market cap is “positioned for a massive bull run.” “People often forget... after Bitcoin’s halving is when the narrative shifts toward alts,” he added.

Related: Altseason is coming — Or at least data suggests that it’s close

Altcoins are trading mostly flat on the day as total crypto market capitalization remains around $2.74 trillion.

Aside from outliers such as Toncoin (TON), which recently hit an all-time high, most high-cap altcoins remain down heavily from their 2021 peak prices.

XRP (XRP), Dogecoin (DOGE), Cardano (ADA), Avalanche (AVAX), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Polkadot’s DOT (DOT) and Chainlink’s (LINK) are at least 60% down from their peaks, whereas Bitcoin is less than 5% down from its all-time high.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base memecoins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Hong Kong’s in-kind ETF creation could be a significant market opportunity: Analysts [/INST] Hong Kong’s financial regulators aim to offer in-kind creation models for spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

This could be a significant market opportunity, which could considerably increase assets under management (AUM) and trading volume for Bitcoin ETF issuers in the region, according to a research note by Bloomberg ETF analyst Rebecca Sin, shared in a March 26 X post by Eric Balchunas:

“Hong Kong is aiming for in-kind creation of the ETF, unlike the US, where the transaction is cash only — in the US, it’s cash in, Bitcoin ETF out, while Hong Kong aims for Bitcoin in, ETF out. This could be an opportunity for the market.”

Hong Kong ETFs chart. Source: Eric Balchunas

Hong Kong’s approach is in contrast with the model of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which only allows cash creation models for spot Bitcoin ETFs.

Related: TradFi Wall Street firms pushing for Ether ETF approval, says former Binance Labs head

The U.S. Bitcoin ETFs have amassed a total of $11.28 billion worth of flows since launch, with a net negative of $1.07 billion in net flows last week, before starting to pick up on March 25.

After five consecutive days of negative outflows last week, the spot Bitcoin ETFs saw over $15 million worth of flows on March 25, the same day Bitcoin (BTC) price recorded its highest daily close of above $69,000 in the past 10 days.

Bolstered by the ETF inflows, Bitcoin price reclaimed $70,000 on March 25. As investors have resumed accumulating BTC off exchanges, BTC supply on Coinbase reached a nine-year low of 344,856 BTC on March 18.

Last week’s negative spot Bitcoin ETF inflows aren’t a long-term concern for Bitcoin holders and price actio, Bitfinex analysts told Cointelegraph:

“Even though negative ETF outflows featured heavily last week, all of it is from the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), as investors both switch out of the higher fees demanded by GBTC and also take profit, especially as many of these investors are long-term holders who entered during the bear market. GBTC investors are not the only sellers in the market. Whale wallet activities have also indicated significant profit taking.”

Related: Over $6B worth of BTC moved by 5th-richest Bitcoin whale"
"[INST] Tether’s USDT stablecoin goes live on TON blockchain [/INST] Stablecoin operator Tether is strengthening ties with Telegram’s Web3 ecosystem by launching its U.S. dollar-pegged USDT (USDT) stablecoin on The Open Network (TON).

Tether made the announcement on April 19, also revealing it would launch the gold-pegged Tether Gold (XAUT) stablecoin on TON as well.

The announcement was made during a joint keynote speech involving Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, Telegram founder Pavel Durov and The Open Platform CEO Andrew Rogozov at the crypto event Token2049 in Dubai.

At the same event, Tether also announced it would be restructuring and introduced four new business divisions: Tether Data, Tether Finance, Tether Power and Tether Edu.

The Open Platform CEO Andrew Rogozov, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino (from left to right) at the Token2049 in Dubai

According to Ardoino, TON and Tether share a vision of an open, decentralized internet and a borderless financial system.

“The launch of USDT and XAUT on TON will allow seamless value transfer, increasing activity and liquidity while offering users a financial experience that can match those found in the traditional financial system,” the Tether CEO stated.

This latest development marks another milestone in Tether’s expansion across multiple blockchains, bringing its coverage to 15 chains, including Tron and Ethereum.

The milestone is also essential for the TON network, whose native token, Toncoin (TON), overtook Dogecoin (DOGE) as the ninth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap on April 16.

“The TON blockchain works with Telegram, meaning USDT and XAUT on TON have the potential to provide a simple, borderless experience for peer-to-peer payments for Telegram’s user base which Telegram estimates at over 900 million global users,” the announcement reads.

Related: Crypto-like communication devices could break gov’t surveillance — Telegram founder Durov

Something unique about USDT’s launch on TON is that the TON ecosystem enables transfers between fiat and crypto and has ambitions to beat traditional finance in efficiency and ease of use, TON Foundation’s marketing head, Jack Booth, told Cointelegraph. He ad:

“[There are] built-in on-ramps for fiat at the launch and global off-ramps to bank cards and accounts coming soon. This will be the first time a mass audience will be able to use crypto infrastructure for global payments.”

USDT’s launch on TON isn’t the first instance of the two ecosystems intersecting. Since at least 2023, USDT has been one of the default cryptocurrencies available on Wallet, a third-party custodial wallet available to Telegram users, alongside other coins like Bitcoin (BTC) and Toncoin.

At the time of writing, the Tron network is the default blockchain available for USDT on Wallet, enabling TRC-20 USDT. According to Halil Mirakhmed, chief operating officer of Wallet, TON-based USDT will become another option on Wallet, while TRC-20 USDT will stay.

The Tron blockchain accounts for the biggest share of issued USDT at the time of the announcement, according to data from Tether.

The news comes a few weeks after Tether launched a recovery tool in March 2024 that allowed users to migrate USDT between different blockchains. On March 4, USDT crossed an all-time high market cap of $100 billion.

Additional reporting by Felix Ng.

Magazine: The real risks to Ethena’s stablecoin model (are not the ones you think"
"[INST] What are memecoins good for? Social signaling, says Avalanche founder [/INST] Love them or hate them, memecoins are all the rage in 2024. Despite the inherent risks of aping a new coin, Avalanche founder Emin Gün Sirer believes they are bringing value and new users into the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph report Ezra Reguerra at Token2049 in Dubai, Gün Sirer weighed up the benefits and drawbacks of the rise of memecoins across several blockchain protocols. From Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana to Avalanche, memecoins have made fortunes and ruined portfolios in recent months.

“They’re great for the space because they bring people in, they keep them excited, occupied and concentrated on what the technology can do,” Gün Sirer said.

The CEO of Ava Labs conceded that many critics argue that memecoins bring no value to the ecosystem, just as the rise of nonfungible tokens had detractors. Gün Sirer said their value is not tied to the prospect of making fortunes but to attracting newcomers to the space.

Cointelegraph's Ezra Reguera (l) alongside Emin Gün Sirer at Token2049 in Dubai. Source: Cointelegraph

“As someone who is very conservative financially and has been in this space for a very long time, I spent a fair bit of time criticizing Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. But you realize after a while that memecoins serve a purpose, and that purpose will not be obvious to boomers,” Gün Sirer said.

The former Cornell University professor sees memecoins as an opportunity for younger, risk-taking crypto enthusiasts to signal their aptitude for betting on the right projects.

“What is that purpose? That purpose is social signaling. In the same way that some people use a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT as a profile picture, they’re saying I made so much money off trading that I can afford this,” Gün Sirer explained.

The Ava Labs CEO said that most memecoin traders are not holding tokens long-term and that the nature of the emergent trend relies on the ability to constantly adjust to the movement of value between different memecoins.

“They don’t see it as an investment in that fashion. They see it as a transitory phase. It’s like riding a bike. It’s a dynamic equilibrium. you have to constantly make corrections.”

Gün Sirer conceded that luck also plays its part as traders jump from coin to coin. “You have to be at the forefront of that community movement. You have to guess right. It’s not easy to do, and not everyone can do it,” he said.

This is also why memecoins have “such a premium associated” with people who understand these memes and act early on projects. Gün Sirer said Avalanche has attracted a thriving memecoin culture on its protocol.

The founder said the Avalanche Foundation was one of the first cryptocurrency ecosystem players to endorse memecoins and wants to see the community grow publicly. He cited an influx of users to Avalanche as a direct result of memecoins.

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"[INST] Can blockchain revolutionize digital securities management for stock exchanges? [/INST] The Athens Stock Exchange (ATHEX) is positioning itself to become a trailblazer in the financial world as it plans to integrate blockchain technology into its Electronic Book Building (EBB) system.

ATHEX announced the move in early March in collaboration with the Sui blockchain ecosystem to have securities minted as digital certificates for enhanced security, efficiency and transparency for its users.

The primary issuance process traditionally involves separate confirmations for securities allocation and settlement. However, integrating blockchain simplifies this by merging them into a single, streamlined confirmation.

This could translate to faster and more efficient transactions for everyone involved — the exchange, its members, investors and, most, importantly, issuers raising capital.

Cointelegraph spoke with a representative from Sui to better understand its collaboration with ATHEX and its blockchain being used to level up operations in a traditional finance (TradFi) setting.

Related: Wall Street’s new asset class: Will Grayscale survive the Bitcoin ETF era?

Enhanced security and transparency

One of the primary motivators for integrating blockchain into a highly sensitive network — like a stock exchange dealing with billions of dollars on a daily basis — is a significant security boost.

Digital certificates, inherent to blockchain transactions, provide an advanced layer of security alongside being on a public, immutable ledger, which can help eliminate the risk of manipulation — a persistent challenge in TradFi.

This transparency extends to regulatory oversight, allowing regulators to easily monitor trade activities for suspicious behavior. The Sui spokesperson commented:

“Centralized processes of primary issuance have fallen victim to bad actors in the space for decades and malpractices of non-transparent allocation.”

“Also having an immutable, public ledger reflecting trades would simplify regulators’ ability to monitor trading activities for suspicious transactions or improper allocations,” they said.

They noted that this particular use case is suited for decreasing the risk of primary issuance and increasing the overall efficiency of capital raising, price formation and transparent allocation.

Electronic book building on-chain

EBB aims to be a future fundraising tool, allowing early-stage and mature companies to list transferable securities.

According to the Sui representative, the Greek stock exchange’s EBB places it at “the forefront of innovation […] in comparison to exchanges around the world.”

“ATHEX has made a successful use of the EBB,” they said, “to re-launch their corporate bond market with a large demand from retail and with significant oversubscription.”

The goal in leveraging blockchain technology is to increase innovation while having the safety, security and transparency that individuals and regulators require.”

They also advised that when implementing blockchain in a project in the traditional financial market at scale, it is essential to prioritize the speed, security and fees of the given blockchain network.

Sui said that other exchanges had made attempts at adopting blockchain technology in other parts of their business strategy, but ATHEX’s committed partnership with Sui places it ahead of the pack in taking action with Web3 tools.

Web3 TradFi trends

While ATHEX may be one of the pioneering stock exchanges implementing blockchain with its EBB tool, other global stock exchanges have been dabbling in the Web3 space, too.

Significantly, on March 11, the London Stock Exchange (LSE) declared its intention to consider applications according to the criteria outlined in its Crypto ETN Admission Factsheet for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) cryptocurrency exchange-traded notes (ETNs) during the second quarter of 2024.

On March 25, it said that applications for the crypto ETNs could be submitted as soon as April 8, with successful funds to be listed the following month with approval from the country’s Financial Conduct Authority.

While not a blockchain integration, the exchange’s openness and Web3-friendly approach could point toward a larger trend in TradFi.

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"[INST] Bitcoin no longer in ‘easy mode’ — Expect a leverage wipeout, observers warn [/INST] Traders with leveraged positions in Bitcoin (BTC) could be in for a nasty surprise as the cryptocurrency faces a critical crossroads, which could see the price bounce in different directions, analysts warn.

“The market was in easy mode, but right now clearly there’s too much leverage and market makers are having a field day exploiting high emotions and degenerate behavior,” pseudonymous crypto trader Honeybadger said in an April 11 post on X.

“Market makers are having the best time ever chopping everyone up,” he added.

Data from CoinGlass shows that $39 million worth of leveraged positions in Bitcoin were liquidated over the past 24 hours, with a total of $18.38 million in long positions and $20.62 million in short positions.

Honeybadger pointed to the Bitcoin price chart, which appears to be forming a symmetrical triangle, indicating a neutral pattern, unlike a bullish ascending or bearish descending triangle, which traders can use to make better judgments of its direction.

Annotated Bitcoin price chart showing the formation of a symmetrical triangle. Source: Honeybadger

He believes traders might prematurely interpret it as a “retest of the triangle,” prompting them to enter long positions with high confidence. He warns these traders could be caught off guard with a fakeout — when the price briefly moves out of a chart pattern but quickly retracts.

Mechanism Capital co-founder Andrew Kang is more optimistic, believing the upward trend will continue into new all-time highs following the Bitcoin halving on April 20.

“I expect BTC to touch $80K by May,” he said in an April 11 post on X.

Bitcoin is currently trading at $70,500, having tested its support level of $68,500 three times in the past week, per CoinMarketCap data.

Bitcoin’s price has hovered between $66,100 and $72,520 over the past 7 days. Source: CoinMarketCap

On April 10, Bitcoin’s price briefly dropped 3% below the support level following the release of United States inflation data, which disappointed many observers.

Recently, the market witnessed a sudden 5% drawdown in the price of Bitcoin from $69,450 to $65,970 on April 2, which saw $50 million of Bitcoin long positions liquidated.

However, the increase in leveraged positions taken by traders over the past few days shows that another similar 5% drop will have a much greater impact on long positions.

If Bitcoin’s current price increases by 5% to $73,819, approximately $2.14 billion in short positions will be liquidated, as per CoinGlass data.

Gold proponent and Bitcoin critic Peter Schiff claims there are “way too many” people with long positions in Bitcoin with too much confidence that “they can’t lose.”

“Markets seldom work out the way speculators expect them to. More often than not they end up disappointed,” he stated in an April 11 post on X.

Related: Bitcoin 5% flash crash leads to $165M in leveraged crypto liquidations

On the other hand, if Bitcoin’s price drops by 5% to $66,671, roughly $1.63 billion worth of long positions will be liquidated.

Honeybadger stated that he’s staying on the market sidelines due to volatility and isn’t worried about missing out on price dips in the short term. Arthur Hayes recently echoed a similar sentiment, claiming that he has decided to “abstain from trading until May” amid a potential crypto “firesale.”

“My strategy is to wait for the right moment and not to rush it. And if I am wrong? Well at least I have protected my capital and I can play catch up later,” wrote Honeybadger.

Similarly, crypto trader Jelle advised his 78,500 X followers to sit on their hands and not “get chopped up” by getting “rinsed on leverage.”

Magazine: YouTuber declines ‘7 figure’ sponsorships after FTX scandal: Brian Jung, Hall of Flame

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Do Kwon appeals Montenegrin court decision, claiming ‘unfounded and illegal’ interpretation [/INST] Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon’s legal saga continues with reports of his lawyers filing an appeal against a high court decision that pthe question of his extradition to the United States or South Korea to Montenegro’s justice minister.

According to an April 23 report from Montenegrin news outlet Vijesti, Kwon’s legal team filed an appeal against an April 8 decision from the High Court in Podgorica, which would have allowed Justice Minister Andrej Milović to decide on the Terraform co-founder’s extradition. That high court decision came in response to Montenegro’s Supreme Court approving a request for a protection of legality after a lower court ruled Kwon could be extradited to South Korea.

Kwon’s lawyers reportedly called the high court decision “unfounded and illegal” and a “bizarre” interpretation of the law. It’s unclear if the appeal will stay the question of Kwon’s extradition, which has been bouncing between lower and higher courts for months as his legal team files motions and appeals regarding procedure.

Authorities in Montenegro arrested Kwon in March 2023 for using falsified travel documents while attempting to leave the country. He reportedly remains free to travel within the country as courts determine who has the authority to grant extradition to the U.S. or South Korea, where Kwon would face criminal charges.

Related: Terraform Labs was ‘built on lies’ — SEC at trial

In the United States, a jury found Terraform and Kwon liable for fraud as part of a civil case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). After the verdict, the SEC said it planned to seek a $5.3 billion judgment, with $100 million in civil penalties for Kwon personally.

The collapse of Terraform in 2022 contributed to a significant crypto market downturn that caused firms, including FTX, BlockFi and Celsius, to file for bankruptcy. The platform filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. in January 2024.

Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis"
"[INST] Tokenized asset market could hit $16T on public blockchains — RippleX VP [/INST] Traditional finance (TradFi) firms have warmed up to the idea of tokenizing financial assets on public blockchains as the race toward blockchain-based tokenization heats up.

According to RippleX senior vice president Markus Infanger, TradFi players are finally bringing financial assets on-chain as they look to deploy for production and solve pain points in various value chains.

Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph during Paris Blockchain Week, Infanger said that TradFi’s use of blockchain is finally becoming tangible.

“We’re starting a paradigm shift for blockchain technology, moving beyond the hype and into real utility. It’s starting to unfold,” Infanger said.

TradFi wants holistic blockchain solutions

The executive said that research estimates pin the future value of tokenized markets at $16 trillion, which is eight times bigger than the total market capitalization of the entire cryptocurrency sector.

“A couple of years ago, many of us in this space were envisioning that. It’s getting closer to reality, and it’s happening on public blockchains. At some point, it looked like it would only happen on JPMorgan Coin or IBM.”

Infanger said that advanced conversations with various financial institutions are ongoing, and they are exploring tokenization projects to issue assets on the XRP Ledger. These firms already have distribution lined up and can articulate use cases and how they want to use the underlying blockchain.

A tangible example of this was HSBC partnering with Ripple-owned technology firm Metaco to allow institutional investors to hold tokenized securities on its new custody platform in November 2023.

Infanger added that Ripple’s business is becoming more holistic by combining various solutions that make use of XRPL.

While Ripple is widely viewed as “a payments-first company” providing a blockchain-based payment solution to solve economic and financial friction, recent developments are broadening its appeal to both TradFi and decentralized finance (DeFi) players.

“We have a custody arm, a payments arm and our contributions to the XRP Ledger. The combination is a holistic digital asset infrastructure value proposition for traditional finance and developers who want to solve DeFi problems,” Infanger explained.

Ripple’s stablecoin

Ripple’s recently announced plans to issue its own United States dollar-pegged stablecoin on XRPL and Ethereum will complement its offering to institutions. Cointelegraph previously spoke to Ripple chief technology officer David Schwartz about the details of the stablecoin.

Infanger added further detail to the impetus behind Ripple’s stablecoin, highlighting that the stablecoin market could reach $2.8 trillion in five years given that there are some $22 trillion that are off-chain.

“Right now, we’re at $130 billion, so there’s clear demand, and there’s an expected trajectory of enormous growth. We’re really still at the early days,” Infanger said.

Another key driver was constant requests from developers in the XRPL ecosystem for a tier-one stablecoin offering like USD Coin (USDC) or Tether (USDT). Infanger said Ripple had used stablecoins in small-scale experimentation alongside XRP (XRP) and its payment product.

“We really envision our institutional DeFi use case, on one hand, tokenization on XRPL and then in our payments product for optionality and some use cases alongside XRP using the stablecoin and for the XRP ecosystem as a whole.”

Ripple has not yet confirmed when it will launch its stablecoin or what it will call the XRPL and Ethereum-based token."
"[INST] Can the future of music be decentralized, community-focused and AI-friendly? [/INST] Music has always been seen as a universal language able to connect people from various walks of life, cultures and backgrounds. It has also been used as a way of introducing new ideas and technologies.

Generally, the music industry has always been eager to adopt new technologies that help creativity, speed up the production process, and make it more accessible. Artists can now make full albums in their bedrooms using technology that didn’t even exist 10 to 20 years ago.

The same can be seen with new Web3 tools like blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence (AI) and their ever-growing use cases in music-related endeavors.

In recent years, artists have used nonfungible tokens (NFTs) to release singles or create exclusive experiences for fans, AI to reinvent artists and sounds, and blockchain as a way to revolutionize music streaming.

Audius, a decentralized music streaming and monetization platform, has been heavily involved in the converging Web3 and music space since 2018.

The platform has made a name for itself capturing the attention of mainstream artists like Deadmau5 and Skrillex and their fans, being a gateway for many to the next iteration of digital integrations.

Cointelegraph sat down with Audius co-founders Roneil Rumburg and Forrest Browning to better understand how the future of music can be decentralized, community-focused and AI-friendly all at the same time.

Building for adoption

While the crypto and Web3 space has been a “niche” industry for the majority of its existence until now, music, on the other hand, is nearly all-encompassing. Browning said this was the platform’s initial approach:

“Music is a hell of a gateway drug to crypto more broadly. The way Audius works and has worked from the beginning is that we’re going after the mainstream Web2 audience, rather than a tool or a protocol for the niche Web3 community. This is being built with the intention of going mainstream.”

He said this included taking an engineering and product perspective that hid and “abstracted away” the more “scary parts” of Web3 that may deter the typical Web2 user who may not understand those aspects.

This way, users can decide how much they want to interact with the important Web3 features that underlie the platform.

“If you want to start to pull back the onion and get into kind of wallet addresses and sending around crypto or sending tips, you can do all that,” he said.

“But if your primary use case is to use it like a normal Web2 streaming service and listen to your favorite artists, perhaps buy a track because you’re a super fan of somebody who uploaded a song, all those Web2 mainstream mechanisms are there. It’s on us to make that usable for you as an end user.”

While many developers in the Web3 space wrestle with the idea of how to attract a wider user base beyond crypto natives, music organically allows for that inflow due to the familiar aspects of streaming, uploading tracks or even being a super fan of an artist looking to collect merchandise.

“Users don't have to know that every time they favorite a track, repost something, upload a song — all of that’s being documented on the blockchain. It’s all moving around on properly decentralized rails, but both the artists and the fans don’t have to know any of that if they don’t want to.”

Related: How the music industry is battling AI deepfakes one state at a time with the ELVIS Act

Fandom isn’t speculative

In March 2023, Audius introduced NFT-gating to its platform to allow its artists the ability to make certain songs, mixes and track stems (individual audio elements of a complete song) accessible only to fans who hold a specific NFT.

However, this NFT feature was introduced to the platform at a time when the NFT market was in a major lull.

According to data from CoinGecko, NFT trading volume in 2023 was down 50% from the previous year, sliding from $26.3 billion down to $11.8 billion.

When asked if NFT utility in the music industry differs from general NFT market trends due to it being connected to music and artists, Rumburg commented:

“The speculative side of NFTs is very much market dependent. The fandom side is not. I think kind of focusing on the latter with all the features that we build helped us weather the cycles in terms of usage.”

He added that the problem with chasing speculative financial use cases is that the usage of those tools now becomes cyclical and cyclically dependent. For Audius, on the other hand, the focus has been first and foremost on the artists or fans and not the purely speculator class.

“It has trade-offs because it also means that when the market is very hot, we don’t capture as much of that activity,” he said. “But the activity we do capture is durable and delivers value.”

Browning said that as time went on, the community on Audius began pushing for more than just an engagement platform, which grew into the marketplace they “always envisioned Audius would become.”

Empowered AI

In the face of rapidly emerging generative AI tools, the team behind Audius also considered its own decentralized community and how to best empower artists yet encourage innovation.

Last May, the platform rolled out a feature that allowed artists to display an “AI friendly” label on their profile, which lets a fan base know they can train on the artist’s work.

Browning explained that anything created by an Audius artist using generative AI will end up tagging the original artist. “Then there’s a nice social graph, and it shows up that it is an AI generation of this other artist.”

“It’s all about making sure that if a lot of smart people are trying to figure out the legal aspect of this, from a moral and artist empowerment side, we just want to let everybody do what feels right to those involved.”

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Australian regulators bust unlicensed blockchain mining companies [/INST] Hundreds of Australian investors are more than 160 million Australian dollars ($104 million) out of pocket after three cryptocurrency mining companies, NGS Crypto Pty Ltd, NGS Digital Pty Ltd and NGS Group Ltd (collectively “NGS companies”) collapsed into liquidation.

According to an April 12 report, the Australian Security and Investments Commission (ASIC) launched civil proceedings against the companies and their directors, Brett Mendham, Ryan Brown and Mark Ten Caten.

The NGS companies have been accused of targeting local investors to establish self-managed superannuation funds (SMSFs) and then convert the funds into cryptocurrency for investment in blockchain mining packages with promised fixed-rate returns.

The ASIC alleges that approximately 450 investors entrusted a total of 62 million AUD ($40 million) to these companies, which also operated without the necessary Australian license.

The financial watchdog expressed concern over the potential dissipation of digital assets invested in blockchain mining and successfully petitioned the Federal Court to appoint liquidators specifically for NGS companies’ digital currency holdings. Mendham has also been barred from leaving Australia.

Additionally, ASIC has moved to prevent NGS companies from offering financial services in Australia without proper authorization.

Related: Australians wouldn’t value retail CBDC for its privacy or safety, RBA finds

ASIC Chair Joe Longo cautioned Australians against investing their SMSFs in cryptocurrency and reiterated the commission’s commitment to scrutinizing crypto products to ensure investor protection through regulatory compliance.

Meanwhile, fellow Australian cryptocurrency entities DCA Capital, Digital Commodity Assets Pty Ltd and the Digital Commodity Assets Fund are also facing liquidation and federal court proceedings.

Concerns from investors regarding mismanagement, lack of proper licenses and potential breaches of managed investment scheme regulations prompted the action.

KordaMentha, appointed as liquidators, has discovered debts totaling 100 million AUD ($65 million) owed to 100 investors. The federal court has frozen the assets of DCA Capital’s director, Ashod Balanian, amounting to 55 million AUD ($36 million), and he has been instructed to surrender his passport.

Regulators in Australia have been giving more attention to its crypto regulatory landscape over the past couple of months. On March 21, ASIC Commissioner Alan Kirkland highlighted the need to solve the “regulatory trilemma” for financial innovation, including consumer protection, market integrity and encouraging financial innovation.

Australia has recently been called a country poised for an “inflection point” of crypto demand. While the local demand for institutional crypto still lags, stablecoins and welcoming policy moves could spark a movement.

Magazine: Filecoin staking platform busted, Matrixport says ‘short ETH’: Asia Express"
"[INST] $7.5B AI crypto token merger scheduled for community vote on April 2 [/INST] A token merger to the tune of $7.5 billion consisting of artificial intelligence (AI) protocols SingularityNet, Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol is scheduled for a community vote of approval on April 2.

According to the March 27 announcement, there will be three separate community votes for each individual protocol, with completion of all voting scheduled for April 16. If the union is approved, SingularityNet’s AGIX token, Fetch.ai’s FET (FET) token and Ocean Protocol’s OCEAN token will be replaced with the new Artificial Superintelligence Alliance’s ASI token.

As of March 26, the merged token would have a fully diluted market capitalization of $7.6 billion across 2.631 billion tokens. The three tokens’ current combined market cap is around $5.3 billion.

“If approved, it will then be possible to swap $FET for Artificial Superintelligence token at a rate of 1:1,"" the teams wrote. “For example, if you hold 100 $FET, you will be able to swap it for 100 $ASI.” FET will be the reserve currency of ASI, while users will be able to convert OCEAN and AGIX into ASI at a new fixed rate.

An additional 1.48 billion ASI tokens will be minted, with 867 million ASI allocated to AGIX holders and 611 million ASI allocated to OCEAN tokenholders. Therefore, Singularity and Ocean tokenholders will “receive 0.433226 $ASI per $OCEAN and 0.433350 $ASI per $AGIX” as a result of the merger. As per Fetch.ai:

“If you have $OCEAN and $AGIX tokens on an exchange, no action is needed. We will work with each exchange to ensure a smooth conversion and your holdings will automatically be converted to $ASI tokens directly by the exchange. You won’t see $OCEAN or $AGIX on the exchange — but don’t panic! Your tokens are there, just look for the $ASI symbol.”

In addition, the swap mechanism will be available indefinitely for OCEAN and AGIX users holding tokens on self-custody wallets to convert their balance. Announced the same day, the novel Superintelligence Alliance will share the common goal of developing blockchain-based decentralized AI protocols, which can’t be controlled by centralized parties or large stakeholders.

Related: Fetch.ai announces GPU rewards for tokenholders after $100M infrastructure investment"
"[INST] BlackRock has ‘no commercial relationship’ with Hedera, HBAR sinks 32% [/INST] BlackRock has confirmed it has “no commercial relationship” with Hedera and that it did not choose the Hedera Hashgraph to tokenize any BlackRock funds, including shares of its $22 billion money market fund.

Hedera’s (HBAR) token rallied over 100% on Tuesday following the HBAR Foundation’s announcement on X stating that blockchain firms Archax and Ownera tokenized BlackRock’s ICS U.S. Treasury Fund on Hedera.

Some misinterpreted the post to suggest BlackRock played an active role in the tokenization effort, but a BlackRock spokesperson has confirmed to Cointelegraph that’s not the case.

“BlackRock has no commercial relationship with Hedera nor has BlackRock selected Hedera to tokenise any BlackRock funds.”

As of the time of writing, HBAR has fallen 32.8% in the past 24 hours to $0.118 since it peaked at $0.176 at 5:00 am UTC on April 24, according to CoinGecko.

“As we have in the past, BlackRock will communicate directly with the public on the evolution of our digital asset strategy,” the spokesperson added.

HBAR Foundation’s announcement has amassed over 2.9 million views and 3,200 reposts since it was posted a little over 36 hours ago — though some cryptocurrency influencers misinterpreted the message.

“BLACKROCK JUST TOKENIZED ONE OF THEIR MONEY MARKET FUNDS ON HEDERA,” said Mason Versluis to his 189,000 X followers.

Archax CEO Graham Rodford also clarified later on X that it was his firm’s choice to put shares of BlackRock’s money market fund on Hedera but said BlackRock was “aware” that Archax was tokenizing shares of the fund.

Rodford further explained the nuance during an interview with crypto YouTuber Jesus Martinez.

“What we saw on Twitter was kind of pretty much close to the truth [...] Archax had clients that wanted to invest in the BlackRock money market fund. When they expressed an interest we opened an account at BlackRock so that we could,” explained Roford.

""With most of the investments we make, we want to tokenize them, we told them [BlackRock] we were going to and then just out of the good relationship with them we said 'hey we're putting out a press release, you guys happy to check it?' — so they checked it and gave their views on it,"" he explained.

“Some kind of went a bit off track, saying ‘hey, BlackRock did this, BlackRock did that, BlackRock were involved’ […] but Archax has been leading the project.”

Cointelegraph reached out to HBAR Foundation on April 24 but didn’t receive a response.

Related: Hedera network approves $408M of HBAR for ecosystem growth

Despite the short-lived price pump, HBAR is still down over 78% from its September 2021 all-time high of $0.57, according to CoinGecko.

HBAR’s change in price over the last month. Source: CoinGecko

Magazine: Is measuring blockchain transactions per second (TPS) stupid in 2024? Big Questions

Update (April 25 at 3:45 am UTC): Added a further explanation from Archax CEO Graham Rodford taken from an interview with Jesus Martinez."
"[INST] Sam Altman pushes ChatGPT mass adoption among Fortune 500 companies: Report [/INST] OpenAI — known for its popular generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT — is actively pitching its services directly to Fortune 500 companies, according to a source close to the matter.

A report from Reuters on April 12 said that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and chief operating officer Brad Lightcap met with hundreds of executives from major corporations across San Francisco, New York and London.

The pitch centered around OpenAI’s enterprise offerings, including ChatGPT Enterprise — a robust chatbot service tailored for corporate use — and software integrating customer applications with OpenAI’s AI services via application programming interfaces (APIs).

The two noted that more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies already use the consumer version of its chatbot.

OpenAI assured prospective clients that data from ChatGPT Enterprise would not be used to train its models, emphasizing privacy and security. This follows a series of lawsuits in which OpenAI has been implicated in alleged data violations.

The move puts OpenAI in competition with its primary financial backer, Microsoft, which already offers some OpenAI services through its own platforms.

Related: OpenAI accuses New York Times of hacking AI models in copyright lawsuit

Through its Azure cloud and Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft already offers access to OpenAI’s technology, which sparked some executives to express skepticism about paying for ChatGPT Enterprise on top of existing Microsoft services.

According to the anonymous sources in attendance, Altman and Lightcap addressed these concerns by highlighting the benefits of direct collaboration with OpenAI’s team, which they said included access to cutting-edge models and customized AI solutions tailored to enterprise needs.

As of March 2024, OpenAI has a valuation of $68 billion and is on track to achieve its target of $1 billion in revenue for 2024.

It hopes to make sales of its enterprise model a significant contributor to its bottom line. During the meetings, Lightcap reportedly revealed a surge in interest in the business model, with over 600,000 signups for ChatGPT Enterprise and Team, up from 150,000 in January — underscoring growing demand for AI solutions in the corporate sector.

OpenAI has also been reportedly in talks with movie studios in Hollywood, promoting its Sora video creation tool to studio executives.

While the technology has garnered excitement, concerns persist regarding the source of training data, output reliability and copyright protection.

Magazine: AI didn’t kill the metaverse, it will build it — Alien Worlds, Bittensor vs Eric Wall: AI Eye"
"[INST] $250K Bitcoin? Tim Draper says halving, Bitcoin ETFs will drive demand [/INST] Renowned venture capitalist Tim Draper sees Bitcoin tripling in value in 2024 due to inflows into spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the looming Bitcoin halving.

Speaking to Cointelegraph during Paris Blockchain Week, Draper reiterated his belief that Bitcoin (BTC) would drastically increase in value considering several factors in 2024.

“If I had to predict, maybe we could see $250,000 by the end of the year; I mean, it’s looking pretty good,” Draper said as he reflected on his previous price prediction for 2022.

The approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States has been a critical driver of renewed interest and capital inflows into the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Draper believes the investment products have opened up a new avenue for Bitcoin-curious investors that might be daunted by the prospect of holding BTC in self-custody and also serve as a hedge against devaluing fiat currencies:

“I think that it gives people an opportunity to buy some Bitcoin and hold on to it so that they can take care of themselves when there’s a run on the dollar or the euro.”

He also highlighted the appeal for investors who want their respective fund managers to continue managing their portfolios. Access to a Bitcoin ETF allows investors to continue working with Fidelity or JPMorgan and have this new asset class managed as part of their wider investments.

$250,000 for $BTC by the end of this year?



During #ParisBlockchainWeek, we had the pleasure of meeting @TimDraper, who shared insights into the future of #Bitcoin.



“The future I see is one where if you don’t have some Bitcoin to take care of yourself when the dollars become… pic.twitter.com/67F6xxmjFU — Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) April 10, 2024

Draper said that Bitcoin’s finite supply and increasing adoption as a payment option for goods or services would increase its appeal to the masses. At the same time, fiat currencies grapple with inflation and decreased purchasing power.

“I don’t really need to hold on to any fiat currency that decreases in value over time because of political whims or government spending, or politicians that just decide they’re going to spend more money and inflate your money,” Draper said.

The venture capital investor added that Bitcoin remains a “place of great security” against inflation.

“I think I’ve actually started to see the lines cross. People feel more comfortable with their Bitcoin than they do with their dollars.”

The fourth Bitcoin halving is also set to have a significant impact on market dynamics. The event, earmarked for April 20, is one that investors should not underestimate, as Draper explains:

“If you’re an investor in the stock market, they say don’t bet against the Fed [U.S. Federal Reserve]. If you’re a Bitcoin buyer, don’t bet against the halving. It changes everything. The supply shrinks, the demand increases and the price goes up. That’s natural economics — supply and demand,” Draper said.

The venture capitalist also reiterated his belief that having single digit percentage exposure to Bitcoin is becoming a more attractive means of hedging against rising concerns over bank failures and devaluing sovereign currencies.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments: Trezor CEO"
"[INST] US authorities arrest and charge new figure in OneCoin scheme — Who is William Morro? [/INST] Officials with the United States Justice Department have arrested and charged William Morro for bank fraud in connection with the OneCoin crypto scheme.

According to April 23 filings in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Morro was responsible for transferring $35 million in funds connected to OneCoin from bank accounts in China to one in Hong Kong in 2016. The superseding indictment alleged that Morro moved more than $6 million from the Hong Kong account to a U.S. one he controlled as part of a scheme to defraud.

Source: PACER

Morro voluntarily surrendered to authorities and pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud. He has been released on his own recognizance until a sentencing hearing scheduled for Aug. 1. Justice Department officials included an order of forfeiture related to the illicit assets in the OneCoin case.

Reports suggested that Morro was connected to Gilbert Armenta, the boyfriend of OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova. Armenta was sentenced to five years in prison in 2023 for his role in laundering roughly $300 million related to the OneCoin scheme. Morro is listed as a managing partner of the InterAmerican Group and a board member of AEE Power.

What information prompted U.S. officials to bring a superseding indictment against Morro roughly eight years after his alleged fraudulent actions is unclear. The Justice Department has charged several individuals for their roles in the OneCoin scheme, including lawyer Mark Scott, former head of legal and compliance Irina Dilkinska, and co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood.

Ignatova, also known as the ‘CryptoQueen,’ has been charged in the U.S. but remained at large at the time of publication. She is currently on the FBI’s list of the ten most wanted fugitives.

Related: OneCoin: A deep dive into crypto’s most notorious Ponzi scheme

According to the April 23 filings, Morro retained Mark Cohen and Jonathan Abernethy of the law firm Cohen and Gresser. Cohen famously represented Sam Bankman-Fried during his 2023 criminal trial, in which the former FTX CEO was convicted of seven felony counts and later sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Founded in 2014, OneCoin was exposed as a fraudulent crypto scheme in 2015, defrauding investors out of roughly $4 billion. In Morro’s case, a charge of conspiracy to commit bank fraud could carry a sentence of up to 30 years in prison.

Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis"
"[INST] Ethereum earnings tripled in Q1 2024, reaching $370M [/INST] Ethereum, the biggest blockchain network by transaction volume, posted major growth in the first quarter of 2024, seeing positive signs in most income statement metrics.

According to data from Coin98 Analytics, Ethereum tripled its earnings in Q1 2024 on a quarter-over-quarter basis, reaching $369 million. The amount accounted for a 210% increase year-over-year from $119 million in Q1 2023.

Ethereum Q1 2024 fees and revenues increased 79% and 85% quarter-over-quarter, respectively. According to the data, Ethereum racked up $1.2 billion in revenue from transaction fees in Q1 2024, which is 155% more than in the first quarter of last year.

Total Ethereum revenue amounted to $1 billion in Q1 2024, surging 186% from last year’s $385 million.

Ethereum income statement metrics summary. Source: Coin98 Analytics

Ethereum’s success in Q1 2024 came amid the cryptocurrency nearing all-time prices in March, which triggered a massive spike in transaction costs on the network.

As Ethereum surged above $3,000 in late February, some users reported paying over $100 in ETH transaction fees at peak times.

As of March 1, the average gas fee for a swap transaction reportedly amounted to around $79, while some users reported that estimated ETH swap fees rose as high as $400 in late February.

Ethereum network fees one-year chart. Source: YCharts

Despite Ethereum network users encountering massive fees, Ethereum showed significant growth in network usage in Q1 2024.

According to Coin98, total Ethereum transactions rose in the first quarter of 2024, with total transactions surging 8.4% quarter-over-quarter to hit more than 107 million transactions.

Related: Fidelity files S-1 application with US SEC for spot ETH EFT with staking

Additionally, the total value locked in the Ethereum decentralized finance ecosystem increased by 86% quarter-over-quarter to $55.9 billion.

Tether (USDT) remained the biggest Ethereum-based, or ERC-20, stablecoin by market capitalization in Q1 2024, adding 14% in market value since the previous quarter. Its biggest rival, USDC (USDC), increased ERC-20 market value by 23% quarter-over-quarter.

According to a recent analysis by Matrixport, the first quarter of 2024 was strong for most assets, including those in traditional finance. The Nasdaq returned up to 10%, and Nvidia showed returns of 81%.

Commodities traded strongly, with oil and gold returning 19% and 11% respectively. While United States bonds continued to sell off, Bitcoin and Ethereum returned increases of 57% and 45%, respectively, in the first quarter.

Magazine: SBF gets 25 years in prison, Fidelity eyes ETH staking, and Coinbase’s court loss: Hodler’s Digest, March 24-30"
"[INST] Tether announces restructuring to go beyond stablecoins [/INST] Tether — the operator of the eponymous Tether (USDT) stablecoin, the world’s largest stablecoin by market value — is restructuring to introduce new divisions beyond stablecoin development.

The stablecoin giant has launched a new framework introducing four new business divisions, including Tether Data, Tether Finance, Tether Power and Tether Edu, according to an official announcement on April 18.

With the new divisions, Tether aims to expand its mission to provide a range of new infrastructure solutions, investments and services.

Tether’s four new business divisions. Source: Tether

At Tether Data, the company will focus on strategic investments in technologies, including artificial intelligence and peer-to-peer platforms like Holepunch, Keet and Pear Runtime.

Tether Finance will serve as the hub of Tether’s traditional stablecoin products and financial services aiming to democratize the global financial system, the announcement notes.

Tether Power targets further development of Tether’s mining and energy efforts, while Tether Edu will focus on digital education and promotion of blockchain adoption regionally and globally.

“We disrupted the traditional financial landscape with the world’s first and most trusted stablecoin,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said, stressing that now the company is “daring to kick-start inclusive infrastructure solutions, dismantling traditional systems for fairness.”

He continued:

“With this evolution beyond our traditional stablecoin offerings, we are ready to build and support the invention and implementation of cutting-edge technology that removes the limitations of what’s possible in this world.”

Founded in 2014, Tether is one of the largest companies in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and operates USDT, the largest stablecoin by market capitalization and the biggest cryptocurrency by trading volumes.

In March 2024, Tether posted a major historic milestone, hitting an all-time high market value of $100 billion.

Related: Stablecoin competition crucial for regulatory engagement — Tether CEO

Apart from USDT, Tether operates numerous other stablecoins, including its Euro-pegged Tether Token EURT (EURT), its offshore Chinese Yuan (CNH₮), its gold-backed Tether Gold (XAUt) and others.

The top three biggest cryptocurrencies by 24-hour trading volume. Source: CoinGecko

Tether’s restructuring is another step in the company’s efforts to move beyond stablecoins. In 2023, the firm was actively entering the Bitcoin (BTC) mining industry, launching its own mining operations and introducing proprietary software.

In February 2024, Tether also created an educational branch to provide courses, workshops and other resources for skills development in blockchain technology and related areas.

Tether has also been accumulating Bitcoin, purchasing 8,888 BTC for $618 million in late March 2024. As of March 31, Tether held a total of 75,354 Bitcoin, bought at an average price of $30,305.

Magazine: Bitcoin Halving will pump games, Shrapnel’s ‘simple’ secret revealed: Web3 Gamer"
"[INST] Binance founder should be jailed for 36 months, US prosecutors say [/INST] As the United States authorities are preparing to give a sentence to Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao on April 30, prosecutors have requested jail time for the former CEO.

Binance founder Zhao should serve 36 months in prison after pleading guilty to violating laws against money laundering, U.S. prosecutors said in a court filing on April 23.

“Given the magnitude of Zhao’s willful violation of U.S. law and its consequences, an above-guideline sentence of 36 months is warranted,” the prosecutors wrote in the filing to the U.S. district court for the Western District of Washington.

“That sentence, together with the agreed $50 million fine, is sufficient but not greater than necessary to balance the relevant 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) factors and achieve the goals of sentencing,” the filing added.

Changpeng Zhao at the Viva Technology conference in Paris in 2022. Source: CNBC

Zhao pleaded guilty to violating money laundering requirements in the U.S. and stepped down from the CEO position at Binance in November 2023. Zhao also subsequently faced a $50-million fine served directly to him, in addition to larger penalties to Binance.

According to online reports, federal sentencing guidelines set a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison for Zhao, who had agreed not to appeal against any stretch up to that length. He has been free in the U.S. on a $175-million bond.

After CZ admitted to violating U.S. money laundering laws, he and Binance agreed to pay the U.S. government $4.3 billion in fines to end the criminal case. In return, Binance was allowed to continue operating while complying with U.S. laws.

Related: Binance sued in Canada for securities law violations

Despite stepping down from Binance, CZ remains involved in the cryptocurrency industry. In March, Zhao announced a new educational project devoted to crypto and blockchain, stressing that the initiative will have “no new tokens.”

Named Giggle Academy, the project specifically targets a much younger population, or two- to three-year-olds, according to a CZ post on X on April 18.

On April 24, CZ showcased the logo of his new educational project. “We wanted the Giggle Academy logo to show youth, fun, positive energy, and growth. We also want to show respect to our ‘Binance heritage,’” CZ wrote.

Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis"
"[INST] 5 crazy April Fools pranks that Crypto X almost fell for [/INST] From Vitalik Buterin touting “degen communism” to a white paper from the Solana CEO for a token designed to operate through shortwave radio channels, here are some of the most outlandish April Fool’s Day gags that almost tricked Crypto X this year.

BunkerCoin, a token transmitted through radio waves

In an April 1 post to X, Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko announced the launch of a new Solana-based token called “BunkerCoin” which made light of the oftentimes over-complicated architecture of new cryptocurrencies.

Yakovenko claimed the new BunkerCoin token operated on “shortwave radio channels” and leveraged several complicated technologies, including ZkProofs, Groth16 proofs and a “Nakamoto-style longest chain rule.”

Overall, the post was a jumble of crypto-related buzzwords designed to prod fun at new tokens.

“If you are into mainstream adoption, pivot to bunkers,” wrote Yakovenko — a not-so-subtle reference to a similar post from All In podcast co-host Jason Calcanis on June 9 last year.

Degen communism, the only correct ideology: Vitalik Buterin

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin made a prank of his own, writing a humorous blog post that declared “degen communism” — a light-hearted jab at memecoins — to be the only acceptable political philosophy for crypto.

According to Buterin, degen communism is a political ideology that “openly embraces chaos, but tweaks key rules and incentives to create a background pressure where the consequences of chaos are aligned with the common good.”

While the post overstates the importance of degeneracy and chaos, it comes back to an idea that Buterin mentioned in a March 29 blog post, where he talked about the need to make memecoins more of a positive force in financial markets.

Bankless co-host turns into a Solana maxi

In a more light-hearted attempt at humor, Bankless co-host and well-known Ethereum maximalist David Hoffman made a tongue-in-cheek announcement that he would be leaving the Ethereum ecosystem and joining forces with Austin Federa and Yakovenko at the Solana Foundation.

Hoffman jested that he would join the Solana Foundation as the ""VP of Decentralization"" — a subtle reference to a common criticism from Ethereum fans who often claim that Solana isn't as decentralized as ETH.

Hoffman, a known Ethereum maximalist has long traded blows with Solana developers and enthusiasts alike — so a sudden switch comes across as deeply out of character for the Bankless co-host.

Related: SBF speaks out after sentencing: ‘I never thought what I was doing was illegal’

The real April Fools? Pump and dumpers

One of the more questionable April Fools Day pranks, at least, according to Crypto X, came from an account associated with an Ethereum-based crowdfunding protocol called JuiceBox which claimed it had received financial backing from crypto venture capital firm Paradigm.

In an April 1 post to X, pseudonymous account Briliegh.eth — since made private — wrote that JuiceBox has secured a $69 million fundraising deal with Paradigm, sending the protocol’s native token JBX surging more than 45% to $0.0043, per CoinGecko data.

JBX pumped and dumped on the April Fool's Day jest. Source: CoinGecko

It took an hour for Briliegh to reveal that the post was an April Fool’s Day joke and the token retraced 25% to $0.0034.

The post — which was screenshotted and shared across X by several commentators — was met with backlash from users who took issue with the humor.

“Waiting an hour to tell the world it's an April Fools joke — CRIME,” said one user. “Jail,” wrote another.

A similar situation unfolded when “Sasha” the pseudonymous founder of the decentralized tech stack Waves announced that the protocol would be integrating with AI and replacing its “Waves” ticker with “AI.”

At the time of the announcement, the price of Waves (WAVES) jumped 5% before quickly retracing back to earlier levels. Several users failed to find the humor in the jest and declared it to be more akin to market manipulation.

“Is this [a] joke? Market manipulating,” wrote one user in response to the post.

Other notable mentions

BitMEX Research joked that Grayscale Bitcoin Trust's (GBTC's) outflows stood at $0. The post was poking fun at the previous high volumes of outflows from GBTC over the past few weeks.

It clarified the joke in a follow-up X post, sharing the real GBTC outflow on April 1 of $303 million.

The tomfoolery reached well beyond the more niche corners of crypto X, with Republican majority whip Tom Emmer using the day to take aim at the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

In four separate posts to X, Emmer appeared to make several statements praising the SEC and its chair Gary Gensler before finishing his post with “April Fools!”

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Crypto ATM firm says revenue unaffected by fluctuations in BTC price [/INST] The high volatility of cryptocurrency prices has had little to no effect on some major players in the industry, including Bitcoin Depot, a Bitcoin (BTC) ATM operator.

Bitcoin Depot, the biggest ATM operator in the United States, has recorded no correlation between its revenues and the price of Bitcoin historically, the firm stated in its 10-K annual report filed on April 15.

The company’s revenues in 2023 and 2022, $689 million and $647 million, respectively, have not been correlated to the price of Bitcoin, even in light of volatile Bitcoin prices.

While Bitcoin surged 155% in 2023, Bitcoin Depot’s year-over-year revenue growth amounted to just 6%, the company stated.

Bitcoin price (from January 2022 to January 2024). Source: CoinGecko

According to the ATM operator, the lack of correlation between Bitcoin Depot’s revenues and the BTC price comes partly from the nature of the services provided.

“Based on our own user surveys, a majority of our users use our products and services for non-speculative purposes, including money transfers, international remittances, and online purchases, among others,” Bitcoin Depot wrote.

Bitcoin Depot has also been putting efforts to reduce its exposure to volatility in BTC prices by maintaining a “relatively low balance” of Bitcoin — or less than $0.8 million — at any given time, the filing reads, adding:

“Our typical practice is to purchase Bitcoin through a liquidity provider such as Cumberland DRW or Abra. We replenish our Bitcoin only through purchases from leading Bitcoin liquidity providers and do not engage in any mining of Bitcoin ourselves.”

Bitcoin Depot pointed out two main components of the working capital required in its operations: Bitcoin in hot wallets to fulfill user orders and cash that accumulates in the Bitcoin ATM kiosks. As of Dec. 31, 2023, cash in the BTM kiosks accounted for roughly 21% of Bitcoin Depot’s average monthly revenues.

Founded in 2016, Bitcoin Depot operates a major network of Bitcoin ATM machines globally. Also referred to as BTMs, Bitcoin ATMs allow users to deposit and withdraw money using cash or a debit card.

Related: BlackRock smashes $10.5T record in Q1 managed assets

According to data from CoinATMRadar, Bitcoin Depot is the largest cryptocurrency ATM operator worldwide, operating more than 7,000 BTMs as of April 2024. Its biggest rivals, CoinFlip and BitStop, operate 4,800 and 2,500 machines, respectively.

Top Bitcoin ATM operators worldwide as of April 16, 2024. Source: CoinATMRadar

As previously mentioned, global Bitcoin ATM adoption experienced the first-ever decline in terms of the amount of machines installed in 2023.

According to Bitcoin Depot CEO Brandon Mintz, the ATM industry will likely see a significant rebound following the much anticipated Bitcoin halving event, expected to occur this week.

Magazine: The real risks to Ethena’s stablecoin model (are not the ones you think)"
"[INST] VeChain announces tokenized gloves in partnership with UFC — community responds [/INST] According to an April 12 blog post from VeChain, gloves worn by UFC fighters will soon be tokenized and their identities tracked on the VeChainThor network.

The gloves will contain VeChain near-field communication (NFC) chips that record fight data, proving the authenticity of each pair, the post stated. After the fight, the athletes will “donate and give away"" their gloves, making them into collectors’ items. The chips inside each pair will allow a buyer to check the authenticity of the item via a VeChainThor network smart contract. Fighters will begin wearing the gloves at UFC 300, which is scheduled for April 13.

VeChain UFC tokenized gloves. Source: VeChain.

In its post, VeChain claimed that the system will help prevent fraud in the secondary market, which is a common problem for buyers who seek to own the gloves worn during particular fights. The new items use aspects of VeChain’s ToolChain system, a supply-chain management system that some enterprises use to track items and make sure they make it to the intended recipient.

VeChain announced that an initial set of 12 exclusive gloves will be given to “A-list” celebrities, including Joe Rogan. UFC CEO Dana White will also be making a live presentation to announce the partnership.

On VeChain’s Reddit board, holders of the VeChainThor (VTHO) token had mixed reactions to the news. Some were excited about the new use case for the network. “[W]e're going to be minting rwa [real world asset] gloves as [non-fungible tokens] every ufc event!” said pez86. Another user, VETterDaysAhead, also saw the announcement as positive, stating, “Gloves and merchandise tracking sound great. Hoping they do QR code scanning on TV for events that burns VTHO as well."" 🔥🔥🔥”

Related: What is VeChain, and how does it work?

But not everyone was impressed. Some users thought the new gloves would not burn enough VTHO from transaction fees to have any appreciable effect on the price. “Hey man, that's like a whole 10 VTHO burned per year. UFC gonna topple Walmart China in usage,” stated tkim91321 in a sarcastic reply to another user who had complained about the overhyped announcement.

In another post, tkim91321 elaborated on their position, asking rhetorically, “And this would burn how many VTHO per month?” and then answering, “Nothing materially significant.”

According to Coinmarketcap data, VeThor’s market cap was over $283 million as of April 12, making it one of the top 300 cryptocurrencies in the world. In May 2022, the network’s foundation had $1.2 billion in its treasury. In June of that year, the VeChain Foundation began its relationship with UFC, entering into a $100 million sponsorship deal with the mixed martial arts promotion."
"[INST] Uniswap tops $2T in trading volume, larger than Australia’s GDP [/INST] Decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap has surpassed $2 trillion in all-time trading volume, notching the milestone five and a half years after it launched in November 2018.

Uniswap reached the $2 trillion milestone at around 11:55 am UTC on April 5, according to data tracked by a Dune Analytics dashboard compiled by Uniswap's strategy and operations lead, Zach Wong.

Uniswap total trading volume, all-time chart. Source: Dune Analytics

Uniswap Labs notified the community of the incoming milestone at 6:00 pm UTC on April 4, when it expected $2 trillion to be reached within 24 hours.

For perspective, Uniswap’s $2 trillion in trading volume is larger than Australia, Brazil and South Korea’s gross domestic products — a measure of the market value of finished goods and services produced within an entire country.

For a bit of fun, Uniswap Labs also said it would transfer $200 in USD Coin (USDC) to the first person who records and sends the firm a video clip refreshing the Dune Analytics dashboard showing Uniswap’s trading volume tick over to $2 trillion.

The trading volume figure is taken from the several blockchains that support Uniswap, which include Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Celo, BNB Chain, Base, Blast and the Avalanche Network.

Related: Uniswap (UNI) price gains 50% after fee-sharing governance proposal

Launched in November 2018, Uniswap took 42 months to breach the $1 trillion milestone in trading volume in May 2022.

It took less than 24 months to surpass the second trillion, despite facing increased competition in the DEX space. DEXs are mainly used to facilitate token swaps without an intermediary via smart contracts.

Cointelegraph reached out to Uniswap Labs but didn’t receive an immediate response.

Uniswap remains by far the largest DEX by trading volume, having amassed $21.6 billion over the last week alone, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard by one of the platform’s founders, Fredrik Haga.

PancakeSwap — a fork of Uniswap — is second at $9.6 billion, while Curve, Balancer and Trader Joe round out the top five with volumes between $1.8 billion and $800 million.

Magazine: Ethereum’s ERC-20 design flaws are a crypto scammer’s best friend"
"[INST] OKX launches WIF and MEW spot trading amid memecoin craze [/INST] Cryptocurrency exchange OKX is moving to capitalize on the ongoing memecoin craze by listing major rising Solana-based memecoins like the Dogwifhat (WIF) and the Cat in a Dog’s World (MEW).

OKX has officially started spot trading for WIF and MEW, according to the exchange’s announcement on X. OKX users can now start depositing WIF and MEW tokens on the exchange to start trading the memecoins against the Tether (USDT) stablecoin.

According to the announcement, WIF spot trading will open at 9:00 am UTC on April 15, or one hour after MEW spot trading was launched. The withdrawals for both tokens will open at 10:00 am UTC on April 16, OKX noted.

WIF and MEW are among fast-growing memecoins, trading millions of dollars each day. Both are based on the Solana blockchain, which has been outperforming rival networks such as Ethereum and Avalanche in terms of network activity and adoption due to the ongoing memecoin frenzy.

Launched in November 2023, Dogwifhat (WIF) has emerged as one of the biggest memecoins, making it to the list of the top 50 coins by market capitalization by the first quarter of 2024 at nearly $50 billion.

At the time of writing, WIF is the 42nd-largest cryptocurrency by market cap and the third-largest memecoin after Elon Musk’s favorite memecoin, Dogecoin (DOGE), and Shiba Inu (SHIB), according to data from CoinGecko.

The token is trading at $3, up around 13% over the past 24 hours at the time of writing.

Top five memecoins by market capitalization. Source. CoinGecko

The new Cat in a Dog’s World, or MEW, cryptocurrency was launched just a few weeks ago, officially debuting on March 26. The memecoin aims to disrupt the dominance of dog-themed memecoins, including DOGE, SHIB and WIF.

Related: Trader hits $6M pay day after spending $8K on Ethereum memecoin

At the time of writing, MEW is trading at $0.0052, up 80% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data.

The newly listed memecoins join a series of memecoins already available on OKX. At the time of writing, the exchange lists roughly 20 memecoins, including the new additions, according to its official website.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Bitcoin hodlers moved $1.7B into ‘accumulation’ wallets during the BTC dip [/INST] Hardcore Bitcoin (BTC) holders added a record $1.7 billion worth of BTC to ‘accumulation’ wallet addresses in a single day as the price of Bitcoin fell below $63,000 earlier this week.

More than 27,700 BTC — worth $1.75 billion at current prices — was sent to accumulation addresses in a single 24-hour period between April 16 to 17, a new daily record for Bitcoin, per the latest data from CryptoQuant.

The previous record — where 25,500 BTC was sent to accumulation addresses in a single day — was notched on March 23 this year, when the price of Bitcoin was also hovering around the $63,500 mark.

A record number of Bitcoin was sent to ‘accumulation addresses’ in 24 hours. Source: CryptoQuant

This data shows that there has been an elevated level of motivated buying around the $63,000 range — suggesting that large, dedicated investors maintain their confidence in accumulating and holding Bitcoin for the long term.

An accumulation address is a Bitcoin wallet that shows no previous withdrawals and holds a balance of over 10 BTC. These addresses have been screened to exclude wallets known to be affiliated with Bitcoin miners and crypto exchanges.

These addresses must have also been active at some point in the last seven years.

Related: Is Bitcoin’s negative futures funding rate a sign of an upcoming BTC price crash?

Several market analysts including pseudonymous trader Rekt Capital have suggested that the first few months of this year may be the last time investors can pick up Bitcoin at “bargain prices” before a post-halving rally event.

In an April 17 post to their 453,000 X followers, Rekt Capital said that Bitcoin price action was currently playing out in a similar pattern to previous halving cycles.

Rekt explained that the recent dip — which has seen BTC tumble more than 14% from its all-time high of $73,600 on March 13 — was an expected part of a “pre-halving retrace.”

They predicted that Bitcoin could enter into a “re-accumulation phase” following the halving event — currently slated for April 20.

“Once Bitcoin breaks out from the re-accumulation area breakout into the parabolic uptrend.”

“Historically, this phase has lasted just over a year (~385 days) however with a potential Accelerated Cycle occurring right now, this figure may get cut in half in this market cycle,” added Rekt.

Web3 Gamer: Bitcoin Halving will pump games, Shrapnel’s ‘simple’ secret revealed"
"[INST] Here’s how crypto game Notcoin onboarded over 30M users — founder [/INST] The viral clicker game Notcoin “just solved the issue” of bringing Telegram users into crypto, according to Sasha Plotvinov, founder of Open Builders, the team behind the game.

In January, the crypto game broke records by having 20 million sign-ups within 26 days of its release. Compared to another popular blockchain-based game called Axie Infinity, which had 2.78 million monthly active users at its peak in 2022, Notcoin showed that it’s possible to onboard millions of users into crypto through gaming.

Reporter Ezra Reguerra with Notcoin’s Sasha Plotvinov at the Token2049 event. Source: Cointelegraph

In a Cointelegraph interview at the Token2049 event, Plotvinov shared the story behind the game, which hit about 30 million users in March. The executive said the original goal was to just introduce crypto to users of the Telegram messaging app. He explained:

“It just solved the issue. Or maybe, the task that we all had on how to bring users from Telegram to crypto. So basically, that was the original goal.”

The executive explained that his team spent years looking at Telegram’s massive user base and the TON blockchain, which had “almost zero action but had really good technology.”

After going through the process, the team decided to go with the approach of simplifying the start of the onboarding process. Plotvinov explained:

“At some point you just, you know, come to the idea. All right. So we just need to remove all the roadblocks for the beginning. Then, we need to give something to users so they have the motivation to go for all this Web3.”

The Notcoin co-creator said it became a very “social thing,” with interactions, competitions, leaderboards and squads. “It’s very, very important for such a game. And within Telegram, it’s really easy to basically onboard users, invite users,” he added.

Related: New Telegram mini-apps will be so convenient users won’t know it’s crypto

Plotvinov said this was how the game became a social phenomenon, explaining that 53,000 communities competed with each other in an attempt to climb to the highest league.

The executive also explained that the team did not have a marketing budget. Everything happened “organically,” he explained, adding:

“94% of Notcoiners came from referrals. People invited other people. We call them friends. You have friends, you just invite them and you play together, and you can see how they’re progressing.”

Plotvinov also explained that the Notcoin project moved on from the common approach where projects attempted to convince users that it had value. “We just decided, all right, so why not reverse it and think more like ‘we’re not trying to convince you, it’s probably nothing,’ you know?”

Magazine: Web3 Gamer: Gods Unchained app drops crypto, Kings of Fighters Arena review"
"[INST] Internet Computer users pledge $80M to decentralize its project ecosystem [/INST] Internet Computer community members pledged almost $80 million worth of Internet Computer (ICP) tokens to help decentralize protocols in the ecosystem last year.

Contributor to the Internet Computer network, the DFINITY Foundation, released its 2023 protocol ecosystem report on March 27, revealing that the community committed more than 6.5 million ICP tokens to decentralization efforts.

The pledge has been made by the Internet Computer’s Service Nervous System (SNS) framework, which allows protocols to become decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

ICP projects and dapps that received funding through SNS decentralization include decentralized messenger OpenChat, metaverse platform Dragginz, blockchain search engine Kinic, “Web3 TikTok” Hot or Not, the first ICP memecoin Ghost, decentralized verification-as-a-service platform Modclub, on-chain gaming platform BOOM DAO, and social dapp Catalyze.

Daily message count on OpenChat surged after October 2023. Source: Token Terminal

“The success of the SNS framework has been a big win for decentralized governance worldwide, through its innovative tech stack and multiple network integrations,” commented Lomesh Dutta, Vice President of Growth at DFINITY.

The DFINITY Foundation also reported tremendous growth in blockchain gaming activity on Internet Computer, which it said was due to low transfer fees and high scaling capabilities.

Additionally, DFINITY distributed $6.25 million in ecosystem grants to 239 projects across 41 countries in 2023 to support the growth of the ICP ecosystem. Overall network usage on ICP increased by 121% year-over-year, indicating constant ecosystem-wide growth, according to the report.

Decentralized finance on ICP has also seen steady growth this year, with total value locked increasing 24% to $27 million since Jan. 1, according to DefiLlama.

ICP surges after pivot to AI

ICP prices have been on fire over the past few days after the network revealed its latest advancements in the realm of artificial intelligence.

In a March 22 post on X, DFINITY CEO Dominic Williams posted a video demonstrating what he claims was a world-first: “quite a sophisticated AI running on blockchain” as a smart contract on the Internet Computer.

Related: Internet Computer founder‘s $250M plan to help end the war in Ukraine

“AI will become the beating heart of our web3, multi-chain world, and this is only my first demo,” he said.

Source: Dominic Willams (March 22)

ICP prices surged 50% since the announcement and reached a two-year high of just under $20 on March 26, according to CoinGecko. However, the asset remains down 97% from its May 2021 all-time high of $700.

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"[INST] Binance Labs shifts investment focus to Bitcoin DeFi [/INST] Binance Labs, the venture capital (VC) arm of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has announced an investment in Bitcoin-native restaking protocol BounceBit.

BounceBit merges centralized finance (CeFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi) features in an effort to create more utility for Bitcoin (BTC), wrote Yi He, co-founder of Binance and head of Binance Labs, in an April 11 announcement:

""BounceBit unlocks new avenues for Bitcoin's utilization with the fusion of CeFi and DeFi. At Binance Labs, we are always seeking innovators shaping the industry, and we look forward to watching their growth as they achieve their mission to empower Bitcoin through secure and transparent CeDeFi solutions.”

BounceBit is among a new wave of protocols aiming to bring DeFi capabilities to Bitcoin in a new technological paradigm known as Bitcoin DeFi (BTCFi).

BounceBit aims to expand Bitcoin’s use case from being a store of value to a yield-generating asset with more capital efficiency.

The proof-of-stake (PoS) layer-1 ecosystem incentivizes validators to stake both Bitcoin and BounceBit ecosystem tokens as part of its dual-token economy.

The Bitcoin-native restaking infrastructure aims to create more utility for Bitcoin, according to Jack Lu, founder and CEO of Bouncebit:

“It is our mission to build restaking infrastructure to drive the utilization of Bitcoin and we want to do it in a secure and transparent manner. Our focus on CeDeFi and developing a robust restaking ecosystem is just the beginning. We are grateful to have Binance Labs support us in this endeavor.”

Binance Labs became an independent venture capital arm after cutting ties with the Binance exchange in March when its portfolio was worth over $10 billion. It covered more than 250 projects from over 25 countries with a return on investment rate of over 14 times.

BounceBit is currently offering its services to more than 110,000 users, with over $782 million in total value locked (TVL), according to its homepage.

Related: With 10 days to the halving, analysts predict $150K Bitcoin top

BTCFi on the rise ahead of the Bitcoin halving

While Bitcoin-native DeFi was considered impossible a few years ago, BTCFi protocols are gaining traction ahead of the much-anticipated Bitcoin halving, set to take place on April 19.

Showcasing the demand for BTCFi, decentralized exchange (DEX) MerlinSwap raised 6,599 BTC, worth $480 million, during its initial DEX offering (IDO) from over 52,000 investors on April 5.

The record IDO was a testament to the market’s demand for BTCFi which could match Ethereum in DeFi innovation in the future. Nash Lee, co-founder of MerlinSwap, told Cointelegraph:

“It symbolizes the community’s eagerness to engage with and drive forward the DeFi revolution on Bitcoin’s platform. It underscores a significant shift toward recognizing the untapped potential of Bitcoin in the DeFi space, highlighting a broad-based demand for innovative, decentralized financial solutions built on the world’s first cryptocurrency.”

Related: Bitcoin surpasses 65 million Ordinals inscriptions days before halving"
"[INST] Blockchain fraud group shifts $1M to Blast for new schemes [/INST] A group with a history of blockchain fraud on platforms like Magnate, Kokomo, and Lendora is launching new schemes on Blast. They have recently moved around $1 million in laundered funds to finance their fraudulent activities.

According to on-chain detective ZachXBT, the funds were initially moved from an Ethereum address linked to previous scams to another address on the Polygon network. Later, the assets were converted into Wrapped ETH (wETH) and moved across multiple blockchain networks via bridging services like Orbiter and Bungee.

Eventually, they were used on the Blast platform to purchase LEAP tokens, increasing liquidity in what appears to be another setup for unsuspecting victims. At the same time, ZachXBT suggests that the same individuals are probably responsible for another ongoing project called ZebraLending on the Base platform, boasting a current total value locked (TVL) of around $311K.

This group has a history of launching numerous projects that attract significant TVL but later abscond with the funds. Their tactics often involve fabricating Know Your Customer (KYC) documents and collaborating with less reputable auditing firms to give an appearance of legitimacy.

This group has targeted a range of platforms, including Base, Solana, Scroll, Optimism, Arbitrum, Ethereum, and Avalanche, showcasing their operational flexibility and extensive presence in the blockchain sphere.

Related: Base hits $4B TVL as monthly txs outstrip Ethereum and Arbitrum

The repeated occurrence of these ripoffs creates the need for vigilance within the blockchain neighborhood. Investors are encouraged to exercise increased caution, specifically with new initiatives on platforms like Blast involving significant fund transfers.

Verifying project qualifications, examining audit experiences, and comprehending the channels of fund transactions are vital steps people can take to safeguard their investments. In addition, local community customers are inspired to share data and guide each other in determining suspicious actions to avert further victimization.

A nonfungible token (NFT) game called Munchables, built on Blast, suffered a $ 62 million exploit on March 26. Munchables announced it had been compromised and said it was tracking the exploiter’s movements and “attempting to stop the transactions.”

Around $400 million in Ether (ETH) was taken out of the Ethereum layer-2 network Blast after the launch of its mainnet on Feb. 29, unlocking nearly $2.3 billion in staked crypto previously locked up on the network. Blast crossed $2.1 billion in total value locked (TVL) just days ahead of its newly announced mainnet launch — slated for the end of this month.

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"[INST] USA to forge AI partnership with Nigeria for economic growth [/INST] The United States of America (U.S.A) and Nigeria are poised to engage in discussions on the digital economy, emerging technology, and the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) to explore potential partnership opportunities.

During the closing ceremony of a four-day Workshop on National Artificial Intelligence Strategy in Abuja, Mr. Arthur Brown, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy, revealed this information. Brown stated that within two weeks, senior officials from the U.S. government would convene in Abuja for a conference organized by the U.S.-Nigeria Bi-National Commission.

Providing further details on the upcoming meeting, the deputy chief of mission said the United States aims to capitalize on the momentum generated by a four-day workshop by organizing an AI conference in Lagos.

The partnership aims to strengthen economic ties and ensure that AI deployment is safe, secure, transparent, and trustworthy. Through its diverse agencies, Brown expressed that the United States is prepared to collaborate with Nigeria as equitable partners to advance initiatives spanning talent development, infrastructure, research, and innovation.

He lauded Nigeria for endorsing a significant United Nations resolution on AI and committed to the ongoing partnership between the U.S. government and Nigeria regarding the economy.

Addressing the workshop’s conclusion, Dr. Bosun Tijani, the Minister of Communications Innovation and Digital Economy, emphasized the importance of African governments and leaders taking decisive action to support their aspirations and strategies.

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study, artificial Intelligence could contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with approximately $3 trillion attributed to enhanced productivity and $9.1 trillion arising from novel goods and services.

Related: Mark Zuckerberg says Meta wearables that read brain signals are coming soon

Speaking on anticipated revenue generation and job creation, Tijani emphasized that rather than prioritizing revenue, Nigeria should focus on establishing effective governance for AI, recognizing it as a critical tool to enhance productivity across sectors.

In partnership with the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), the Ministry orchestrated a four-day Artificial Intelligence workshop to craft a collaborative framework for implementing AI in the nation.

The four-day artificial intelligence workshop led to the launching of Nigeria’s first Multilingual large language model (LLM) as the country pushes forward to take a leadership position in artificial intelligence development in Africa.

In August 2023, the Nigerian government invited scientists of Nigerian heritage, as well as globally renowned experts who have worked within the Nigerian market, to collaborate in formulating its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy.

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"[INST] With 10 days to the halving, analysts predict $150K Bitcoin top [/INST] With only 10 days left until the much-awaited halving, Bitcoin is still trading above the $70,000 psychological level, bolstering bullish long-term price predictions from market analysts.

Following the halving, Bitcoin (BTC) price could appreciate over 160% to reach a cycle top of above $150,000, according to a research report by Bitfinex analysts shared with Cointelegraph.

“Using a straightforward regression model, we predict a 160% post-halving price surge in the next 14 months, taking the price to between $150,000 - $169,000.”

Bitcoin fell 2.2% in the 24 hours leading up to 11:50 am UTC to trade at $70,694. The world’s first cryptocurrency is up over 7.5% on the weekly chart, according to CoinMarketCap data.

BTC/USDT, one-month chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

However, the analysts note that there is more built-up selling pressure than in previous cycles due to Bitcoin hitting a new all-time high before the halving for the first time in crypto history.

While this is a sign of confidence for Bitcoin bulls, it could also introduce significant selling pressure, as 1.87 million BTC, or 9.5% of the circulating supply, was bought above the $60,000 mark. The analysts noted:

“This underscores the active engagement of Short-Term Holders at higher prices, reflecting evolving ownership dynamics amidst market activity and institutional influence through spot ETFs. Increased entity movement suggests a shift in the cycle towards the gradual distribution of dormant supply and profit-taking.”

However, Bitcoin prices could see a sharp decline during the halving period due to the Federal Reserve’s quantitative tightening, which is removing liquidity from markets. Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX, wrote in an April 8 blog post:

“That is why I believe Bitcoin and crypto prices in general will slump around the halving [...] It will add propellant to a raging firesale of crypto assets.”

Related: How high can Bitcoin go? New BTC price prediction sees cycle top at $180K

Bitcoin ETFs amass 4.28% of circulating BTC supply

The inflows from the United States spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have been a significant part of Bitcoin’s price rally.

By Feb. 15, the Bitcoin ETFs accounted for about 75% of new investment in the world’s largest cryptocurrency as it surpassed the $50,000 mark, according to CryptoQuant research.

Since their launch, the Bitcoin ETFs have amassed over 841,900 BTC, worth $59.2 billion, which represents 4.28% of the Bitcoin’s circulating supply.

With the accumulation pattern of the past two weeks, the Bitcoin ETFs are set to absorb 2.6% of Bitcoin supply per year, according to Dune.

Bitcoin ETF Flows chart. Source: Dune

Bitcoin ETFs amassed over $500 million worth of net inflows last week, with a total of $286 million worth of daily net inflows on April 8, during this week’s first trading day, according to Dune data.

Related: 10 days until halving: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall"
"[INST] Arkansas house passes bills restricting crypto mining [/INST] The Arkansas State House has passed two bills that could restrict cryptocurrency mining within the state. Although these bills have not yet evolved into full-fledged laws, they lay the groundwork for further discussions leading to potential legislation.

In a Senate hearing on April 17, lawmakers sought to address general concerns such as noise reduction, foreign ownership and the proximity of crypto mines to residential areas.

Two of the eight bills presented to the House on Wednesday passed, even though the Senate only approved one bill last week that addressed cryptocurrencies.

There is considerable debate about whether Act 851 should be amended and the level of detail those amendments should entail. The committees will discuss the matter before potentially passing a law either in the current fiscal session or the next one.

According to the bill, the Arkansas Data Centers Act of 2023 intends to regulate the Bitcoin (BTC) mining industry in the American state, creating guidelines for miners and protecting them from discriminatory regulations and taxes.

Related: Crypto-focused lawmaker wants to lead House Financial Services Committee in 2025

The prolonged and energy-intensive process of Bitcoin mining faces criticism for the waste it generates. Investopedia states that Bitcoin mining produces over 77 kilotons of electrical waste each year.

Crypto mining also presents legal challenges outside the United States. Paraguay lawmakers proposed a bill to temporarily ban crypto mining and related activities in the South American nation, saying illegal crypto mines are stealing power and interrupting the electricity supply.

The proposed legislation aims to prohibit the establishment of crypto mining facilities and activities involving the creation, preservation, storage and trade of cryptocurrencies.

However, Paraguayan senators have halted progress on the mining ban, and officials are now considering the benefits of selling excess energy from its Itaipu hydropower plant to miners.

Miners are facing pressure with this week’s upcoming Bitcoin halving. Miners could liquidate $5 billion worth of Bitcoin BTC in the months after the halving, according to the head of research at 10x Research, Markus Thielen.

“The overhang from this selling could last four to six months, explaining why Bitcoin might go sideways for the next few months — as it has done following past halvings,” he said.

Thielen added that the same could happen again, with crypto markets potentially facing “a significant challenge in a six-month ‘summer’ lull.”

Magazine: Wolf Of All Streets worries about a world where Bitcoin hits $1M: Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Ethereum layer 2s to hit $1T market cap by 2030: VanEck [/INST] Ethereum’s layer 2 scaling networks will hit a $1 trillion market capitalization in six years and will be made up of thousands of use case-specific chains, according to analysts from investment manager VanEck.

Layer-2 blockchains are set to capitalize on Ethereum’s “primary challenge” — its “limited capacity to process, store, and compute data,” VanEck’s senior digital assets investment analyst Patrick Bush and digital assets research head Matthew Sigel said in an April 3 report.

Busha and Sigel reached their $1 trillion market cap prediction by estimating Ethereum would take up 60% of the market share across all public blockchains and then estimating the volume of assets within the Ethereum ecosystem.

There are currently 46 Ethereum L2s with $39 billion total value locked, the largest being Arbirtum with $18 billion, according to L2BEAT.

“Ethereum’s dominance in smart contracts faces a critical hurdle: scalability,” the analysts wrote. “While the network offers unparalleled security and decentralization, transaction fees and processing times soar when usage intensifies.”

Ethereum’s development is now focused on bettering its ability to process its layer-2’s transaction data, they said — evident in its recent Dencun update which helped to lower L2 transaction fees through the specialized data-saving feature, “Blobs.”

Data publishing costs per L2 network to Ethereum in terms of Ether (ETH). Source: VanEck

The analysts said there was future potential for “substantially more” revenues to be generated on L2s over the base Ethereum network.

“We expect L2 revenues to exceed Ethereum’s because Ethereum cannot match the transaction throughput or user experience of L2s.”

The “cutthroat competition,” however, left Bush and Sigel “generally bearish” on the long-term value for a majority of L2-related tokens.

They noted the top seven Ethereum L2 tokens already have a $40 billion fully diluted valuation and “many strong projects” launching over the next 18 months will swell that to $100 billion.

“It seems a bridge too far for the crypto market to absorb even limited amounts of that supply without massive discounts,” they added.

Related: ‘No bridges or wrapping’ — dWallet and Avail are building native Bitcoin rollups

The analysts forecasted a “future of thousands of use-case-specific” L2s with just “a few major players” part of the general-purpose L2 market.

These thousands of use-specific networks would be “segmented by sector, application, or function” with some chains built for a specific purpose, like a decentralized social media-specific L2 with accompanying apps.

The handful of general-purpose chains will be due to the network effect — where those blockchains become more valuable because there are more users, the analysts said.

“It is also clear that most roll-ups will eventually move towards the zero-knowledge framework (ZKU) due to its many advantages,” they added.

Magazine: Is measuring blockchain transactions per second (TPS) stupid in 2024? Big Questions"
"[INST] Panasonic teams up with Jasmy to create controlled identity platform for IoT [/INST] Tech giant Panasonic has partnered with Jasmy to roll out a Web3 platform to connect personal data on the Internet-of-Things (IoT). The new platform will be based on Jasmy’s Personal Data Locker product.

IoT platform developer Jasmy and Panasonic Advanced Technology began their collaboration in February, but announced it on March 26. The new platform will provide secure data storage and give users control over access to their data, as well as improving processing and reaction times. According to the statement:

“This platform incorporates agile development methods into Web3 technology and develops with an emphasis on speed. We will implement the public [platform] as an open platform, recruit users widely, and aim to use it in a wide range of fields.”

Jasmy chief financial officer Hiroshi Harada, who uses the name Hara on social media, stated on X that the new platform would be built in “3-6 months.”

Source: HARA

According to the Jasmy website, with the Personal Data Locker, only hash values are managed on the blockchain while data files are stored in a decentralized network. Thanks to this system, the storage capacity of single blocks and large file sizes are not an impediment to performance.

Schematic of Jasmy's Personal Data Locker. Source: jasmy.global

Jasmy was formed by former Sony executives in 2016 and listed its JasmyCoin (JASMY) on exchanges in 2021. It states on its website that it is “billed as Japan’s Bitcoin.” As described on its website, merchants pay Jasmy to use data stored by it and the data owner JASMY as a reward.

Related: Japanese e-commerce giant Mercari to allow Bitcoin payments from June

Jasmy announced the launch of a DePIN project called Janction earlier this month. It aims to form a GPU colony into a public layer-2 and AI service hub.

Trading in JASMY, which has a market cap of $1.1 billion, rose 111% in 24 hours on the news. It hit a high of $0.024 on March 26, up from $0.021 the previous day.

Magazine: Big Questions: How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?"
"[INST] Blockchain Association and crypto activist group sue SEC over ‘Dealer Rule’ [/INST] The Blockchain Association (BA) and the Crypto Freedom Alliance of Texas (CFAT) revealed a new lawsuit against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the Northern District of Texas, according to a statement.

On April 23, the BA announced the lawsuit in a move to challenge the SEC’s recent expansion of the “Dealer Rule,” which the industry groups argue stifles innovation in the U.S. digital asset market.

The BA and CFAT argue that the SEC overstepped its authority by implementing a broad interpretation of the term “dealer” within the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

In February the SEC adopted new rules which redefine “dealer” and “government securities dealer” and therefore require more crypto market participants to register, join a self-regulatory organization and comply with federal securities laws.

This expansion, the lawsuit claims, creates a vague and burdensome regulatory environment for businesses involved in digital asset trading.

The lawsuit alleges that the SEC failed to adequately address public concerns raised during a limited comment period and neglected to assess the potential negative impacts of the rule.

Kristin Smith, the CEO of the Blockchain Association, said this the latest example of the SEC’s “blatant attempts to unlawfully regulate outside its authority.”

“The Dealer Rule advances the SEC’s anti-digital asset crusade and unlawfully redefines the boundaries of its statutory authority granted to it by Congress, threatening to drive U.S. companies offshore and incite fear in American innovators.”

Related: SEC’s Hester Peirce wants more decentralization in the financial system

The lawsuit seeks a court order to overturn the Dealer Rule expansion based on violations of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The APA ensures fair and transparent rulemaking by requiring agencies to consider public feedback and provide clear guidelines.

Smith said that they are seeking “declaratory judgment and injunctive relief” against the regulators to overturn the expansion of the rule and ultimately to prohibit its use against the industry “before more harm can be done by this rabid regulator.”

The BA and CFAT represent a significant portion of the cryptocurrency industry, including leading investors, companies, and projects. Overall, their work advocates for a national policy framework within the U.S. that aims to foster local innovation and responsible development within the digital asset space.

Magazine: Altseason on the horizon, SEC targets Uniswap, and BTC halving news: Hodler’s Digest, April 7-13"
"[INST] Cathie Wood’s Bitcoin ETF hits daily inflow record as BTC retests $72K [/INST] ARK 21Shares’ spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) managed to notch a record $201.8 million of inflows on Wednesday, almost quintupling its average daily inflows as Bitcoin just fell short of reaching $72,000.

Preliminary data from Farside Investors revealed that on March 27, the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF's daily inflow was a four-fold increase from its daily average of $43.9 million since its launch on Jan. 11.

It also nearly tripled the amount from the previous day when ARK Invest saw inflows of $73.6 million, while there were no recorded inflows on March 25.

Bitcoin ETF flow table. Source: Farside Investors

Meanwhile, the Valkyrie Bitcoin ETF (BRRR) witnessed $5.1 million in inflows, the Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF (BTCO) saw $4.8 million in inflows, the Franklin Bitcoin ETF (EZBC) had $4 million in inflows and the VanEck Bitcoin ETF (HODL) noted $1.9 million.

Both the WisdomTree Bitcoin ETF (BTCW) and Fidelity Investments Bitcoin ETF (FBTC) reported $1.5 million in inflows — all single-digit inflows. However, BlackRock data has yet to come in at the time of writing.

It comes as Bitcoin hit $71,670 before falling below the $69,000 support level before closing the day at $69,698. At the time of publication, Bitcoin’s current price is $69,464, as per CoinMarketCap data.

Crypto commentators, meanwhile, have begun to argue that investors are too fixated on Bitcoin’s short-term price fluctuations rather than considering the broader perspective.

In a March 28 post on X, crypto researcher Gumshoe informed his 28,900 followers that investors are opting for a micro perspective, focusing on daily price closures rather than considering the actual influx of funds into Bitcoin.

“Bitcoin ETFs seeing ATH inflows and people are panicking over the daily close of a candle,” he stated.

Related: Bitcoin ETFs see $15M comeback as BTC price taps best close in 10 days

In a March 27 post on X, chief investment officer of Bitwise Matt Hougan stated that the majority of professional investors are still unable to buy Bitcoin ETFs, especially in the United Kingdom where “the FCA is still broadly aligned against crypto.”

“The truth is, most professional investors still cannot buy bitcoin ETFs. That will change through a series of 100+ individual due diligence processes over the next two years,” he stated.

Popular crypto commentator Bitcoin Munger told his 31,800 followers he believes the next $13 billion of inflows could “add $50K-$70K or more to the price.”

On March 18, Cointelegraph reported that a total of $13.2 billion in new capital has flowed into investment products such as spot Bitcoin ETFs year-to-date.

Magazine: China will intensify Bitcoin bull run, $1M by 2028: Bitcoin Man, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Andreessen Horowitz raises $7.2B for new venture funds [/INST] Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) said it raised $7.2 billion to invest across several tech sectors, including gaming and artificial intelligence — but isn’t putting any more toward crypto.

The firm’s “Growth” venture strategy — a bundle of funds backing a range of early-stage startups — will receive the largest chunk of the raise at $3.75 billion. Its ""Infrastructure"" and ""Apps"" will respectively receive $1.25 billion and $1 billion, a16z said in an April 16 statement.

Its Infrastructure strategy mostly focuses on funding teams in the AI, computing and data industries, while the Apps funds focus on consumer, enterprise and fintech application builders.

The remaining $1.2 billion will be evenly split between “Games,” its gaming-focused funds, and its new “American Dynamism” fund — which invests in founders and companies supporting United States national interests in aerospace, defense, safety, education and manufacturing.

Its $4.5 billion crypto-focused fund didn’t receive any additional funding.

The $600 million dedicated to Games will be used to create a second game-focused fund, according to Andrew Chen, a general partner at a16z, who oversees its Games Fund One.

“From AI/infra, web3 games, VR/AR, 3D tooling, gamified apps, game studios, and much more. The fund targets a $300B+ industry that has spawned incredible companies over the past decade, and it’s great to be able to build,” Chen posted to X on April 16.

Chen added he’s particularly focused on funding games that integrate generative AI.

“[Generative AI] will transform many product categories, but in particular, games and interactive entertainment. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as gaming has been the driver of new killer apps for emerging computing platforms.”

A slice of the $600 million will be used in a16z’s accelerator program launched in early April, which will hand out $750,000 to a maximum of 40 gaming startups at a 12-week course in Los Angeles beginning in late July.

Related: ‘Tens of millions’ to enter Web3 through gaming in 2024 — GameFi execs

Each focus fund will have its own experts to maximize the likelihood of each fund’s success, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz said in the April 16 statement.

“Each area requires deep expertise, so it’s not wise to try to cross-train someone in, for example, Games and Infrastructure,” said Horowitz. “Founders building AI foundation models need an entirely different set of networks and capabilities than founders building biotech therapies.”

“A great investor with the right help, the right networking, and the right expertise at the right time can be the difference between success and failure.”

Magazine: Web3 Gamer: Games need bots? Illivium CEO admits ‘it’s tough,’ 42X upside"
"[INST] Only 6 altcoins in the top 50 have outperformed Bitcoin this year [/INST] Only six altcoins among the top 50 tokens by market capitalization have managed to outperform Bitcoin (BTC) so far this year, as Bitcoin dominance reached a three-year high over the weekend.

The memecoin Dogecoin (DOGE) stands as the best-performing altcoin in the top 50, having posted year-to-date gains of just over 77% — climbing from $0.09 on Jan. 1 to $0.15 at the time of publication, per TradingView data.

Included in the remaining outperformers are fellow memecoin Shiba Inu (SHIB), Bitcoin smart contract network Stacks (STX), Binance’s BNB (BNB), Ethereum layer-2 network Mantle (MNT) and GPU-sharing blockchain network Render (RNDR).

Bitcoin has grown from a price of $44,100 on Jan. 1 to $65,000 at the time of publication, a year-to-date gain of 54%.

Many have pegged the price rise to consistent institutional inflows into the 10 United States-traded spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) approved in January this year, generating more than $12 billion in cumulative net inflows, per Farside Investors data.

Notably, Bitcoin dominance pushed to a new year three-year high of 56.5% on April 13, as the cryptocurrency bounced back sharply from a marketwide sell-off sparked by escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.

Bitcoin dominance reached its highest level on April 14. Source: TradingView

The Bitcoin dominance metric refers to the ratio of Bitcoin’s market cap compared to the cumulative market cap of all other cryptocurrencies.

While Bitcoin recovered ground in the following days, the majority of smaller altcoins failed to find their footing and tumbled significantly in price.

Alternative layer-1 network Aptos (APT) and decentralized crypto exchange Uniswap (UNI) led the decline among the top tokens 50 by market cap, posting losses of 35% and 31%, respectively, in the last seven days.

Related: Bitcoin’s ‘normal drop’ leads to $256M longs liquidated — Analysts

In an April 14 investment note viewed by Cointelegraph, IG Market analyst Tony Sycamore said Bitcoin appears to be on track for its fourth weekly decline, with the expectations of no further U.S. Federal Reserve rate weighing on crypto investing sentiment.

Despite the current negative-leaning sentiment toward risk assets, Sycamore predicted that Bitcoin would gradually climb to around $80,000 in the coming months — depending on whether or not it can hold above its key support mark.

“Providing Bitcoin remains above the [$60,000–$58,000] support zone, we expect the uptrend to resume towards $80,000,” Sycamore wrote.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Changpeng Zhao could serve time in the same facility as ‘crypto-anarchist’ Jim Bell [/INST] Former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has requested that a federal judge sentence him to probation after pleading guilty to violating money laundering laws. His legal team has filed several declarations in support of his recommendation, including one suggesting he could serve time at the Federal Detention Center (FDC) SeaTac, Washington.

In an April 23 filing in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle, Robert Palmquist said it was “highly probable” that, if given prison time, Zhao would serve his sentence at FDC SeaTac. Palmquist, who served as warden of the Washington facility from 2003 to 2009, described it as having “little natural light” with the prison understaffed, given the number of inmates.

“If Mr. Zhao is incarcerated [...] his wealth and status as a public figure would expose him to a risk of threats to his physical and mental health, including but not limited to theft and extortion,” said Palmquist. “Mr. Zhao would encounter offenders of all security levels and potentially be prey to predators with high security designations due to his naivety concerning prison experiences and his financial resources.”

FDC Seatac, based directly south of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and containing 794 inmates according to its website, has previously housed a Proud Boys member charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and Jim Bell, a ‘crypto-anarchist.’ Bell, released in 2012, was charged with tax evasion in the 90s related to ‘Assassination Politics’: promoting anonymous payments for individuals to order the killing of government officials.

Zhao’s lawyers filed several letters from friends, family members and business leaders supporting a lenient sentence for the former CEO. Under U.S. sentencing guidelines, a judge has the authority to put CZ in federal prison for up to 10 years, but there is a recommended sentence of 12 to 18 months for his specific charge. Prosecutors have requested three years in prison and a $50 million fine.

Related: What to expect at Changpeng Zhao’s sentencing on April 30

After the conviction and sentencing of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, CZ will be one of the most high-profile figures in the crypto space to enter a federal courtroom and learn whether a judge will decide to grant probation or send him to prison. Former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, facing seven securities and commodities fraud charges, will go to trial in January 2025.

CZ has largely not publicly commented on the charges since his guilty plea as part of a $4.3 billion settlement between U.S. authorities and Binance in November 2023. In a letter to Judge Richard Jones dated Feb. 2, Zhao apologized for his “poor decisions” regarding Binance and said he was prepared to accept responsibility for his actions.

The former Binance CEO is scheduled to return to court on April 30 for sentencing. Since November, he has been free to travel within parts of the U.S. on a $175 million bond.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] 2 theories why GBTC sticks to high fees despite bleeding billions [/INST] Grayscale may be sticking to high fees for its spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund to keep “stuck” holders from cashing out while betting that Bitcoin’s price will continue to rocket upward, according to one market analyst.

The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) has seen daily outflows since its launch on Jan. 11 — totaling over $14 billion as of March 25.

Many, including Bianco Research founder and former Wall Street analyst Jim Bianco, have pointed to GBTC’s fees as “the problem.” In a March 25 X post, he speculated at least half of GBTC outflows were those moving to lower-fee ETFs.

Chart showing GBTC net outflows from Jan. 11 up to March 22. Source: Jim Bianco/X

Grayscale’s ETF charges a 1.5% per year management fee, five times that of the 0.30% average of the other spot Bitcoin ETFs.

Bianco said two possible reasons why Grayscale doesn’t drop the fee. Firstly, it could be a bet that GBTC holders won’t leave as the asset manager “analyzed its holders’ tax bill [...] And concluded they are ‘stuck’ as it is too costly to leave until they need the money.”

GBTC wields assets under management of nearly $24.7 billion as of March 25, per YCharts data.

Bianco also believes Grayscale’s firmness on its fees could result from optimism that Bitcoin’s price “will moon well over $100k in the next year or two.”

“Under this scenario, [Grayscale] are betting the price of BTC will rise enough to increase their assets (for which they charge a fee) to “offset” most or all their outflows,” Bianco wrote.

If BTC falls, he added, “then this strategy could prove disastrous” as GBTC selling could ramp up “and ‘stuck’ tax bill holders find these bills shrink enough that they can leave and never return to GBTC again.”

“Expect GBTC to be a constant selling source until it’s held by dead people, those who forgot they owned it, or those “trapped” with giant tax bills if they sell it.”

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas posted in response to Bianco’s theory that “there may never be an inflow to GBTC ever.”

“My guess is we see a few more big outflow days and then a slow trickle into eternity,” Balchunas added. “If BTC price goes up [...] They’ll be just fine revenue-wise.”

Why sue the SEC just to bleed?

United States spot Bitcoin ETFs only came about due to Grayscale winning a lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission last year which forced it to review Grayscale’s bid to convert GBTC to an ETF.

“Why did GBTC spend all the time and effort to sue the SEC to allow it to convert to an ETF and only manage it like this (so that it will slowly bleed out)?” Bianco asked.

Answering, Balchunas speculated that Grayscale maybe knew that even if GBTC were to “bleed out every last investor,” the ETF hype would “pump BTC enough” to offset the losses, and its assets under management would remain stable.

Related: BlackRock’s ETF could flip GBTC in Bitcoin holdings within 3 weeks

Grayscale had also long said it would convert GBTC, so it “had to follow through” and didn’t lower fees as it’s “TOUGH to kill 80% of your revenue stream in one shot,” Balchunas added.

Grayscale likely “underestimated just how brutally competitive” the U.S. ETF market is, Balchunas said, and maybe wasn’t expecting the cutthroat fee war issuers started in a bid to gain market share.

Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart postulated another reason could be that Grayscale was acting to try to help bankrupt crypto lender Genesis — both are subsidiaries of crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group (DCG).

Genesis had over 62 million GBTC shares used to collateralize loans made by Gemini Earn users and the two companies were in a long legal fight over them.

“There was 100% a selfish interest in just being able to get out of those positions at [net asset value],” said Seyffart.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments — Trezor CEO"
"[INST] MarginFi outflows $190M as CEO rage quits amid token controversy [/INST] Nearly $200 million of user funds have exited Solana-based lending protocol MarginFi over the last two days amid an abrupt resignation of the platform’s CEO and followed by accusations of wrongdoing from its competitors.

On April 10, the now-former CEO of MarginFi, Edgar Pavlovsky, suddenly announced he had resigned from MarginFi, citing disputes that had arisen from both within his firm and from outside of it.

“I resigned from mrgn today. From working on marginfi, from the research arm, from it all,"" said Pavlovsky, adding:

“I don't agree with the way things have been done internally or externally.”

Hours earlier, Pavlovsky had been trading blows with users on X who had been requesting that the protocol launch its long-anticipated MRGN governance token.

“After today, feels maximally right to push back any kind of token. Will see what I can do internally to brick this,” wrote Pavlovsky in a now-deleted post to X on April 11, which also saw a heated response from the community.

Net outflows from MarginFi have topped $191 million in the last 48 hours. Source: Dune Analytics

In the wake of the controversy — seemingly worsened by a stream of public insults from the former CEO — withdrawals from MarginFi have reached as high as $191 million in the last 48 hours, according to Dune Analytics data.

Competing protocols accuse MarginFi of spreading lies

The controversy only escalated as the teams from other Solana-based lending protocols began posting accusations that the MarginFi protocol hadn’t been meeting their stated requirements.

SolBlaze claimed that MarginFi had allegedly failed to replenish BLZE token emissions for its users. Failing to replenish emissions for the BLZE token meant that BLZE lenders were not paid yield on their deposits within a specific time frame.

MarginFi co-founder MacBrennan Peet however defended against the claims, arguing that recent delays were due to “chain congestion” and user safety concerns.

Peet described SolBlaze’s accusations as “completely wrong” and claimed his platform had consistently paid out more than its required amount to BLZE lenders and borrowers.

Related: SushiSwap DAO backs transition to ‘Labs model’ in preliminary vote

“Marginfi has failed to replenish BLZE over the last 3 days, not three weeks. Yes, this is because of chain congestion and prioritizing user safety,” he added.

Meanwhile, Solend founder Rooter took to X to share accusations that MarginFi has allegedly attempted to “blackball” Solend by spreading inaccurate information about Solend’s total value locked and attacking its oracles.

Despite the internal discord that was catapulted into public view, MarginFi has reassured its users that all of its products were unaffected by Pavlovsky’s departure, adding that the team remained committed to growing the protocol moving forward.

The team has still not informed its users when the MRGN token will be launched.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Hong Kong’s Ether, Bitcoin ETFs will be ‘lucky to get $500m’ [/INST] Three recently approved spot Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Hong Kong may not be as big of a deal as some may think, according to senior Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas.

On April 15, The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) issued conditional approvals to three offshore Chinese asset managers to begin issuing spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs. The asset managers cleared for approval include Harvest Fund Management, Bosera Asset Management, and China Asset Management.

However, in an April 15 post to X, Balchunas shot down lofty predictions that the ETFs could generate $25 billion in inflows and pointed to four main reasons why crypto investors should temper their expectations for the recently approved products.

“Don't expect a lot of flows — I saw one estimate of $25b that's insane. We think they'll be lucky to get $500m.”

Justifying his predictions, Balchunas explained that the Hong Kong ETF market is “tiny” when compared to countries like the United States, adding that these ETFs don’t allow Chinese retail investors with official access to the products.

Balchunas noted these three prospective ETF issuers were tiny relative to “big fish” asset management giants such as BlackRock — which currently boasts more than $9 trillion in assets under management.

“U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs have more assets than the entire HK ETF market,” wrote Balchunas in a follow-up post to X.

Related: Bitcoin eats up fresh bid liquidity as BTC price fights for $65K

Additionally, Balchunas said the capital environment for these funds was far less efficient than elsewhere, and fees would likely be set around the 1-2% mark — a far cry from the “dirt cheap fees in the U.S. Terrordome.”

“The underlying ecosystem there is less [liquidity] efficient = these ETFs will likely see wide spreads and prem discounts,” said Balchunas.

“Takeaway: Other countries adding [Bitcoin] ETFs is no doubt additive but it's nickel-dime compared to the mighty US market.”

On the other hand, the chief crypto analyst at Real Vision and former crypto analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, Jamie Coutts, said that despite recent reservations at the size of the Hong Kong ETF market, the products would open up a “massive pool of capital” for Chinese investors, who Coutts says are already savvy with skirting government-imposed capital controls.

Notably, the Hong Kong FSC approved the spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs to be launched using an in-kind model, meaning new ETF shares can be issued directly using BTC and ETH.

The in-kind creation model stands in contrast to the cash-create redemption model, which allows issuers to create new ETF shares only with cash. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs currently use the cash-create model, with the SEC fearing that cash-create could lead to money laundering and fraud-related issues.

The spot ETFs are slated for launch in roughly two weeks' time.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments — Trezor CEO"
"[INST] Genesis purchases $2.1B of Bitcoin following GBTC sell-off [/INST] Bankrupt crypto lending firm Genesis reportedly offloaded about 36 million shares of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) to acquire additional Bitcoin (BTC) as part of its preparations to settle its debts with creditors.

According to a recent Bloomberg report, Genesis liquidated approximately 36 million GBTC shares on April 2, valued at approximately $58.50 per share at that time.

The share price has climbed by approximately 50% since Genesis initially sought permission from a United States bankruptcy court to sell the 36 million GBTC shares on Feb. 2, when the shares were at $38.50.

The total sale amount came to $2.1 billion, which allowed the purchase of 32,041 Bitcoin on April 2 at a price of $65,685. Genesis will use Bitcoin to continue its efforts to repay creditors.

At the time of publication, the 32,041 Bitcoin is currently worth $2.18 billion.

Recently, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase assured the community that the sell-off was not expected to have a wider impact on the crypto market.

“Our view is that much of these funds will likely remain within the crypto ecosystem, contributing to a neutral overall effect in the market,” Coinbase stated.

It explained that the rules of the bankruptcy plan allowed Genesis to either convert shares of the GBTC into the underlying Bitcoin asset on behalf of the creditors or sell the shares outright and distribute the cash.

Related: Gemini mulled forming a ‘juggernaut’ with Genesis before it went to smoke

This comes after the Digital Currency Group (DCG) argued that its subsidiary company Genesis has proposed paying its customers more than they are entitled to.

On Feb. 6, Cointelegraph reported that DCG claims Genesis’s current plan would see “hundreds of millions of dollars more than the full amount of their petition date claims” go to lenders.

Genesis filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2023.

Magazine: Ethereum’s ERC-20 design flaws are a crypto scammer’s best friend"
"[INST] Bitcoin gears up for a ‘massive’ short squeeze, price could go ‘vertical’ [/INST] As Bitcoin (BTC) toes around the $70,000 price mark, there’s speculation that short-sellers are feeling the pressure due to diminishing downtrends and quicker-moving uptrends, potentially driving Bitcoin’s price to $80,000, according to an analyst.

“This is a textbook sign that shorts are being squeezed as we hit fresh all-time high territory,” trading resource The Kobeissi Letter stated in a March 26 X post.

The Kobeissi Letter explained the main factor for the BTC short squeeze is the margin between institutional long positions and hedge fund short positions is “at a record high.”

Institutions net long against hedge funds net short. Source: X/The Kobeissi Letter

“While hedge funds hold nearly 15,000 in net short contracts, institutions hold nearly 20,000 in net longs,” the post added.

Meanwhile, it noted that Bitcoin’s price dips “keep on getting shorter and shorter.”

Over the past seven days Bitcoin hit its lowest point at $61,224 on March 20 while reaching its peak at $71,511 on March 26, representing a gap of just 8.7%, per CoinMarketCap data.

Bitcoin’s current price is $70,480. If it reaches $71,000, $156.18 million in short positions will be liquidated, per CoinGlass data. A climb to $75,000 will liquidate $3.85 billion in short positions.

Crypto exchange Swyftx lead analyst Pav Hundal told Cointelegraph at this point, it might propel Bitcoin into unprecedented all-time highs. Currently, Bitcoin’s all time high is $73,737.

“The potential for a violent price action is off the charts right now. If we see a short squeeze, Bitcoin could go vertical to $80,000 and from there you really are starting to seriously think about the $100,000 point at some point this year,” Hundal said.

Asset managers with long exposure to BTC is at all-time highs. Source: Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten told Cointelegraph that while he enjoys watching the ongoing tug-of-war between long and short positions, eventually, one faction will crack.

“Somebody gotta break at some point, they are piling up more and more capital behind their views to try and defend it. It is fascinating, we guide all our clients to not think about the 5-10 years. Nevertheless, I am a willing and avid speculator,” Klippsten said.

Read more: Bitcoin whale accumulation suggests pre-halving BTC rally will continue

Hundal suggested that asset managers may be hedging their bets with both positions.

“This is not a classic bulls versus bears battle. Asset managers are sitting on record piles of long exposure to Bitcoin,” he explained. Hundal suggested asset managers are taking both positions to mitigate the downside exposure.

“It’s likely that those same investors are covering their bets by taking out shorts. It’s a risk game. Institutional investors will be happy to pay a premium to protect their downside risk,” Hundal stated.

Klippsten suggested the increased trading activity in Bitcoin could be in anticipation of the upcoming Bitcoin halving, which is slated for April 21.

“Bitcoin’s halving event is historically marked by speculative trading, where traders buy the rumor and sell the news,” Klippsten explained, adding this could lead to a short-term downturn in Bitcoin’s price:

“It’s important to remember that although the price may respond favorably, there’s also a possibility that we experience a temporary drop in price post-halving.”

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments: Trezor CEO"
"[INST] MeWe social network boss says blockchain can solve the TikTok problem [/INST] MeWe chairman and CEO Jeffrey Edell recently penned an op-ed detailing how he believes the situation between the United States government and China’s TikTok could be avoided by implementing blockchain technologies.

Edell is in the unique position of helming a social media company with reportedly more than 20 million users that’s made the leap from traditional Web2 to the blockchain.

The TikTok situation

A slew of recent reports indicate that the U.S. is currently weighing an outright ban on China’s TikTok social media platform. There are allegations that ByteDance, the platform’s owner, has turned over sensitive user data to the Chinese government with potential negative implications for U.S. security.

In an op-ed penned for Rolling Stone, Edell wrote that the TikTok situation is, at its crux, a matter of user privacy that could have been averted through decentralization:

“While the concerns surrounding TikTok are valid, I believe the focus should not solely be on one app or one country. Instead, companies should work toward creating and setting strict guidelines for handling personal data, digital identity and users’ privacy, regardless of their origin.”

Edell added that “one way to ensure that personal data is secure and protected is through the use of Web 3-based, blockchain technology.”

Transitioning to blockchain

As Cointelegraph reported, MeWe made the transition from Web2 to the Frequency blockchain network, a Polkadot parachain, in April 2023.

Essentially, the argument for blockchain-based user privacy hinges on who, exactly, has access to user data. On traditional social media platforms, such as X, user data is held and accessed through a centralized control method wherein the company itself retains ownership of all data.

In TikTok’s case, this ostensibly means that ByteDance — and, by legal extension, the government of China — owns all of the platform’s user data, including more than 150 million U.S.-based users.

By placing data on the blockchain and implementing specific privacy controls, a social media network can give users control over their data without compromising platform functionality.

Related: Worldcoin launches its own ‘human-centric’ blockchain network

While MeWe’s user base doesn’t quite stack up to TikTok’s, the company’s transition to blockchain shows that it’s possible.

To that end, Edell shared six best practices for other companies considering the change in his Rolling Stone article: understanding the technology, starting small, choosing the platform that’s right for your organization, staying up to date with regulatory compliance changes, collaborating with stakeholders, and ensuring employees are educated and trained on blockchain."
"[INST] Binance forms board of directors for the first time [/INST] Binance Holdings, which operates the cryptocurrency exchange of the same name, has formed a seven-person board of directors filled with company executives and independent members.

According to Binance’s website, the firm’s board of directors is now chaired by Gabriel Abed, the former ambassador of Barbados to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Other members included Binance CEO Richard Teng, Binance co-founder Heina Chen, Bayview Acquisition Corp CEO Xin Wang, Gojo & Company managing partner Arnaud Ventura, Roger Wang and Rock He.

“We are pleased to share that Binance has established a new Board of Directors,” a spokesperson told Cointelegraph. “The Board consists of seven total Directors, three of whom are Independent Directors. We are proud to have some of the world’s strongest Web3 leaders advising our company as we enter our next chapter.”

The formation of the board is likely one of the most significant changes to Binance’s leadership since Teng moved from his position as head of regional markets to become CEO in November 2023. Former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao resigned as CEO at roughly the same time as part of a settlement agreement with United States authorities.

As part of the deal with the U.S. Justice Department, Treasury Department, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Binance agreed to pay $4.3 billion in penalties, and CZ pleaded guilty to one felony count related to his failure to maintain an effective Anti-Money Laundering program at the crypto exchange. Zhao is expected to be sentenced on April 30, and Binance still faces enforcement action from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Related: Binance is now ‘totally different’: Interview with CEO Richard Teng

Founded in China in 2017, Binance became one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world under Zhao, who largely kept the firm’s operations and personnel decentralized. The firm runs out of the UAE for its Middle East and North Africa operations and in France for its European business.

Binance’s agreement with U.S. authorities required the firm to form a board of directors with independent members and compliance and audit committees. Teng said in December 2023 that he intended to report to the board.

Magazine: Fake news crypto panic, Binance gains users as market share falls? Asia Express

Update (April 1 at 9:41 pm UTC): This article has been updated to include a statement from Binance."
"[INST] Bitwise files with SEC for spot Ether ETF listing [/INST] Asset management firm Bitwise has filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to list and trade shares of a spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded fund, or ETF.

In a March 28 filing, Bitwise filed a Form S-1 registration statement with the SEC for shares of its Ethereum ETF. The filing came amid speculation that the SEC was seeking to label Ether a security under its regulatory purview, putting future listings of spot ETF ETFs into doubt.

Based on a 19b-4 amendment filing with the SEC, Bitwise intends to list shares of the ETH investment vehicle on NYSE Arca. The asset manager was among the first to obtain approval from the SEC for listing and trading shares of its spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETF in January.

Related: 3 theories why the SEC may be eyeing down Ethereum: Crypto lawyer

The final SEC deadline for approving or denying the next round of spot ETH ETF applications will come on May 23, starting with VanEck’s investment vehicle. Though many experts seemed to be optimistic about approval in 2023, some have suggested going into 2024 that the commission could deny applications.

Several firms have spot ETH ETF applications pending approval or denial, including Fidelity, Hashdex and ARK 21Shares. The SEC began approving investment vehicles tied to Ether futures in October 2023.

Magazine: Ether ETFs face Senate opposition, Wright is not Satoshi, and Dencun goes live: Hodler’s Digest, March 10-16"
"[INST] Base hits $4B TVL as monthly txs outstrip Ethereum and Arbitrum [/INST] Crypto exchange Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Base has seen its total value locked (TVL) surge by over 13.2% in the past week to surpass $4 billion for the first time as its 30-day transactions beat out Ethereum and its top rival, Arbitrum.

L2Beat data updated on April 7 shows Base’s total TVL at $4.15 billion, including $1.45 billion of canonically bridged value — assets locked on Ethereum to be represented on Base — and $2.7 billion in natively minted assets.

Base is the third-largest Ethereum layer 2 by TVL, beating fourth-place rival Blast by around $1.4 billion and $3.5 billion behind the second-place Optimism and $14.6 billion behind leader Arbitrum.

Base’s total TVL chart with the split between canonically bridged funds (purple) and natively minted (pink). Source: L2BEAT

Base is the only layer 2 of the top five by TVL to have posted a gain in the past week. Starknet saw the biggest TVL loss at 10.2%, while Optimism was down 9.1%, Arbitrum declined 5.5%, and Blast shrunk 2.4%.

The Ethereum scaler’s TVL bump comes amid an activity surge that’s seen its 30-day transaction count hit 50.34 million, surpassing Arbitrum’s 40.1 million and Ethereum’s 37.9 million.

Base’s average daily transactions per second (TPS) jumped by 29.7% over the week and over the past day has averaged 35.19 TPS — higher than the combined TPS of rival layer-2 Arbitrum and Ethereum, which saw respective scores of 16.61 and 13.91.

Base’s TPS (red) has consistently outstripped Ethereum (blue) for over two weeks. Source: L2Beat

Meanwhile, Base has been one of the main beneficiaries of recent memecoin activity. Its meme token market capitalization has reached over $1.6 billion, a 13% jump over the last day, according to CoinGecko.

Related: Coinbase partners with Lightspark for Bitcoin Lightning payments

However, Base’s popularity has also attracted scammers, as the network saw an 18-fold increase in successful phishing scams from January to March — with $3.35 million stolen last month.

Ethereum has focused its development efforts on improving the blockchain’s ability to process layer-2 transaction data, as exampled by its March 13 Dencun upgrade, which has lowered layer-2 transaction fees.

Meanwhile, layer 2’s like Base could gain further from Ethereum’s shortcomings, with VanEck analysts estimating the network’s scaling ecosystem could hit a $1-trillion market capitalization by 2030.

Magazine: Is measuring blockchain transactions per second (TPS) stupid in 2024? Big Questions"
"[INST] Thailand will block unlicensed crypto exchanges ‘to solve online crimes’ [/INST] Thai authorities will block unlicensed crypto exchanges from operating in the country to prevent money laundering and other online crimes.

Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will submit a list of unlicensed crypto exchanges to the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society.

The order was made public by Thai SEC Secretary-General Pornanong Budsaratragoon after the Technology Crime Prevention and Suppression Committee meeting on April 19.

Thailand’s decision to block unlicensed firms was inspired by India and the Philippines, which recently banned all off-shore exchanges that failed to comply with local regulations.

To minimize the impact on the public, the Thai SEC urged crypto investors to withdraw their funds from unregistered platforms before the ban takes effect. A translation of the SEC announcement read:

“The SEC would like to warn the public and investors to be careful of using services with unlicensed digital asset business operators because they will not be protected by law. There is also the risk of being deceived (scam) and being (associated with) money laundering.”

The Thai SEC urged investors to check the license registrations of the platforms with the SEC Check First application before making any investments. A quick search of “Binance” shows that the crypto exchange has yet to register and will need to close down when the ban takes effect.

Thailand’s SEC Check First application shows the license status of Binance. Source: Thai SEC

Other popular offshore crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, KuCoin, Kraken and OKX do not operate legally in Thailand, according to government data.

Related: Apple India blocks Binance, 9 other crypto exchanges weeks after FIU notice

Regulatory pressure in Europe could lead to a ban on non-decentralized protocols. According to the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) — the new regulatory framework governing digital assets within the region — the European Commission is required to prepare a report by Dec. 30, evaluating the decentralized finance (DeFi) market and the feasibility of specific regulations for the sector.

Among many crypto entrepreneurs, MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen noted that the rules could place some DeFi interfaces, such as decentralized exchanges, under licensing requirements.

“This would make DeFi frontends on normal internet domains, as we know them today, impossible. Only fully decentralized, local, downloaded frontends or full-KYC online frontends would be possible. Sad,” he wrote on X.

Magazine: a16z snubs crypto, Mango Markets exploiter found guilty and Worldcoin L2: Hodler’s Digest, April 14-20"
"[INST] Former Ethereum dev Virgil Griffith asks for resentencing in North Korea case [/INST] Former Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith, who was handed a 63-month prison term in 2022 for assisting North Korea in using blockchain technology, has requested a sentence reduction.

The plea was made in a letter from Glen Garrett McGorty and Alexander Urbelis, attorneys representing Virgil Griffith, to Judge Kevin Castel of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on April 17.

The letter requests that the court revise Griffith’s sentence based on newly enacted revisions to U.S. sentencing guidelines, which provide a two-point offense level reduction for certain “zero-point” offenders.

Griffith was sentenced to 63 months and a $100,000 fine in April 2022 after pleading guilty to violating sanctions laws when he attended a conference in North Korea and assisted the state in using blockchain technology — despite economic sanctions imposed by the United States.

The letter argues that Griffith qualifies for a two-point reduction as a “zero-point"" offender based on the criteria outlined in the revised guidelines.

Screenshot from a letter in United States v. Virgil Griffith. Source: Pacer

This reduction would lower his total offense level from 26 to 24, resulting in a revised guidelines range of 51 to 63 months — potentially shaving a year or more off his sentence.

The letter requests that the court order the U.S. Probation Office to draft a revised pre-sentence investigation report, schedule a resentencing hearing, and allow for a briefing schedule so the defense can provide updated information and arguments for their reduction request.

“The defense respectfully requests the opportunity to provide the Court with updated information which would counsel toward a sentence no greater than the lowest end of the new Guidelines range–51 months—if not lower.”

A “zero-point” offender is a first-time, non-violent offender whose crime meets certain criteria indicating a lower risk of recidivism compared to other lawbreakers.

Related: Railgun denies being used by North Korea as it nears $1B total volume

In May 2023, the U.S. Department of Commerce also imposed a 10-year export privilege ban on Griffith, who was serving the first year of his five-year sentence.

This means he was restricted from engaging in any transactions involving commodities, software, or technology that fall under the jurisdiction of U.S. export regulations.

Magazine: Lawmakers’ fear and doubt drives proposed crypto regulations in US"
"[INST] Binance Labs shifts focus to Bitcoin DeFi, MarginFi sees $200M of outflows: Finance Redefined [/INST] Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you the most significant developments from the past week.

Like Ethereum’s peak era in 2017, Solana is facing a similar hurdle in network congestion that has lasted almost a week, leading to a high transaction failure rate.

Solana developers have now set April 15 as their target date to resolve the issue, calling it a bug rather than a design flaw.

Binance Labs has shifted its DeFi focus toward Bitcoin by investing in Bitcoin-native restaking protocol BounceBit.

In other news, withdrawals from the Solana-based DeFi protocol MarginFi grew over $190 million amid an apparent management meltdown and claims from competitors that it hasn’t met its promises.

Solana devs target April 15 for failed TX fix — It’s “not a design flaw”

Solana developers are targeting April 15 to implement a fix for an “implementation bug” that recently caused the transaction failure rate on Solana to skyrocket.

“Solana’s current issue is not a design flaw; it’s an implementation bug,” stressed Mert Mumtaz, the CEO of Helius Labs, a blockchain infrastructure firm that provides back-end support exclusively to the Solana network.

Continue reading

Arkham accuses competitors of spreading “false rumors” amid token sell-off

Blockchain analytics firm Arkham has accused its fellow competitors of “spreading false rumors” to create fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) after questions arose regarding the firm’s transfer of its native ARKM tokens.

Although Arkham did not name the dissenting competitors, just a few days prior, a post published by fellow blockchain analytics firm Nansen claimed that Arkham “moved over 25.2m ARKM ($56 million) over the past two days” to unlabeled wallets and cryptocurrency exchange Binance.

“Let’s take a look at what’s going on because they won’t show you,” wrote Nansen, noting that the ARKM was sent to different Binance addresses with no prior activity and to a fresh wallet address.

Continue reading

Binance Labs shifts investment focus to Bitcoin DeFi

Binance Labs, the venture capital arm of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has invested in Bitcoin-native restaking protocol BounceBit.

BounceBit merges centralized finance and DeFi features to create more utility for Bitcoin (BTC), wrote co-founder of Binance and head of Binance Labs,

Continue reading

MarginFi outflows $190 million as CEO rage-quits amid token controversy

Nearly $200 million of user funds have exited Solana-based lending protocol MarginFi over the last two days amid an abrupt resignation of the platform’s CEO, which was followed by accusations of wrongdoing by its competitors.

On April 10, the now-former CEO of MarginFi, Edgar Pavlovsky, suddenly announced he had resigned from MarginFi, citing disputes arising from both within his firm and outside of it.

Continue reading

DeFi market overview

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a bullish week, with most trading in the green on the weekly charts. The total value locked in DeFi protocols rose above $100 billion.

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space."
"[INST] Turkish Misyon Bank moves into Bitcoin with Taurus [/INST] Update March 27: The article was updated to reflect that Misyon Bank and Taurus' collaboration will enable custody of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether in the first phase of implementation.

Misyon Bank — an investment banking firm and one of the first neobanks in Turkey — is moving into digital asset custody and tokenization with Swiss cryptocurrency custody provider, Taurus.

The Turkish neobank signed a partnership agreement with Taurus to implement its technology in order to provide crypto custody and tokenization services at Misyon Bank. The custody service will support Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and Avalanche (AVA) in the first phase, a spokesperson for the Misyon Bank told Cointelegraph.

“We plan to extend our coverage by including the other essential cryptocurrencies provided by Taurus for our clients in the following phases,” the representative noted, adding that crypto support is enabled in addition to tokenization of real world assets.

Announcing the news on March 26, Misyon mentioned that the collaboration is structured through its wholly-owned subsidiary MisyonTech.

Misyon will deploy multiple Taurus-developed solutions, including the custody platform Taurus Protect, the tokenization tool Taurus Capital and the blockchain node infrastructure Taurus Explorer.

Taurus is known for providing its custody service to major European banks, including the Spanish financial services giant Banco Santander and global investment bank Credit Suisse. The latter is also a major Taurus investor, leading a $65 million Series B raise for the firm in February 2023.

According to Misyon Bank CEO Önder Halisdemir, the partnership with Taurus is a significant step forward in its plan to make Turkey the “Switzerland of its region.”

“With this collaboration, Turkish assets will be made accessible to investors worldwide through tokenization,” Halisdemir noted. He added that local solutions for digital assets will be designed with the contributions of Istanbul Technical University and KPMG. The exec stated:

“With the completion of the local regulatory framework for digital asset custody services, our efforts will make Turkey a center of excellence and attraction in its region regarding custody services and tokenization.”

Misyon and Taurus didn’t mention whether the collaboration targets the addition of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) on the Misyon platform directly.

Related: OKX announces launch of Turkish platform

Turkey has emerged as one of major crypto economies in the world, ranking fourth in terms of crypto transaction volumes, or $170 billion in 2023, according to data from Chainalysis. The country is just behind the United States, India and the United Kingdom.

According to Misyon Bank and Taurus, the newly signed partnership opens the door for a wave of institutional activity in the region.

“We have been impressed by Misyon and MisyonTech team of experts, and we are confident that through this significant collaboration, Turkey could establish a prominent position within the region in digital asset custody and tokenization,” Taurus co-founder Lamine Brahimi said.

Magazine: Asia Express: $383M for HK crypto hub, APAC exchanges expand, Digital Yuan bridge"
"[INST] Fantom founder concerned negative funding rates will introduce next Terra-like’ unbacked asset’ [/INST] Fantom creator Andre Cronje is concerned that incentives behind Ethena Labs’ USDe could lead to the next Terra-like meltdown. Cronje is considered one of the most influential thought leaders in decentralized finance (DeFi).

Without mentioning the protocol or its synthetic dollar directly by name, Cronje shared a note about his concerns regarding the risk management behind Ethena Labs, highlighting the issue with funding rates in perpetual futures contracts. In an April 3 X post, Cronje wrote:

“While things are going great now (because the market is positive and shorting funding rates are positive [because everyone is happy being long]), eventually that turns, funding becomes negative, margin/collateral gets liquidated, and you have an unbacked asset.”

Ethena’s USDe stablecoin yield first caused widespread concerns on Feb. 19, when it launched on public mainnet with a 27.6% annual percentage yield (APY), which was considerably higher than the 20% yield on the failed TerraUSD (UST) on the Anchor protocol, which collapsed in May 2022, erasing tens of billions of dollars of value in a few days.

Following the mainnet launch, Ethena Labs’ founder Guy Young told Cointelegraph that the widespread concerns are a sign of a maturing industry with a healthy amount of skepticism, rising from the ashes of the Terra collapse.

When asked about the concerns related to funding rates turning negative, Young said it’s not a major concern, highlighting that funding rates only turned negative to below -3% for a week during 2022, which was among the worst years for the crypto market.

Ethena also employs other measures for when funding rates turn negative, including an emergency insurance fund and arbitrage mechanics, Guy told Cointelegraph:

“Think of this as an exogenous interest rate for the system where if the interest rate is too low, that's just the market telling us that the supply of USDe is too high relative to leverage demands in the system… So when the interest rate goes low, you'll expect that users will not be coming into the product and they'll be redeeming out of it, and in the process of doing so we have to lift the shorts, which allows funding to fall back to zero or above.”

While Anchor protocol’s yield was simply made up, Guy highlighted that USDe’s yield is publicly verifiable and is generated via staking returns and shorting Ether perpetual futures contracts.

Guy Young, Interview with CT. Source: Cointelegraph.

According to Jae Sik Choi, an analyst at Greythorn Asset Management, Anchor protocol’s artificially inflated yield was unsustainable, unlike the dynamic yield promised by USDe.

“We saw how the real yield on Anchor was actually ~5.81% and it paid out 19.45% which is a cause for disaster as the yield backing the product is less than what it pays out… There is no mention of 'risk-free’ returns that were promoted in Anchor, as the yield is clearly stipulated and we know where it’s coming from (perpetual futures + stETH).”

Related: Ethena becomes highest earning DApp in crypto"
"[INST] ZachXBT won’t assist after memecoin devs throw tokenholders under the bus [/INST] Prominent blockchain sleuth ZachXBT has refused to assist holders of the Complex (SIMPLE) memecoin, minted on the Base blockchain, after its developers abruptly shut down the project on April 4.

“After careful consideration and with heavy hearts, we’ve made the difficult decision to sunset Complex,” the project wrote, adding: “While this project has been a labor of love and a source of inspiration for our team, recent instances of harassment have created an untenable environment that impacts the mental well-being of our members.”

Meanwhile, SIMPLE will remain liquidity-locked until a later date, allowing users to sell their token holdings until then. At the time of publication, SIMPLE has lost over 90% of its value in the past 24 hours and now has a negligible market cap.

It appears that users were very dissatisfied with the developers’ reference to “mental health” as the main reason for the project’s shutdown. “What kind of cringe shit is this?” wrote one user. “You guys didn’t even last a week and rugging using mental health as an excuse, might as well just rug without this pathetic attempt of a post expecting people to clap for you. Idiots.”

Other angry users turned to ZachXBT in search of help. However, the blockchain sleuth was also dissatisfied, albeit at the incoming help requests: “No, I do not care about your meme coins stop asking me,” replied Zach. “I simply dislike spending long periods helping people who willingly choose to gamble on vaporware meme coins vs actual victims,"" he continued. “You do not even follow me and then speak poorly of me yet expect me to want to spend time helping you for free?”

Another user who chimed in appears to have developed a deeper (and more poetic) understanding of the situation. “You expose people, and they attack you; you don’t expose, people attack you; God bless you, ZachXBT, this space wouldn’t be the same without you,” they wrote.

It appears that the Complex memecoin project ended just days after its initial debut on March 30. The protocol had previously reached a high of 3,013 tokenholders. Amid the ongoing crypto bull market, memecoins have displayed average returns of 1,312.6%, the highest among the top tokens by market capitalization.

Related: Trader turns $13K into $2M within 1 hour as memecoin frenzy continues"
"[INST] Here are the next biggest crypto court cases with the SBF saga over [/INST] The cryptocurrency “trial of the century” wrapped up a week ago with the 25-year sentencing of FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, but there’s plenty of crypto action still to come throug the United States courts.

At the end of this month, Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao will know what jail time, if any, he’ll serve.

Bankman-Fried may also appeal his sentence at some point, which his lawyers said was in the works since he was found guilty last November. His 25-year sentence on March 28 now allows that to happen.

Here are some of the other cases where crypto and its key executives will face U.S. courts:

Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao

Ex-Binance boss Zhao pled guilty to money laundering last year alongside Binance.US and Binance’s $4.3 billion settlement with the U.S. on charges including operating an illegal exchange and having an ineffective Anti-Money Laundering program.

He’s facing up to 18 months behind bars at his April 30 sentencing date in a Seattle federal court, but prosecutors have made it clear they could argue up to a maximum of 10 years.

Is former Binance boss CZ a flight risk? U.S. prosecutors think so. Dive into our latest short video for the full scoop. What implications could this have for the crypto sphere? #CZ #Binance #CryptoNews pic.twitter.com/m26biWyQdr — Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) November 25, 2023

Zhao’s bond conditions leave him stuck in the U.S. as the government is worried he won’t come back if he goes home to his family in the United Arab Emirates — something he’s repeatedly asked the court if he can do.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is still chasing charges against Binance, its U.S. arm and Zhao, alleging they sold unregistered securities and commingled customer assets.

FTX execs and more court for SBF

FTX co-founder Zixiao “Gary” Wang, engineering lead Nishad Singh and Alameda Research ex-CEO Caroline Ellison will be sentenced in New York at some point for their roles in the massive fraud carried out at the exchange.

Wang, Singh and Ellison are respectively facing up to 50, 75 and 110 years in prison, but their jail time may not be as much as their former boss since they made deals to plead guilty and provide evidence against him for a reduced sentence.

FTX Digital Markets’ former co-CEO Ryan Salame — who didn’t testify against Bankman-Fried but did take a plea deal — will be sentenced on May 1 after he admitted to making unlawful political contributions and conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business.

With Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial over, paused lawsuits from the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission charging him with securities and commodity law violations are set to also resume soon.

Terraform Labs' Do Kwon

In March last year, the U.S. lumped Terraform co-founder Do Kwon with a string of fraud and market manipulation charges after his crypto ecosystem tied to an algorithm-backed stablecoin ended up not being very stable.

The U.S. has tussled with Kwon’s native South Korea to extradite him from Montenegro. Kwon won an appeal to stop his extradition to the U.S., and he’s free in Montenegro while its Supreme Court deliberates on U.S. and South Korea’s extradition requests.

The SEC has a suit against Kwon for allegedly selling unregistered securities in a New York federal court, and that’s gone to trial even though he’s not there.

“Highly profitable trading” strategist Avi Eisenberg

Avraham “Avi” Eisenberg, the $117 million alleged exploiter of DeFi protocol Mango Markets exploiter who said it was just “a highly profitable trading strategy,” will face a trial for commodities fraud, manipulation and wire fraud charges on April 8.

Eisenberg has claimed everything he did was legal and permitted on Mango Markets’ smart contract.

The CFTC and SEC have sued him on market manipulation and anti-fraud charges, but they’re on pause until the criminal trial wraps up.

Tornado Cash devs Roman Storm and Semenov

Crypto mixer Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm’s trial is set for September on charges he conspired to commit money laundering, operated an unlicensed money transmitting business and violated the International Economic Emergency Powers Act.

The charges carry a combined maximum sentence of 45 years, and Storm has pleaded not guilty and asked they be dismissed as he said there was little he could do to stop U.S.-sanctioned entities using the tool.

His co-developer, Roman Semenov, is at large and is believed to be in Russia.

Celsius founder and former CEO Alex Mashinsky

Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky has his criminal trial set for Sept. 17 on seven charges relating to various fraud and market manipulation, totaling a maximum sentence of 115 years.

Mashinsky’s seven charges. Source: Department of Justice

He’s pleaded not guilty and asked for two of the charges to be dismissed and that information about Celsius’ bankruptcy not be included in the case.

Mashinsky faces SEC and CFTC lawsuits too — paused for his criminal case — which claims he sold unregistered securities and operated an unregistered commodity pool.

SafeMoon boss Karony

U.S. prosecutors pinned SafeMoon CEO Braden John Karony on securities, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy in November — charges carrying a maximum of 45 years in jail.

He’s pleaded not guilty, is out on bail and has struggled to pay for legal services.

SafeMoon creator Kyle Nagy and chief technology officer Thomas Smith were also charged alongside Karony. Nagy remains at alrge and Smith is angling for a plea deal.

After their criminal trial, Karony, Smith and Nagy will face an SEC lawsuit for unregistered securities sales and misappropriating funds.

KuCoin and co.

Last month, the U.S. charged the crypto exchange KuCoin and founders Chun “Michael” Gan and Ke “Eric” Tang for failing to keep an anti-money laundering program and conspiring to run an unlicensed money transmitting business.

Gan and Tang — both Chinese nationals — each face a maximum of a decade in prison, but both are at large.

Related: Hospitality worker caught with $2.5B Bitcoin found guilty of money laundering

The CFTC has also sued KuCoin for “multiple violations of the Commodity Exchange Act.”

SEC vs. (almost) everyone

Besides the SEC lawsuits already mentioned, the agency is suing no less than eight other crypto firms — pinning most on the allegation they sold unregistered securities and operated unlicensed.

Coinbase, Kraken, Tron, and Gemini are facing the regulator in court — all pinned for selling unregistered securities, among other charges, and all are fighting the SEC’s allegations.

Ripple is also still in its yearslong court biff with the regulator, though that will soon come to an end.

The SEC also sued the claimed crypto mining and development firm Green United for the same reason, which the mining firm has asked to be dismissed.

Magazine: Inner City Press says ‘less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Abra settles with fifth state as US operations may be winding down [/INST] Cryptocurrency platform Abra and its CEO William Barhydt reached a settlement with the Oregon Division of Financial Regulation, under which it will return assets held by Oregon users on the platform and cease and desist from offering unregistered securities in the state. This is the latest step in the United States-based company’s withdrawal from the U.S. market.

Oregon is at least the fifth state to take action against the companies that make up the Abra ecosystem. The state of Oregon charged Abra with violations of state securities laws in connection with its interest-bearing crypto depository accounts Abra Earn and Abra Boost. It required Abra to advise all account holders in the state to remove their crypto assets from the platform. If it succeeds in returning all assets to Oregon customers by April 25, it will not be subject to a monetary penalty.

In Oregon, 167 Abra customers have $32,387.14 on the platform. The state of Iowa settled with Abra and its CEO in February, and Abra agreed to return $6,426.90 to its approximately 39 customers in that state. It would avoid a penalty of $461,610.14 by fulfilling the conditions of the settlement by March 6.

Related: SEC and CFTC Fine Crypto Investment App for Offering Synthetic Assets

Maryland took action against Abra in September 2023 on behalf of 162 Marylanders with balances totaling $700,000. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown stated in the announcement:

“Maryland has been participating in a working group of state securities regulators focused on interest-bearing crypto asset accounts.”

This past January, Abra agreed in a settlement with the Texas State Securities Board to repay state residents their balances on the platform. That was the second action Texas had taken against Abra. In a June 2023 enforcement action, the Texas agency found that Abra had approximately 1,600 state residents on its platform with a balance of $1.8 million. It also claimed that Abra has been insolvent since March of that year, which was during the height of the banking crisis.

Source: Bill Barhydt

The California Commissioner of Financial Protection and Innovation issued a consent decree in April 2023 requiring Abra to close out Californians’ Earn accounts, worth $19 million.

Abra said in a blog post in July that it was ending retail operations in the United States.

Magazine: Home loans using crypto as collateral: Do the risks outweigh the reward?"
"[INST] Don’t be too quick to ‘poo-poo’ memecoins: Arthur Hayes [/INST] BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes said one should be careful before labeling all memecoins as “stupid,” arguing they can be a net positive for the blockchain networks they’re launched on.

In a March 30 interview with Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal, Hayes argued that memecoins bring value to the crypto sector by drumming up attention and then accruing new users and engineers to blockchains.

“You can poo-poo these things as stupid and valueless, but if it brings attention and more engineers to the space, it’s positive value for the chain itself.”

“The chains that can support this culture are going to be the chains that have value,” Hayes said, adding that Solana and Ethereum stand as the most well-positioned networks to capture the flow of attention from memes.

Last year, Solana network activity grew considerably after a memecoin frenzy in November — with many non-meme projects launching on the network in the following months.

Similarly, network and development activity on Bitcoin has grown significantly after a flood of BRC-20 tokens and Ordinals around the same time.

Pal believes memecoins would likely grow increasingly popular among younger crypto investors, capitalizing on the “gaming mentality” present in Gen Z and Millennials.

“This is the same thing, just gaming with money,” said Pal.

Both Pal and Hayes noted that the attention flowing into memecoins would continue for some time into the future, with Solana-based memecoin Dogwifhat (WIF) slated to be projected on the Las Vegas Sphere sometime in the coming months.

The dog-themed memecoin recently flipped the Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum (ARB) in terms of total market capitalization. At the time of publication, WIF commands a market cap of $4.5 billion, while ARB stands at $4.4 billion.

Industry executives, however, argue there are also countless risks that come along with memecoins.

In a March 14 investor note, United States investment firm Franklin Templeton wrote that while memecoins may present an opportunity for “quick profits,” — they are prone to risks that arise from lacking any fundamental “value or utility.”

In a March 29 blog post, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his general disinterest in memecoins. However, he asked crypto investors and memecoin developers to find a way to make the tokens useful or charitable — instead of merely denouncing them or “virtue signaling” to those who trade them.

“I value people’s desire to have fun, and I would rather the crypto space somehow swim with this current rather than against it,” Buterin wrote.

Related: Dogwifhat en route to $10? WIF is now the third-biggest memecoin as whales hold tight

Despite the risks, memecoins have been the best-performing asset class within the crypto sector in the last month, according to data from CoinGecko.

Memecoins have been the best-performing CoinGecko category in the last week. Source: CoinGecko

In the last week, memecoins listed on CoinGecko have gained an aggregate of 20%, compared to 6% for layer-1 network tokens and 5.4% for decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] EU enacts crypto regulations to combat money laundering [/INST] The European Parliament approved new regulations that establish formal due diligence obligations for cryptocurrency companies with the goal of combating money laundering.

The new laws are aimed at improving “due diligence measures and identity checks” for customers, extending to entities such as crypto asset managers. These entities will also be required to report any suspicious activities to authorities.

This new legislation, approved on April 24, will impact crypto-asset service providers (CASPs), like centralized crypto exchanges under the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation and various other entities, including gambling services.

MiCA is a regulatory framework introduced by the European Union to oversee digital assets and their markets. It was enacted in June 2023 and will be fully enforceable by the end of the year.

A new agency, the Authority for Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AMLA), has been designated to oversee and supervise the implementation of the new rule.

AMLA’s office will be situated in Frankfurt, Germany. However, the law has not been formally adopted by the Council and has yet to be published in the EU Office Journal.

Patrick Hansen, EU strategy and policy director at Circle, expressed anticipation for the vote’s outcome in a post on X. He mentioned that the package would proceed to be officially adopted by the Council of the EU and come into effect three years later.

Related: EU watchdog warns handful of exchanges may dominate crypto market

In another post, Hansen mentioned that these CASPs will be required to adhere to standard Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) procedures such as customer due diligence .

He noted that this requirement is not novel, as all crypto exchanges and custodial wallet providers in the EU are already obligated to comply with these regulations under existing legislation.

Hansen described the final version as a “positive result” for the crypto sector. He noted that earlier iterations of the proposed AMLR suggested a much stricter approach, which would have necessitated KYC on the self-custody originator/beneficiary.

However, he credited industry efforts for advocating a risk-based approach with multiple options, ultimately leading to consensus.

Last month, a majority of the European Parliament’s lead committees scrapped the 1,000-euro ($1,080) limit on cryptocurrency payments from self-hosted crypto wallets as part of new AML laws.

Magazine: Cyprus keeps FTX Europe license suspended until September"
"[INST] Portuguese data regulator bans Worldcoin operations for 90 days [/INST] The Portuguese data regulator — the National Data Protection Commission (CNPD) — issued a statement announcing the decision to temporarily limit Worldcoin’s collection of biometric data through its Orb devices within the country.

According to the CNPD, the decision was made in an effort to protect the rights of its citizens, minors in particular. The measure will take effect immediately and until the conclusion of an investigation, which it initially opened on March 8.

Worldcoin operates through scanning individual’s irises via its Orb devices, which it exchanges for a digital ID and its own cryptocurrency.

Worldcoin was founded by Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of artificial intelligence developer OpenAI.

According to the company, over 4.5 million people in 120 countries have signed up with Worldcoin. Portugal reports that 300,000 people have already provided their biometric data for the project.

The CNPD said these measures come after receiving “dozens of reports” on the collection of data from minors without the proper authorization from parents or legal authorities. It stated:

“Given the current circumstances, in which there is illegality in the processing of minors’ biometric data, associated with potential violations of other GDPR standards, the CNPD understood that the risk to citizens’ fundamental rights is high, justifying urgent intervention to prevent serious or irreparable damage.”

Related: Data privacy and security concerns worry nearly half of tech industry consumers: Report

Paula Meira Lourenço, president of the CNPD, called the measure “indispensable and justified” to effectively defend the public interest in safeguarding fundamental rights, especially those of minors.

The complaint was addressed to the Worldcoin Foundation, which is the entity behind the Worldcoin data collection initiative.

These troubles follow a slew of other complaints from regulators around the world. Kenya’s government continued to uphold its ban on the project despite what it said was “pressure” from the United States to relax its stance.

Legal authorities in Spain have also told Worldcoin to cease activity in the country after complaints that local users could not withdraw their consent. It was also alleged that data collection was being collected from minors.

Despite these bans, on March 18, Worldcoin released a statement assuring that it operates “lawfully in all of the locations in which it is available” and is designed to fully comply with related laws.

On March 22, the project announced that it would be open-sourcing its software and providing a new “personal custody” privacy feature to give users more control over their data.

Magazine: ‘Am I sorry? No’ — 3AC founder. $6B BTC laundered for fast food worker: Asia Express"
"[INST] Cosmos patches ‘critical’ IBC protocol bug, saving $126M [/INST] Cosmos developers have fixed a “critical” security bug in its Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol that put at least $126 million at risk, said a blockchain security firm that privately notified Cosmos of the issue.

“We privately disclosed the vulnerability through the Cosmos HackerOne Bug Bounty program and the issue is now patched,” Asymmetric Research said on April 23.

“No malicious exploitation took place and no funds were lost,” it added.

The bug could have allowed a reentrancy attack, allowing a hacker to mint infinite tokens on IBC-connected chains such as Osmosis and other decentralized finance ecosystems on Cosmos.

“We believe at least 126M+ in assets could have been stolen on Osmosis. However, rate limiting on Osmosis slows down the damage that could be caused.”

Rate limits serve to prevent or at least mitigate attacks that attempt to overwhelm a system by controlling the rate at which requests are made.

Asymmetric noted the bug has existed in ibc-go, a high-level programming language implementation of IBC, since it launched in 2021.

However, the bug only recently became exploitable after Cosmos devs launched a new third-party application called IBC middleware, which allows tokens of the ICS20 interchain token standard to cross chains.

Related: Cosmos Hub greenlights ATOM inflation cut for security boost

“This issue demonstrates how easy it is to break trust assumptions and introduce new vulnerabilities by adding new features and functionality. It is also another example of the importance of defense-in-depth,” Asymmetric emphasized.

“This vulnerability highlights the critical need for more research into cross-chain security risks to protect the multichain ecosystem better.”

The bug was patched up by Cosmos dev Carlos Rodríguez about three weeks ago, a GitHub commit shows.

Another “critical” security vulnerability was identified in the IBC protocol in October 2022, which impacted all IBC-connected chains but was patched before any potential exploit.

Magazine: Are DAOs overhyped and unworkable? Lessons from the front lines"
"[INST] PayPal stablecoin circulation dropped 38% in March — Paxos [/INST] PayPal USD (PYUSD) — a stablecoin issued by the payment giant PayPal and the cryptocurrency company Paxos — saw a significant circulation drop in March.

According to Paxos’ latest PayPal USD transparency report, PYUSD circulation amounted to $188.5 million in March — 39% less than in February.

In February and January, PayPal USD circulation topped at $304 million and $301 million, respectively.

As of March 29, PayPal USD treasury included $14.9 million in United States Treasury bonds, with a notional value of around $14.8 million.

The current market value of PYUSD collateral in the U.S. Treasury bond-collateralized reverse repurchase agreements is $177.9 million, and the notional position value is approximately $174 million. The total net assets amounted to $192 million, with the notional position value of $189 million.

PayPal USD market capitalization has been dropping since late February after reaching all-time high levels of $312 million on Feb. 26, according to data from CoinGecko.

The stablecoin saw some sharp growth at the beginning of 2024, with its market value doubling in just about one month by mid-January.

At the time of writing, PYUSD's market capitalization amounted to $194 million, up around 3% in the past seven days.

PayPal USD all-time price chart. Source: CoinGecko

The drop in PYUSD circulation came despite a rally in cryptocurrency markets, with Bitcoin (BTC) breaking all-time highs above $73,000 on March 13.

Cointelegraph approached Paxos for a comment regarding the drop in PYUSD circulation but has yet to receive a response.

Related: Tether completes ‘gold standard’ security audit

PayPal launched the PayPal USD stablecoin in collaboration with Paxos Trust in August 2023, promoting it as being designed for digital payments and Web3. Pegged to the U.S. dollar on a 1:1 ratio, PYUSD is backed by U.S. dollar deposits, short-term Treasurys and other cash equivalents.

Eight months after launch, PYUSD has emerged as a major stablecoin, ranked the 13th largest stablecoin by market capitalization, beating Paxos’ Pax Dollar (USDP) and Gemini Dollar (GUSD), according to CoinGecko.

Top 13 stablecoins by market capitalization. Source: CoinGecko

PYUSD’s market value accounts for just 0.18% of Tether (USDT) stablecoin, which boasts a $106.6 billion market value at the time of writing. The total market capitalization of all stablecoins amounted to $155 billion at the publishing time.

Magazine: The DeFi bots pumping Solana’s stablecoin volume"
"[INST] Bitcoin miner bankruptcies will be less common this cycle — Hut8 CEO [/INST] There will be far fewer Bitcoin (BTC) mining firms filing for bankruptcy in the coming years than there were in 2022, says Hut 8 CEO Asher Gennot.

Speaking in an April 3 interview with Bloomberg, Genoot said that the main cause of bankruptcies in 2022 came from firms being overleveraged and unprepared for rising energy costs.

“A big area that led to a lot of bankruptcies in the mining sector and distressed assets was because of the leverage of 2021,” said Genoot.

“A lot of companies grew with that and that debt couldn't be serviced in 2022 when Bitcoin prices went down and energy prices went up.”

Compute North, Celsius Mining, and Core Scientific — which has since relisted on the Nasdaq — were among several of the Bitcoin miners that filed for bankruptcy during the crypto winter in 2022.

However, Genoot said that since then, Bitcoin miners have typically relied on less leverage and higher volumes of debt-free capital coming from equity markets to grow their businesses.

He expects to see an uptick in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity among smaller-scale Bitcoin miners, something he predicts will contribute to a far lower rate of bankruptcies.

Bitcoin would likely need to retrace to $30,000 or $40,000 for a significant amount of M&A activity or “distress opportunities” to unfold, Genoot explained.

The Bitcoin halving is currently slated for April 20 when block 840,000 is reached. The event will reduce miner rewards from 6.25 BTC ($412,000) to 3.125 BTC ($211,000) at current prices.

Genoot added that investors will flock toward “large-scale operators who have the lowest marginal cost of production,” in the wake of the halving.

The Hut CEO said he took a similar course of action last December when he founded US Bitcoin Corp (USBTC) and combined it with Hut 8 Mining Corp’s operations in an all-stock merger.

The merger is now registered as Hut 8 Corp in Miami, Florida, which boasts over 9,100 Bitcoin, worth $600 million on its balance sheet.

Related: Riot, TeraWulf and CleanSpark best-positioned miners for Bitcoin halving — CoinShares

Bitcoin is currently priced at $66,000, with the halving event now 17 days away.

Bitcoin’s change in price over the last 7 days. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

Historically, Bitcoin has set new all-time highs approximately 6-12 months after the halving event, occurring three consecutive times in 2012, 2016 and 2020.

Bitcoin bucked this trend in recent weeks, surpassing its previous all-time high price of $68,990 on March 5, roughly 46 days out from the halving.

Several industry pundits look to the recent launch of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the United States as the main contributor to Bitcoin’s outsized and atypical price action in recent months.

Magazine: This is your brain on crypto — Substance abuse grows among crypto traders"
"[INST] OKX, Binance and Bybit monthly volumes tripled since late 2023 [/INST] A new report says trading volumes on global centralized cryptocurrency exchanges (CEX) like Binance have spiked significantly since late last year.

According to data from the Bybit Institutional Report 2024, many CEXs at least tripled their monthly trading volumes from October 2023 to March 2024.

Released on April 18, Bybit’s report indicates that OKX 30-day volumes have surged as much as 278% since last October, while Binance followed with a 239% increase. Bybit exchange also stood out as one of the fastest-growing platforms in terms of volumes, adding 264%.

All three exchanges have surpassed the industry’s average growth rate of 255%, a spokesperson for Bybit told Cointelegraph.

The U.S.-based exchange Coinbase increased its volumes by 193%, slightly trailing from the average growth rate.

CEX spot trading volumes (Oct. 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024). Source: Bybit

According to Bybit, the significant growth trends in CEX volumes were largely driven by the price rallies of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), which followed the approvals of spot Bitcoin BTC exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the U.S.

“For the volume sections, we compare 30-day volumes to eliminate volatilities in volume figures on a daily basis,” a Bybit representative said. Bybit analysts compared October 2023 trading data to March 2024 to show volume growth and see market share changes between CEXs, the spokesperson added.

Despite OKX beating Binance in terms of growth speed over the analyzed period, Binance remains the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of market share, accounting for at least 58% of the total spot trading volume, according to Bybit’s data.

Related: Bitcoin supply to run out on exchanges in 9 months — Bybit

In the report, Bybit is positioned as the second-largest exchange by market share, accounting for 9.6% of the market as of March 2023. Rival OKX exchange made up around 9% of the total crypto trading volumes.

Changes in CEX spot market shares. Source: Bybit

According to Bybit data, the growth trend of CEXs has failed to overtake the growth rate of decentralized exchanges (DEX), as major DEX Uniswap v3 increased volumes by 320%.

Derivatives CEXs have also slightly increased 30-day trading volumes, with the biggest derivatives player, Binance, adding around 66% over the period.

“The derivatives market for CEXs is almost entirely dominated by Binance, OKX and Bybit,” the report notes.

Magazine: Synthetix founder: It’s DeFi that’s wrong, not the market"
"[INST] Samourai Wallet mixer co-founders arrested on AML, licensing charges [/INST] The co-founders of cryptocurrency mixer Samourai Wallet have been arrested on charges of money laundering brought by the United States Justice Department (DOJ) and other agencies.

Samourai Wallet CEO Keonne Rodriguez and chief technology officer William Hill will each face one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, with a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and one count of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, with a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

Rodriguez was arrested on the morning of April 24 in Pennsylvania, and Hill was arrested the same day in Portugal. According to a statement released by the United States Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York, the United States will seek Hill’s extradition. The company’s servers and domain were also seized in Iceland, and a warrant has been served to stop downloads of the company’s app from the Google Play Store. The app has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

Screenshot of the Samourai Wallet homepage. Source: doj.gov

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation also took part in the investigation. According to the DOJ statement, Samourai Wallet:

“Executed over $2 billion in unlawful transactions and facilitated more than $100 million in money laundering transactions from illegal dark web markets, such as Silk Road and Hydra Market; a web-server intrusion; a spearphishing scheme; and schemes to defraud multiple decentralized finance protocols.”

Samourai Wallet offered its Whirlpool crypto mixing service and Ricochet service, which created additional, unnecessary transactions to further muddy users’ crypto paths. They allegedly made $4.5 million from fees.

Related: Arbitrum DAO votes on $1M fund for Tornado Cash devs’ legal defense

The U.S. government has become increasingly aggressive toward crypto mixers. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctioned Blender.io in May 2022 after the Axie Infinity hack. The OFAC added addresses associated with the Tornado Cash mixer to its list of Specially Designated Nationals in October 2022, effectively banning U.S. residents from using the service. That decision survived a court challenge. The three co-founders of Tornado Cash had all come under arrest by August 2023.

In October 2023, the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed designating crypto mixers as a “primary money laundering concern” after the Hamas attack on Israel.

Magazine: Tornado Cash 2.0: The race to build safe and legal coin mixers"
"[INST] ‘I’ve moved on to other things’ — Satoshi Nakamoto’s final email revisited after 13 years [/INST] Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin (BTC), decided to move on to other things 13 years ago, when they sent the last communication to Bitcoin’s first developers on April 23, 2011.

Bitcoin core developer Mike Hearn previously revealed the final instructions as part of an email exchange with Nakamoto about the challenges and technical aspects of implementing Bitcoin functionalities to control spam using BTC as collateral:

“I do hope your BitcoinJ continues to be developed into an alternative client. It gives Java devs something to work on, and it’s easier with a simpler foundation that doesn’t have to do everything.”

Satoshi’s final message also adds a sense of passage:

“I had a few other things on my mind (as always). [...] I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”

History of Crypto: Bitcoin — Satoshi Nakamoto’s response to the global financial crisis

Nakamoto’s identity remains one of the tech world’s biggest mysteries since no conclusive evidence has been found, which makes the communication with Bitcoin's first adopters a rich source of information about the early days of the cryptocurrency.

Source: Mike Hearn

Various individuals have been speculated to be the original crypto inventor. One of the most controversial cases involved Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist who claimed to be Nakamoto in 2016. Wright faced a lawsuit by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), with United Kingdom Judge James Mellor ruling that he did not create Bitcoin last March.

Satoshi first introduced the world to Bitcoin with the publication of the Bitcoin white paper on Oct. 31, 2008, which was circulated among a mailing list of cryptographers. The paper outlined a method for using a peer-to-peer network to create a system of digital transactions without relying on trust or third-party involvement. Satoshi continued to work on Bitcoin software until 2010, when they handed over control to other developers. Since then, Bitcoin has grown to become a $1.3 trillion asset.

Magazine: Big Questions: Did the NSA create Bitcoin?"
"[INST] ‘Ripple is well-positioned to pay a significant civil penalty,‘ says SEC [/INST] A United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brief detailing proposed fines and penalties for blockchain firm Ripple describes a different narrative than the one pushed by the company’s executives.

In a March 25 filing in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, attorneys for the SEC proposed Ripple pay $876,308,712 in disgorgement and $198,150,940 in prejudgment interest and a $876,308,712 civil penalty — roughly $1.95 billion total. According to the regulator, the fines and penalties were appropriate based on Ripple’s “defiance of the law,” continuing to sell XRP after legal warnings.

“Ripple is well-positioned to pay a significant civil penalty,” said the SEC. “And one is warranted here both because a civil penalty should not be just the cost of doing business for a securities law violator, as the Second Circuit has held, and because the need for deterrence is clear given Ripple’s enormous amount of unregistered sales of XRP over the last three years.”

The filing was consistent with what Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty claimed would be made public in a March 25 X post: roughly $2 billion in fines and penalties. Alderoty claimed the SEC intended to “punish and intimidate” Ripple, adding the firm planned to file a response to the proposed judgment in April.

The proposed SECorder added:

“Only a significant sanction from this Court and the return of the ill-gotten gains Ripple made from its violations will cause Ripple to correct its conduct.”

Related: RippleX addresses XRP ledger’s AMM pool error, advises user caution

Filed in December 2020, the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple, CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and co-founder Chris Larsen alleged the firm raised $1.3 billion in unregistered securities through sales of XRP tokens. The case made waves in the crypto space when Judge Analisa Torres ruled in July 2023 that XRP was not a security regarding programmatic sales on digital asset exchanges.

Magazine: ETH a security? Celsius clawbacks, SBF says sentence too harsh: Hodler’s Digest, March 17-23"
"[INST] Over $1B in US Treasurys have now been tokenized on-chain [/INST] More than $1 billion worth of United States Treasurys now exist across Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and other blockchains, helped in part by the recent launch of the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund.

BlackRock’s product, tickered “BUIDL,” was launched on Ethereum on March 20 and now boasts a market cap of $244.8 million. According to Etherscan, four transactions to the fund totaling $95 million over the week added a boost to the fund, making it the second largest tokenized government securities fund.

BUIDL now only trails Franklin Templeton’s 11-month-old Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX), which has $360.2 million in U.S. Treasurys, according to data compiled by the parent firm of 21Shares on a Dune Analytics dashboard.

The dashboard shows that $1.08 billion in U.S. Treasurys have now been tokenized across 17 products.

The most recent $79.3 million deposit to BlackRock’s fund was made by real-world asset tokenization firm Ondo Finance, which will allow instant settlements for its own U.S. Treasury-backed token, OUSG. The firm made a total of $95 million in deposits across four transactions, according to Etherscan.

Ondo Finance now owns a 38% share in BUIDL, noted Tom Wan, a research strategist at 21.co in a March 27 X post.

BUIDL’s price is pegged 1:1 with the United States dollar and pays daily accrued dividends directly to investors each month. It was launched on Ethereum via the Securitize protocol.

In its Dune dashboard, 21.co described tokenized government treasurys as more appealing from both a risk and return perspective than stablecoin yields, given the current high-interest rate environment.

Related: BlackRock receives memecoins, NFTs after depositing $100M USDC onchain

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink recently voiced that capital markets could be made more efficient by blockchain tokenization, which Boston Consulting Group estimates will become a $16 trillion market by 2030.

U.S. Treasurys are only one piece of the pie — stocks, real estate and many other assets can also be tokenized.

Ethereum also accounts for $700 million of all real-world assets (RWA) tokenized on-chain.

Franklin Templeton’s FOBXX is tokenized on Stellar and Polygon, which have the second and third largest market share of tokenized products at $358 million and $13 million, respectively.

WisdomTree another large asset management firm tokenizing RWAs, while Ondo Finance, Backed Finance, Matrixdock, Maple Finance and Swarm are among the blockchain-native firms operating in the space.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Nigeria puts faith in new crypto-friendly regulator [/INST] Nigeria’s blockchain stakeholders have expressed hope and confidence in the newly appointed Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The new SEC Chair’s pro-crypto background is seen as an added advantage for the local crypto industry.

Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has appointed Emomotimi Agama, the former managing director of the Nigerian Capital Market Institute (NCMI), as the new chair of the SEC.

This appointment aims to regulate the capital market, enhance investor confidence, and promote economic development.

In interviews with Cointelegraph, local crypto stakeholders shared their opinions about the new appointment.

Nathaniel Luz, CEO of Flincap — an over-the-counter crypto exchange — expressed his excitement about the appointment, saying that the Director-General’s favorable views on crypto will likely bring positive changes to the crypto sector.

Luz said that the community is looking forward to the new chair working together with startups to streamline their licensing process for operating crypto platforms in Nigeria.

With the government issuing licenses for crypto organizations this year, Luz believes assisting numerous crypto startups in obtaining these licenses will ensure compliance and operational stability for exchanges in the country.

Related: Nigeria’s central bank forced to deny claims of crypto account freeze

Similarly, Lucky Uwakwe, chair of the Blockchain Industry Coordinating Committee of Nigeria (BICCoN) and founder of SaBi Exchange, described the appointment as a “wise decision,” considering the new Director-General’s wealth of experience in blockchain and the capital market.

According to Luz, the new leader needs to clearly state that cryptocurrency is not prohibited in Nigeria. Given recent developments and uncertainties surrounding cryptocurrency regulations in the country, stakeholders are seeking a clear declaration from the leadership to confirm the legality of crypto activities. Luz said:

“We expect that his administration will separate the baby from the bath water and show that the crypto industry has several exciting benefits for the country. We need to prove to the whole world that we are open for crypto business despite the issues that some exchanges might have experienced in the country.”

In February, the Nigerian government used the country’s telecommunication providers to prevent local crypto users from accessing the websites of various crypto exchanges, such as Binance, OctaFX and others.

Authorities then accused Binance of illegally moving $26 billion out of the country and invited the firm to send representatives to discuss the issue.

Two Binance staff were subsequently detained and charged with five counts related to money laundering after meeting with Nigerian officials.

One of them, Nadeem Anjarwalla, escaped custody and was tracked down in Kenya, where he faces extradition.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime"
"[INST] Solana struggles: Record 75% of user txs are failing... or are they? [/INST] Roughly three-quarters of all transactions on the Solana network have been failing amid a deluge of activity brought by the recent memecoin mania on Solana; however, proponents say the data is being widely misinterpreted.

Dune Analytics data shows that on April 4, just over 75% of all “non-vote” Solana transactions failed, the highest failure rate on record.

75.4% of non-vote transactions on Solana have failed. Source: Dune Analytics

The uptick has been paralleled by a recent uproar from Solana users on social media, complaining of failed transactions and degraded user experience.

In an April 4 post to X, pseudonymous trader Altcoin Sherpa said that while he still believed Solana would cement itself as the blockchain network for retail adoption, he noted that the current user experience was currently less than ideal.

“As much as I think that SOL is the chain for retail this cycle — the experience is f---ing brutal lately.”

Or maybe it’s bot spam

However, in an April 4 post to X, vocal Solana proponent and Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz took issue with the claim that 75% of transactions were failing, noting that the vast majority of failed non-vote transactions were simply “bot spam.”

Related: Solana activity flips Ethereum amid memecoin craze, even as txs fail

“This is usually not a big problem for users because your wallet will simulate the [transaction] and let you know that it will not work beforehand anyway,” he said.

Mumtaz claimed that the failed transactions chart was “not a good way of assessing user impact as most users don’t make it there to begin [with].”

“About 95% of that entire chart is just bots failing arbitrage attempts,” he added.

Additionally, Mumtaz explained that because much of this spam activity occurs before the scheduling process, increasing transaction priority fees won’t help and that “increasing it above a certain median” will see users “waste money.”

He added that it was unlikely that the upcoming 1.18 Solana network upgrade would fix these issues, hinting that user experience on Solana could remain degraded for some time.

“Networking patches are what’s required, and those are rolling out soon.”

Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko took to social media to express his frustration at the process of improving congestion bugs on the network.

“Dealing with congestion bugs sucks so much more than total liveness failure. The latter is one and done, bug is identified and patched and chain continues. The former has to go through the full release and test pipeline. Shipping fast is impossible,” wrote Yakovenko in an April 5 post to X.

The price of Solana’s SOL (SOL) has fallen around 3% in the last week, stumbling slightly after a 45% rally in the last month. Its recent weekly drawdown has seen it fall back to being the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, per CoinGecko data.

SOL currently commands a total value of $81 billion, trailing behind Binance’s BNB (BNB) at $89 billion.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Pantera Capital’s crypto fund surges 66% amid market optimism [/INST] Pantera Capital’s Liquid Token Fund reportedly posted a 66% return in the first quarter of 2024, driven by investments in crypto tokens such as Solana’s (SOL).

According to a shareholder letter reviewed by Bloomberg, the fund’s strong performance from January to March was also propelled by assets such as Ribbon Finance (RBN) and Stacks (STX), while exposure to tokens tied to Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) decreased during the period.

Portfolio manager Cosmo Jiang told Bloomberg the fund has reduced its Bitcoin holdings by more than half since the beginning of 2024. “We’d been pretty heavy in Bitcoin until the start of the year, and I really like each month we’ve decreased that Bitcoin position meaningfully,” he said.

Data from TradingView shows the RBN token rising 400.43% so far this year, while gains for SOL stand at 69.88%, outperforming Bitcoin’s 62.59% appreciation in 2024.

SOL token performance year-to-date. Source: TradingView

Launched in November 2017, the Pantera Liquid Token Fund holds a pool of 10–20 liquid tokens. The fund is designed for accredited investors willing to commit a minimum of $100,000 and primarily targets decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens.

Related: FTX founder SBF asks for a 6.5-year sentence, tells prison guards to invest in Solana

Pantera Capital is a $5.2 billion asset manager and an early investor in the crypto space. The firm has recently raised around $250 million to buy SOL tokens from former crypto exchange FTX. The tokens were reportedly purchased for $64, about 60% below the current market price.

SOL’s price performance has been attributed to a rise in its blockchain market dominance and the memecoins frenzy. On April 3, memecoins like Dogwifhat and Bonk continued to rise in popularity, along with the recently launched Cat in the Dogs World and Book of Meme. According to a CoinShares report, institutional investors poured almost $25 million into SOL-based investment funds in March, supporting the token’s price rise.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Bitcoin Cash open interest folds 47% since halving as price slides [/INST] Bitcoin Cash (BCH) open interest (OI) and its price have plummeted in the seven days since its halving, erasing a brief stint of extra momentum leading up to the April 4 event.

On April 12, the OI for Bitcoin Cash sat at $378.3 million, down by a massive 47% from its peak of $708.5 million before the BCH halving, according to CoinGlass data.

The decline in OI coincided with a 13% drop in the price of BCH.

The majority of its price decline occurred on April 10, with a steep drop of 7.51% within a three-hour window, after four days of tight fluctuation between $676 and $691, per CoinMarketCap data.

Bitcoin Cash has been hovering between $605 and $691 over the past seven days. Source: CoinMarketCap

The behavior is a complete flip on the week after its 2020 halving event — its first-ever halving. At the time, Bitcoin Cash saw upward momentum, rising 4.7%, while OI rose 10% to $73.86 million.

Back then, Bitcoin Cash was just under three years old. However, there have been debates over Bitcoin Cash’s use cases, mainly due to its lower transaction processing costs and reduced energy requirements for verifying new blocks.

Related: Bitcoin Cash price hiccups amid second-ever halving event

Meanwhile, the Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash communities have clashed again.

In a March 18 X post, Blockstream CEO Adam Back asked early Bitcoin adopter Roger Ver to rejoin the Bitcoin community after he left for the Bitcoin Cash community a number of years ago.

“Join the f*cking party @rogerkver It’s just warming up. you know you want to. you don’t have to go it alone, be the prodigal son and return.”

Roger Ver, commonly known as “Bitcoin Jesus,” is a strong advocate for Bitcoin Cash, claiming it aligns more closely with Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision for Bitcoin.

Ver argues that Bitcoin Cash is better positioned to serve as both a store of value and a currency due to its lower transaction fees.

Meanwhile, many investors are taking positions in Bitcoin, eagerly anticipating a rise as the halving approaches next week.

At the time of publication, Bitcoin’s OI stands at $34.89 billion, which is approximately 15 times higher than it was eight days before the halving in May 2020.

Magazine: Synthetix founder Kain Warwick: It’s DeFi that’s wrong, not the market

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] BlackRock CEO ’very bullish’ on Bitcoin as its ETF crosses $17B [/INST] BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has been “pleasantly surprised” by the performance of his firm’s spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) and has reiterated he's “very bullish” on the long-term viability of Bitcoin.

“IBIT is the fastest growing ETF in the history of ETFs. Nothing has gained assets as fast as IBIT in the history of ETFs,” Larry Fink said in a March 27 interview with Fox Business.

Fink said the iShares Bitcoin Trust’s (IBIT) performance has even “surprised” him at how well it has performed over the first 11 trading weeks.

IBIT has a strong start to trading, tallying $13.5 billion in flows in the first 11 weeks, with an $849 million daily high on March 12, according to Farside Investors. IBIT averages a little over $260 million in inflows per trading day.

“We’re creating now a market that has more liquidity, more transparency and I'm pleasantly surprised. I would never have predicted it before we filed it that we were going to see this type of retail demand,” Fink said.

Asked whether IBIT would “do good, but not this good,” Fink responded: “Yes, definitely.”

“I’m very bullish on the long-term viability of Bitcoin,” the BlackRock CEO added.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says the $IBIT Spot #Bitcoin #ETF is the fastest growing ETF in history

pic.twitter.com/NOsDlFgROi — Simon Dixon (@SimonDixonTwitt) March 27, 2024

IBIT currently holds $17.1 billion in Bitcoin, according to BitMEX Research, and took only two months to reach the $10 billion mark — a milestone that took the first gold ETF two years to reach.

Of all the currently approved ETFs, IBIT only trails the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust in Bitcoin holdings — at $23.6 billion in BTC. Grayscale's Bitcoin holdings have continued to slip, however, down from 620,000 BTC it held before converting to a spot Bitcoin ETF.

The nine-spot Bitcoin ETF issuers (excluding Grayscale) now hold over $34.1 billion in Bitcoin, with IBIT, the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) and ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB) leading inflows.

Related: Bitcoin currently in ‘middle of the bull run’ — Grayscale report

Meanwhile, some industry pundits predict that some spot Bitcoin ETF issuers could eventually shut down due to a lack of profits.

“Most of the current ETFs launched will never even break even as costs will only work if they get to billions of assets under management, which they won’t,” Hector McNeil, the co-CEO and founder of white-label ETF provider HANetf, recently told Cointelegraph.

Several ETF issuers have lowered fees to try to be competitive against some of the bigger players.

But these smaller issuers “face an uphill battle in entering this turf war of giants,” according to Bloomberg ETF analyst Henry Jim.

“If they match fees, they won’t have enough revenue to survive, and if they don’t lower fees, they won’t be able to gather enough critical mass assets to survive.”

Asset management firm Hashdex had its spot Bitcoin ETF approved on March 27, making it the 11th and latest entrant to a competitive spot Bitcoin ETF market in the United States.

Magazine: Wolf Of All Streets worries about a world where Bitcoin hits $1M: Hall of Flame"
"[INST] TradFi firms now prefer public blockchains: Ex-Grayscale exec [/INST] Traditional financial institutions are more keen on tokenizing assets on public blockchains than ever before, says a former Grayscale executive.

Speaking with Cointelegraph, Celisa Morin, who served as Vice President of Platform Distribution at Grayscale until mid-2022, said that a new BlackRock-led narrative among TradFi institutions could see more firms look to tokenize assets on public chains over private ones.

“I think we see a preference for private chains with JPMorgan’s Onyx. But I do think that this was the narrative a few years back. Now, I think it's very much the public blockchains.”

Morin is now the head of international law firm Reed Smith’s crypto department, explaining it would make sense for larger traditional financial institutions to follow the lead of BlackRock — which launched its $100 million tokenized ‘BUIDL’ fund on the Ethereum network on March 18.

The BUIDL fund now holds $288 million in assets per Dune Analytics data.

Top tokenized funds of government securities. Source: Dune Analytics

BlackRock’s move to launch a fund on Ethereum wasn’t without controversy, with the asset manager’s on-chain wallet quickly becoming the target of various spoofs from crypto enthusiasts.

Deposits to BlackRock’s public wallet included legally dubious transactions from the now OFAC-sanctioned mixer Tornado Cash, as well as a roster of various cryptocurrencies from real-world asset (RWA) tokenization projects and memecoins.

Despite the potential legal troubles that come with opting to tokenize assets on public blockchains — instead of using a more KYC and AML-friendly private network, Morin said many firms would likely take the lead from BlackRock.

“If BlackRock has made these choices, I don’t know why the rest of the crew would be held back.”

Morin also noted that Franklin Templeton had already made the “forward thinking” move to launch its tokenized money market fund on the payments-oriented Stellar Network in 2021. The fund integrated with the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Polygon in October last year.

Related: Over $1B in US Treasurys have now been tokenized on-chain

Franklin Templeton’s three-year-old Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) now boasts a total of $360.2 million in U.S. Treasurys. In total, $1.08 billion in U.S. Treasurys have now been tokenized across 17 products.

Ethereum ETF in May unlikely

Morin was less enthusiastic about spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds (ETFs), saying it's unlikely they would be approved in May. She agreed that the lack of communication between the United States Securities and Exchange Commission between prospective fund issuers was a bad sign.

Echoing the sentiments of Senior Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas — Morin said the chances of an approval by VanEck’s deadline on May 23rd grew slimmer with each day the SEC refrained from engaging in public comment.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments — Trezor CEO"
"[INST] RFK Jr. wants to put the entire US budget on a blockchain [/INST] United States presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to put the entire U.S. budget on the blockchain.

During a Michigan rally on April 21, he proposed the idea and said the move would allow every American to look at “every budget item anytime they want, 24 hours a day.”

“We’re gonna have 300 million eyeballs on our budget, and if somebody is spending $16,000 for a toilet seat, everybody’s gonna know about it.”

NEW: RFK Jr. says “I’m gonna put the entire US budget on blockchain”



“Every American can look at every budget item in the entire budget, anytime they want, 24 hours a day.”



“We’re gonna have 300 million eyeballs on our budget!” pic.twitter.com/TBpkcXt5i1 — Radar (@RadarHits) April 22, 2024

Kennedy’s plan would allow for more transparency and accountability, allowing taxpayers to see where their tax dollars are spent.

The blockchain proposal was lauded by many crypto advocates on social media, where people claimed it would be revolutionary and end corruption.

One user wrote that transparent public accounting might be the best use case for blockchain tech besides the supply chain: “checks and balances in our government doesn’t work if the branches are in on the corruption together (president and congress particularly) it’s time the people hold them accountable.”

Some, however, have criticized the plan, claiming Kennedy is advocating for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) via his blockchain plan. However, in the past, Kennedy has vowed to end U.S. efforts to move toward a CBDC, claiming it infringes on privacy.

Related: Bitcoin price hits all-time highs across Argentina, Nigeria and Turkey

Kennedy is running as an independent candidate in the upcoming U.S. presidential election after ending his bid to be the Democratic Party nominee in October 2023.

He is a strong advocate for Bitcoin (BTC) and blockchain and has been among the few presidential candidates who have endorsed Bitcoin and decentralized technology.

He is also the first presidential candidate to accept Bitcoin for campaign donations. Kennedy also revealed his plans to back the U.S. dollar with Bitcoin if elected president.

In recent years, more politicians have advocated against centralized government systems — particularly financial ones — as decentralized financial alternatives have grown in popularity.

In December 2023, Bitcoin-friendly candidate Javier Milei won the Argentine presidential election on the back of a campaign promising to slash the size of government.

Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom"
"[INST] VC Roundup: Capital flows and alternative funding models fuel crypto startups [/INST] Venture capitalists are back in crypto, bringing with them liquidity for alternative funding methods for startups, such as grants and node sales.

Base-native lending platform Seamless, for instance, has announced a co-sponsored initiative with layer-3 Degen Chain and semi-fungible token protocol Pandora that will distribute nearly $600,000 in grants to creators and developers building on Base.

While Degen focuses on developers interested in building within Farcaster and Degen Chain, Pandora seeks creators interested in ERC-404 technology for their collections and memecoins.

“Members of the various communities will be evaluating applications, so it’s important that there’s a clear vision of how the grants will help uplift the relevant ecosystems. Useful and innovative ideas are encouraged,” told Cointelegraph Ras, a pseudonymous member of the Seamless Community Grants Program (SCGP).

New grant submissions are available through the Community Governance forum. Applicants must complete a form detailing their project and specific needs.

Another grant round is just around the corner, this time from the SingularityNET ecosystem. The Deep Funding Round 4, which will provide over $1 million in capital for decentralized artificial intelligence initiatives, is expected to be unveiled in early May.

While grants can be a valuable resource for new projects and developers, a more welcoming funding environment is also emerging for crypto startups. Investment in crypto firms rose by 38% during the first quarter of 2024, and the number of projects receiving funding grew by 49% — the highest since the fourth quarter of 2021.

In March alone, over $1.1 billion was invested across 180 crypto-related projects, a 52.5% month-on-month increase, with funds primarily directed toward infrastructure and decentralized finance projects.

Among April’s highlights to date, Paradigm led a $225 million round on layer-1 protocol Monad Labs, while Auradine, a crypto mining hardware provider, completed a Series B funding worth $80 million.

In this edition of Cointelegraph’s VC Roundup, we feature startups that raised capital during the first weeks of April.

AI-blockchain platform Sapien raises $5M in seed round

The artificial intelligence data labeling startup Sapien has secured a $5M seed investment from Primitive Ventures, Animoca, Ravikant Capital, and Yield Guild Games. Founded in 2023 by Trevor Koverko, previously of Polymath, Sapien aims to solve an AI bottleneck: data labeling. The company uses blockchain technology to implement gamification in data labeling and rewards for labelers to produce higher-quality work. The global data labeling market is currently estimated at around $3 billion, primarily dominated by labeling farms in developing countries. “This funding will allow us to expand our team, expand our frontend labeling infrastructure, and provide better quality data,” said Koverko in a statement.

Ribbit Capital leads $10.6M funding round for Alpen Labs’s Bitcoin-based economy

Alpen Labs, a Bitcoin layer-2 developer, has successfully raised $10.6 million to enhance Bitcoin’s blockchain scalability using zero-knowledge proofs. Emerging from stealth mode, Alpen Labs aims to introduce smart contract functionality to Bitcoin through its rollup infrastructure. The funding round, led by Ribbit Capital, also saw participation from Castle Island Ventures, Robot Ventures, and Axiom Capital. The startup, which began its journey nearly two years ago, focuses on creating a programmable and scalable layer for Bitcoin, supporting various on-chain financial applications, including payments, lending, and stablecoins. The team has veterans from Blockstream Research, Nethermind, Aleo, and Palantir, building an ecosystem that will enable applications to settle transactions via Bitcoin.

Node sales generated $8M for Ethereum layer-2 HYCHAIN

Layer-2 decentralized network for gaming HYCHAIN has raised 2,098 Ether (ETH), worth over $8 million, within 48 hours through a node sale. The protocol employs a business model that allows community members to earn rewards by operating software nodes. Participants receive 25% of transaction fees indefinitely for contributing to network security. According to the platform, 16,876 node keys were created by 3,357 unique holders. The HYCHAIN mainnet launched on March 9, providing several features and bridges for connectivity with Ethereum and Polygon networks.

Web3Firewall secures $2.5M in pre-seed funding

Web3Firewall completed a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round led by Laser Digital — Nomura’s digital asset subsidiary, gumi Cryptos Capital, and SPEILLLP, a Susquehanna International Group member. Founded in 2023 by Dr. Samer Fayssal, former chief information security officer at BitGo, the company offers an integrated risk and compliance platform designed for blockchain and digital asset companies, specifically targeting firms working in decentralized finance (DeFi), nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). According to the startup, the platform will go live in the second quarter of this year, featuring real-time threat detection, prevention, and response powered by AI and machine learning.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all — Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] South Korean party bets on US Bitcoin ETF access for votes [/INST] Leading political parties in South Korea are promising crypto-related incentives to secure voters’ support ahead of the country’s upcoming parliamentary elections.

According to a Bloomberg report on April 5, the opposition Democratic Party has vowed to remove restrictions on domestic and international exchange-traded funds (ETFs) directly holding crypto tokens, including United States-based spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs. Following the approval of Bitcoin ETFs in January, South Korea’s securities regulator warned that local distribution of these ETFs could violate domestic laws.

“We’re going to allow the ETFs, whether domestic or overseas,” the Democratic Party’s Hwanseok Choi told Bloomberg, citing the group’s manifesto.

Also hoping to capitalize on crypto voters, President Yoon Suk Yeol’s People Power Party pledged to delay taxes on digital assets’ profits, scheduled to take effect in 2025.

According to government statistics, nearly six million South Koreans traded crypto via registered exchanges in the first half of 2023, representing 10% of the country’s population. A total of 7% of election candidates own cryptocurrencies, according to official disclosures.

Related: Crypto.com expands in South Korea despite increasing regulatory scrutiny

Data from Korea Securities Depository shows crypto users have invested over $200 million in shares of U.S.-listed firm MicroStrategy. The company’s massive exposure to Bitcoin has led some analysts to label it as “essentially a leveraged Bitcoin ETF.”

Despite politicians’ promises, South Koreans are bracing for tighter regulations on crypto assets. Local financial authorities plan to release new rules for token listings on centralized exchanges in the coming weeks.

According to local media reports, domestic exchanges will be prohibited from listing digital assets affected by hacking incidents until their root causes are determined. In addition, foreign digital assets will be listed on domestic exchanges only if a white paper or technical manual is available for local investors.

Furthermore, South Korea’s upcoming Virtual Asset Users Protection Act prohibits the use of “undisclosed important information” about crypto, market manipulation and illegal trading. The crypto law will come into force on July 19. In February, the government issued an update to the act, imposing significant fines and criminal penalties for violations, including a fixed-term imprisonment sentence of more than one year or fines of three to five times the amount of illegal profits.

Magazine: Inside Pink Drainer — Security analyst defends his crypto scam franchise"
"[INST] ‘Bitcoin will reach over $1M’ — Animoca founder at WebSummit Rio [/INST] Yat Siu, the founder of Animoca Brands, spoke at WebSummit Rio on April 16 on a panel titled ""Bitcoin’s Revenge: Is Web3 Making a Comeback?”

At the panel, Siu said he has no doubt that Bitcoin (BTC) will reach $1 million:

""I do believe that Bitcoin could reach over a million dollars-plus over time. But, I believe, not because it is a store value, but because it will be one of the most important status symbols of the digital economy in the future.”

Cointelegraph Ambassador Kristina Lucrezia Cornèr moderated the panel, at which Ripple president Monica Long appeared alongside Siu. Long emphasized that the development of the crypto market is more important than the price of Bitcoin:

""I would say the more important place for all of us to focus on is real utility for the assets, and that’s what's going to drive long-term value and stability and liquidity for all of the assets in crypto.""

Long praised Brazil and said the country is one of the places where there is a real focus on crypto development:

""Brazil [...] is a place where we're seeing breaking ground for that type of development. You have a government that creating clear rules around virtual assets, [and] a community of focused developers, and you have traditional finance banks like Itaú that are a blessing to crypto. So that is the mix of a real focus on crypto.”

Cornèr focused on the importance of Web3 for giving power to the people, especially those who do not have many choices in society. She said:

""Web3 is about giving power to the people, to those who didn't have access to certain things.""

As the panel moved on to Web3, Long highlighted that, in contrast to other market cycles, there will be more maturity in Web3 companies this year, and equally important, this maturity is reflected in its current institutional adoption. She said:

""If you think about it, some of the biggest brands in financial services, like Goldman, BlackRock and Fidelity, they actually build their products and offerings in bear markets, meaning they see the bigger picture. So I think that's what's going to be very different this year, the institutional embrace.”

Web3 and spot Bitcoin ETF

Siu stated that financial inclusion and its effects, particularly on blockchain and Web3 games, are more important than institutional adoption. He said:

“We look in places like the Philippines, or even in some places in Latin America, millions of people in the world who don’t have a bank, don’t have a university education, in some cases don’t even have a high-school education. But now though having a crypto wallet, they are included in the new financial system, are becoming somewhat financially literate, taught through gaming, which is another form of play.”

Regarding spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), Long said Ripple is working with banks and payment companies around the world to use blockchain as a layer or a new infrastructure to make global money much more efficient. She noticed a greater interest in the crypto market from banks and has been wondering how to ensure regulated exposure to the market:

""As here in Brazil, there is certainly a much stronger liftoff, like Hong Kong, and that's another key market. I think one of the interesting things is that we are not done yet with the ETFs, broadly speaking, meaning Bitcoin ETF is going to emerge in other markets. [...] Now in Hong Kong, then there's Singapore, there's Tokyo, there's London, there's Europe.”

Source: WebSummit Rio

Derek Andersen contributed to the English translation of this article."
"[INST] Chainlink debuts new protocol aimed at boosting cross-chain interoperability [/INST] Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) has entered general availability with the aim of fostering more cross-chain connectivity.

The protocol lets developers permissionlessly use CCIP for cross-chain token transfers and arbitrary smart contract messaging across different blockchain networks.

Developers will also be able to send and trigger function calls on smart contracts deployed on other blockchains, making cross-chain smart contracts more interoperable.

CCIP’s mainnet general availability will enable a faster and easier implementation for developers, bolstering cross-chain connectivity, according to Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink.

In an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, Nazarov wrote:

“CCIP is now starting to become the standard for both capital markets blockchain transactions across banks, as well as the way that secure Web3 cross-chain value and data is moved across public chains.”

Cross-chain bridges help users facilitate transactions between different blockchain networks. They represent some of the most significant points of vulnerability in crypto.

Chainlink is among the largest firms working on cross-chain interoperability, which is among the most pressing shortcomings of the industry — since individual blockchain networks have no means to communicate with each other without interoperability solutions.

At the beginning of April, Chainlink launched Transporter, a cross-chain messaging app for bridging tokens, aiming to foster more secure cross-chain crypto transfers with a beginner-friendly app interface.

Chainlink’s Transporter is underpinned by CCIP, which is “the only cross-chain protocol that achieves level-5 security,” according to a Chainlink spokesperson.

CCIP is available on nine blockchains, including Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Kroma, Optimism, Polygon and WEMIX, with plans to integrate more networks.

CCIP aims to help financial institutions unlock the $500 trillion opportunity in tokenized assets, by offering better liquidity access for cross-chain assets, a Chainlink spokesperson told Cointelegraph:

""CCIP is part of a larger Chainlink platform that enables financial institutions to fully unlock tokenized assets by helping them overcome their data, cross-chain, compliance, and synchronization needs.

Related: ‘Money-hungry VCs’ are bad for token launches in the long term — Analyst

Cross-chain interoperability remains a pressing industry concern

Due to their technical complexity, cross-chain bridges represent some of the biggest points of vulnerability in today’s crypto protocols.

Since 2016, over $5.85 billion worth of cryptocurrency has been stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Cross-chain bridges account for over 48%, or $2.83 billion, of the total value lost to exploits, according to DefiLlama data.

Total value hacked since 2016. Source: DefiLlama

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has criticized cross-chain infrastructure in the past. In a Reddit post from January 2022, Buterin shared his concerns about how 51% attacks on cross-chain bridges will become more prevalent in the future:

“The more usage of cross-chain bridges and apps there is, the worse the problem becomes. No one will 51% attack Ethereum just to steal 100 Solana-WETH... But if there are 10 million ETH or SOL in the bridge, then the motivation to make an attack becomes much higher, and large pools may well coordinate to make the attack happen.”

Related: Bitcoin outperforms Tesla stock for the first time since 2019"
"[INST] Apple wins antitrust suit over Venmo, Cash App fees after judge tosses case [/INST] United States District Judge Vince Chhabria dismissed an antitrust lawsuit brought against Apple by Venmo and Cash App customers over allegations the California company’s Apple Cash product was anti-competitive.

The lawsuit, initially filed on Nov. 17, 2023, in San Jose, sought to hold Apple accountable for its perceived monopolistic practices involving the Apple iOS App Store.

Per the complaint, Apple allegedly makes it difficult or impossible for competitors to the Apple Pay service to introduce desirable features such as integrating decentralized cryptocurrency payments into existing or new products and services.

As such, the complainants allege that Venmo, CashApp, and other existing or new services are unable to introduce features that would lead to competitive pricing and improved functionality for iOS end users.

Related: Apple sued for blocking crypto tech for P2P payments

Judge Chhabria granted Apple’s motion for dismissal on March 26, 20. According to the case filing, the complaint suffered from “several fatal issues.”

The filing goes on to state that the plaintiffs failed to establish what antitrust actions took place, nor did they establish why competitors such as Zelle weren’t included in the initial complaint. It also refers to the plaintiff’s suit as “speculative,” and outlines what the court perceives as a flawed premise.

Essentially, the initial complaint alleges that Apple’s terms of service for products such as Venmo and Cash App to appear on the App Store prohibit those companies from including cryptocurrency features in their products. The judge’s ruling cites the relevant rule (Guideline 3.1.5 in the App Store T.O.S.) and dismisses its applicability in the suit.

According to the filing:

“Even assuming that Guideline 3.1.5 restricts decentralized cryptocurrency transactions (which seems doubtful), it is not clear how companies agreeing to a guideline outlining the Apple Store requirements for apps facilitating cryptocurrency transactions constitutes an unlawful agreement.”

Going forward, the plaintiffs have 21 days from the date of the filing to submit amendments to the case that could compel the court to move forward with the lawsuit before the dismissal becomes record.

However, the odds may not be in the plaintiff’s favor, given the tenor of the judge’s final remarks in the filing:

“The plaintiffs should not assume that the defects mentioned in this ruling are the only ones in the complaint. Apple’s motion to dismiss has put them on notice of many more potential problems. Indeed, it is difficult to see how amendment could salvage this case. But, in an abundance of caution, the motion to dismiss is granted with leave to amend. If no amended complaint is filed within 21 days of this ruling, dismissal will be with prejudice.”"
"[INST] Fiji central bank warns against crypto use, disappointing Bitcoin hopes [/INST] The Reserve Bank of Fiji (RBF) has issued a warning to the public against using cryptocurrency for payment or investment. This is a reversal of the Fijian prime minister’s perceived position on crypto.

Fijian residents may even face criminal charges for investing in cryptocurrency abroad using “funds held in Fiji,” the release added. Apparently, the warning was motivated by cryptocurrency promotion in the country:

“The Governor of the RBF, Mr Ariff Ali acknowledges that there are indications of persons or entities promoting cryptocurrency investment schemes in Fiji. These investment schemes are increasingly being promoted through various platforms including social media.”

The RBF has not licensed any person or entity to provide cryptocurrency investments or trade in virtual assets, it said.

Hopes were high for the adoption of Bitcoin (BTC) in Fiji after Sitiveni Rabuka, a long-time presence on Fiji’s political scene, became prime minister in December 2022. This was mainly due to the pronouncements of Tongan member of parliament and nobleman Mata'i'ulua 'i Fonuamotu, Lord Fusitu’a, who labeled Rabuka “pro-Bitcoin” in an X (then Twitter) post shortly after Rabuka’s election. “Let’s go 2 for 2 - BTC Legal Tender Bills for the Pacific in 2023,” Fusitu’a posted.

Source: Lord Fusitu'a.

Lord Fusitu’a went on to explain that Rabuka “asked me to meet with him a number of times & show him step by step how Fiji can do bitcoin legal tender like Tonga.” A comment on Fusitu’a’s post noted that Rabuka had not made any public statements on the use of Bitcoin. “I don’t think he’s been asked about it,” Lord Fusitu’a replied.

Lord Fusitu’a was a vocal proponent of the introduction of Bitcoin in 2022, to the extent of converting the national treasury to the cryptocurrency. Those measures have yet to be enacted in the country.

Related: Island nation turns to metaverse to preserve its disappearing heritage

The new statement from the RBF is in line with the advice of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on cryptocurrency. The IMF released a paper on the use of digital money in Pacific Island countries in February in which it called cryptocurrencies “poor substitutes for means of payment, and they carry additional macroeconomic risks.”

Magazine: Why are crypto fans obsessed with micronations and seasteading?"
"[INST] Token airdrops targeted by farm accounts and ‘Sybil attacks’ [/INST] Amid surging prices, many crypto projects have seen a rise in fake farm accounts, or “Sybil attacks,” named so after a book about a woman with many personalities. These fake accounts create artificial network activity to claim as many tokens as possible during airdrop events, which have become highly lucrative over the years.

“We’ve recently taken action by banning approximately 2,000 users whom we suspect were farming Degen,” creators of the Degen memecoin project, which was built on the Farcaster social media protocol, wrote on X. “Taking part in Degen farming, such as coordinated posting or artificial engagement, could lead to bans.”

The Degen airdrop is ongoing until Aug. 1 and will reward users who engage with or create quality content posted on Farcaster social channels. However, it appears that a sizable number of users began posting subpar content for the sole purpose of earning airdrop points. “Joining organized actions mainly to earn tokens and posting unrelated content in boosted channels” will result in bans, Degen wrote.

Degen's warning to Sybil attackers. Source: Degen

The memecoin project is far from the first protocol to suffer from Sybil attacks.

On April 4, self-custody wallet Bitget Wallet said it would deduct airdrop points from users who use “emulators and cloud phones” to create artificial wallet referrals and downloads to farm BWB token rewards. “Upholding fairness and integrity for all participants is paramount to us, and we cannot turn a blind eye to any dishonest behavior that violates the rules of conduct for the event,” Bitget Wallet wrote.

The Bitget Wallet airdrop has been ongoing for the past month and is scheduled to end on April 27. Users can earn rewards by referring friends, depositing tokens or performing decentralized finance (DeFi) swaps through the self-custody wallet.

Despite identifying the problem, cracking down on Sybil attacks remain difficult.

“To be certain that we do not inadvertently penalize honest users, we have identified and deducted points only for the top 50 users who boosted their referral points through illicit means,” explained Bitget Wallet.

Earlier this year, prominent DeFi developer Banteg also raised an issue with the Ethereum layer-2 protocol Starknet and its airdrop. They claimed to have gone through all Starknet airdrops and “found 1854 people who have either renamed or deleted their account since the activity snapshot.” Banteg also identified an estimated 701,544 addresses that were allegedly linked to repeat or renamed GitHub accounts controlled by airdrop farmers.

Despite such revelation, the airdrop farmers’ addresses were included in the Starknet airdrop anyway. Shortly after its launch, Starknet temporarily surpassed a fully diluted valuation of $20 billion. The airdrop is ongoing until June.

In a report by Gamic HQ last August, researchers explained that to deploy a Sybil attack, airdrop farmers “leverage scripts or bots to create a massive number of fake accounts on a targeted platform” that proceed to automate tasks such as “generating random usernames and emails, filling out registration forms, and even verifying accounts with CAPTCHAs.""

Gamic HQ further wrote that Sybil attacks “amass a large portion of the airdropped tokens, leaving less for genuine users who might be more interested in using and supporting the project long-term.” As a result, a project’s reputation is damaged, its token supply inflates and price manipulation may occur as a result of excessive dumping by airdrop farmers after the event is over.

However, the firm also noticed several positives as a result of the attacks. “The rise of Sybil attacks has pushed blockchain projects to develop more sophisticated methods for verifying user identities and ensuring fair airdrop distribution,” they claimed. “This ongoing battle will hopefully lead to a more robust and secure blockchain ecosystem in the long run.”

Related: Blockchain data-availability protocol Avail announces 600M token airdrop"
"[INST] Does wine age better on the blockchain? [/INST] In an effort to redefine the world of fine wine investment a new Web3 marketplace aims to uncork the next era of market accessibility.

GrtWines, co-founded by former CLSA Chairman Jonathan Slone and acclaimed wine critic James Suckling, is a digital platform that allows collectors and investors of vintage and fine wines access to the market via digital asset tokenization.

Each digital certificate issued is tied to a real, investment-grade bottle of wine sourced directly from prestigious wineries. They are sourced directly from renowned wineries and stored in optimal condition until ready to be redeemed and delivered.

According to data from Statista, the wine industry is a multi-billion dollar market with a combined revenue from supermarkets, convenience stores, bars and restaurants to amount to $60 billion in 2024, in the United States alone.

Victor Yin, the CTO and co-founder at GrtWines called the creation of the platform a “significant milestone” in the maturation of the digital asset industry and blockchain technology and a new way to “democratize” the wine industry. He said:

“With the use of smart contracts, we double down on proof of ownership and provenance, effectively enhancing the overall transparency and security in the persistent counterfeit market.”

Related: Data NFT platform enhances security and user participation with XP system

The platform is launching alongside a new collection, “The Jefferson Collection,” which serves as a tribute to one of history’s most famous wine enthusiasts, Thomas Jefferson.

Jonathan Slone, the CEO and co-founder at GrtWines, said as a wine connoisseur, he feels passionate about the platform for preserving the rich heritage of wines while building a “transparent and connected community” driven by the consumers. He said:

“Traditional alternative assets such as well-aged wines, fine art and luxury watches have gained significant traction among younger buyers, serving as both portfolio diversification and elevated lifestyle.”

Luxury items as a whole have gained significant traction as tokenized assets on the blockchain over the last few years.

Examples can be seen with luxury brand blockchain platform Arianee, which recently launched a Polygon CDK-powered layer-2 to issue and manage digital product passports for various luxury brands and companies.

Additionally, in the fashion industry, fine artists, luxury brands and watchmakers have been utilizing on-chain assets like nonfungible tokens (NFTs) to verify ownership, track history of products and foster community.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Iraq commitment to capture flare gas sparks crypto mining speculation [/INST] Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister, Muhammad Ali Tamim, recently co-chaired a U.S.-Iraq Higher Coordinating Committee meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to discuss the future partnership between the two nations.

During the meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Tamim stated clearly that it was Iraq’s goal to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, lower pollution, and engage in new partnerships to develop and employ technology to capture “flare gas,” a byproduct of the oil field industry considered a poisonous pollutant.

""The Iraqi Government is widening its partnership and conducting agreements so that we’ll be able to, for example, use technologies to capture flaring gas, to create and achieve independence in energy, and also to invest in other sources of energy, including renewables and solar energy.”

The statement surrounding the use of “technologies” to capture flare gas have caused some in the crypto community to speculate that Iraq intends to enter the Bitcoin mining sector.

Flare Gas

When crude oil is extracted and refined, gas builds up and pressurizes the processing equipment. This “waste gas” is typically either routed to a facility where it can be converted into something useful such as electricity or burnt off into the atmosphere.

Due to the remote location of many of Iraq’s oil fields, it’s long been considered economically infeasible to convert the flare gas and, as such, much of it ends up polluting the atmosphere.

Iraq’s Rumaila oil field is the world’s biggest producer of toxic flare gas, though efforts are reportedly underway to capture and repurpose as much as 60% today, with the target of ending all gas flaring in the country by 2027.

Bitcoin Mining

People have used everything from nuclear energy to their own excrement to mine cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin mining firm Giga, a Texas startup, uses the flare gas from local oil fields to power truckloads of portable mining rigs. Per a report from CNBC, the company was earning millions in profits as far back as 2021.

In Iraq the challenge comes at a much higher scale. As the world’s largest producer of flare gas pollutants, it would take an exceptional effort to convert 100% of its pollutants into usable electricity.

However, as noted above, Iraq currently has to balance its domestic energy requirements with its foreign debt. While adding power to the grid could certainly help ease the nation’s burdens, converting a portion of that electricity into Bitcoin mining could have an even greater positive impact.

Related: Crypto firm 7RCC is quietly advancing its eco-conscious spot Bitcoin ETF

Another potential avenue for using the energy provided by captured flare gas is in the area of carbon credits. Theoretically speaking, Iraq could not only reduce its own carbon footprint by capturing flare gas, but it could engage the international market by selling carbon credits via the blockchain. This would provide immutable proof of the nation's efforts and a potential temporary revenue stream as it pursues the reduction of its dependence on fossil fuels."
"[INST] Can crypto traders out-predict Wall Street on Coinbase Q1 earnings? [/INST] Coinbase is set to share its financial performance for the first quarter of 2024, sparking differing expectations between the crypto community and traditional investors over the anticipated figures.

Speculation is mounting whether the crypto community predictions will be more accurate than the typical investment analyst ahead of Coinbase announcing its financial results on May 2.

Researcher for crypto research company Messari, Kunal Goel, explained that over the last three quarters, his Coinbase revenue estimates “have handily beaten consensus analyst estimates.”

“I estimate Coinbase will generate a whopping $1.5 billion in net revenue for Q1 2024 growing by 65% for the quarter. My estimate is much higher than consensus estimate of $1.2 billion for gross revenue,” he explained in a recent X post.

Coinbase has now beaten consensus earnings-per-share (EPS) estimates for the past four quarters, as well as consensus revenue in each period, too, according to a recent report from Zack’s Equity Research.

According to Tipranks, out of 24 consensus analysts covering Coinbase (COIN), nine recommended “buy,” 11 suggested “hold,” and three advised “sell.”

Former CFO of Polygon Labs Young Ko believes it is “very likely” that Coinbase’s earnings will “blow out estimates.”

Ko further explained in an April 24 post on X that several catalysts would only bolster the momentum prior to its earnings report being released on May 2.

These include his hopes that Coinbase will announce a win in its lawsuit against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and positive reports on its layer-2 Ethereum protocol Base revenue.

At the time of publication, the share price of COIN stands at $236.43, marking a 4.67% increase for the day but reflecting a 15.47% decline over the past 30 days, as per Google Finance data.

COIN's share price is currently $236.41. Source: Google Finance

“Those of us tracking closely already know they will blow away Street estimates,” crypto commentator Snow stated in an April 22 post.

“The combination of a massive Q1 beat + Q2 trading revs tracking *ahead* of Q1 will literally blow minds,” Snow added.

Meanwhile, crypto commentator 0xCristian said in an April 16 post that the success of Coinbase’s layer-2 network Base will have a positive impact on its Q1 2024 earnings report.

“It's about to beat Q4 earnings by a long mile and this will affect the price of the stock. Q1 seen massive volume for Base + Coinbase wallet. Pay attention,” he stated.

Related: Coinbase partners with Lightspark for Bitcoin Lightning payments

It is a common thought among the crypto community that revenue from Base could be the X factor for Coinbase this last quarter, a factor overlooked by much of Wall Street.

On April 19, Cointelegraph reported that crypto analyst Will Clemente declared that “the street isn’t really pricing in the crypto native revenue that I think a lot of the crypto natives understand.”

“I think Coinbase is the biggest kind of venture-style bet in public markets since maybe Tesla about five years ago,” Clemente added.

Although Goel predicts that Coinbase will not “internalize” the revenue from Base for the past quarter:

“However, I expect Coinbase not to internalize this revenue. I expect it may hold this revenue in an on-chain entity to be used only to fund future growth on Base,” he stated.

According to data from investment research firm Fintel, Coinbase’s momentum score is 93.98, which is approximately 21.87 index points higher than Nvidia (NVDA), and 80.84 index points higher than Tesla (TSLA).

Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Blockchain data-availability protocol Avail announces 600M token airdrop [/INST] Avail, a Web3 infrastructure layer built using Polygon’s software development kit, will be airdropping 600 million of its native AVAIL tokens to users.

“The Unification Drop is a unifying force bringing different communities together, rewarding developers, governance contributors, technical educators, rollup users, stakers, and other valuable contributors from across multiple blockchain communities,” Avail said in an April 18 statement.

Founded in 2020, Avail consists of three segments: Nexus, Fusion and DA. Avail DA improves base-layer transactions further by scaling rollups via methods such as KZG commitments and data availability sampling.

Data availability enables nodes to verify bundled transactions without having to download all data for a block. Meanwhile, KZG commitments, common in zero-knowledge protocols, allow for the verification of underlying data without revealing private information.

At the same time, Avail Nexus provides a cross-chain bridge for users to transact or swap for assets on multiple blockchains. Finally, Avail Fusion allows the liquid staking of assets on Ethereum, Bitcoin and others.

According to its developers, AVAIL is used to “obtain Avail DA services, secure the unification layer via staking, and take part in governance.” Tokens are airdropped based on a user’s total time, depth and impact of their commitments to the ecosystem. A total of 354,605 wallet addresses will receive the airdropped AVAIL token upon mainnet launch.

Out of the 600 million token airdrop supply, 90 million are allocated to blockchain ecosystem developers, 49.5 million to testnet users, 380 million to rollup users on various blockchains such as Arbitrum One, 70 million to Polygon stakers and 10.5 million to community contributors.

The airdrop is not exclusive to users of the Avail or Polygon ecosystems. “Unification of Web3 requires unification to happen at the most fundamental level,” Avail wrote. “This [airdrop] includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, Avalanche, Near, and others who have each made unique contributions to the blockchain ecosystem.”

Many in the Polygon community spoke highly of the airdrop. “Oooh, looks like a massive airdrop is upon @0xPolygon community,” commented Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, in relation to the news.

Avail was spun off from Polygon Labs on March 16, 2023. At the time, developers explained that the move was due to Polygon shifting its attention to more Ethereum-native data availability efforts. “Avail as a standalone layer will be better positioned to play a leading role in bringing modular blockchain architectures to market and enabling any Web3 project to scale,” Polygon Labs said in a statement.

Related: Polygon CEO says L3s are taking value away from Ethereum, sparking debate"
"[INST] ICP’s Schnorr integration ushers in Bitcoin DeFi era [/INST] The Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) plans to use advanced threshold cryptography to unlock decentralized finance capabilities and smart contract functionality on Bitcoin’s base layer.

Speaking to Cointelegraph during Paris Blockchain Week, Dfinity senior research scientist Aisling Connolly outlined how ICP’s integration of threshold-Schnorr signatures will enable the protocol’s smart contracts to obtain addresses and authorize transactions directly to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Schnorr signatures are a specific type of digital signature named after mathematician Claus Schnorr. They work like a secret handshake between two parties, proving that one person has signed off on something without revealing their secret code.

Related: Unpacking Schnorr Signatures: Blockstream’s MuSig to Improve Bitcoin Transactions?

The implementation will allow ICP smart contracts to sign Schnorr signatures to etch Bitcoin Runes, inscribe Ordinals in a decentralized manner, send, receive and bridge BRC-20 tokens directly on the Bitcoin base layer, sign taproot transactions and re-inscribe Ordinals.

ICP anticipates the full implementation of threshold-Schnorr to be launched midway through 2024. ICP integrates the core implementation of threshold-Schnorr-BIP340, which enables smart contracts to derive addresses and authorize native Bitcoin transactions.

“Schnorr allows extra functionality, like batching transactions. It also allows for new use cases that are developing on Bitcoin. You see people inscribing Ordinals over the last year, it will help do this without any tweaks and from other chains,” Connolly explains.

The researcher added that the ability to inscribe Ordinals or etch Runes following the Bitcoin halving generally requires using Schnorr signatures. Connolly said Schnorr signatures are similar to ECDSA signatures that Bitcoin uses to control its ownership, but the former is “simpler, faster and more secure.” She said:

“If you have Schnorr as a native thing, then it allows smart contracts to directly write or etch runes on the Bitcoin blockchain. This is pretty special. I don’t know anyone who’s doing this at the moment.”

The hope is that combining Schnorr signatures with ICP’s protocol-level integration with the Bitcoin network will open possibilities for decentralized applications (DApps) and services that can leverage the liquidity and security of Bitcoin without relying on centralized bridges.

Connolly highlighted a handful of working use cases that are already being explored and built by ecosystem developers.

“One use case is ICP serving as this orchestration layer. Let’s say you have an existing DApp on Ethereum, and you want to leverage Bitcoin. You can have an ICP smart contract that works alongside it to talk and write to Bitcoin,” Connolly explains.

Others are building applications from scratch using ICP. Connolly highlighted Taler DAO, an algorithmic Bitcoin-backed stablecoin, as an example of new experiments using the infrastructure.

Related: Bitcoin Core Devs Reveal How Schnorr Signatures Can Help Scale Bitcoin

Another consideration is how the integration will be received by the wider Bitcoin community. “OG” Bitcoiners are typically skeptical of integrations and solutions that promise to bridge the preeminent cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain to other chains.

Connolly said conversations with Bitcoin proponents suggest that there is an open attitude toward infrastructure that broadens the utility of Bitcoin:

“Some of the work that we’re doing is being picked up by Bitcoiners and in the BitVM Telegram chat, they're discussing the stuff that we're doing and how it can be used.”

The researcher believes the Bitcoin community is generally open to exploring and considering using tools like decentralized exchanges on ICP that supports noncustodial wallets. Connolly said this would allow DeFi capabilities like staking Bitcoin without relinquishing control of a user’s private keys.

“If Bitcoin is the kind of de facto store of value in a digital currency like cryptocurrency, why can it not be the sort of de facto like hyper-secure compute platform as well?”

ICP now has over 300 developers building Bitcoin-enabled DApps in the field of DeFi, NFTs, gaming and social media. ICP introduced Bitcoin integration in 2022. Using chain key cryptography removed the need to use bridges for cross-chain functionality, allowing ICP smart contracts to hold, send and receive Bitcoin.

Magazine: Big Questions: How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?"
"[INST] Coinbase to move customer and corporate USDC balances to Base [/INST] Coinbase will start moving more of its customer and corporate USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin accounts to Base — its Ethereum layer-2 blockchain launched a little over seven months ago.

Coinbase vice president Max Branzburg posted to X on March 26 claiming the move would allow the crypto exchange to “manage and secure customer funds with lower fees and faster settlement times.”

The change only impacts Coinbase.com accounts — not Coinbase Wallet, as those users are responsible for their own private keys.

Currently, Coinbase.com user tokens are custodied by Coinbase in a wallet secured by multiparty computation.

Branzburg stressed that Coinbase always holds customer assets 1:1 and doesn’t lend funds out unless instructed.

Coinbase’s move on-chain will carve a path toward a future on-chain financial system, explained David Hoffman, a co-host on the Ethereum-focused show Bankless in a March 26 X post.

Bankless co-host, Ryan Sean Adams, believed the move would also set a precedent for cryptocurrency exchanges and banks to follow suit.

“Every asset is a future token [...] Every bank is a future chain,"" Sean Adams added.

Not everyone is on board with the move, though.

X user “callmeKappa.algo” suggested Base is too centralized in its current state.

Related: Base TVL doubles in a month as pundits tip memecoins to drive adoption

Coinbase is currently the sole sequencer of Base, according to L2BEAT data — meaning the chain is fully controlled by the exchange.

However, the firm has iterated its intention to progressively decentralize Base over time.

Base was launched as an Ethereum scaling solution on Aug. 9, 2023. It uses optimistic rollups to store transaction data off-chain and submit transactions to Ethereum’s base layer.

Coinbase also open-sourced Base's code in October to increase transparency and accountability while simultaneously allowing public contributions to the project.

It is currently the fourth largest Ethereum layer 2 by total value locked at $2.63 billion, trailing only Arbitrum, Optimism and Blast, according to L2BEAT.

Base notched an all-time high of 2 million daily transactions on March 16 as figures for daily new users also continue to rise.

Magazine: ‘Am I sorry? No’ — 3AC founder. $6B BTC laundered for fast food worker: Asia Express"
"[INST] Is Bitcoin’s on-chain bull run momentum over? Indicator flashes red [/INST] Bitcoin (BTC) OGs appear to be gearing up to cash in on their gains ahead of the Bitcoin halving, according to a leading indicator popular among crypto traders.

An indicator called the Value Days Destroyed (VDD) Multiple recently spiked above 4.0, leading crypto commentators to speculate that the wider market could be nearing the end of the bull run.

“Has on-chain momentum topped?” pseudonymous trader TXMC Trades asked their 83,200 X followers in an April 10 post.

The VDD Multiple is intended to highlight instances where the price of Bitcoin could be showing signs of overheating and nearing its peak during major market cycles.

A higher VDD Multiple reading indicates a larger amount of Bitcoin quickly entering the market, likely to be sold.

It is measured by multiplying the existing Coin Days Destroyed metric by the current price of Bitcoin to compare spending velocity over time.

Currently, it stands at 3.03, having briefly surged to 4.21 on March 28. It has doubled since the beginning of this year when the VDD multiple hovered around 2.04 on Jan. 1, as per GlassNode data.

The VDD multiple indicator peaked at 4.4 in April 2013. Source: Glassnode

The last time the VDD multiple went above 4 was in January 2021, when Bitcoin was $40,257.

However, the brief peak before the cooldown didn’t result in a market downturn, as Bitcoin’s price promptly surged. Just two months later, Bitcoin’s price soared by 52.2% to $61,283 in March 2021, as per CoinMarketCap data.

It is now just nine days to the Bitcoin halving, and it has surpassed the levels observed before past halving events.

During the same timeframe preceding the last halving on July 9, 2016, the VDD multiple stood at 0.419, while it reached 1.606 10 days before the 2020 Bitcoin halving.

Related: Bitcoin analysis eyes CPI as whales ‘pressure’ BTC price below $69K

A senior researcher at Glassnode, who goes by the name CryptoVizArt on X, attributed the soaring VDD Multiple levels to the substantial outflows from Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC).

“Volume and age of Grayscale coins moving since 10th of January, push VDD to new highs,” he stated in an April 10 post on X.

On Jan. 10, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission approved spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for trading. Since their approval, GBTC has shed a total of $15.96 billion in assets, as per Farside data.

The fund’s high fees relative to the other Bitcoin ETFs were also noted as a reason for the elevated outflows.

Bitcoin has surged by 56% since Jan. 1 this year, climbing from $44,172 to its current price of $69,260 at the time of publication.

Magazine: Nic Carter vs. the Bitcoin Maxis, ‘no regrets’ about losing $10M DOGE: X Hall of Flame

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Retail interest in crypto ‘quite low’ compared to last bull run — LunarCrush CEO [/INST] While Bitcoin and other digital asset prices are increasing, retail investors are not yet “believing the hype,” according to Joe Vezzani, the CEO of social media analysis platform LunarCrush.

Vezzani said that compared to the last major bull run, social interactions and overall retail interest are “still quite low.” In the last six months, posts mentioning Bitcoin (BTC) showed bursts of activity in January and March.

Posts created mentioning the keywords “Bitcoin” or “BTC” in the last six months. Source: LunarCrush

The January mentions may be due to the hype surrounding the spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). On Jan. 10, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved spot Bitcoin ETF applications from asset managers.

There was also a surge of posts in March as Bitcoin reached a new all-time high. However, the number of posts remained steady despite the Bitcoin rally to $73,737 on March 14.

Posts created mentioning “Ethereum” or “ETH” in the last six months. Source: LunarCrush

Social mentions of the keywords Ethereum or ETH remained somewhat steady in the last six months. However, the data shows that these keywords have seen a downward trend since the beginning of March.

Meanwhile, Solana’s (SOL) token shows several bursts in the last six months, likely driven by the memecoin frenzy on the network. Despite this, social media posts mentioning Solana or SOL declined at the beginning of April.

Posts created mentioning “Solana” or “SOL” in the last six months. Source: LunarCrush

Vezzani said that if factoring out spam and bots from the interactions, the crypto space could be experiencing a decline in social media activity. He explained:

“In terms of the number of creators and influencers posting daily, we have witnessed growth. However, the notable change we are not observing is in the level of engagement with those creators.”

Even with upcoming major events like the Bitcoin halving, the executive does not believe there would be a substantial shift in retail engagement. Vezzani argued that the halving “is typically perceived as more of an insider event.”

“Bitcoin is already challenging for newcomers to grasp, and when we introduce concepts like halving, we risk alienating the public and diminishing their interest in that discourse,” he added.

Related: Number of new memecoin traders hits record high — IntoTheBlock

When asked why it’s important to look at the social engagement data, Vezzani said that crypto markets continue to be fragmented, with new coins and exchanges emerging. Because of this, the executive believes that looking at social engagement gives traders an edge. He said:

“Traders who leverage social media data acquire a significant edge over the rest of the market by having access to an additional critical metric that drives market movements at their disposal.”

The executive also argued that information on social media could shield traders from downside risks or identify promising coins that could maintain their social media presence over time.

Magazine: Bitcoin hits new highs, SEC delays options decision, and stablecoin bill looms: Hodler’s Digest"
"[INST] Binance gets Dubai crypto license following CZ’s departure: Report [/INST] Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, received a long-awaited regulatory license in Dubai.

Binance received its Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) license after co-founder Changpeng Zhao gave up his voting power in the exchange’s local entity, unnamed people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on April 18.

The Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority’s (VARA) final requirement for granting the VASP license was for Zhao to give up his voting power in Binance FZE, the Dubai-based unit of the exchange, according to unnamed people familiar with the matter.

While Binance's current CEO, Richard Teng, confirmed receiving the license, he said that Zhao giving up his voting power was ""pure speculation"", in a statement shared with Cointelegraph:

“That's pure speculation. Again, we don't comment on media speculation... Our relationship, our dealings with regulators are confidential.""

The full regulatory license signals a significant win for Binance, which has been under regulatory scrutiny since the FTX collapse.

In November 2023, Binance agreed to pay a $4.3-billion settlement to United States authorities to settle federal charges related to a lack of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) protocols violating the Bank Secrecy Act.

Binance co-founder Zhao pleaded guilty to one felony count, namely for failing to maintain adequate AML protocols, and resigned as part of the plea deal. Zhao’s sentencing is set for April 30. He faces up to 18 months in prison.

Related: Top five BTC miners not selling despite Bitcoin halving

Why did Binance’s Dubai unit sever ties with Zhao?

Dubai’s VARA officials wanted to ensure that they didn’t interfere with Binance’s recent settlement with U.S. authorities, which forced Zhao to step down from his position as the CEO of Binance.

This was the main reason for VARA requiring Zhao to cede his voting powers in Dubai FZE. After Zhao’s voting control was surrendered, VARA took a stringent look at the products that the exchange planned to offer in Dubai, according to people familiar with the matter.

Despite receding voting rights, Zhao remains the ultimate beneficial owner of Binance FZE’s Abu Dhabi-based parent company.

Gaining a full license in the United Arab Emirates has been a focal point for Binance’s future operations, according to Alex Chehade, Binance Dubai’s general manager, who told Cointelegraph:

“Binance identified that the senior leadership of the UAE wanted to establish the region as a focal point for Web3. They’re trying to diversify away from fossil fuels, and they see [crypto] as a great driver for doing so.”

Binance received a preparatory minimal viable product license from VARA in September 2022, which enabled the exchange to offer a range of digital asset services for qualified retail and institutional investors.

Related: Bitcoin halving will lead to more sustainable BTC mining: Report"
"[INST] $1B of US Treasurys tokenized, Base TVL doubles in a month: Finance Redefined [/INST] Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you the most significant developments from the past week.

Over $1 billion of United States Treasurys have been tokenized on Ethereum, Polygon, Solana and other blockchains amid a growing trend of real-world asset tokenization.

A U.S. judge has ruled that Coinbase’s self-custody crypto wallet doesn’t make it a broker, which lawyers say is a “significant setback” for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and a boon for DeFi.

Coinbase’s layer-2 platform Base has recently benefitted from the memecoin frenzy, with its total value locked (TVL) on-chain doubling in a month.

Over $1 billion in U.S. Treasurys have now been tokenized on-chain

More than $1 billion worth of United States Treasurys now exist across Ethereum, Polygon, Solana and other blockchains, helped in part by the recent launch of the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund.

BlackRock’s product, tickered “BUIDL,” was launched on Ethereum on March 20 and now boasts a market cap of $244.8 million.

According to Etherscan, four transactions to the fund totaling $95 million over the week boosted the fund, making it the second-largest tokenized government securities fund.

Continue reading

Coinbase Wallet’s triumph over SEC allegations is a “giant win” for DeFi

Crypto lawyers are hailing a recent decision by a U.S. judge to dismiss allegations against Coinbase Wallet as a win for self-custody wallets and DeFi apps.

On March 27, U.S. District Judge Katherine Failla denied Coinbase’s bid to dismiss an SEC lawsuit, finding the SEC “sufficiently pleaded” Coinbase was unlicensed and its crypto staking offering was unregistered securities.

The judge also determined that the SEC failed to allege that Coinbase conducted brokerage activity through Coinbase Wallet, which is a self-custody crypto wallet app that gives users full control of their assets.

Continue reading

Solana’s Jupiter DEX kickstarts native DAO with $137 million in initial capital

The Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Jupiter is allocating 10 million USD Coin (USDC) and 100 million of its native JUP token, worth a combined $137 million at publication, to kick-start its Jupiter DAO.

In a March 27 announcement, Jupiter said the budget “provides the DAO the capability to fund the ideas with USDC and have the JUP allocation for long-term incentive alignment with J.U.P Contributors.” The exchange added, “To ensure that the DAO will be able to execute on these crucial things over the long term, we will aim to top up the same budget yearly.”

Continue reading

Base TVL doubles in a month as pundits tip memecoins to drive adoption

Ethereum layer-2 network Base’s TVL has doubled in less than a month, reaching $2.13 billion, while commentators say it could become the next epicenter for memecoins.

Base notched $1 billion in TVL on Feb. 27, 226 days after its launch in August 2023. However, the network managed to breach the $2 billion level just 25 days later, on March 23, according to data from L2Beat.

Continue reading

DeFi market overview

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a bearish week, with most trading in the red on the weekly charts. The total value locked in DeFi protocols rose back above $100 billion.

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space."
"[INST] Chainlink co-founder expects more coins to have ETFs — Token2049 [/INST] With the crypto space looking for the next narrative to power it higher, Sergey Nazarov, the co-founder of blockchain oracle platform Chainlink, shared some of his ideas on what might be next for crypto.

In an interview with Cointelegraph at the Token2049 event in Dubai, Nazarov shared how the crypto exchange-traded fund (ETF) space could develop and what could spur further mainstream adoption for Web3 and digital assets.

Cointelegraph reporter Ezra Reguerra with Chainlink’s Sergey Nazarov at the Token2049 event. Source: Cointelegraph

According to Nazarov, with Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs being approved, the crypto space could expect more ETFs of other coins and tokens. The executive highlighted that beyond BTC and Ether (ETH), other tokens have the potential to get approved for their own ETF. Nazarov explained:

“I think what’s next is more ETFs about coins other than Bitcoin and Ethereum. So, I think the ETF dynamic is going to continue during this year and just grow and grow and grow.”

Furthermore, the executive also explained how tokenized real-world assets (RWA) may be generated by Web3 companies and banks in the near future. The executive believes that the Web3 world will further converge with traditional finance through RWA.

“Eventually, I expect the Web3 assets to be bought by the banks and the bank assets to be bought by the Web3 protocols for various reasons why they would want each other’s assets.”

The executive expects these things to happen in three to four years.

Related: Crypto community triumphs: Token2049 attendees brave Dubai storms

Nazarov also explained that crypto needs to improve its usability to achieve wider mainstream adoption. “I think the usability of crypto still has a long way to go,” he said.

The executive added that user experience is “nowhere near what it needs to be” and that there’s still a lot of work to be done in that aspect.

The Chainlink co-founder also shared four main pillars that need to be addressed to spur further adoption into the mainstream. He said:

“I would say the usability, the scalability, the connectivity and the privacy are the four main pillars of what I look at the crypto industry when I think about how it is developing.”

Nazarov explained that the space is moving closer to these goals and will “keep pushing the limits on what’s possible.”

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Crypto phishing attacks reached ‘alarming levels’ — CertiK co-founder [/INST] While the first quarter of 2024 seemed “relatively typical” when it comes to hacks and exploits, Ronghui Gu, co-founder of blockchain security firm CertiK, said the complexity of private key compromises and phishing attacks raises concerns.

Gu told Cointelegraph that among the incidents in Q1, losses attributed to private key compromises increased significantly compared with the first quarter of 2023.

In its quarterly “Hack3d” security report, CertiK highlighted that losses from this attack reached $239 million despite there being only 26 incidents.

Chart showing the number of incidents and amount lost in Q1 2024. Source: CertiK

Compared with the same time period in 2023, when losses were only around $18.8 million, Q1 2024 recorded a 1,171% increase in losses caused by compromised private keys.

Along with the 26 private key compromises, the overall number of incidents attributed to phishing attacks reached 83, with total losses reaching $64 million. Gu said that the complexity of such attacks also raises concerns:

“The sophistication and success of phishing attacks have also reached alarming levels, with 18 phishing incidents, each causing over $1 million in losses.”

Despite these two attack vectors being a constant risk for the Web3 space, Gu believes the crypto community is not entirely helpless. He said implementing multisig wallets and multiparty computation can greatly enhance security:

“Private keys are the keystones of security in the blockchain world. Multisig wallets and multiparty computation can enhance security by distributing authorization power, thus mitigating the risk of single-point failures and unauthorized access.”

Gu explained that these techniques ensure no single entity holds complete control over the assets. This means that attackers must attack multiple parties to gain access to a project’s private keys.

Related: Nearly $100M recovered from hacks in March — PeckShield

While the threats seem like a Web3 problem, Gu believes that countering targeted and advanced attacks requires incorporating both Web2 and Web3 security practices.

This includes properly encrypting internal systems, implementing multifactor authentication and conducting regular security audits to address potential vulnerabilities.

Gu also noted that educating employees is necessary to combat security attacks. “Educating team members on the latest phishing and social engineering tactics can significantly reduce the risk of compromises.”

Losses from Web3 security incidents by quarter. Source: CertiK

When asked if the trends observed in the first quarter would carry over to the rest of the year, Gu predicted that a continuation is reasonable because of the recent market upswing. He explained that as the market grows, the incentive for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities also increases.

“This, combined with the escalating sophistication of attacks, suggests that we should not only expect the continuation of serious security incidents but also proactively prepare for the emergence of new, innovative attack vectors,” he added.

Magazine: ‘Web3 Gaming sucks’ says Ava, 2M Bitcoin Miner players make 13c: Web3 Gamer"
"[INST] Doctors turn to Apple Vision Pro headset to practice surgery amid cadaver shortage [/INST] Veyond Metaverse, a medical technology company, recently announced that its medical telepresence platform would expand its footprint to the Apple Vision Pro.

The company’s real-time translation and remote communication services were previously used on traditional virtual and augmented reality headsets to conduct what it claims to be the world’s first “digital surgery” in 2023.

With the addition of Apple’s recently released Vision Pro headset, Veyond Metaverse appears to be entering the high-end medical telepresence market at a time when the need for new doctors exceeds the global cadaver supply.

Metaverse

Veyond Metaverse is a relative newcomer to the medical technology field. Launched in 2021, its primary services are surgical telepresence and immersive educational experiences.

According to the company’s website, it facilitates telepresence surgery by allowing subject matter experts to assist in or proctor surgeries in remote locations. The surgeon on site with the patient can conduct the physical processes, while the attending physician is able to immerse themselves in the operating space, in real time, via headset.

The company’s other vertical, educational experiences, combines haptic feedback devices with immersive augmented reality to help students learn to make their first cuts.

Medical cadavers remain in short supply after the COVID-19 pandemic caused a global shutdown. To compensate for the lack of physical resources, Veyond Metaverse has combined visceral 3D imagery with special haptic feedback gloves designed to mimic the feel of conducting surgery.

Extended reality

The Vision Pro is among the world’s most advanced (and expensive) mixed-reality headsets. Apple calls it a “spatial computing device” to highlight the idea that it’s not necessarily a dedicated gaming device, but at its core, it’s a virtual and augmented reality headset — often referred to as a mixed reality or extended reality device.

Users donning the headset can see virtual imagery on the screens inside while numerous external cameras capture the outside world. This allows for the combination of real-world and digital imagery.

Related: Apple is poised to bring metaverse mainstream and dominate the market

A recent study conducted by medical researchers in the Netherlands found that VR technologies were being adopted at steadily increasing rates throughout the global medical industry, with further implementation expected as both hardware and software improves."
"[INST] Bitcoin’s 2023–2024 growth rate has it on track to surpass Microsoft within a year [/INST] Bitcoin has had a banner year so far in 2024. It reached a new all-time high price of $73,679 on March 13, and in the time since, it’s hung around the $70,000 threshold — putting it up more than 140% over the same time last year.

When Bitcoin (BTC) reached its 2024 peak (so far) and new all-time high, it briefly surpassed silver as the eighth most valuable commodity in the world by market capitalization.

Related: Bitcoin price nails new $73.6K all-time high as ETFs eat away at supply

In the current market situation, if one could fast-forward another year under the exact same growth rate, Bitcoin would reach a price of approximately $170,574 by the beginning of April 2025. This would put it ahead of silver today, as well as Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Saudi Aramco, Nvidia and Microsoft to take the second-place spot on CompaniesMarketcap’s list of the top 100 commodities by capitalization.

Source: CompaniesMarketCap

While this number only holds water when imagining a scenario where Bitcoin grows and the rest of the market remains static, today’s market capitalizations can be used as a measuring stick for what Bitcoin’s potential future growth could look like.

Silver

If silver’s market cap remains at its current value of $1.412 trillion, Bitcoin could surpass it again by increasing its current price point from $69,678 (as of the time of this article’s publication) to $71,732. This would give Bitcoin a total market capitalization of approximately $1.413 trillion and sole possession of the eighth-place spot on the list.

Google

The Mountain View search giant currently has a market capitalization of $1.885 trillion, just $12 billion ahead of Amazon.

Bitcoin can surpass them both and claim the sixth-place spot on the list by reaching a price of approximately $95,642 to surpass a market cap of $1.885 trillion. This would put it squarely behind Saudi Aramco, which currently sits in fifth place with a cap of $1.984 trillion.

Microsoft

Fourth and third on the list are occupied by Nvidia and Apple, respectively. Bitcoin will have to reach a total market value of about $2.65 trillion in order to slide into third place and have a shot at knocking Microsoft out of its second-place slot.

The number to beat there, if Bitcoin is to surpass Microsoft’s $3.126 trillion cap and reach number two on the list, is approximately $165,608 per BTC.

While this might seem lofty given its current price at just under $70,000, it’s worth remembering that the price of Bitcoin increased by approximately 144.82% year over year from April 2023 through the end of March 2024.

If Bitcoin increased by 144.82% in the next year, from its current value of $69,678, it would reach approximately $170,574. At this price, its market cap would be approximately $3.224 trillion, more than enough to overtake Microsoft.

Gold

Once Bitcoin secures second place — again, assuming the entire market remained static and BTC’s price alone rose —its price would need to be approximately $800,476 per BTC to achieve a market cap of $15.15 trillion. This would beat gold’s current cap of $15.141 trillion and give the world’s first cryptocurrency the top slot on the market cap leaderboard."
"[INST] HKVAEX withdraws Hong Kong license application post-deadline [/INST] Update March 29, 11:00 am UTC: This article has been updated to add that Binance refutes SCMP’s claim of HKVAEX being part of the Binance group.

HKVAEX, a Hong Kong-based crypto exchange allegedly tied to Binance, withdrew its license application from the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong (SFC) on March 28.

The SFC had set a deadline of Feb. 29 for all crypto exchanges to apply for operational licenses in the region. HKVAEX, a crypto exchange that, according to Chinese state media SCMP, shares technical and other resources with Binance, applied for the Hong Kong license on Jan. 4.

List of all crypto exchanges that withdrew license applications with the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong (SFC). Source: sfc.hk

The SFC website confirms that HKVAEX withdrew its license application nearly three months after the filing. Following the application withdrawal, HKVAEX must wind up its operations in Hong Kong on or before May 31.

The Hong Kong SFC shared deadlines for crypto license applications. Source: sfc.hk

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Binance denied any links to the Hong Kong-based crypto exchange and stated:

""HKVAEX is not part of Binance group. Please reach out to HKVAEX.""

Three other virtual asset trading platforms have withdrawn their operational license applications in 2024 for reasons that were not made public, including the prominent global crypto exchange Huobi.

Crypto Twitter community member Wu Blockchain speculated that the reasons for the withdrawal may involve a variety of reasons, including a request to change the audit company or provide more information.

At the time of its launch, HKVAEX was confused with VAEX, a different crypto exchange in Hong Kong tied to KuCoin.

At the time, an HKVAEX representative told Cointelegraph, “VAEXC is another applicant, and they have nothing to do with us.”

Related: Binance executive reportedly escapes detention as Nigeria files tax evasion charges

CommEx, a Russian crypto exchange with strong ties with Binance, officially announced it is shutting down operations and has halted deposits on March 25.

“We have to announce the gradual suspension of operations on the CommEX platform,” the firm said, recommending users to withdraw their assets immediately to third-party wallets.

Binance had previously hinted at exiting Russia in early September 2023 as top local executives, including vice president of Eastern Europe Gleb Kostarev, stepped down.

Subsequently, CommEx emphasized that it operated independently of Binance but admitted that some of its core members were former Binance staff.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Cboe seeks SEC approval to mix mutual funds with ETFs [/INST] Cboe Global Markets has asked the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to approve a rule change that would allow issuers to combine exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and mutual funds.

According to a Reuters report on April 4, Cboe submitted a 19b-4 form requesting the green light to add an ETF share class to existing mutual funds, allowing for a multi-share class fund structure. If approved, the rule would allow issuers to combine and offer similar mutual funds and ETFs within a single investment vehicle.

Todd Sohn, an ETF analyst at Strategas LLC, told Reuters that “both the number of ETFs and ETF assets could soar” if the SEC approves Cboe’s request.

Mutual funds and ETFs present unique differences in their operations, as well as regulatory frameworks. Mutual funds are typically bought and sold at the end of the trading day at a price based on the fund’s net asset value, which is calculated after the market closes.

ETFs, on the other hand, trade on exchanges throughout the trading day at market prices, like stocks, and can fluctuate at any time. If the rule change is approved, Bitcoin (BTC) ETF shares could potentially be added to a mutual fund’s portfolio, offering exposure to the digital asset.

The proposed system won’t be the first of its kind. Since 2001, the Vanguard Group has had a patented investment strategy that allowed for a unique “share class” structure within their ETFs.

This structure enabled Vanguard to offer ETFs as a share class of their existing mutual funds, allowing both funds to share the same underlying portfolio. Vanguard’s patent on this share class concept expired in May 2023.

According to Reuters, eight asset managers — including Dimensional Fund Advisors, Morgan Stanley and Fidelity — have since filed for regulatory approval to replicate the model. T. Rowe Price and JPMorgan have also expressed interest in using a similar approach.

Cboe’s application must be approved or rejected by the SEC within 240 days. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas noted that the filing gives issuers a chance to force the SEC to respond to their applications.

According to Mordor Intelligence, the North American ETF market is projected to eclipse $8 trillion in 2024 and expand at a compound annual growth rate of 14% to $15.52 trillion by 2029.

Magazine: MakerDAO’s plan to bring back ‘DeFi summer’ — Rune Christensen"
"[INST] Fidelity files S-1 application with US SEC for spot ETH EFT with staking [/INST] Fidelity filed an S-1 application with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on March 27 to create a spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded fund (ETF). As expected from an earlier filing, the ETF will give Fidelity the option to stake part of the ETH it holds.

The asset management giant’s ETF would trade on the Cboe BZX Exchange. Fidelity Digital Asset Services, which affiliated with sponsor FD Funds Management, would serve as custodian of the trust’s ETH. According to the S-1:

The Trust [fund] intends to establish a program to stake a portion of the Trust’s assets through one or more staking infrastructure providers.

That decision entails additional risk, the application noted. There would be a risk of loss “including in the form of ‘slashing’ penalties” and liquidity risks while the stake is being processed. In addition, staking rewards would be treated as income for the fund for tax purposes, as a result of which investors will experience a taxable event “without an associated distribution from the Trust.”

The application does not specify the expected fees for the ETF. In case of a fork, the custodian will decide which chain the fund will support.

Fidelity's spot ETH EFT S-1 application. Source: SEC

There are multiple other risks associated with the ETF. The form points out that regulatory measures in the United States and elsewhere could negatively impact the fund. Among the potential causes of the termination of the trust, it lists regulatory action such as the SEC determining the fund to be an investment company under the 1940 Act, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission determining the fund to be a commodity pool under the Commodity Exchange Act and the determination that the fund is a money service business under the rules of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

The SEC is reportedly investigating the Ethereum Foundation, which analysts say could impact the chances of spot ETH ETF approval. There has also been political opposition to spot ETH EFTs.

Related: SEC radio silence on Ethereum ETF ‘not a good sign’ — Bloomberg analyst

The Ethereum blockchain is also liable to a 51% attack, where a bad actor could take over the governance of the network through a majority vote. “The top three largest staking pools controlled nearly 50% of the ether staked on the Ethereum network,” according to the form. Lido DAO is the largest ETH staking pool, with 31.5% of all staked ETH.

Source: David Gokhstein

Analysts have said that the introduction of a spot ETH ETF could reduce the influence of DAOs, but create new “concentration risk” depending on how ETFs choose to distribute their ETH among stakers.

The SEC has pushed back the approval deadline for other ETH ETFs to May 23. There are eight applicants for spot ETH EFTs awaiting an SEC decision.

Magazine: Ether ETFs face Senate opposition, Wright is not Satoshi, and Dencun goes live: Hodler’s Digest, March 10-16"
"[INST] Paraguay floats temp crypto mining ban as illegal ‘farms’ cripple grid [/INST] Paraguay lawmakers have proposed a bill to temporarily ban crypto mining and related activities in the South American nation, saying illegal crypto mines are stealing power and interrupting the electricity supply.

The draft law introduced on April 4 would ban (translated) “the installation of crypto mining farms” along with ”the creation, conservation, storage and commercialization” of cryptocurrencies.

Its broad scope seemingly aims to regulate crypto staking — “the creation of new crypto assets” — and wallets — “the conservation and storage activities of crypto assets.”

The ban would stretch for 180 days — around six months — or until a full law is enacted and power grid operator the National Electricity Administration (ANDE) guarantees it can supply enough energy to crypto miners “without affecting other users of Paraguay’s electrical system.”

A highlighted and translated excerpt of the draft law outlining what would be banned. Source: Republic of Paraguay Congress

Noted in the draft is the “significant boom” of crypto miners setting up in Paraguay, reportedly attracted to its “abundant hydroelectric energy.”

The Alto Paraná region in the county’s southeast bordering Brazil and Argentina is an area crypto miners have flocked to, the draft states. The area houses the Itaipu hydroelectric dam, the world’s third-largest supplying all of Paraguay’s domestic electricity needs.

Since February, the region has seen 50 cases of interrupted power supply linked to crypto miners clandestinely and illegally hooking into the grid, it claimed.

ANDE estimates each so-called “crypto mining farm” causes damages and losses of up to around $94,900 (700 million Paraguayan guaraníes) and claims the yearly estimated losses in Alto Paraná could climb up to $60 million (420 billion guaraníes).

Related: Bitcoin halving ‘blood bath’ could push US miners offshore

The draft claims crypto regulations would mean Paraguay could better supervise the industry, and the legal void is causing issues for Paraguay with digital assets short on consumer protections along with having possible use in money laundering and tax evasion.

In 2022, Paraguay came close to passing a tax and legal framework for the crypto and crypto mining sector but was vetoed by then-president Mario Abdo Benítez over concerns mining’s high power consumption would hamstring expanding a sustainable energy system.

Magazine: Bitcoin in Senegal: Why is this African country using BTC?"
"[INST] Mastercard sees partnerships as key to blockchain remittances in Latam [/INST] Mastercard has released a white paper on remittances in Latin America. Remittance rates are growing faster than the global average in the region, and mobile phone and internet penetration will fuel a transition from cash to digital options, the report said.

As of 2022, one in ten people worldwide lives in a home that receives remittances worth a total of $831 billion. The average cost of sending remittances to Latin America was 5.8% of the amount sent, compared to a global average of 6.3%, and costs reaching up to 25.5% at times, usually in the poorest regions, Mastercard reported.

Competition is increasing, however, sometimes creating a race to the bottom on prices. The report also cited World Bank data that showed that at least half of remittances were transmitted by informal means.

The report identifies a number of current remittance options that together “speak to the emergence of a completely new reality in global remittances.” Latin America currently receives 43% of its remittances digitally, compared to a world average of 52%. Digital remittances are expected to be worth $20 billion by 2026.

Related: Circle and SBI Holdings partner to boost USDC circulation in Japan

MoneyGram and Stellar provide remittances using USDC (USDC), and SBI Remit does so through Ripple, it said. Ripple is also leading the way in developing promising uses for central bank digital currency, along with other, more limited, projects. MoneyGram head of fintech strategy and innovation Luther Maday is quoted in the report:

“We can move money more quickly with new channels like USDC, which ultimately translates into additional liquidity for our day-to-day global operations.”

There are several other crypto players in the Latin American market, including Binance and Mastercard itself, in partnership with wallet provider Belo. Problems remain in the crypto field, however. Trust, regulatory and technological adoption issues still hinder the progress of crypto players and other providers, the report said. Moreover:

“The current digitization efforts are limited to the remittance transaction itself. In order to digitize fully and reduce costs more broadly, the digital money ecosystems in the recipient countries must be fostered.”

“It’s not enough that a recipient receives the money in an account, a card, or a wallet if they can’t make digital payments when they spend that money,” the report continued.

“The intelligent weaving of partnerships between diverse players” is needed by all remittance providers, the report concluded.

Source: WrathofKahneman

Magazine: Crypto in the Philippines: Necessity is the mother of adoption"
"[INST] Tornado Cash co-founder requests dismissal of money laundering charges [/INST] Roman Storm, co-founder of cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, has filed a motion to dismiss all three charges against him that allege he operated a money laundering business and violated the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

“By no stretch can Mr. Storm be deemed to have conspired to launder funds,” Storm’s lawyers stated in a March 29 filing in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Storm’s lawyers argued that Tornado Cash was developed, “became immutable” and publicly available before it was used by the hacking groups sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Therefore, by the time of the alleged misconduct, there was allegedly little that Storm could do to prevent a “sanctioned entity from using it.”

The charges are centered around Tornado Cash allegedly facilitating the efforts of the North Korean Lazarus Group bypassing U.S. sanctions, allowing the country’s regime to reportedly fund its nuclear program.

Court filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Source: CourtListener

Furthermore, the lawyers contended that Tornado Cash was not a money-transmitting business as it did not charge a fee for transmitting funds, and users retained sole control over their crypto.

Arguing that Storm intended to build software solutions to provide financial privacy for law-abiding crypto users, they declared that the charges are “fatally flawed and should be dismissed.”

In September 2023, Cointelegraph reported that Storm pleaded not guilty to all charges and was released on a $2 million bond shortly after his arrest. He is largely restricted from traveling outside some areas of New York, New Jersey, Washington and California.

Related: Hacker moves $10M from 2023 phishing incident to Tornado Cash

This comes as the U.S. government continues its crackdown on crypto-mixing services.

On March 12, Cointelegraph reported that the founder of Bitcoin Fog, a $400 million crypto-mixing service, was convicted of money laundering.

Roman Sterlingov was found guilty of money laundering, money laundering conspiracy, operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business and violations of the D.C. Money Transmitters Act.

However, the crypto community sees significant value in crypto mixers, as they can provide increased privacy and confidentiality for legitimate reasons for those wanting to make anonymous business transactions.

At one stage, the Arbitrum DAO had considered allocating around $1.3 million worth of ARB tokens to support Storm’s legal expenses, but the proposal was scrapped for reasons that remain unclear.

Magazine: Tornado Cash 2.0: The race to build safe and legal coin mixers"
"[INST] Google’s inclusion of Bitcoin wallet balances sparks privacy debate [/INST] Google has expanded its features to allow users to search wallet balances across multiple blockchains, such as Bitcoin, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, Polygon and Fantom. When entering the wallet address, search results display the token balance by network along with the last updated time.

Users can search three Bitcoin address formats — P2PKH, P2SH and Bech32 — and view current balances and recent transactions.

Incorporating Bitcoin data into search results boosts Google’s accessibility to on-chain activity, leveraging its extensive daily search volume.

While some praise Google’s new feature as a move toward mainstream adoption, privacy-centric Bitcoin supporters have raised concerns about centralized data aggregation and its impact on privacy.

An example of a Google Bitcoin wallet search. Source: Google

Google’s latest feature comes after it introduced Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain search results, allowing users to check wallet balances with readable domain names like “vitalik.eth” for Ethereum wallet addresses.

Google’s recent expansion builds on its initial introduction of Ethereum wallet balance searches in May 2023. In 2022, Google integrated a crypto feature enabling some Ethereum wallet addresses to have their Ether (ETH) balances tracked by the Google search engine, saving the need to make the trip to Etherscan.

Related: Amazon takes minority share in ChatGPT rival Anthropic AI

The addition of wallet searches marks a shift in the tech giant’s attitude. Google prohibited Bitcoin-related advertisements in 2018 but recently reversed its stance, allowing spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) advertisements following their approval in the United States in January.

ETF products from notable asset managers like BlackRock now appear in search results.

In October 2022, Google partnered with Coinbase to allow its customers to pay for cloud services with crypto.

The tech firm also initiated a countdown to the Ethereum Merge event — Ethereum’s transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) in 2022 — by featuring animated pandas moving in sync.

In 2023, Google Cloud joined forces with Web3 startup Orderly Network to create user-centric developer tools for decentralized finance (DeFi) to lower the barrier of entry into the decentralized world.

The collaboration aimed to address DeFi’s major hurdles: entry barriers and security issues, which have been long-standing challenges in the ecosystem.

Magazine: Doctor Who materializes in Web3 — Tony Pearce’s journey in time and space"
"[INST] Scammers eye Toncoin as Telegram-TON partnership grabs headlines [/INST] Telegram’s public support for The Open Network (TON) blockchain and its intention to incorporate its native Toncoin token have led to scammers targeting unsuspecting tokenholders to exploit them.

Information shared with Cointelegraph from cybersecurity firm Kaspersky outlines a cryptocurrency scam that has been attempting to steal Toncoin (TON) from Telegram users worldwide.

According to experts at Kaspersky, the scam has been operating since at least November 2023 as interest and investments in TON surged. Scammers have been promoting an elaborate referral scheme that ultimately aims to steal TON tokens from users.

Related: Telegram commits to TON blockchain, plans to support tokenized emojis and stickers NFTs

Potential targets receive a link from friends or contacts to participate in an “exclusive earning program.” The scammers then begin prompting victims to join an unofficial Telegram bot purportedly designed to store cryptocurrency and to link their Web3 wallet to the bot’s system.

At the same time, the fraudsters instruct users to purchase Toncoin through legitimate channels like the official Telegram bot, peer-to-peer (P2P) markets or cryptocurrency exchanges, which adds an element of credibility and a false sense of security.

The signup page for users to purchase boosters that offer varying returns for TON deposits. Source: Kaspersky

Victims are then coerced into purchasing “boosters” using a separate bot. The scammers claim that users must complete this action to start earning.

This is the point at which scammers make their money. After purchasing a booster, the user irrevocably loses control of their cryptocurrency.

“The costs of ‘boosters’ — labeled by the scammers as ‘bike,’ ‘car,’ ‘train,’ ‘plane,’ or ‘rocket’ — vary from 5 to 500 Toncoins,” Kaspersky’s experts explained.

The scheme’s booster tier with commissions offering returns typical of a pyramid scheme. Source: Kaspersky

Users lose anywhere between $2 and $2,700 through the targeted pyramid scheme. After convincing users to purchase fake boosters, the scammers also tout a referral program that requires victims to create private Telegram groups with friends and contacts.

Related: New Telegram mini-apps will be so convenient users won’t know it’s crypto

The scammers provide a referral link that comes with its own video instructions for users in both Russian and English. Users are required to have five successful referrals in order to start earning through the fraudulent scheme.

The scammers promise earnings from two sources, including a fixed payment of 25 TON for each invited friend and commission based on the booster tariff purchased by your referrals.

“It turns out to be a classic pyramid scheme, in which each participant is a partner rather than a freeloader. Sadly, nobody profits except the scammers, and all ‘partners’ lose their investments,” Kaspersky’s analysts explained.

Cointelegraph has requested additional information from Kaspersky regarding the number of users who have been affected and the total amount of funds that have been lost. This article will be updated accordingly.

Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis"
"[INST] BTCFi innovation to match Ethereum DeFi in the future — MerlinSwap co-founder [/INST] Bitcoin decentralized finance (DeFi), or BTCFi, is a recent paradigm seeking to bring DeFi capabilities to the world’s first blockchain network. Provided that its current adoption rate continues, BTCFi could match the innovation of Ethereum-based DeFi in the future.

This is the view of Nash Lee, co-founder of MerlinSwap, who told Cointelegraph:

“[Market appetite] is seeking expansive platforms capable of accommodating the surging volumes and expectations. DeFi stands out as the only sector with the potential to leverage this narrative, providing a sustainable ecosystem for Bitcoin’s evolving use cases. This dynamic sets the stage for Bitcoin DeFi to potentially match, if not exceed, the innovation and complexity seen in Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem.”

Showcasing investor demand for Bitcoin-native DeFi applications, decentralized exchange (DEX) MerlinSwap raised 6,599 Bitcoin (BTC) worth $480 million during its initial DEX offering (IDO) on April 5. The IDO attracted over 52,000 participants.

The record IDO is a testament to the market’s demand and confidence in Bitcoin-native DeFi applications, says Lee.

“It symbolizes the community’s eagerness to engage with and drive forward the DeFi revolution on Bitcoin’s platform. It underscores a significant shift toward recognizing the untapped potential of Bitcoin in the DeFi space, highlighting a broad-based demand for innovative, decentralized financial solutions built on the world’s first cryptocurrency.”

MerlinSwap is built on the Bitcoin layer-2 network Merlin Chain. It surpassed the $100 million in total value locked (TVL) on April 4, according to MerlinSwap.

Related: How high can Bitcoin go? New BTC price prediction sees cycle top at $180K

Bitcoin Ordinals were the first step to BTCFi

BTCFi emerged following the introduction of the BRC-20 token standard, which enabled the minting of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin blockchain for the first time.

Bitcoin-native NFTs, also known as Ordinals, are inscribed directly on satoshis (sats), giving them a permanent home on the Bitcoin network, unlike most NFT collections, to which the images and metadata are stored on centralized servers, creating potential vulnerabilities.

Showcasing the interest in Bitcoin-native NFTs, the network surpassed 64.1 million Ordinals inscriptions in less than one and a half years since the first Ordinal was inscribed in December 2022, according to Dune.

Ordinals Inscriptions overtime chart. Source: Dune

Beyond Ordinals, the emergence of Bitcoin layer-2s is another significant element of BTCFi, which will ultimately give more use cases to Bitcoin. Lee said:

“Before the advent of layer-2 solutions, Bitcoin native assets lacked practical applications, confining BTC’s role largely to that of digital gold. The emergence of Bitcoin layer-2 technologies has been a game-changer, unlocking a vast array of utilities for BTC assets.”

Related: Bitcoin’s 2028 halving price target is $435K, historical data suggests"
"[INST] Bitcoin halving could ‘indirectly’ affect cryptocurrency regulation [/INST] The additional scrutiny around the Bitcoin (BTC) halving event could have an indirect effect on its future regulation.

This is according to Natalia Latka, policy director and regulatory affairs at blockchain analysis firm Merkle Science.

“While there is no direct impact on regulations or regulators’ approach, the economic and market dynamics influenced by halving events could indirectly affect regulatory considerations, especially in areas related to market stability and investor protection,” Latka told Cointelegraph.

The halving and the approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in January are helping to fuel a Bitcoin bull run, making crypto hard to ignore.

Should Bitcoin also become more volatile during this period of increased interest and mainstream media coverage — a not altogether unlikely scenario — regulators could feel inspired to consider action.

Latka went on to outline a further scenario that could lead to increased regulatory scrutiny.

“The Bitcoin halving could also impact energy consumption,” said Latka. “With rewards for mining reduced, less efficient miners could be pushed out of the market, potentially leading to a concentration of mining activities among larger players and a concentration of geographies.”

Latka adds, “This might attract regulatory scrutiny regarding the environmental impact of PoW [proof-of-work], leading to regulations focused on sustainability.”

Further clarity is required in the United States

Cointelegraph spoke with Andrew Balthazor, a litigator with legal firm Holland & Knight, to better understand the current regulatory framework in the United States.

According to Balthazor, U.S. law remains unclear on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency at large.

Recent: Bitcoin halving supply shock set to shake up mining sector

“I think there’s still some clarity in terms of what constitutes a security transaction in the United States, although there’s a general agreement that Bitcoin probably isn’t. We still don’t have a definitive statement one way or the other on even Bitcoin or Ether, or any cryptocurrency for that matter,” Balthazor said.

Frustratingly, when courts have ruled on cryptocurrency, those courts tend not to be high enough to be binding across the union.

“We don’t tend to have a lot of court adjudications saying definitively this token is a security in all circumstances. So, we have some conflicting lower court decisions, which in the U.S. aren’t binding on other courts. So that’s the issue.”

Without clear guidance from the SEC or the courts, the U.S. finds itself in a situation referred to as “regulation through enforcement,” where the bounds of lawful behavior are measured through enforcement action.

Latka said, “The absence of clear, upfront guidelines means businesses often find themselves navigating a regulatory minefield, uncertain if their operations comply with current or future interpretations of laws.”

Balthazor’s experience shows that the situation has a real impact on businesses that want to and are trying to do the right thing:

“I have clients who are frustrated and uncertain about whether their projects might be treated as securities, paying attorneys to negotiate for years.”

Balthazor said this is only possible for companies with “deep pockets,” adding that he would like to see some mechanism put in place so that corporations and the SEC could deal with each other more transparently.

“It would be great to have a more formal process where the SEC could say, ‘Here are our concerns about your project. We think it’s too much like a security for these reasons,’” said Balthazor.

A moving target for U.K. businesses

In the United Kingdom, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) deals with crypto asset regulation, bringing forward rules that, in instances such as the approval of crypto investment products, have been well-received, and in others, such as the introduction of “positive frictions” for U.K. customers of centralized exchanges, have been widely rebuked.

Latka explained how the U.K.’s regulation philosophy and implementation create confusion.

“The U.K.’s approach to regulating crypto assets has been to retrofit existing regulations in a phased manner. This method involves gradually implementing these retrofitted regulations, requiring businesses in the crypto space to constantly adjust to an evolving regulatory landscape,” Latka said.

The approach taken by the FCA means that corporations must always keep one eye on compliance matters as they continue to shift and change.

Latka said, “This ongoing adaptation process can lead to substantial costs and operational inefficiencies for these businesses, alongside a significant degree of legal uncertainty. The challenge arises when regulations designed for traditional financial systems are applied to the rapidly evolving crypto sector.”

FCA announced ETNs in March. Source: FCA

In March CryptoUK — the U.K. trade association for crypto — welcomed the FCA’s approval of crypto exchange-traded notes (ETNs). ETNs are similar to ETFs but exclude retail investors.

CryptoUK asked the FCA to reconsider its position, adding, “We will continue to advocate for a reconsideration of the existing bans on access to appropriate financial investments for retail investors.”

Commentators, including Latka, believe that criticism of the broader regulator landscape in the U.K. is widely true.

Latka said, “There is a conspicuous discrepancy between the growing interest from the public in crypto assets and the regulatory measures in place, highlighting a significant misalignment that requires urgent attention.”

Europe takes a different approach

In Europe, where regulators have introduced bespoke regulation for cryptocurrencies, the chances of the Bitcoin halving making an impact seem more remote.

Recent: Bitcoin returns “too significant to ignore” for world’s retirement plans

The European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) was introduced in 2023, providing a far more comprehensive regulatory framework than the U.K. and a more crypto-tailored solution than in the United States.

However, even here, Latka said that “further clarifications” are still required, as well as “the development of technical guidelines, particularly concerning MiCA’s interaction with existing EU financial regulations and directives.”

So, even in the EU, just a few days out from Bitcoin’s halving, its potential to influence the regulator’s thinking remains."
"[INST] Coinbase cleared in lawsuit over crypto transactions [/INST] Coinbase crypto exchange has achieved a significant victory in an ongoing lawsuit. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in favor of Coinbase, confirming that secondary sales of cryptocurrencies on its platform do not violate the Securities Exchange Act.

The court’s decision affects a nationwide group of people who traded tokens on Coinbase from Oct. 8, 2019, to March 11, 2022. At the heart of the dispute was whether cryptocurrencies traded on Coinbase met the criteria for securities.

The plaintiffs lodged federal claims under Sections 5, 12(a)(1) and 15 of the Securities Act 1933, alongside Sections 5, 15(a)(1), 20(a) and 29(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. They also presented state law claims related to securities legislation in California, Florida and New Jersey, representing a nationwide class of individuals.

Summary order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Source: CTF Assets

The plaintiffs contended that Coinbase’s actions amounted to offering and selling unregistered securities. Furthermore, they accused it of violating various provisions of securities laws.

However, Coinbase argued that secondary crypto asset sales didn’t meet securities transaction criteria, disputing the relevance of securities regulations. The court examined various aspects, ultimately overturning some of the lower court’s decisions while upholding others.

The court determined Coinbase’s potential liability under Section 12(a)(1) of the Securities Act for vending unregistered securities. However, it rejected the plaintiffs’ Securities Exchange Act claims, citing insufficient proof of transaction-specific contracts needed for rescission under Section 29.

Related: Coinbase secures restricted dealer license in Canada

The court’s decision hinged significantly on interpreting Coinbase’s user agreements, which evolved over time. Varying language across versions complicated title and privity issues critical to the case. Clarity on the applicable user agreement version was emphasized, with discrepancies hindering a definitive resolution.

The plaintiffs view the ruling as a step forward in holding crypto platforms accountable under securities laws, advocating for investor protection in the evolving crypto space. Conversely, Coinbase asserts the decision reinforces its position that secondary crypto sales aren’t securities transactions.

Furthermore, Coinbase stressed the necessity of regulatory clarity to foster innovation within the industry. The court’s verdict has substantial consequences for overseeing cryptocurrencies and digital assets.

Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal expressed gratitude on X social platform, stating that the court reaffirmed no private liability for secondary trading of digital assets on exchanges like Coinbase under federal securities law, emphasizing the significance of contracts.

Magazine: How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?"
"[INST] Bitcoin spikes outside US hours, traders could ‘take advantage’ — Analyst [/INST] Bitcoin (BTC) has seen most of its daily gains come outside United States trading hours ever since the launch of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which could present an opportunity for traders, according to an analyst.

The trend is a seeming reversal from the last two years, where most gains were concentrated during U.S. trading hours. Research firm 10x Research CEO Markus Thielen suggests the new trend allows investors to capitalize on frequent small profit margins.

“Traders can take advantage of this information and buy Bitcoin ahead of the U.S. trading hours and sell a few hours later,” Thielen told Cointelegraph.

On April 4, Bitcoin rallied approximately 2.6% outside U.S. hours, while prices only rose around 0.6% during U.S. hours.

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas also noted in an April 5 post on X that “the vast majority of the 40% gains” in Bitcoin since spot Bitcoin ETFs were introduced on Jan. 11 happened outside regular U.S. market trading hours.

U.S. trading hours are the operating hours of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Nasdaq stock exchange, running from 2:30 pm to 9:00 pm UTC.

Source: Eric Balchunas

At the time of publication, Bitcoin is currently trading at $68,400 with Cointelegraph recently reporting a 64% growth in Bitcoin during the first quarter of 2024.

Buying Bitcoin before market open

Thielen explained that investors, including those from other time zones, often anticipate surges in ETF inflows by buying Bitcoin before the market opens:

“We also noticed through our data analysis that Bitcoin tends to rise during the 1-4 hours before U.S. ETFs start trading on that day, a sign that there is likely front running of the ETF flow occurring,” he added.

On April 4, Bitcoin experienced a slight 2.6% rise in the four hours before the opening of the U.S. market, climbing from $65,593 to $67,308.

Bitcoin’s price has been hovering around $64,940 and $71,256 over the past 7 days. Source: CoinMarketCap

However, Thielen noted that U.S. investors tend to take advantage of the market spread between the spot market and the futures market:

“The buying flow during US trading hours appears mostly arbitrage - buying Bitcoin Spot ETFs but selling CME-listed Bitcoin futures as hedge funds pocked the futures premium,” Thielen stated.

Related: Bitcoin is hedge against ‘horrible’ gov’t fiscal policy — Cathie Wood

It’s not the first time an asset has been singled out for gains outside U.S. trading hours. In June 2022, two ETF funds, the NightShares 500 ETF and the NightShares 2000 (NIWM), were launched to take advantage of the overnight increases in U.S. stocks.

According to a report from the Financial Post in July 2023, the products were discontinued just one year later because other factors, such as off-hours announcements, data releases and earnings reports, can diminish performance.

Before the introduction of spot Bitcoin ETFs, it was understood that Asian investors did more of the selling during Asian market hours.

In March 2022, Cointelegraph reported that investors based in Asia have generally been sellers, while those in the U.S. and the European Union have been buyers for the previous two years.

Glassnode researcher and report writer “Checkmate” pointed out that U.S. and European investors offered general bid support for the past two years. However, Asian markets generally offered lower buying support through Q1–Q3 of 2021 and produced heavy selling pressure.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETF guru Eric Balchunas has the last laugh at doubters: X Hall of Flame

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Former Disney boss launches Web3 game publisher with Marvel, Star Wars talent [/INST] A team of Hollywood and gaming luminaries has joined forces to launch a AAA Web3 games publisher in the United Arab Emirates.

Dubbed Galactic Entertainment Publishing, the recently launched venture represents the first arm of parent company Galactic Group.

The firm’s inaugural endeavor, PlanetQuest, has been in active development since 2022. Loren Roosendaal, CEO of Galactic Entertainment and founder of PlanetQuest, told Cointelegraph that despite the game not having launched yet, it’s installed a massive user base:

“PlanetQuest passport holders account for over 300,000 connected wallets, over 200,000 of which hold one or more PlanetQuest NFTs.”

AAA franchise experience

The team behind PlanetQuest is comprised of former employees from Disney, Warner Bros., Activision-Blizzard and Epic. Their previous individual credits include a bevy of franchises, from films such as The Batman, Avengers and Blade Runner to AAA games such as Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor.

The firm’s chief creative officer, Jon McCoy — who has worked on AAA Hollywood blockbusters throughout his career — said those experiences couldn’t compare with his work with Galactic Group:

“Naturally no first attempt at something new is perfect, but it’s been amazing getting to create a sci-fi universe with the fans in a way that’s never been attempted before. I’ve gotten to fulfill a lot of my childhood dreams, working on Star Wars, Blade Runner and Marvel movies to name a few, but there’s little that compares to being able to interact and build with the fans from day one.”

PlanetQuest

The company’s first title, PlanetQuest, has been described as existing in a “Star Wars-like” world full of assets that players can own and trade. Everything from ships to entire planets can be copped as digital assets that, ostensibly, players can keep for their own game use or sell/trade to other players for native currency.

Galactic currently has plans to launch tie-in media for PlanetQuest, including novels, comic books and another game to be revealed later, according to a report from VentureBeat.

Related: Disney launches NFT platform with Dapper Labs"
"[INST] Bitcoin options expiry worth $1.5B sets $69K max pain price [/INST] Over $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin (BTC) futures options are set to expire on April 12, signaling potential downside price volatility that could see Bitcoin fall to the $69,000 mark.

The over $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin options are due with a put-to-call ratio of 0.62, suggesting a “max pain” point of $69,000 for Bitcoin, according to an April 12 X post by pseudonymous trader Greeks.

Despite the maximum pain point, Bitcoin won’t necessarily fall back to its old all-time high, according to Hao Yang, global head of derivatives trading at Bybit exchange, who told Cointelegraph:

“The max pain point refers to the price at which most options contracts would expire worthless. It’s an indicator of where options market participants are positioned, but it doesn’t necessarily influence where the underlying [asset] will be trading at.”

Periods close to the expiration of options are often characterized by increased price volatility in the crypto markets. Yet, Yang added that he doesn’t expect more volatility, pointing out the relatively small size of Friday’s options expires:

“I don’t expect more volatility given options market is still only a fraction of the total crypto derivative market.”

Bitcoin price action was flat in the 24 hours leading up to 10:25 am UTC when Bitcoin was trading at $70,725. The world’s first cryptocurrency was up 5.9% on the weekly chart, according to CoinMarketCap data.

BTC/USDT, one-day chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Bitcoin could still see increased downside price volatility due to external macroeconomic factors, but not necessarily because of the upcoming options expiry, according to Andrey Stoychev, the head of Prime Brokerage at Nexo. He told Cointelegraph:

“Bitcoin may approach the $69,000 mark, but whether it falls to that level depends on the broader context, including market sentiment and Bitcoin’s dance with inflation. The recent U.S. CPI [Consumer Price Index] data, which came in higher than expected on Wednesday, has raised concerns about inflationary pressures, potentially impacting Bitcoin’s price dynamics.”

The U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) print for March came in narrowly above expectations at 3.5% year-on-year, prompting Bitcoin whales to buy the dip, which nudged the price back above the $70,000 mark on April 10.

Related: With 10 days to the halving, analysts predict $150K Bitcoin top

ETF inflows slow down ahead of the Bitcoin halving

The inflows from the spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States have slowed ahead of the Bitcoin halving. The ETFs generated a total of $220 million worth of net inflows during the past week, according to Dune Analytics data.

Bitcoin ETF net flows chart. Source: Dune

Weekly ETF inflows have been steadily slowing since their best week on March 11, when they generated $2.58 billion worth of net inflows. The ETFs only managed $337 million worth of net inflows last week, down over 45% from $615 million from the previous week.

The Bitcoin ETFs have amassed over 839,000 BTC worth $59.4 billion in total on-chain holdings, representing 4.26% of the current BTC supply.

How can you prepare for the 2024 Bitcoin halving? Source: Cointelegraph

Related: Bitcoin surpasses 65 million Ordinals inscriptions days before halving"
"[INST] Kraken exchange rolls out self-custody crypto wallet, following other CEXs [/INST] Crypto exchange Kraken has rolled out its self-custody wallet for digital assets, following the likes of Binance, OKX, Coinbase, Bitget and Bybit.

""Whether you’re a Kraken client or not, you can use multichain Kraken Wallet as your bridge to the decentralized financial system,” the exchange wrote. Currently, Kraken Wallet supports assets on eight blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon and Dogecoin.

The Kraken Wallet app on iOS.

Kraken claims that the app “collects the absolute minimum amount of data required to function as a wallet” and that ""not even internal app performance analytics are collected.” The company also stated:

“User activity is proxied through Kraken’s own infrastructure, shielding your IP address and preventing your identity and location information from potential external exposure.""

For security, the wallet features mobile biometrics and user password protection, while its code has been audited by Trail of Bits. The app’s code is also open-source and available on GitHub.

Functionwise, Kraken Wallet supports decentralized finance tokens, nonfungible tokens, interaction with decentralized applications through Wallet Connect, and “24/7/365” customer support.

""Kraken Wallet is how we invest in the your keys, your crypto ecosystem which is vital for the existence of permissionless financial access,"" said Eric Kuhn, product director for Kraken Wallet, in a statement.

Exchanges have increasingly turned to the self-custody wallet sector amid a worldwide regulatory tightening on their activities.

On April 11, Kraken announced that it is winding down support for the Monero (XMR) privacy coin for its customers based in Ireland and Belgium. Last October, the exchange suspended support for several stablecoins, such as Tether (USDT) and Dai (DAI), for its Canadian users.

In many jurisdictions, self-custody wallets are not subjected to the same rules that apply to money transmitters, such as exchanges, as they do not natively process fiat money transactions.

On March 19, the European Parliament scrapped a 1,000 euro ($1,080) limit on cryptocurrency payments from self-hosted crypto wallets as part of new Anti-Money Laundering laws.

Similarly, on March 28, U.S. District Judge Katherine Failla ruled that Coinbase Wallet was “not a broker” and, therefore, not subject to brokerage rules set forth by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Related: US investigates Trust Wallet iOS app for vulnerability"
"[INST] OneCoin’s legal boss gets 4 years jail for massive $4B crypto scam [/INST] The former head of legal and compliance for the multibillion-dollar OneCoin fraud scheme has been sentenced to four years in jail after admitting she helped launder millions of dollars.

42-year-old Irina Dilkinska was sentenced on Wednesday to four years in jail by United States District Judge Edgardo Ramos, according to an April 3 statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

In addition to her four-year jail sentence, Dilkinska was sentenced to one month of supervised release and ordered to forfeit $111 million as restitution.

Judge Ramos reportedly denied Dilkinska’s request to avoid jail time and return home to care for young children in Bulgaria, according to an April 3 report from Bloomberg.

Ramos said Dilkinska was “a woman of great intelligence and a woman who ought to have known better,” adding that she was fully aware of the legal consequences of her actions while involved in operating the $4-billion Ponzi scheme.

“I honestly do not understand what prevented her from leaving the scheme before the point when it was brought down,” Ramos said.

Dilinska pled guilty to wire fraud and money laundering charges in a Manhattan federal court on Nov. 10. Each charge carried a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison, meaning that Dilkinska faced the possibility of 10 years imprisonment.

Dilkinsa is the latest OneCoin executive to land themselves in prison for their role in the fraud scheme.

On Sept. 12 last year, the scheme’s co-founder, Karl Sebastian Greenwood, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on fraud and money laundering charges and was ordered to pay $300 million in restitution.

Related: Cryptoqueen’s brother is freed after 3 years jail over OneCoin scheme: Report

OneCoin was founded by “Cryptoqueen” Ruja Ignatova and Greenwood in 2014 and promised guaranteed returns to investors from a bogus cryptocurrency called “OneCoin.”

However, it was later revealed that the company had never built a functioning blockchain and instead operated as a pyramid scheme that made its money by paying commissions to investors to sign up a constant stream of new buyers.

Ignatova remains at large, having gone missing in October 2017 after a flight to Greece just 15 days after a federal warrant was issued for her arrest. Some have speculated that Ignatova has been killed following the murders of several OneCoin associates in Mexico in 2020.

OneCoin was exposed as fraudulent in 2015 but still managed to generate over $4.3 billion in revenue, recording profits of nearly $3 billion between 2014 and 2016.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all — Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Coinbase pushes for UK crypto adoption with Apple Pay integration [/INST] Crypto exchange Coinbase said that United Kingdom-based users can now purchase Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and other digital assets using their iPhone’s Apple Pay feature.

Coinbase believes enabling Apple Pay would give its users a “more secure and private” way to buy crypto.

The exchange said that when users make Apple Pay purchases, the card numbers are not stored on the device or the Apple servers.

Coinbase explained that there’s a unique device account number assigned, encrypted and stored in an industry-standard chip for storing payment information.

Daniel Seifert, Coinbase country director for the U.K., said that the new integration helps make accessibility to digital assets easier in the country. He said:

“We know users already love using Apple Pay in their daily lives, so it only made sense to bring this convenient way to pay to Coinbase as well.”

According to Coinbase, over six million adults in the U.K. own crypto. The company said that the Apple Pay integration is part of its efforts to “increase this number” by lowering entry barriers to digital assets.

Related: Microsoft AI to make long-term investments in the UK — CEO

The integration comes as the crypto space experiences a slowdown in volume and retail interest. On April 5, Coinbase said that crypto volumes are decreasing as the market tries to find the next narrative to fuel it higher.

The exchange noted that the upcoming Bitcoin halving could catalyze higher prices. However, the exchange also highlighted that it must deal with a “typically weak time of year” for risky assets like crypto.

Apart from low crypto volumes, social media engagement data also shows weak retail interest in crypto. On April 10, data shared by the social analytics platform LunarCrush showed fewer social media posts on crypto-related keywords like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana’s (SOL) token.

LunarCrush CEO Joe Vezzani said that retail interest and social interactions are low compared to previous major bull markets. Factoring out spam and bots, the executive believes that there may be a decline in social media activity within the crypto space.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] US Treasury official outlines proposals for tighter crypto crime control [/INST] United States Deputy Treasury Secretary Adewale Adeyemo continued advocating for more enforcement powers for his agency in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on April 9. In a hearing on countering illicit finance, terrorism and sanctions evasion, Adeyemo outlined three proposed reforms to improve U.S. enforcement efforts against international bad actors using crypto.

Adeyemo was following up on proposals made by the Treasury Department in November. In his latest testimony, Adeyemo listed three changes the department was looking for. Those were to introduce secondary sanctions targeting “foreign digital asset providers” engage illicit finance.

U.S. sanctions prohibit institutions from using U.S. correspondent accounts and transaction processing through banks, Adeyemo said, but crypto exchanges and money services do not always depend on the use of correspondent accounts. “A new secondary sanctions tool” is needed:

“We can clarify that our authorities can reach extraterritorially when digital asset entities harm our national security while taking advantage of our financial system.”

Adeyemo did not elaborate on the form the new secondary sanctions might take.

Related: Elections may swing Senate Banking Committee toward crypto, Sen. Lummis says

The second reform the Treasury is seeking would expand the powers of “existing authorities” to reach the digital asset ecosystem. Third, Adeyemo said, was “addresses jurisdictional risk from offshore cryptocurrency platforms.” He called the last point a “key challenge.” He noted:

“There is clear overlap between these proposals and the bills coming out of this Committee.”

Adeyemo was referring at least in part to committee member Elizabeth Warren and chair Sherrod Brown’s Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2022, which Warren reintroduced in the current congress. Both authors are prominent crypto skeptics.

Source: Eleanor Terrell

Adeyemo pointed to the use of crypto by terrorist groups, North Korea and in the fentanyl trade as evidence of the Treasury’s need for greater enforcement powers. He conceded that “we continue to assess that terrorists prefer to use traditional financial products and services,” but cautioned, “we fear that without Congressional action to provide us with the necessary tools, the use of virtual assets by these actors will only grow.”

Banking Committee chair Sherrod Brown released a statement supporting the Treasury Department’s enforcement goals ahead of Adeyemo’s testimony. Ranking member Tim Scott praised the work the Treasury Department has done, but concentrated on foreign policy issues that he believes threaten U.S. security.

Magazine: Terrorism and Israel-Gaza war weaponized to destroy crypto"
"[INST] XRP price-to-sales ratio double that of Nvidia [/INST] The XRP token’s price-to-sales ratio is nearly double that of Nvidia, one of the most traded stocks on the market.

The XRP (XRP) token has a price-to-sale ratio of 61.689, while Nvidia has a price-to-sales ratio of 37. This ratio is calculated by dividing a company’s market capitalization by the company’s revenue or total sales over the past 12 months. The lower the ratio, the more attractive the investment.

Ripple’s XRP ledger generated over $583,000 worth of network fees in 2023, according to Messari. In comparison, Nvidia generated $26.97 billion in revenue during 2023, according to its 2023 fiscal report.

The XRP token rose 0.15% in the 24 hours up to 10:30 am UTC, to $0.6205, with a $34 billion market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Nvidia shares were down 0.49% in pre-market trading to $898.25, according to Yahoo Finance data.

Nvidia is the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer and the third-largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $2.25 trillion.

The firm reported a 265% year-on-year increase in revenue amid rising global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) equipment.

The XRP price rose 20.55% over the past year, while Nvidia’s share price rose over 241%, mainly driven by increased global demand for semiconductor chips widely used for high-level AI models.

XRP/USDT and NVDA/USD, one-year chart. Source: TradingView.

Related: Nvidia CEO’s simple solution to AI hallucination could upend crypto — but only if it works

What is holding the XRP price back?

The XRP price has been under increased pressure since December 2020, when the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Ripple, its CEO Brad Garlinghouse and its co-founder Chris Larsen, alleging that the firm raised $1.3 billion in unregistered securities offerings through XRP token sales.

The lawsuit received even more interest in July 2023, when Judge Analisa Torres ruled that XRP was not a security but only in regard to programmatic sales on digital asset exchanges.

The judge also ruled that XRP is a security when sold to institutional investors, which meets the conditions of the Howey test.

According to a March 25 court filing, the SEC proposed Ripple pay a total civil penalty of $1.95 billion, based on Ripple’s “defiance of the law” in continuing to sell XRP after legal warnings.

Related: XRPL blockchain plugs into cross-chain DeFi"
"[INST] Bitcoin miner Sphere 3D refutes Gryphon’s claims of financial doubts: 'Disingenuous' [/INST] Bitcoin miner Sphere 3D has denied reports of financial troubles, claiming that accusations from its former partner Gryphon Digital Mining are “at best disingenuous.”

In a court document shared with Cointelegraph, Sphere 3D refuted accusations made a few days earlier by Gryphon to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, requesting a block on millions of dollars on grounds that Sphere was on the “verge of economic collapse.”

On March 25, Gryphon requested court permission to file a motion seeking to secure $10 million in equity proceeds that Sphere recently received from a settlement related to Core Scientific’s bankruptcy exit. According to Gryphon, the move was necessary since Sphere could not pay roughly $30 million in future breach of contract judgments.

Sphere 3D, on the other hand, claims to have $45 million in assets and $5 million in liabilities, per its 2023 Annual Report. “A judgment of even $30 million could be rendered against Sphere tomorrow and it would have the means to pay,” reads the document. The company also accused Gryphon of unreasonably multiplying the proceedings, including through counterclaims later dropped.

Sphere 3D's response to a pre-motion letter filed by Gryphon Digital Mining. Source: Dontzin Nagy & Fleissig/Sphere 3D.

As a result of the market downturn, crypto miners endured a tough winter between 2022 and 2023. According to a source familiar with the litigation, Gryphon’s move to get $10 million from Sphere might be related to its own financial difficulties.

“Since April of 2023, it’s been back and forth [...] They [Gryphon] have $18 million in assets, and $27 million in liabilities, which means they have $9 million of negative working capital [...] And on top of that, it looks like from their loan agreement, every single amount of excess income that they generate has to go to pay down their loans with Anchorage,” noted the source.

The MSA breach

Before their legal dispute, Gryphon and Sphere were bound by a Master Service Agreement (MSA) since 2021, in which Gryphon served as the exclusive provider of management services for Sphere’s blockchain and cryptocurrency operations. Gryphon managed certain digital assets for Sphere, selling them as instructed by the company.

The relationship eroded in April 2023, when Sphere initiated legal action against Gryphon following an alleged spoofing incident that resulted in the unauthorized transfer of 26 Bitcoin (BTC) to a malicious actor. Gryphon contended it was the victim of Sphere’s “gross negligence,” blaming them for the security breach.

Furthermore, Gryphon alleges Sphere breached the contract by entering into four hosting agreements without Gryphon’s consent. Sphere contends that under the MSA, and through independent discussions with Gryphon, it was allowed to enter contracts with third parties. Sphere also argues that any breaches it committed were minor “technical breaches” and do not justify the large damages Gryphon is seeking.

Related: Sphere 3D’s legal issues escalate as Gryphon seeks to block $10M

Sphere 3D seeks $25 million in damages

Sphere is also seeking damages exceeding $25 million from Gryphon, under claims of failure to file a proof of claim in Core Scientific’s bankruptcy case.

Sphere provided $35 million in deposits to Core for hosting services, but only rendered about $1 million in services. After Core declared bankruptcy, Sphere eventually settled with Core for $10 million in reorganized equity.

A critical issue for Sphere was the contract that Gryphon entered with Core. This led to a complex situation where Core argued Sphere was not directly involved, complicating Sphere’s efforts to recover its deposits. This situation was further exacerbated by Gryphon’s failure to file a proof of claim in Core’s bankruptcy case by the set deadline.

Magazine: Is measuring blockchain transactions per second (TPS) stupid in 2024? Big Questions"
"[INST] Ethereum liquid restaking drove DeFi TVL to $100B in first quarter [/INST] Decentralized finance total value locked (TVL) almost doubled in the first three months of this year compared to the previous quarter, partially driven by Ethereum liquid restaking initiatives, according to recent research.

DeFi total value locked surged from a Q4 2023 low of $36 billion to peak at almost $97 billion in the first quarter of 2024, according to DefiLlama. Since the beginning of the year, it has increased by 81% to a two-year high of $98 billion last week.

Messari reported slightly higher TVL figures on April 18, noting that DeFi collateral increased by 65.6% quarter-on-quarter to reach $101 billion. However, it attributed this growth to the prices of the underlying assets increasing and liquid restaking.

“This uptick was primarily driven by asset price appreciation and liquid restaking, led by Ethereum's TVL growth of nearly 71%.”

DeFi total value locked between Q4 2023 and Q1 2024. Source: DefiLlama

The findings were echoed in an April 18 report by Web3 infrastructure and developer platform QuickNode, and institutional crypto data platform Artemis.

“Staking, liquid staking, restaking, and liquid restaking have all been catalysts of DeFi’s recent explosive growth,” it stated before adding that this “explains why staking now represents a large portion of DeFi’s TVL.”

Liquid staking TVL skyrocketed to an all-time high of $63 billion on March 13, primarily driven by Ether (ETH) liquid staking protocol Lido which currently has a 62% market share of the liquid staking ecosystem, according to DefiLlama.

Additionally, liquid restaking protocols such as EigenLayer exploded in popularity and usage during the period. EigenLayer TVL surged a whopping 990% during the first three months of 2024 to end the quarter with $12 billion.

EigenLayer allows ETH to be staked more than once for additional yields.

Liquid staking TVL, Q4, 2023-Q1 2024. Source: DeFiLlama

Related: DeFi TVL reaches $100B as Bitcoin pumps sentiment

QuickNode also reported that a substantial 291% quarter-on-quarter rise in user activity “has roused hopes of a second ‘DeFi Summer’ as there are signals for growth and a transformative shift despite the SEC’s best efforts.”

Nevertheless, since the recent crypto market retreat, DeFi TVL ha declined 11% to $86.6 billion at the time of writing.

Magazine: China and the crypto ETFs, Thai NFT music fest, KuCoin’s 1.3M new bots: Asia Express"
"[INST] Ethena Labs adds Bitcoin backing to its USDe synthetic dollar [/INST] Ethena Labs, the team behind USDe, has added Bitcoin (BTC) as collateral to its synthetic dollar-pegged product with the hopes of scaling “significantly” from its current $2-billion supply.

With Bitcoin open interest increasing from $10 billion to $25 million over the past year on major cryptocurrency exchanges, USDe has the capacity to scale by a factor of 2.5, Ethena explained in an April 4 post on X.

USDe went live on Ethereum on Feb. 19. At the time, Ethena promised a 27.6% annual percentage yield (APY) on staked USDe, prompting widespread concerns in the community. USDe’s APY topped out at 113% on March 5 but has since fallen to 7.15%.

Excited to announce that Ethena has onboarded BTC as a backing asset to USDe



This is a crucial unlock which will enable USDe to scale significantly from the current $2bn supply pic.twitter.com/FOZRWBrVZV — Ethena Labs (@ethena_labs) April 4, 2024

Ethena said Bitcoin would provide better liquidity and offer a more “safe” and “robust” product for USDe token holders.

“BTC derivative markets are growing at a faster pace than ETH and offer better scalability and liquidity for delta hedging.”

Ethena adopts a delta hedging strategy in the derivatives market to maintain USDe’s peg.

For example, Ethena may have short positions in Ether (ETH) or Ether-based derivatives, which become rewarding when Ether’s price falls. As a result, Ethena can offset any downward volatility from USDe’s collateral to a considerable degree.

Prior to the Bitcoin addition, USDe was backed by ETH, Tether (USDT) and Ether-based liquid staking tokens in proportions of 45%, 38% and 17%, respectively.

The firm sources the bulk of its collateral from Binance, Bybit and OKX in 59%, 15% and 20% proportions, respectively. Deribit, Bitget and BitMEX make up the remaining 6%.

Ethena acknowledged that Bitcoin doesn’t possess a native staking yield like staked Ether but said staking yields of 3%–4% are “less significant” during bull markets where funding rates can exceed 30%.

Related: Ethena will become highest revenue-generating crypto project — Delphi Labs CEO

Ethena is trying to differentiate its synthetic dollar product from stablecoins by eliminating or significantly reducing reliance on the traditional banking system.

USDe currently boasts the fifth-highest market capitalization among United States dollar-denominated products, according to CoinGecko.

Its $2-billion market cap only trails USDT, USD Coin (USDC), Dai (DAI) and First Digital USD (FDUSD).

Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom"
"[INST] Web3 needs player-centric games for mass adoption — Websea exec [/INST] Web3 gaming needs more player-centric projects with smooth onboarding to bolster mainstream adoption, according to Herbert Sim, chief operating officer of the hybrid cryptocurrency exchange Websea.

He told Cointelegraph in an exclusive interview:

“GameFi projects need to put players at the forefront. At Websea Labs, we’re looking at projects enhancing user experience and gameplay, with eSports being the biggest thing in the market, even within crypto.”

Web3 games have been widely criticized for their lack of gameplay and user experience. Many previous Web3 games have grown in popularity simply based on their promised economic incentives for users despite having poor overall user experience.

However, today’s Web3 games will need to have both a sustainable economic model and a user-centric approach, according to Sim:

“Building sustainable economics is very important for the longevity of projects. So we only invest in projects that have longevity and put players at the forefront.”

Both the GameFi and decentralized finance (DeFi) sectors are seeing increased institutional interest, according to Sim, which will bolster mainstream user adoption:

“We’re focused on GameFi and DeFi because all the institutions are looking at this. Capital is flowing in along with a lot of technological innovation that are crucial for driving market growth and maturity in these sectors.”

Websea’s ecosystem investment institution, Websea Labs, launched a $100 million fund focused on incubating GameFi and DeFi projects at the end of March. Websea Labs was launched in October 2023.

According to Sim, the growing list of institutional participants will bolster the adoption of both sectors:

“More institutional involvement [in GameFi] helps raise awareness and credibility. So with this, more users and developers are joining the games […] we see this happening for both GameFi and DeFi.”

Related: Google sues alleged China crypto app racketeers: Report

Web3 games are becoming “playable”

An array of AAA-grade Web3 games are emerging from stealth in 2024, offering a combination of gameplay-focused user experience with high-quality graphics for the first time.

Among the most anticipated games is Solana-based space exploration role-playing game (RPG) Star Atlas, built on the popular Unreal Engine 5.

While Star Atlas is still in development, over 335,000 X followers are anticipating the game’s release, which will come in separate modules over the next five years.

Star Atlas Surge trailer. Source: Star Atlas

Showcasing the interest in Web3 games, Web3 RPG game Big Time generated over $100 million in revenue within the first six months of its pre-season without selling a single token, according to a March 28 X post by Mario Nawfal. He wrote:

“This is a game-changer, proving that Web3 Gaming is not just the future — it’s inevitable. After all these years of traveling the world talking about the use cases around Web3 Gaming, I’m glad it’s all finally coming to fruition!”

Related: Bitcoin’s 2028 halving price target is $435K, historical data suggests"
"[INST] Israeli central bank official says CBDC competition with banks is good for economy [/INST] While the impact of central bank digital currency (CBDC) on commercial banks has often been seen as a source of concern, Bank of Israel deputy governor Andrew Abir took a contrarian view in a speech published on the central bank’s website. Let the banks scramble to compete, he said, in essence.

Years of effort to increase competition in the Israeli banking sector have paid off in a variety of ways, but “we still have a long way to go,” Abir said. As the Bank of Israel raised interest rates to combat inflation, banks raised interest rates on credit, but the rise in deposit rates was “partial and slow.” He added:

“In many countries around the world, including Israel, commercial banks do not win public popularity contests. […] In Israel, some of the anger directed at the banking system is the result of the need to increase the level of competition in some of the segments.”

The design of the digital shekel includes an option to pay interest on it. Abir confidently declared that the digital shekel, which is still in its planning stages, would enjoy public support:

“The digital shekel will not be developed by some anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. Everyone will know who is behind the digital shekel and who is responsible for it — […] the same Bank of Israel that stands behind the cash we all know and trust.”

The introduction of a digital shekel would benefit the Bank of Israel as well, by making central bank money more readily available, for instance for use in digital payments, reversing the downward trend in central bank money use brought on by technological breakthroughs in the private sector, Abir said.

Related: Israel’s central bank says CBDC could be issued if stablecoin use increases

Just the option to hold digital shekels could incentivize banks to pay higher interest, Abir said. Thus the digital shekel would give the central bank a mechanism to influence the degree of transmission of central bank interest rates.

The digital shekel reportedly has strong support among the Israeli public.

Magazine: Terrorism and Israel-Gaza war weaponized to destroy crypto"
"[INST] Bitcoin trades above $69K following largest quarterly options expiry in history [/INST] The Bitcoin (BTC) price remained above the $69,000 mark on March 29 despite the market experiencing the biggest quarterly Bitcoin futures options expiry event in history.

Hao Yang, the global head of derivatives trading at Bybit exchange, told Cointelegraph:

“We have experienced the largest option expiration in history for Bybit and Deribit as well. People may roll over or unwind their hedging position during the expiration time, and the action of unwinding may have a small impact on the price movement in the very short term.”

Over $15.1 billion worth of cryptocurrency futures options expired on Deribit on March 29 at 8:00 am UTC, according to a March 28 X post by Deribit.

Of the $15.1 billion, $9.53 billion represented the notional value of Bitcoin options expiring at a put/call ratio of 0.84, with a “max pain” price potential of $51,000.

BTC options: Open interest by strike price. Source: Deribit

While options expiry can lead to heightened volatility, the max pain price point doesn’t offer an accurate reflection of Bitcoin’s long-term price potential, which is still tied to its fundamental values, Yang explained:

“Just as a fancy gaming PC case doesn’t directly impact the performance of the hardware inside, max pain is an indicator that provides some insight but ultimately has limited influence on the actual price movement of Bitcoin.”

Related: Max pain $51K? Bitcoin options worth over $9.4B set to expire Friday

Despite the expiry, the price impact was minimal, said Andrey Stoychev, project manager at Nexo’s prime brokerage division. He told Cointelegraph:

“With the current scenario where calls are substantially in the money while puts are converging to zero, delta hedging has largely concluded, and we anticipate minimal price impact from the expiry. However, the pivotal question remains: will the call profits be reinvested into new contracts, and if so, what strikes and maturities will be favored?”

The pre-halving Bitcoin correction may be over

Bitcoin price fell 0.7% in the 24 hours leading up to 10:35 am UTC to trade at $69,924, according to CoinMarketCap data. The world’s first cryptocurrency is up over 11.9% on the monthly chart.

BTC/USDT/ 1-day chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Bitcoin’s historic pre-halving retracement occurred in line with previous historical retraces. The current pre-halving correction may be over if Bitcoin price can flip its old all-time high of $69,000 into support, said Rekt Capital in a March 26 video analysis:

“Bitcoin is now peaking beyond this old all-time high, potentially positioning itself for this pre-halving retracement to be over.”

Related: Bitcoin Halving: Latest News and Full Coverage by Cointelegraph"
"[INST] Tron argues SEC ‘not a worldwide regulator’ and lawsuit goes ‘too far’ [/INST] The entity behind layer-1 blockchain Tron has asked a New York federal court to dismiss a United States Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against it, arguing the U.S. regulator targeting “predominantly foreign conduct.”

“The SEC is not a worldwide regulator,” and its effort to apply U.S. security laws to “predominantly foreign conduct” goes “too far,” the Tron Foundation said in a March 28 dismissal motion in a New York federal court.

Last March, the SEC sued Justin Sun, the Tron Foundation, file-sharing platform backers the BitTorrent Foundation and its San Francisco-based parent firm, Rainberry Inc. — the latter two Tron acquired in 2018 — alleging its sale of Tron (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) tokens are unregistered securities offerings.

The Singapore-based Tron said in its motion that the SEC’s case is against “foreign digital asset offerings to foreign purchasers on global platforms” for which it has no authority.

Tron claimed the tokens were sold “entirely overseas” with steps taken to avoid the U.S. market and that the SEC didn’t allege they “were offered or sold initially to any U.S. residents.”

It said the SEC’s claim that later secondary token sales “on a U.S.-based platform serving users worldwide” were unregistered U.S. securities “is tenuous at best.”

Highlighted excerpt of Tron and Sun’s motion to dismiss. Source: CourtListener

Even if the SEC had authority, the tokens fail classification as investment contracts under the U.S. securities classification, the Howey test, Tron argued.

In its suit, the SEC also claimed Sun, a Chinese-born Grenadian citizen, engaged in “manipulative wash trading” — where one entity buys and sells a token to simulate market activity — and secretly paid celebrities, including Soulja Boy and Akon, to promote the tokens.

“No particularized facts show that the trades were actually ‘wash trades,’ wrongfully executed for illegitimate purposes (much less affecting anyone in the United States),” Tron wrote in its motion.

“The SEC also does not allege a single victim,” it added.

Related: CFTC commissioner warns against infringing on SEC’s authority in KuCoin case

Tron’s other arguments included that the SEC failed to detail “factual allegations, laying out each defendant’s role in each claim” and relied on “generalizations and conclusions to support its already thin, frequently indiscernible claims.”

“For example, although the SEC purports to allege fraud, no material misstatement is alleged, leaving Defendants (and the Court) to speculate on the precise basis for those claims,” it wrote.

Tron also argued the case should be dismissed under the major questions doctrine — a Supreme Court ruling saying Congress will pass laws and not give authority to regulators, which other crypto firms, including Kraken and Coinbase, have cited in SEC lawsuit dismissal bids.

The SEC should file its own response to Tron’s motion within two weeks. The SEC declined to comment beyond the public filings.

Magazine: Crypto regulation — Does SEC Chair Gary Gensler have the final say?

Update (April 1, 11:15 pm UTC): This article has been updated to include that the SEC declined comment."
"[INST] Swiss Bitcoiners renew efforts to orange-pill the country’s central bank [/INST] Update April 25 at 3:35am UTC: This article has been updated to reflect that 2B4CH's first filing in October 2021 was postponed, and therefore, it didn't fail to obtain the 100,000 signatures needed to initiate a referendum.

Several Swiss-based Bitcoiners are renewing attempts to get the Swiss National Bank to hold Bitcoin (BTC) in its reserves by holding a referendum to change the country’s constitution — but they will need to convince more than 100,000 locals to sign a petition first.

Adding Bitcoin to the central bank’s reserves would help protect the country’s “sovereignty and neutrality” in an increasingly uncertain world, said Yves Bennaïm, founder and chairman of 2B4CH, a nonprofit think tank leading the charge.

“We are in the process of completing the organizational preparations for the committee and preparing the documents that must be submitted to the State Chancellery in order to start the process,” Bennaïm told Swiss news outlet Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) on April 20.

However, 100,000 signatures from Swiss nationals are needed within 18 months for a referendum to be held on issues brought about by Swiss nationals or groups — a threshold that forced 2B4CH to postpone it first attempt in October 2021.

2B4CH first launched the “Bitcoin Initiative” around that time, stating its mission was to add Bitcoin as a reserve currency to Article 99-3 of the Swiss Federal Constitution.

Switzerland boasts a population of 8.77 million, meaning about 1.15% of locals will need to sign the petition.

“By including Bitcoin in its reserves, Switzerland would mark its independence from the European Central Bank. Such a step would strengthen our neutrality,” said Luzius Meisser, president of the Bitcoin-focused trading platform Bitcoin Suisse, who is assisting Bennaïm with the initiative.

Meisser will try to convince the Swiss National Bank about the benefits of adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet in an April 26 meeting. He’ll have three minutes to plead his case.

The executive previously tried to convince the central bank to buy 1 billion Swiss francs ($1.1 billion) of Bitcoin each month as an alternative to German government bonds in March 2022, according to NZZ.

However, Swiss National Bank Chair Thomas Jordan reportedly said Bitcoin didn’t meet the requirements for SNB to add it as a reserve currency in April 2022.

Related: Crypto adoption is booming, but not in the US or Europe — Bitcoin Builders 2023

Meisser is now claiming that Switzerland would be 30 billion Swiss francs ($32.9 billion) richer had the central bank followed his suggestion in 2022 and that leaving it any later risks the chances of other central banks swooping in on Bitcoin, forcing Switzerland to buy at “significantly higher prices than everyone else,” he said.

However, Leon Curti, head of research at asset manager Digital Asset Solutions, is hopeful that the recent approvals of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the United States and Hong Kong will influence the Swiss National Bank to invest in Bitcoin.

2B4CH told Cointelegraph that they'll take as much time as necessary to get the 100,000 signatures needed to initiate a referendum:

""The project is a marathon, not a sprint, putting all the chances on our side to gather the 100k signatures within the allocated timeframe is precisely why we are taking the time to prepare carefully, even if it takes time.""

The NZZ article brought about a positive response from Joana Cotar, a German politician and Bitcoin activist who strongly opposes a European Union-backed digital currency.

Cointelegraph reached out to 2B4CH but didn’t receive an immediate response.

Magazine: Bitcoin in Senegal: Why is this African country using BTC?"
"[INST] IRS criminal investigation chief joins Chainalysis: ‘It’s time to move on’ [/INST] A 29-year veteran of the United States government, including three years as chief of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Criminal Investigations team, has moved to a position at cryptocurrency analytics firm Chainalysis.

In an April 8 announcement, Chainalysis said Jim Lee had ended his time at the IRS and moved to become the analytics firm’s global head of capacity building. Lee said he plans to focus on “helping international agencies develop solutions against cryptocurrency-based crime.”

As the IRS’ chief of criminal investigations, Lee sometimes worked with Chainalysis to facilitate the seizure of crypto used for illicit purposes. In December 2023, he said digital assets posed a risk for financing terrorism and ransomware attacks but acknowledged most people use the technology for “legitimate purposes.”

“Crypto has brought greater transparency and efficiency to finance, and we’re still in the early innings,” said Lee. “I believe that with time, this technology can continue to give people more control over their money and heighten financial inclusion around the world. However, criminals of all stripes have also been quick to adopt cryptocurrency.”

In a March post on LinkedIn, Lee said:

“It’s time to move on and give others a chance to lead.”

Lee said his move to Chainalysis was partly due to the company “[leading] the way from the private sector in making cryptocurrency safe.” The firm has often worked with U.S. authorities in criminal crypto cases, including ransomware attacks during the pandemic and tracing transactions for reporting taxes.

Related: Ransomware returns: Chainalysis flags record $1B payments in 2023

The former IRS chief announced his retirement from the criminal investigations team. In March, the agency said Guy Ficco would succeed Lee on April 1. Cointelegraph reached out to the IRS but did not receive a response to its questions about Lee at the time of publication.

Lee’s move to Chainalysis comes as U.S. lawmakers, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, express concerns about policymakers who previously legislated or enforced crypto rules moving into the digital asset industry after leaving the government. Senator Warren suggested that many officials could be laying the groundwork while in public service to “audition” for positions in the private sector involving crypto.

Magazine: Lawmakers’ fear and doubt drives proposed crypto regulations in US"
"[INST] Ethereum-based investment products see negative outflows for 4th consecutive week [/INST] Ethereum-based crypto investment products saw negative outflows for the fourth consecutive week despite positive inflows into other crypto-based investment products.

Ethereum saw $22.5 million worth of outflows last week, in contrast with most of the other top altcoins, according to an April 8 report by CoinShares.

“Digital asset investment products saw continued positive sentiment with inflows totalling US$646m last week. inflows year-to-date at US$13.8bn are at their highest ever level, now far surpassing the US$10.6bn seen in 2021.”

Weekly crypto flows by asset. Source: CoinShares

Ethereum’s fourth consecutive week of outflows came despite other top altcoins recording positive inflows. According to the report, Litecoin registered $4.4 million worth of weekly inflows, followed by Solana with $4 million and Filecoin with $1.4 million.

The Ether (ETH) price rose 6.8% in the 24 hours leading up to 11:45 am UTC to change hands at $3,625. The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency is up 2.3% on the week but down 8.2% over the past month, according to CoinMarketCap data.

ETH/USDT, one-month chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Solana is often touted as one of the most promising “Ethereum killers” due to its scalability and high transaction throughput. Its native token has also been outperforming Ether. Solana’s (SOL) token rose 24% during the past month, while Ether fell over 6.2%, according to TradingView data.

ETH/SOL, one-month chart. Source: TradingView

Related: Frax Finance dives into DeFi liquidity with $250M USDe allocation

Is investor ETF appetite on the decline?

Despite $646 million worth of weekly inflows into digital asset investment products, investor appetite for exchange-traded funds (ETFs) may be on the decline, according to CoinShares.

“Despite this, there are signs that appetite from ETF investors is moderating, not achieving the weekly flow levels seen in early March, while volumes last week declined to US$17.4bn for the week compared to US$43bn in the first week of March.”

Since spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved in January, they have massed over 834,000 Bitcoin worth $60.4 billion in total on-chain holdings. ETFs have accumulated 4.24% of the current BTC supply, according to Dune data.

Short Bitcoin investment products saw outflows for the third consecutive week, totaling $9.5 million, suggesting “minor capitulation among bearish investors,” according to CoinShares.

Related: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall after halving"
"[INST] Bitcoin charts suggest the ‘dominance train’ is coming, traders say [/INST] A clear ascending triangle is forming on the Bitcoin dominance chart, signaling a potential surge in Bitcoin’s (BTC) market share, according to several crypto traders. Some, however, argue it’s going to go the other way.

“The BTC dominance train is about to leave the station,” crypto trader and Into The Cryptoverse founder Benjamin Cowen declared to his 810,700 followers in a March 27 X post.

Since September, Cowen claims Bitcoin’s market cap dominance has been in an ascending triangle pattern. Source: Benjamin Cowen

An ascending triangle pattern on a chart develops when the price consolidates between an upward trendline support and a horizontal resistance trendline.

Bitcoin’s dominance — measuring Bitcoin’s share of the total crypto market capitalization — “is coming back in a big way,” crypto trader “Beanie” on X told his 194,800 followers on March 27.

Beanie suggested Bitcoin’s dominance usually grows in bear markets as crypto-native investors flock to it as a safe haven, preferring its stability over more risky and speculative digital assets.

Despite Bitcoin hitting an all-time high this month, Beanie added the current trend mirrors the 2018 bear market.

“This is far different from the 2021 bull market, where dominance fell considerably from 70% to 40%. It actually parallels the 2018-2019 bear market,” they said.

Bitcoin held an 85% market dominance in March 2017, but by January 2018, it plummeted to an all-time low of 32.45%.

Bitcoin dominance is currently sitting at 50.1%, according to CoinStats data.

Related: Cathie Wood’s Bitcoin ETF hits daily inflow record as BTC retests $72K

Not every trader agrees with the sentiment. Some hold that Bitcoin’s market share seems to be decreasing in the long term from a macro perspective.

Crypto trader Zero Ika told his 43,500 X followers that Bitcoin’s dominance is actually in a “long-term downtrend.”

“If we take a look at the whole picture considering the logarithmic chart, we can clearly see that BTC D. is in a long-term downtrend.”

BTC dominance chart on TradingView. Source: Zero Ika

Magazine: Is measuring blockchain transactions per second (TPS) stupid in 2024? Big Questions"
"[INST] Van Eck heir to launch new USD stablecoin with $12M VC backing [/INST] Nick van Eck, the son of investment management maestro Jan van Eck, is set to launch a new United States dollar-backed stablecoin after closing a $12-million funding round.

Crypto veterans Drake Evans and Joe McGrady joined with van Eck in October to build Agora, which will launch the Agora digital dollar with the ticker AUSD, according to an April 2 Bloomberg report. Nick van Eck will serve as CEO.

AUSD will be fully backed by cash, U.S. Treasury bills and overnight repo agreements, while $90-billion asset management firm VanEck — where Jan van Eck is CEO — will manage a fund for Agora’s reserves.

“There is a need to have transparent and trustworthy institutions managing the assets of these digital dollars,” said VanEck director of digital assets Kyle DaCruz.

The $12-million seed funding round was led by digital asset VC firm Dragonfly, with additional investments coming from Robot Ventures, Wintermute, Breed and General Catalyst — where van Eck previously worked as a partner.

Evans previously served as head of lending at decentralized finance firm Frax Finance, while McGrady was the director of operations at digital asset management firm Galaxy Digital.

Agora’s parent company is incorporated in Delaware, and its stablecoin issuer is based in the British Virgin Islands. For the time being, it will only serve select markets outside the United States.

“Until there’s federal legislation for stablecoins in the U.S., we’re going to focus primarily on customers outside of the U.S.,” van Eck told Bloomberg.

Van Eck expects places such as Argentina and Southeast Asia will benefit most from a digital dollar.

Agora enters a fierce stablecoin market, led by Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC), which boast market capitalizations of $104.3 billion and $32.5 billion, respectively, according to CoinGecko.

The next six largest stablecoins all have market caps above $500 million.

Related: Cardano finally gets fiat-backed stablecoin USDM after huge delays

However, van Eck believes there’s still room for a newcomer. Agora will focus on establishing strong partnerships with all industry players, from cryptocurrency exchanges and custodians to decentralized applications and trading firms.

Van Eck said AUSD holders wouldn’t receive income like holders of the TerraClassicUSD (USTC) did before it completely collapsed in May 2022.

“I think especially post what happened last cycle, we were losing the narrative and I want to build a company that I think brings this industry forward.”

Agora did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom"
"[INST] Bitcoin ‘no longer cheap’ — Fidelity revises medium-term outlook for BTC [/INST] Fidelity Digital Assets has revised its medium-term outlook for Bitcoin (BTC) from “positive” to “neutral” following the first quarter, citing several metrics that suggest Bitcoin is no longer considered “cheap” amid a potential build up of sell pressure.

In its latest Signals report released on April 22, Fidelity Digital Assets cited the Bitcoin Yardstick, or Hashrate Yardstick, which works in the same way as the Price-to-earnings ratio is used in stocks, except in this case, it is used to determine if Bitcoin is undervalued.

Fidelity noted that the Yardstick remained between a negative one and zero deviations from the mean of 51% in the first quarter, meaning there were “zero days on Q1 where Bitcoin was considered 'cheap.'”

This would suggest that Bitcoin is now trading at “fair value,” said Fidelity, which has now revised its medium-term outlook for Bitcoin to neutral. Other metrics it cited that added to its neutral outlook was the fact that long-term holders are adding to sell pressure, while 99% of addresses are in profit, which “could incentivize selling.”

Other on-chain metrics backing up the firm’s revision to a neutral outlook in the mid-term included the Net Unrealized Profit/Loss (NUPL) ratio and the MVRV Z-Score, which is used to assess when BTC is over or undervalued relative to its “fair value.”

Fidelity highlights the reasons behind its neutral outlook. Source: Fidelity Digital Assets

The investment firm, however, has maintained its positive short-term outlook for Bitcoin, saying there was “some potential for short-term profit-taking” at the end of Q1, 2024, but added there were “no extreme indicators that are commonly seen during bull market peaks.”

The company cited price levels remaining above a “golden cross” on the Bitcoin chart with the asset trading above its 50-day and 200-day moving averages throughout Q1, indicating bullish momentum.

“We believe on-chain indicators are now clearly above the lows or extreme bottoms previously observed,” said the firm’s director of research Chris Kuiper in a post on X on April 23.

The report also referred to Bitcoin’s realized price, a metric that aims to capture the average cost basis of all current coin holders. The realized price was around $28,000 at the close of Q1, and has maintained a position of support since mid-January.

BTC price against SMAs and RP. Source: Glassnode/Fidelity

Additionally, on-chain data showed continued accumulation by smaller investors, with the number of addresses holding greater than or equal to $1,000 worth of BTC growing by 20% since the beginning of the year and hitting new all-time highs.

Exchange balances have also continued declining as more investors moved to self-custody, reducing selling pressure, it noted.

Related: Bitcoin price breaks above $66K — Has BTC flipped bullish again?

Kuiper said that “we are nowhere near the historical extreme highs,” before adding that “this leaves us in a middle-ground or halfway point” of the market cycle.

“Historically, a disproportionate amount of price gains occur in the latter half of the cycle.”

Bitcoin has remained range-bound since the end of February, oscillating between resistance at $72,000 and support at $60,000. However, it has gained 5% since the weekend halving event and is currently changing hands for a ten-day high of $66,863, according to Cointelegraph data.

Magazine: Jameson Lopp: Skeptical of spot Ether ETFs, BTC price prediction dilemma: X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Bitcoin halving 2024: 5 ways it’s different this time [/INST] Another Bitcoin halving has come and gone, the fourth so far, and this one was like no other before it, with institutional investment playing a key role for the very first time.

Bitcoin halvings have been historically associated with one essential similarity — a subsequent spike in BTC price, which often occurs some time after the halving.

While the community has yet to find out whether the fourth halving will follow the same path, some things are already different about the Bitcoin halving 2024.

Crypto user base up at least 400% since the 2020 halving

While the speed of new Bitcoin generation has decreased since the first halving, the demand has not stood still.

Since the previous Bitcoin halving — which occurred in May 2020 — the global crypto user base has added at least around 400 million users, based on various sources.

In 2020, the number of crypto owners worldwide counted around 100 million users, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) estimations. By the end of 2023, the number of global crypto users surged to as high as 580 million people, as estimated by crypto exchange Crypto.com.

Global cryptocurrency users from January 2023 to December 2023. Source. Crypto.com

Despite Bitcoin being the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and the oldest, it apparently has fewer users than the entire crypto ecosystem.

According to data from Technopedia, approximately 2.7% of the global population is estimated to own Bitcoin as of 2024, which translates to around 219 million people. If accurate, the estimated figure is up around 208% from 71 million Bitcoin users four years ago, as calculated by Crypto.com.

With Bitcoin or most other cryptocurrencies, most user count estimations can not be 100% accurate, as on-chain transaction analysis is often incapable of differentiating between long-term holders and lost BTC, as well as other factors.

2024 pre-halving Bitcoin rally has not been seen before

One of the biggest differences between the fourth Bitcoin halving and the three past halvings is that the price has seen extraordinary growth pre-halving in 2024.

In the previous cycles, Bitcoin price recorded breakouts after the halving rather than before, and new all-time highs came roughly one year following the halving date.

For example, Bitcoin didn’t break out above the previously set ATH of $20,000 before the 2020 halving. In that cycle, the Bitcoin price only crossed ATH 10 months after halving. The picture is much different this time around.

In the current cycle, Bitcoin reached all-time highs right before the halving event, setting a record of $73,600 on March 13, 2024.

Such a breakout has never been seen before, and multiple analysts agree, including eToro crypto analyst Simon Peters.

Miners ‘better shaped’ for halving this time

The never-seen-before Bitcoin price appreciation pre-halving has potentially had a positive impact on the mining industry as miners obtained more control over mining costs.

“In comparison to the previous halving, it appears miners are in better shape overall in terms of lower levels of debt and potentially better control over their costs, such as electricity,” Fidelity Digital Assets’ director of research Chris Kuiper told Cointelegraph, adding:

“What’s also helping miners this cycle is the price appreciation before the halving — something that also hasn’t been seen in previous cycles.”

Since the third halving in May 2020, Bitcoin mining energy consumption has significantly increased, surging from around 50 Terawatt hours (Twh) to 99 Twh on April 18, 2024.

Bitcoin energy consumption. Source: Digiconomist

At the same time, the amount of Bitcoin network’s energy consumption powered by renewable energy sources has also increased, with renewables accounting for 54.5% BTC mining consumption as of January 2024, according to Bitcoin ESG Forecast. As of September 2020, this figure stood at 39%, according to data from CCAF.

First Bitcoin halving with spot BTC ETFs in the U.S.

One of the most straightforward things about Bitcoin halving 2024 is that this halving is the first ever with BTC exchange-traded funds (ETF) enabled in the United States.

After many years of efforts, spot Bitcoin ETFs debuted trading in January 2024, opening exposure to Bitcoin for institutional investors.

Related: Not just the halving: Why analysts are bullish on Bitcoin in 2024

According to Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas, spot Bitcoin ETFs have seen “blockbuster success,” which apparently reflects a spike in demand for Bitcoin.

Since the first day of trading, all ten spot Bitcoin ETFs combined have increased their holdings by at least 220,000 BTC, which is worth around $14 billion at the time of writing.

BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF has attracted the biggest amount of inflows among 10 BTC ETFs, with its holdings surging more than 10,000% from just 2,621 BTC on the trading debut to 273,140 BTC on April 18.

M2 CEO Stefan Kimmel said:

Looking at the broader landscape, while halving garners attention, we are cognizant that it's just a part of a larger narrative. The confluence of ETFs, quantitative easing, and halving will define the future contours of the market.

Bitcoin became more globally decentralized and secure

Bitcoin has also significantly improved in terms of network security and decentralization. Since 2020 — when most new Bitcoin was mined in Mainland China — Bitcoin has emerged as a more distributed network.

Just four years ago, Bitcoin mining in China amounted to nearly 80% of Bitcoin’s total mining hash rate globally. As of February 2024, the biggest Bitcoin mining countries are the United States with 40% of the total hashrate, as well as China and Russia, accounting for 15% and 12%, respectively, according to Hashlab Mining founder Jaran Mellerud.

Geographic distribution of Bitcoin hash rate between September 2019 and January 2022. Source: CBECI

“This geographic decentralization is continuing as miners migrate to Africa and Latin America to take advantage of cheaper electricity prices,” Mellerud said.

Additionally, the Bitcoin blockchain has become more resistant to attacks as its hash rate has surged five times since the previous halving.

“It now requires five times more computing power and associated electricity supply, electrical infrastructure, and mining hardware to attack the network,” Hashlab Mining founder noted.

Magazine: Bitcoin Halving will pump games, Shrapnel’s ‘simple’ secret revealed: Web3 Gamer"
"[INST] Nifty News: LA’s Bored Ape lovers go hungry, Bitcoiners sell $500 Game Boy dupe and more [/INST] Bored & Hungry LA flips its last NFT-themed burger

A Los Angeles burger restaurant which used a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) nonfungible token (NFT) as its brand is serving up its last patties and fries after two years in business and is being sold to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

“Today we say goodbye to the original Bored & Hungry location in Long Beach, CA,” co-founder Andy Nguyen said in an April 8 X post.

Nguyen added the “branding and franchising company” Hungry DAO acquired the Bored & Hungry brand, which also has three locations in the Philippines, one in Seoul, South Korea and slated Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai pop-ups during events later in the year.

The restaurant’s founding team will join the DAO as a shareholder, and the brand “will be announcing their new home in the U.S. soon,” he added.

Bored & Hungry opened in April 2022 and other Bored Ape NFT holders have started businesses — including a Cuban restaurant in Miami — using their NFTs which they own the rights to.

“The supportive BAYC and Web3 community helped us break ground, in becoming the first to utilize ownership of the digital IP asset and create a restaurant brand,” Nguyen wrote. “We’re proud to have made our mark, and excited to see where the community takes it next.”

Game Boy dupe will cost $500 to play Bitcoin NFTs

The Bitcoin Ordinals-based gaming platform Ordz Games is planning to hock a Bitcoin gaming console and crypto wallet that looks like a Game Boy for a reported $500 price tag.

On April 7 at Hong Kong’s Web3 Gaming Expo, Ordz debuted its BitBoy One device, a name blending “Bitcoin” and “Game Boy” — not to be confused with the crypto influencer turned one-time “fighter” of the same name.

Ordz Games expects the console will cost around $500, exact price pending, with preorders slated for mid-April, GamesBeat reported.

That’s 10 times as pricey as competing handheld retro game consoles such as those from Anbernic, which start at about $50 and its around $50 more than a new entry-level PlayStation 5.

The BitBoy One (left) being demonstrated in Hong Kong. Source: BitBoy/X

The BitBoy One can play retro-style play-to-earn games put on Bitcoin using its NFT-emulating Ordinals protocol and acts as a wallet to store any Bitcoin (BTC) earned, which — obviously — neither the PS5 nor Anbernic’s consoles can do.

The Bitcoin console can also power a Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) with users able to farm airdrops by leaving it running, according to a press release.

Doodles to make animated film with Lil Wayne as a skeleton

NFT collection Doodles has teased its upcoming animated film Dullsville and The Doodleverse, which will have rappers Lil Wayne and Coi Leray voicing characters.

In an April 5 X post, the collection said it will start to unroll the film’s “storytelling experience” starting in “summer” (that’s mid-year for non-Americans) through music, live events, partnerships, merchandise and NFTs, which it decided to market as “digital collecting experiences.”

The marketing blitz will end with the film premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

A poster for the Doodles film. Source: Doodles/X

Doodles kept further details about the film sparse but said Lil Wayne, known for his diamond-certified 2008 hit Lollipop and Coi Leray, who rose to prominence with her 2022 platinum hit Players, will voice respective film characters “Captain Stoke” — a skeleton — and “Deysi” — a seemingly anthropomorphic flower.

A promotional picture for the Doodles film. Source: Doodles/X

The musical pair will also take part in the film’s original soundtrack composed by singer-songwriter and Doodles chief brand officer Pharrell Williams which includes three music videos.

NFT sales drop for 5th straight week

NFT sales volumes for all blockchains have slid for the fifth week in a row after reaching a year-to-date high in early March led by a significant drop in Ethereum NFT sales.

CryptoSlam! data shows the daily total NFT sales volume peaked this year on March 4 at over $80.4 million, which has slid over 50% to nearly $39.4 million five weeks later on April 8.

Daily total year-to-date NFT sales volumes in U.S. dollars. Source: CryptoSlam!

Ethereum NFT sales volumes have seen a significant downturn, with 30-day figures seeing a nearly 48% drop to $363.3 million — larger than the drops seen by market leader Bitcoin at 13.5%, Solana at over 15% and Polygon’s nearly 34%.

The 30-day NFT sales volumes by the top 5 most used blockchains. Source: CryptoSlam!

Over the past seven days, however, Bitcoin-based NFTs saw an over 24% volume jump at $97.7 million — the only blockchain in the top five to see a weekly gain.

Related: ZachXBT claims he is being ‘borderline harassed’ by US law enforcement

The most traded NFTs over the past week and the past 30 days were “Uncategorized Ordinals,” which as the name suggests, is any Bitcoin Ordinal not part of a recognized collection.

These vagrant Ordinals saw $156 million in trading volumes over 30 days, a 54% bump from the previous 30-day period — $37.4 million of which was in the past week.

Other news

Dogecoiners did their own “Runestone” airdrop, copying the hyped giveaway done through Bitcoin Ordinals last month.

Crypto exchange Binance shelved supporting Bitcoin Ordinals about a year after introducing them to its NFT marketplace, claiming it needed “to streamline product offerings.”

Web3 Gamer: Gods Unchained app drops crypto, Kings of Fighters Arena review"
"[INST] As Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing approaches, letters invoking vegan lifestyle call for leniency [/INST] Advocates for Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried, expected to be sentenced on March 28 following his conviction on seven felony counts, have called for leniency for the former FTX CEO.

In letters filed in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on March 26, five individuals called on Judge Lewis Kaplan to impose a light sentence on SBF. The letters, from people who knew Bankman-Fried personally or were impacted by the collapse of FTX, highlighted SBF’s vegan lifestyle, his experience dealing with autism, and the exchange’s plan to repay users.

Dr. Adam Hesterberg, who lived with SBF from 2012 to 2014, argued the former FTX CEO should receive “leniency in his sentence” based in part on converting half of their household to vegetarianism or veganism. Others who did not know the CEO personally suggested that Judge Kaplan consider Bankman-Fried’s atypical “personality traits” in and out of the courtroom.

“I can speak from experience that the mind of those on the spectrum works differently,” said Maria Centrella, a mother of a child diagnosed with autism. “Though I have never met Sam, I firmly believe that while he may be an MIT grad - he did not fully understand the scope of what was going on and did not have malicious intent.”

Prosecutors submitted a sentence recommendation that Bankman-Fried serve between 40 and 50 years for his role in misusing funds at FTX and Alameda Research. SBF’s lawyers recommended he serve 6.5 years behind bars. The maximum allowable sentence gives Judge Kaplan the discretion to sentence SBF for up to 110 years, but many have suggested that this outcome is unlikely.

Related: SBF says proposed 50-year sentence casts him as ‘depraved super-villain’

Bankman-Fried’s immediate family and others submitted similar character references to the judge in February, claiming that throwing him in prison would be “draconian” and present the risk of physical danger given his personality. Many of the letters do not mention the impact the collapse of FTX had on investors, who lost access to millions of dollars.

“SBF does not deserve to get off lightly for his crimes because of the ‘autism defence,’” said AutismBC Director Lucas Gates in a Feb. 28 X post. “He knew what he did was fraud, and he should go to prison for the rest of his days.”

The former FTX CEO has been in prison since Judge Kaplan revoked his bail in August 2023 following alleged attempts to influence or intimidate witnesses in his criminal case. In November, a jury convicted Bankman-Fried on all seven counts after a month-long trial.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Where will Bitcoin's price be at the next halving in 2028? [/INST] Saturday’s Bitcoin (BTC) halving has officially seen the rewards paid out to miners reduced from 6.25 Bitcoin per block to 3.125 BTC. But now, experts turn their eye to where Bitcoin could be by the next halving in 2028.

Despite miners being technically paid less for their efforts in securing the network, halving events are widely regarded by many analysts as being a precursor to significant increases in the price of Bitcoin — with the “supply shock” of new BTC hitting the market from miners being significantly reduced.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Swyftx lead analyst Pav Hundal looked to the price action that occurred following previous halvings to predict a price increase of at least 100% by the 2028 halving, which would put Bitcoin somewhere around the $120,000 mark.

“We’ve gone from trough to peak price gains of more than 60,000% in 2013, to 12,000% in 2017, and then 2,000% in 2021,” he said.

“Our central scenario is for this trend to continue and to see a high double, or low triple digit percentage point increase in price by the next halving.”

He added that investors would be “hard-pressed” to imagine a scenario where Bitcoin would not be worth more than its current price of $60,000 by the next halving.

Offering a slightly more bullish sentiment, Henrik Andersson, the chief investment officer at Australian crypto investment firm Apollo Crypto, told Cointelegraph that he predicts a peak price of around $200,000 per Bitcoin before 2028.

Andersson said that the price action of Bitcoin would be buoyed by the wider acceptance of Bitcoin from an institutional standpoint brought by the eleven recently approved spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States.

Additionally, he said his fund predicts that there will be roughly $65 billion worth of net inflows into the ETFs during the current cycle.

Caroline Bowler, the CEO of BTC Markets told Cointelgraph that she was looking to external predictions from investment banking firms such as Standard Chartered which said the price of Bitcoin could reach as high as $200,000 by the end of 2025.

“In the short window of time we’ve seen with ETF involvement, there has been ongoing support for that thesis,” she said.

Kraken Australia Managing Director Jonathon Miller told Cointelegraph that while the conversation around the time of the halving naturally translates into price predictions, he sees the event as a “reminder of the progress being made towards global adoption.”

“My hope is that by the next Bitcoin halving, crypto adoption will have accelerated so far that even the most stubborn technology laggards will be learning about the halvingprocess for the first time,” Miller said.

The halving could see miners struggle

There are, however, still concerns that come with Saturday’s Bitcoin halving and the next in 2028 — the primary one being that miner rewards could be reduced to a level that makes Bitcoin mining unprofitable in the long run.

Related: 10 days until halving: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall

On Jan. 26, Cantor Fitzgerald released a report outlining that the price of Bitcoin would need to stay firmly above $40,000 if the majority of publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies want to stay in business for the long haul.

Bitcoin miners could struggle if BTC dips below $40k. Source: Cantor Fitzgerald

At current prices, this isn’t an issue for most miners. However, if Bitcoin were to fall below $40,000 — it could create concerns around reve

Andersson looked to an increase of alternative revenue sources for mining firms outside of pure BTC-denominated mining rewards.

He noted the increase in revenue for miners brought about by the popularity of Ordinals and other fee-generating applications such as the upcoming launch of the Runes protocol and layer-2 networks like Stacks.

Similarly, Bowler seemed unfazed by the idea that mining could become “too expensive” saying that the current concerns around mining and energy efficiency should be considered “hyperbole.”

Web3 Gamer: Bitcoin Halving will pump games, Shrapnel’s ‘simple’ secret revealed"
"[INST] Bitcoin outperforms Tesla stock for the first time since 2019 [/INST] Bitcoin's (BTC) price has finally outperformed Tesla's (TSLA) stock over the past five years in percentage terms. The electronic vehicle manufacturer has also missed out on a potential $1.27 billion in profit after selling a big chunk of its BTC holdings in 2022.

BTC overtakes TSLA in long-term gains

Over the past five years, Bitcoin's price has risen over 1,180%, while Tesla's stock price has risen over 806%, according to TradingView data.

Looking at smaller time horizons, Bitcoin’s returns have outperformed TSLA over the past year, in particular. Bitcoin rose 139% while Tesla fell over 11% over the past 12 months, while year-to-date BTC is up 49% while Tesla’s stock price is down 42%.

Such a stellar year so far for BTC has made it the world’s ninth-largest asset with a $1.3 trillion market capitalization, larger than Meta Platforms, Berkshire Hathway, Visa, or JPMorgan Chase.

In comparison, Tesla is the world’s 21st largest asset, with a $455 billion market capitalization, according to Companiesmarketcap.

World’s 10 largest assets by market capitalization. Source: Companiesmarketcap

Tesla was among the first publicly traded companies to invest in Bitcoin back in February 2021, when the company bought over $1.5 billion worth of BTC, around the $36,000 mark.

However, Tesla sold around 10% of its holdings in March 2021. Then, the company sold approximately 75% of its Bitcoin reserves in the second quarter of 2022.

Had Tesla not sold, it would have made over $1.27 billion in profit, up over 84% on its initial investment, at current price levels.

Tesla BTC Balance. Source: Arkham Intelligence

Tesla currently holds 11,509 BTC worth over $766 million with Coinbase Prime Custody, according to Arkham Intelligence.

Related: Bitcoin price breaks above $66K — Has BTC flipped bullish again?

Bitcoin ETFs are the main reason why BTC is winning

The approval of the ten United States spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) was the main reason behind BTC price rising 60% so far this year, according to Andrey Stoychev, the head of prime brokerage at Nexo. He told Cointelegraph:

“U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs’ role in elevating Bitcoin to a genuine asset class has been invaluable, with pleasing trading volumes and capital flows since launch.”

The ten Bitcoin ETFs amassed over 835,000 BTC in cumulative on-chain holdings, worth over $55.1 billion, according to Dune.

Related: New Bitcoin whales, ETFs are up only 1.6% in unrealized profit — Is the BTC bottom in?

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Degen Chain L3 now tops the TPS charts within the Ethereum ecosystem [/INST] Degen Chain, a new Ethereum layer-3 network, has recorded the highest transaction per second (TPS) count in the Ethereum ecosystem over the last 24 hours.

Degen’s TPS count increased 62% over the last day to notch 35.7 TPS — beating out the blockchain it was built on, Base, at 29.7 TPS, according to L2BEAT.

Arbitrum One, Ethereum and zkSync Era rounded out the top five.

TPS by Ethereum-based blockchain over the last 24 hours. Source: L2BEAT

Multiplying Degen’s 35.7 TPS by 86,400 seconds in a day means the memecoin chain processed 3.08 million transactions over that timeframe.

But Degen Chain has only notched $819,600 in trading volume over the last day, placing it 35th out of 44 blockchains tracked by CoinGecko.

This means the average value per transaction was a mere $0.27 — which is much lower compared to Ethereum and Base at $1,867 and $170 respectively.

While TPS is widely used to measure a blockchain’s scalability limits, several industry leaders say it is a flawed metric — as it fails to consider the computational size of each transaction.

“[It] is a bit like counting the number of bills in your wallet but ignoring that some are singles, some are twenties, and some are hundreds,” explained Steven Goldfeder, a founder at Offchain Labs who recently spoke with Cointelegraph Magazine.

Related: Memecoin sector’s continued growth hinges on long-term utility

The memecoin turned chain is powered by the Degen (DEGEN) token, which initially started out as a tipping token for users interacting with Degen’s channel on Farcaster — a decentralized social media platform.

This is a textbook example of how a memecoin can actually accrue social value, according to Thomas Tang, a vice president of investments at cryptocurrency venture capital firm Ryze Labs.

“It’s gained massive mass popularity because everyone’s tipping each other, and everyone holds it,” Tang told Cointelegraph.

“So they built a layer 3, based on that.”

Ian Lee of blockchain infrastructure firm Syndicate believes Degen Chain is paving the way for applications on layer 3s. Source: Ian Lee

There is currently $4.1 million in total value locked on Degen Chain, while the three-month-old DEGEN token boasts a market capitalization of $326 million, according to CoinGecko.

Degen Chain is considered an ultra-low-cost, application-specific layer 3 blockchain which was built with Arbitrum Orbit and leverages the settlement layer of Base, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution.

Magazine: Is measuring blockchain transactions per second (TPS) stupid in 2024? Big Questions"
"[INST] Solana project launches delayed due to extended network congestion [/INST] Intermittent congestion on the Solana blockchain has forced several crypto projects to postpone their launches. Solana developers say they are working on a fix by April 15.

Users of the Solana blockchain reported increasing issues around network congestion and transaction errors over several weeks. New projects, especially those planning token launches, decided to hold off until the technical difficulties were resolved.

Some Solana projects that waited for a congestion resolution included a nonfungible token (NFT) project, Suit Up, altcoin project DuckCoin and Solana staking rewards platform Surge Finance.

On April 6, Anza, a Solana-focused software development shop, laid out its plan to address the network congestion on its Solana validator client implementation, Agave.

Initial investigations pointed to issues around QUIC implementation, a general-purpose transport layer network protocol, as the root cause. The developers said:

“Anza engineers, with other core contributors, have been working around the clock to diagnose and remedy bottlenecks and increase network performance. Expect more improvements and changes to roll out over the coming months.”

At the time of writing, users have reported experiencing delayed sends for Solana’s SOL (SOL) tokens on the crypto exchange Coinbase.

According to the incident report, Solana has been investigating the issue for over eight hours. However, the issues do not impact the trading and fiat withdrawal and deposit functionality.

Solana incident report for Coinbase. Source: status.coinbase.com

Solana co-founder Raj Gokal previously said that “the failed transactions on Solana blockchain have nothing to do with scalability.”

Related: Solana struggles: Record 75% of user txs are failing... or are they?

Amid growing criticism around transaction failures, Fantom network creator Andre Cronje has expressed support for the Solana network.

According to Cronje, the ongoing congestion on Solana stems from the ecosystem’s rapid growth, which has increased demand for block space. Cronje stated that performance issues are technical challenges, not consensus mechanism flaws.

Cronje referred to the Solana network as a victim of success. The uptick in transaction failures was followed by a recent uproar from Solana users on social media, who complained of failed transactions and a degraded user experience.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base memecoins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] 21Shares debuts Toncoin staking ETP TONN on SIX Exchange [/INST] 21Shares, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange-traded product (ETP) issuers, is launching a staking ETP based on cryptocurrency Toncoin (TON).

The new Toncoin Staking ETP is a 100% physically backed product that tracks the performance of TON while reinvesting staking yields into the ETP for enhanced performance.

The product will start trading on the Swiss SIX Exchange under the ticker TONN on March 27, the firm said in an announcement to Cointelegraph on Wednesday.

The new crypto investment product aims to provide investors with an opportunity to earn TON staking rewards without the need to set up and manage a staking node.

The TON Blockchain uses a proof-of-stake (PoS) model to achieve network consensus, allowing validators — or network security supporters — to earn rewards by staking.

According to the TON Foundation, users typically need at least 600,000 TON ($2.9 million) to qualify for staking, but users are allowed to join forces and pool their assets together.

With 21Shares, investors will be able to enjoy the benefits of staking Toncoin without the technical complexities associated with TON staking. Instead, they will have the convenience and liquidity of traditional financial markets, the announcement notes.

According to 21Shares co-founder and president Ophelia Snyder, TONN is the “first and only TON ETP” ever launched. Snyder told Cointelegraph that the firm opted to launch a staking ETP instead of a spot one because staking ETPs are “superior to non-staking ETPs as the staking yield benefits ETP holders.” She added:

“A non-staking ETP would forego their income stream which is paid in TON, so for investors thinking in USD terms, their USD on yield cost goes up if TON goes up.”

According to the 21Shares website, the Toncoin Staking ETP holds $25 million at launch, equivalent to roughly 5 million TON at the time of writing. The ETP’s net asset value debuts at $20.

The Toncoin Staking ETP. Source: 21Shares

21Shares mentioned that the TONN ETP provides a regulated and secure way for investors to tap into The Open Network, a blockchain network used by popular crypto-friendly messengers like Telegram.

Related: TON blockchain launches $115M community incentive program

“The Open Network aims to create a comprehensive ecosystem of user-facing services like the super-app WeChat, offering products like a decentralized storage, decentralized VPN, a payments solution and a native wallet to hold crypto directly within the messaging app,” 21Shares announcement noted.

The Open Network, or TON, started as “Telegram Open Network” in 2019 and was developed by Pavel Durov’s Telegram.

The company was forced to cut involvement in the blockchain project in May 2020 following a long-running legal battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

Despite dropping TON formally, Telegram continued actively participating in promoting the open-sourced TON technology and Toncoin.

TON is one of the few coins natively supported in the custodial cryptocurrency wallet on Telegram, known simply as “Wallet.”

In line with the ongoing rally on cryptocurrency markets, TON has posted significant growth recently, surging 134% over the past 30 days. At the time of writing, the coin is trading at $4.97, down about 4.5% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] New Zealand tests the water on ‘digital cash’ issuance [/INST] The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) opened a 101-day public consultation on the principles and design options it created for the country’s digital dollar. However, the central bank plans to discuss the issuance of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in future consultations.

The RBNZ has taken a four-stage approach to CBDC issuance and aims to issue an in-house digital dollar by 2023. New Zealand’s central bank is in the second stage of its digital cash initiative, which involves exploring high-level design options for digital cash and related consulting and budgeting.

New Zealand’s four-stage approach to CBDC issuance. Source: consultations.rbnz.govt.nz

On April 17, the central bank released a consultation paper to help determine “future work on whether digital cash is right for New Zealand.” The consultation closes on July 26.

The consultation paper promotes CBDC adoption while highlighting the need to align with other central banks and the declining cash usage.

“Cash is no longer a core payment medium for many people. The frequency of cash use by New Zealanders continues to fall.”

The consultation paper asks 12 questions about four broad topics: personal opinion on New Zealand’s CBDC, the benefits of digital cash, strategic design and managed issuance. According to the RBNZ, launching a CBDC along with a robust supporting infrastructure can spur innovation in the local payments sector.

Concurrently, the RBNZ is developing alternate formats for its digital cash consultation paper, which will be available in late May.

Related: Printing money for fools is a ‘great business to be in’ — NZ central bank head

Andrew Bayly, the minister of commerce and consumer affairs of New Zealand, recently warned against the country’s sluggish approach toward experimenting and adopting innovations on digital assets and blockchain technology.

In response to the inquiries by the parliamentary Finance and Expenditure Committee into cryptocurrencies, Bayly’s office said:

“The current ‘wait and see’ approach could risk New Zealand missing out on the benefits of development in the digital asset industry.”

The ministry’s advisers made eight key recommendations for New Zealand to get back on the global crypto wave, which includes adopting policies and regulations to encourage developments in digital assets and blockchain and facilitate greater collaboration between government and industry players, among others.

Magazine: 6 Questions for Kieren James-Lubin, who wants us to ‘get on the same page’ about grandma"
"[INST] PayPal opens PYUSD stablecoin to USD conversions for cross-border transfers [/INST] PayPal will allow all United States users outside the state of Hawaii to fund money transfers to family and friends abroad using U.S. dollars converted from its native stablecoin PayPal USD (PYUSD).

According to the April 4 announcement, the service, powered by PayPal’s Xoom, is able to fund money transfers via PYUSD to more than 160 countries with no Xoom transaction fees. “By introducing the option to fund cross-border money transfers with USD converted from PYUSD, Xoom now offers an easy and reliable way for U.S. users to send money abroad using PYUSD as a funding source,” the company wrote, adding:

“When this option is selected, Xoom will convert the PYUSD in a U.S. user’s PayPal Cryptocurrency Hub to USD currency with no crypto sale fee, and recipients will receive funds in the fiat currency selected by the sender.""

Through the service, funds can be sent abroad either to a recipient’s bank account, a mobile wallet address or a financial institution for pickup. Transactions not denominated in U.S. dollars will be subject to currency conversion, which includes a spread. All U.S. users can use the service except in Hawaii, where the holding of cryptocurrencies with PayPal is prohibited by state law.

The issuance of and custody of PayPal USD is performed by Paxos Trust Company in New York. Since its launch last August, close to $200 million PYUSD has been issued, a number well below USD Coin’s (USDC) market cap of $32.9 billion and Tether’s (USDT) $110 billion. Jose Fernandez da Ponte, senior vice president of PayPal’s Digital Currency Group, said that the firm’s goals surrounding PYUSD are to create “a stable value to maximize user confidence and ensure it had utility for commerce and payments.”

The same day, Ripple announced it would launch its own U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin to rival the $150 billion stablecoin market. Similarly, on April 3, Nick van Eck, the son of investment management maestro Jan van Eck, is set to launch a new U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin after closing a $12-million funding round.

Related: What is PayPal USD, and how does it work?"
"[INST] Coinbase partners with Lightspark for Bitcoin Lightning payments [/INST] Coinbase is one step closer to integrating Bitcoin Lightning on its platform amid a new partnership with Lightspark, an enterprise-focused Lightning solution led by former PayPal president David Marcus.

In an April 4 X post, Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong said the integration of the Bitcoin layer-2 network will happen “soon” — which will allow its 108 million user base to leverage potentially faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions.

“Lighting up all Coinbase touchpoints with Lightning” will offload more transaction activity to Bitcoin’s second layer, which will combat the recent rise in fees on Bitcoin’s base layer, Lightspark explained in an April 3 post.

Armstrong confirmed that Coinbase would integrate Bitcoin Lightning last September but didn’t provide further details on how or when that would occur.

Cointelegraph reached out to Coinbase but didn’t receive an immediate response.

Founded in 2022, much of Lightspark’s efforts have revolved around removing complexities that come with implementing and managing a Lightning node to send and receive transactions reliably.

The firm also built Lightspark Predict — an AI-based smart engine that aims to optimize liquidity requirements and routing in real time to maximize transaction success rates and finality times.

According to Bitcoin financial services firm River, Lightning payments success rate is around 99.7%, measured from the 308,000 Lightning transactions requested on its platform last October.

Related: Bitcoin Lightning Network is growing, but 3 major challenges remain

The main reason for failure occurs when no payment route can be found that has enough liquidity to facilitate the transfer, however, River found the average Lightning transaction size was around 44,700 satoshis or $11.84.

The firm estimated between 279,000 and 1.1 million Lightning users were active in September.

Coinbase’s biggest competitor, Binance, integrated Bitcoin Lighting last July.

Lightning has become a popular payment method in Lugano, Switzerland, El Zonte in El Salvador — known as “Bitcoin Beach,” and Utiva in Costa Rica, known as “Bitcoin Jungle.”

However, Bitcoin bull Michael Saylor and some other industry pundits believe Bitcoin is far better off as a store of value technology than a medium of exchange.

Big Questions: How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?"
"[INST] ApeCoin DAO gives thumbs up to .APE top-level domains [/INST] Update March 4, 10:40 UTC: This article has been updated to include interview responses from D3 co-founder and CEO Fred Hsu.

The ApeCoin community unanimously approved a proposal to register “.APE” as a new top-level domain (TLD) with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the world’s authority on IP addresses and domain names.

In line with ICANN’s plan to implement new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) by the second quarter of 2026, the ApeCoin decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) proposed working with Web3 domains specialist D3 to create the .APE TLD as a real-world asset (RWA).

A majority (91.68%) of the ApeCoin community voters did so in favor of the proposal, while 8.32% voted against it.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Fred Hsu, co-founder and CEO of D3, said that DNS domains it offers and intends to register with ICANN are inter-operable, i.e. can be used for Web1 (email/web), Web2 (apps/social) and Web3.

According to the proposal, D3 will lead the effort to prepare and submit the application, which is expected to take approximately one year to be readied.

Additionally, D3 also plans to offer Ape-linked name tokens as an immediate Web3 identifier for users. Hsu’s vision for D3 includes bridging over 5 billion Web2 users to Web3 through domains. “Not much has changed in the past 20 years with traditional domains, so we’re aiming to revolutionize both domain ownership and usage,” he added.

Apecoin DAO voted in favor of launching .APE domains. Source: snapshot.org

Hsu said that the .APE domains, once launched, will have the potential to generate multi-million dollars in annual revenue. “Domains serve as both a vital piece of digital real estate and a source of recurring revenue,” he explained.

As part of the deal, the gross revenues generated from the Ape name tokens and the .APE TLDs will be split 50/50 between ApeCoin DAO and D3.

The proposal clarified that “owning” a TLD is not possible. Instead, “ICANN contractually grants the rights to exclusively operate and monetize each TLD that automatically renews every 10 years.”

The initial budget for the .APE acquisition process. Source: snapshot.org

As shown above, the total costs involved for the initiative is three million ApeCoin (APE). D3 will incur ongoing technical and operational costs related to managing the .APE namespace, with contributions from ApeCoin DAO for co-marketing to the masses.

Related: ENS data from Etherscan now visible in Google search results

In February 2024, domain registrars GoDaddy and the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) signed a partnership to allow users to link Web3-based .eth domains and domain name system top-level domains at no cost.

The GoDaddy-ENS partnership eliminates the barrier of high gas fees that previously demotivated users from bringing domain names over to ENS. Paul Nicks, president of domains at GoDaddy, highlighted the development as “the fusion of domain names and blockchain technologies,” which benefits the Web2 and Web3 ecosystems.

In July 2023, GoDaddy’s Web3 competitor Unstoppable Domains allowed users to buy .eth names with added payment methods and functionality to streamline the management of ENS domains.

Magazine: Ethereum’s ERC-20 design flaws are a crypto scammer’s best friend"
"[INST] Bitcoin clings to $65K — More losses ahead for BTC price? [/INST] Bitcoin’s (BTC) price fell over 7.1% during the past day, slipping below the $65,000 mark for the first time since March 24.

The current week, or the 14th week of the year, is historically one of the worst weeks for Bitcoin’s price performance. BTC price fell an average of 8.33% on the 14th week of the year, according to Coinglass data.

Bitcoin price must sustain $65,000

Bitcoin price fell over 6% in the past 24 hours, reaching a daily low of $64,610 at 1:35 pm (UTC), while trading volume for the world’s largest cryptocurrency rose over 75% during the day to $46 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.

BTC/USDT, 1-day chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Bitcoin failed its post-breakout retest, and the price momentum will continue slowing down as the Bitcoin halving approaches, argued popular crypto analyst Rekt Capital in an April 2 X post:

“Bitcoin has failed its post-breakout retest. Bitcoin could still technically recover above the old all-time high of ~$69,000 before the new weekly candle close is in.”

BTC/USD, 1-week chart. Source: Rekt Capital

Bitcoin’s price needs to be sustained above the $65,600 weekly range low to avoid further losses, added Rekt Capital.

Over $249 million worth of long leveraged positions would be liquidated across all exchanges, if Bitcoin price fell to to the $65,000 mark, according to Coinglass data.

Bitcoin Exchange Liquidation Map. Source: Coinglass

Following the correction, Bitcoin has reset multiple key metrics that previously suggested the price was overheated, including the relative strength index (RSI), which fell to 48 on the daily timeframe, suggesting that Bitcoin is no longer overbought, according to TradingView.

Related: Over $6B worth of BTC moved by 5th-richest Bitcoin whale

The RSI is a popular momentum indicator used to measure whether an asset is oversold or overbought based on the magnitude of recent price changes.

BTC/USD, 1-day chart. Source: Tradingview

Bitcoin’s price correction can be mainly attributed to newcomers who ha entered the Bitcoin market in the past two months since the approval of the United States' spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), according to Andrey Stoychev, the head of Prime Brokerage at Nexo. He told Cointelegraph:

“For fresh adopters, Bitcoin’s move from $40,000 then to the current $65,000 potentially signifies an over 50% return in as little as 60 days – a sure profit-taking signal in the investment world. It's important to remember that market corrections are part of every market dynamic.”

Stoychev expects a short-term correction thanks to new latecomers who want to invest in Bitcoin. He said:

“Bitcoin bull markets have come with returns, as three out of the first four cycles have surpassed previous highs. Looking back at 2020, Bitcoin surged 250% in just four months after breaking a new all-time high, suggesting a potential trajectory toward $231,000 if history repeats itself in this cycle.”

Traders should be watching the $64,000 mark, with over $17.21 million worth of Bitcoin futures liquidation leverage on Binance, the world's largest exchange. An additional $9.92 million worth of BTC stands to be liquidated at the $63,500 mark, according to Coinglass data.

Binance BTC/USDT liquidation heatmap. Source: Coinglass

Bitcoin long liquidations reach $109M as holders start selling

Over $152.5 million worth of leveraged Bitcoin positions were liquidated in the past 24 hours, with $109.11 million worth of long positions, according to Coinglass data.

Bitcoin’s sudden drawdown caused over $165 million of leveraged crypto liquidations in less than two hours on April 2.

Crypto liquidation heatmap. Source: Coinglass

Meanwhile, the dormant Bitcoin supply has reawakened. Long-term holder (LTH) supply declined by 900,000 BTC since the peak of 14.91 million BTC in December 2023, with Grayscale accounting for a third, or 286,000 BTC, according to an April 2 report by Glassnode. The report noted:

“Conversely, the Short-Term Holder Supply has increased by +1.121M BTC, absorbing the LTH distribution pressure, as well as acquiring an additional 121k BTC from the secondary market via exchanges.”

Bitcoin: Long/short-term holder threshold. Source: Glassnode

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Runes make up 68% of all Bitcoin transactions since launch [/INST] Runes, a new token standard on the Bitcoin blockchain, has made up more than two-thirds of transactions on Bitcoin since it was launched following the network’s halving event on April 20.

More than 2.38 million Runes transactions have been processed, accounting for 68% of all Bitcoin transactions made since it launched on April 20, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard shared by blockchain research firm Crypto Koryo.

Ordinary peer-to-peer Bitcoin (BTC) transactions, BRC-20s, Ordinals and Runes were included in the total transaction count.

Share of Bitcoin transactions among various token standards. Source: Dune Analytics

Runes had its biggest day on April 23 with more than 750,000 transactions, though the count more than halved the next day at 312,000 transactions.

Much of the initial demand at block 840,000 came from memecoin and nonfungible token enthusiasts competing to inscribe and etch “rare satoshis” via the Runes protocol.

As a result, Runes transactions contributed to nearly 70% of miner fees on the halving day. Since then, the daily figure fluctuated between 33% and 69%.

However, industry pundits are also split on whether Runes will provide a sustainable revenue stream for Bitcoin miners, and there’s already a disparity between the numbers of Rune transactions and miner fees earned from Runes.

The new protocol, launched by Ordinals inventor Casey Rodarmor, has been marketed as a more efficient way to create new tokens on the Bitcoin network when compared to the BRC-20 token standard, an Ordinals-based method for creating Bitcoin-based tokens.

Related: Bitcoin fees crash after record daily average of $128 on halving day

However, not everyone is happy with the amount of block space that has been taken up by Runes transactions in recent days.

Among those critics is Nikita Zhavoronkov, a lead developer at blockchain search engine Blockchair, who believes Bitcoin has “completely ceased” becoming a peer-to-peer electronic cash system — what its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, originally envisioned.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Tether completes ‘gold standard’ security audit [/INST] Tether has announced the successful completion of a System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC) audit — the highest level of security compliance that an organization can demonstrate. The audit was developed by the American Institute of Certified Accountants (AICPA).

The audit underscored Tether’s commitment to offering a secure user experience, according to Paolo Ardoino, the CEO of Tether, who wrote in an April 1 announcement:

“This compliance measure assures our customers that their assets and data are managed in an environment meeting the highest standards for data protection and information security. This independent validation of security controls is vital for Tether, demonstrating our commitment to being the world’s most trusted and compliant stablecoin.”

Tether has committed to undergoing annual SOC 2 audits to ensure its security practices remain consistent with the standards.

The firm aims to achieve the SOC 2 Type II certification by the end of 2025, which assesses the effectiveness of Tether’s internal controls over a period of 12 months.

Related: Tether boosts Bitcoin reserves with latest acquisition

Tether issues the largest stablecoin, Tether (USDT), which has a current market capitalization of over $104 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Tether’s USDT reached a record $100 billion market cap on March 4, posting 9% year-to-date growth.

This makes Tether the third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization behind Ether (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC). Its closest competitor, Circle’s USD Coin (USDC), is the seventh-largest crypto, with a $32.5 billion market cap.

Related: Tether launches recovery tool to migrate USDT between blockchains

Tether aims to overtake 1% of BTC mining in 2024

Tether is also expanding into new venues beyond stablecoins. The firm is planning to spend around $500 million on the construction of Bitcoin mining facilities in Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador.

The firm aims to grow its computing power to 1% of the Bitcoin mining network, Tether’s Ardoino told Bloomberg in an interview on Nov. 16, 2023.

The new sites would have a capacity of between 40 and 70 megawatts (MW) and include the $610 million debt financing facility extended to German miner Northern Data Group.

Tether also aims to amp up its direct mining operations to 450 MW by the end of 2025. The firm is also considering a 300 MW facility and is setting up its facilities inside containers that can be moved when electricity prices change, Ardoino said in the interview:

“Mining for us is something that we have to learn and grow over time. We are not in a rush to become the biggest miner in the world.”

Related: Tether expands AI operations with global recruitment drive for top-tier talent"
"[INST] Nigeria’s central bank forced to deny claims of crypto account freeze [/INST] Update 11:45 am UTC: The central bank is denying they have issued a directive.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has been forced to deny a report saying it issued a directive requiring all banks and financial institutions to identify individuals or entities engaging in transactions with cryptocurrency exchanges and to ensure that such accounts are put on Post No Debit (PND) instruction for six months.

A “Post No Debit” instruction is a directive issued by a bank or financial institution to restrict certain transactions on a customer’s account. When a PND instruction is in place, the account holder is prohibited from making debit transactions, meaning they cannot withdraw funds or make payments using the affected account.

Confusion occurred when the central bank denied the story on X but then deleted the denial. Some hours later they claimed the allegations were indeed false.

The bank said it would catch anyone it believes is buying and selling Tether (USDT) on the listed platforms illegally, especially those using peer-to-peer (P2P) methods.

Central Bank of Nigeria circular ordering a restriction on crypto users’ accounts. Source: Central Bank of Nigeria

The alleged circular also stated that regulated financial institutions engaged in crypto or facilitating payments for crypto exchanges are prohibited. However, this contradicts an earlier ban lifted in December 2023, allowing banks to facilitate transactions for crypto exchanges.

The central bank lifted the ban nearly two years after enforcing a comprehensive ban on banks engaging with digital currencies.

According to a statement by the CBN at the time, it recognized that the increasing global demand and adoption of crypto make it unjustifiable to maintain the stringent restrictions imposed on financial institutions in 2021.

Related: Binance exec will remain in Nigerian custody until May 17 bail hearing: Report

However, due to the swift devaluation of the naira and the subsequent inflation rate of 29.9%, the government shifted its attention to platforms offering cryptocurrency services. It disabled websites associated with crypto trading that had gained notoriety for setting informal valuations for the naira.

Binance encountered significant scrutiny when the CBN raised concerns regarding “suspicious financial transactions” occurring through Binance Nigeria in 2023.

CBN head Olayemi Cardoso said $26 billion had passed through Nigeria via Binance in 2023 from unidentified sources and users.

Binance is facing further challenges in Nigeria, with its executive Tigran Gambaryan, who is based in the United States, being detained in the country. He’s facing five charges linked to money laundering following a meeting with Nigerian officials regarding Binance’s regulatory compliance.

Nadeem Anjarwalla, one of the executives who met with Nigerian officials about Binance’s regulatory issues, subsequently escaped custody and was tracked down to Kenya, where he faces extradition.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Crypto Biz: The return of Web3 gaming, Binance appoints board, and more [/INST] The gaming industry is set to release a massive crop of games in 2024, following a few years of development since the last bull cycle, with game developers reimagining business models to attract and retain players amid growing competition.

Metaverses, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and even play-to-earn features are still on the table for some studios. Game developer Illuvium, for instance, is working on an interconnected environment that will combine three different titles under the same experience.

In addition, Illuvium’s upcoming release will offer a revenue-sharing model. “We take all the in-game revenue from players spending to travel, cure shards, purchase cosmetics, and fuel and then use it to buy ILV off the market. We then take the ILV and distribute it to stakers in the protocol. The longer you stake, the higher the amount you receive from each distribution,” Kieran Warwick, Illuvium’s co-founder and CEO, told Cointelegraph.

The platform recently raised $12 million to support the gaming launch, which is scheduled for the second quarter of 2024. “The gaming market is about to explode,” predicts Warwick.

Venture capital (VC) firm Andreessen Horowitz is in the same boat. It recently announced it would inject $30 million into the intersection between tech and gaming.

Source: Sam Altman

Along with the revived sentiment surrounding the gaming industry, this week’s Crypto Biz explores Binance’s new (and first) board of directors, Paradigm’s new crypto fund and how miners are gearing up for the Bitcoin halving.

Andreessen Horowitz to invest $30 million in tech-fueled gaming startups

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has announced it will invest $30 million in technology-centric gaming startups, including artificial intelligence (AI), virtual and artificial reality (VR/AR) and Web3 games. “We are investing at the intersection of TECH x GAMES, which means AI/infra, 3D tools, VR/AR, web3 games, gamified consumer apps, and much more,” said Andrew Chen, a general partner at a16z, who oversees a16z’s Games One Fund. The $30 million will be invested across the next 45 days via the firm’s early-stage accelerator “SPEEDRUN” program, Chen said in an April 1 X post, with $750,000 handed out to each startup that joins the program.

Binance forms board of directors for the first time

Binance Holdings, which operates the cryptocurrency exchange of the same name, has formed a seven-person board of directors filled with company executives and independent members. According to Binance’s website, the firm’s board of directors is now chaired by Gabriel Abed, the former ambassador of Barbados to the United Arab Emirates. Other members included Binance CEO Richard Teng, Binance co-founder Heina Chen, Bayview Acquisition Corp CEO Xin Wang, Gojo & Company managing partner Arnaud Ventura, Roger Wang and Rock He. The board’s formation is likely one of the most significant changes to Binance’s leadership since Teng moved from his position as head of regional markets to become CEO in November 2023.

Crypto VC Paradigm seeking up to $850 million raise for fund: Report

Crypto VC firm Paradigm is reportedly negotiating a raise of up to $850 million for a new fund. Paradigm is discussing with investors to raise between $750 million to $850 million as crypto markets have returned over the past months, Bloomberg reported on April 3, citing people familiar with the matter. If Paradigm completes the raise, it would be its largest since it raised a $2.5 billion fund in November 2021 at the peak of the last cycle’s bull run — which was the largest cryptocurrency fund ever at the time. Some of Paradigm’s most notable Web3-related investments include Coinbase, Fireblocks, Blast, Optimism, Uniswap, Gitcoin and Friend.tech.

Bitfarms announces $240 million mining upgrade to triple post-halving hash rate

Bitcoin (BTC) mining company Bitfarms will invest nearly $240 million to upgrade its mining equipment as it aims to remain profitable after the upcoming Bitcoin halving. Bitfarms earned 286 BTC through mining in March 2024, with a monthly operating hash rate of 6.5 exahashes per second (EH/s). In March 2023, the firm mined 424 BTC with 4.8 EH/s — indicating the importance of increasing hash rate capacity to stay profitable in Bitcoin mining. Bitfarms sold nearly all the Bitcoin it mined over the past two months as it continues to reinvest into growing its mining fleet.

Crypto Biz is your weekly pulse on the business behind blockchain and crypto, delivered directly to your inbox every Thursday."
"[INST] Scammers exploit Google platform to promote phishing site [/INST] Google appears to be promoting a malicious crypto website that directs users to a phishing website clone that drains users’ crypto through Google Ads, an online advertising platform enabling businesses to showcase ads on Google’s search engine results pages.

According to a report by BleepingComputer, threat actors have discovered a method to advertise a counterfeit version of Whales Market, an over-the-counter (OTC) cryptocurrency platform facilitating the trading of airdropped tokens.

The report indicates that the fake version is being advertised as a sponsored link at the top of Google search results.

Cointelegraph has verified that Google is currently promoting the counterfeit Whales Market as an advert. Although it displays a seemingly genuine domain address on the search results page, users are rerouted to [www.whaels.market] instead of the authentic [www.whales.market] upon clicking.

Fake version of Whales Market promoted by Google Ads Source: Google

BleepingComputer also notes that the malicious actors have reportedly registered multiple domains mimicking Whales Market, including [www.whaless.market], which is already inactive.

The fake version replicates the interface of the authentic Whales Market site, deceiving users into connecting their digital wallets. However, malicious scripts are activated upon doing so, siphoning crypto from victims’ wallets.

This incident contributes to similar events where scammers have used Google’s platform to advertise deceptive services.

An example is the nearly $900,000 worth of crypto drained from one of the hot wallets belonging to billionaire investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban by an unidentified hacker.

Related: Scam crypto projects using stolen funds for liquidity disappear

In December 2023, Scammers used a wallet-draining service called “MS Drainer” to siphon approximately $59 million in crypto from victims over the past nine months.

The scammers used Google Ads to target victims with fake versions of popular crypto sites, including Zapper, Lido, Stargate, DefiLlama, Orbiter Finance and Radient.

While the individuals responsible for this recent phishing campaign are still unknown, Google appears to be taking action against scammers.

In April, Google filed a lawsuit against Chinese nationals Yunfeng Sun and Hongnam Cheung for deceiving individuals with counterfeit crypto investments through the Google Play store.

Wallet drainers have become a major problem in the Web3 ecosystem. In November 2023, the developer of the “Inferno” drainer claimed to be retiring after successfully stealing more than $80 million from victims during the software’s lifetime.

In March, the developer of “Monkey Drainer,” which had successfully stolen an estimated $13 million up to that point, also announced their retirement.

Magazine: Google sues crypto app scammers, Crypto.com in Korea"
"[INST] OKX launches Ethereum layer-2 network for lower fees & interoperability [/INST] Cryptocurrency exchange OKX has joined the likes of Coinbase in launching an in-house Ethereum-based layer-2 network to provide lower fees and interoperability for users interacting with decentralized applications.

OKX’s launched the public mainnet of X Layer, its zero-knowledge proof powered network, on April 15. The network was built using Polygon’s chain development kit (CDK) and enables shared state and liquidity across multiple blockchain networks using the Ethereum scaling protocol’s Aggregation Layer.

An announcement shared with Cointelegraph notes that X Layer provides faster, cheaper transaction capabilities when interacting with on-chain applications. The network uses ZK-proofs, the underlying technology used by various Ethereum layer-2 networks for improved security and scalability.

Related: Ethereum layer 2s to hit $1T market cap by 2030: VanEck

X Layer is EVM-compatible, allowing developers to launch or migrate Ethereum-based decentralized apps (DApps) without having to rewrite the underlying code.

A statement from OKX chief marketing officer Haider Rafique notes that X Layer and other layer-2 networks are set to become integral infrastructure for an interconnected Web3 ecosystem.

“We are building an ecosystem that is as seamless and interoperable as possible. We think X Layer has limitless potential thanks to our strong community and its connectivity with other Ethereum-based networks,” Rafique said.

OKX launched the mainnet beta of X Layer in November 2023, which attracted more than 50 Web3 DApps to launch on the testnet. OKX notes that DApps including the Graph, Curve, LayerZero, QuickSwap, Galaxy and Timeswap are in the process of deploying on its proprietary layer-2 network.

X Layer will allow OKX users to transfer assets, deposit and withdraw cryptocurrencies on OKX and access nearly 200 DApps offering token swaps, staking and smart contract functionality. OKX’s native OKB token acts as X Layer’s native token and is used to pay gas fees on the network.

Related: Ethereum ecosystem needs a major mindset shift for global impact, says Vitalik Buterin

Polygon CDK is touted to provide symbiotic benefits for OKX, X Layer and other chains connected to Polygon’s AggLayer. X Layer essentially connects to other chains built on Polygon CDK through the AggLayer, which allows for the transition of liquidity between these chains.

According to Polygon CEO Marc Boiron, this creates an interconnected network of liquidity across different blockchain protocols

“X Layer’s connection to the AggLayer solves the fragmentation of liquidity and users across chains on the AggLayer so they can all grow together. OKX’s 50 million users now have an easy path to onboarding to X Layer and all the other chains connected to the AggLayer.”

Investment management firm VanEck estimates that Ethereum layer-2 networks could exceed $1 trillion in market capitalization by 2030. These networks have become integral to helping Ethereum achieve scale, powering low-fee, secure and decentralized transactions and applications.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Paris Blockchain Week recap: Optimism abounded as the Bitcoin halving approaches [/INST] Paris Blockchain Week, a three-day insider event featuring panels, discussions, and presentations from a diverse group of global industry leaders, has now concluded its fifth annual gathering.

Cointelegraph was on site to capture the highlights, and there were plenty. As we turn the page in our calendars and begin preparing for the next big event — the Bitcoin halving predicted to occur on or about April 20 — here’s a recap of what you missed in France at Blockchain Week.

BTC to hit $250K?

Venture capitalist and Tim Draper, whose list of unicorn investments includes such noteworthy companies as Tesla, Baidu, Coinbase, and Twitch, believes Bitcoin could thrash its current all-time-high price of around $72K per coin by the end of the year.

“If I had to predict, maybe we could see $250,000 by the end of the year; I mean, it’s looking pretty good,” Draper told Cointelegraph in an interview.

Crypto market to hit $100T?

If Draper’s cool quarter-million prediction for BTC isn’t bombastic enough, eToro CEO Yoni Assia told Cointelegraph they believed the global cryptocurrency market would reach a capitalization of $100 trillion over the next decade. For comparison, gold, the precious metal, has a global market cap of about $16.18 trillion as of the time of this article’s publication.

But that might not be the most interesting prediction Assia gave us. They also told us that “the crypto community will be the first to identify singularity,” a hypothetical point in future human history where an artificial intelligence (AI) entity becomes effectively more capable (or intelligent) than any human, “because it’s very hard to define what consciousness is.”

Binance turns the page

Many companies wouldn’t face having to pay a $4.3 billion settlement to the U.S. government with optimism and aplomb, but Binance has moved on.

According to Binance executive Catherine Chen, the company is looking forward to the challenges it faces in the wake of the settlement. During a panel discussion moderated by Cointelegraph’s editor-at-large Kristina Cornèr, Chen said the monitoring restrictions placed on the company would ultimately prove to be a net positive for the industry:

“It is a challenge, but it’s a welcome challenge, and we fully embrace it because we know that that would be great for the market.”

Chen on stage at Paris Blockchain Week discussing Binance’s settlement. Source: Paris Blockchain Week

ETF inflows uneven

Around 90% of Bitcoin ETF inflows are still retail according to Jan van Eck, CEO of American investment management firm VanEck. The traditional banking and institutional investment sectors have, so far, been seemingly reluctant to dive into the BTC ETF market.

Jan van Eck on stage at Paris Blockchain Week. Source: Gareth Jenkinson

“You’ve had some Bitcoin whales, and some other institutions move some assets in, but they were already exposed to Bitcoin,” van Eck told Cointelegraph, adding that the end of April might see some further inclusion by non-traditional investors.

Dubai to ease burdens for small investors

Matthew White, CEO of Dubai's Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA) told Cointelegraph that the new system, if implemented, would place the bulk of the regulatory financial burdens on the largest players:

“The cost of compliance is borne by the larger systemic players, and this allows the smaller players to come into the ecosystem, be regulated, but also not have to suffer the same sort of level of costs of compliance that we’ve got.”

VARA CEO Matthew White discussing regulations at the Paris Blockchain Week stage. Source: Paris Blockchain Week

Ubisoft teases new game

AAA gaming giant Ubisoft, the publisher behind Assassin’s Creed, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and numerous other gaming franchises, took the stage to discuss its newest web3 title, a blockchain-based competitive PVP turn-based role-playing game called “Champions Tactics.”

“We must understand the market and how we launch this kind of game,” he said. “That’s really what we want to achieve here. We want to give the players the power to populate the game with figurines and understand what it means to own your gaming assets.”

Ultimately, Paris Blockchain Week turned out to be another optimistic gathering of like-minded entrepreneurs and professionals highlighting the challenges, opportunities, and triumphs in our industry."
"[INST] Vitalik Buterin shares the next steps for Ethereum Purge [/INST] Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared the next steps for protocol simplification and node resource load decreases, known as the Purge.

The Purge is a key stage in the Ethereum transition that involves the removal of old and excess network history and simplifying the network over time.

Aside from reducing historical data storage, this stage also significantly lowers the hard disk requirements for node operators and the technical debt of the Ethereum protocol.

Ethereum roadmap. Source: Vitalik Buterin

Buterin noted that introducing Ethereum improvement proposal (EIP)-6780 during the Dencun hard fork eliminated most of the “SELFDESTRUCT” code functions, which simplified the protocol by removing complexity and adding new security guarantees.

Buterin said that after the EIP-6780 implementation, each Ethereum block would have a higher number of storage slots due to the clearance of certain SELFDESTRUCT functions. Buterin hopes that a new EIP will completely eliminate the SELFDESTRUCT code in the future.

Related: Vitalik Buterin is cooking up a new way to decentralize Ethereum staking

The Purge will introduce history expiration via EIP-4444 to limit the amount of historical data stored. As a result, nodes will have the option to prune historical blocks that are over a year old.

The historical data will only be required when a peer has to synchronize with the head of the chain or when specifically asked for it.

Thus, when fresh blocks are confirmed, a fully synced node won’t require historical data that is more than 365 days old.

Buterin said that EIP-4444 can greatly increase Ethereum’s node decentralization.

“Potentially, if each node stores small percentages of the history by default, we could even have roughly as many copies of each specific piece of history stored across the network as we do today.”

The Ethereum co-founder also shared that Geth has recently deleted thousands of lines of code by dropping support for pre-Merge (PoW) networks.

He added that post-Dencun, an 18-day storage window for blobs will reduce the node data bandwidth to 50 gigabytes.

Buterin also discussed the need to purge precompile Ethereum contracts. The precompile contracts are used to implement complex forms of cryptography that cannot be implemented by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

However, in recent times, the demand for the contract function has declined, and it has become a “key source of consensus bugs and a huge source of pain for new EVM implementations,” said Buterin.

Magazine: ‘Account abstraction’ supercharges Ethereum wallets: Dummies guide"
"[INST] Cathie Wood’s ARK Bitcoin ETF has record $87M outflows, surpassing GBTC [/INST] Cathie Wood’s ARK 21Shares Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) has notched more than $87 million in daily outflows, marking the first time the fund has witnessed a larger daily outflow than Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) since the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States.

The outflows from the Ark 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB) was $87.5 million on April 2 — roughly 1,300 BTC — according to data from Farside Investors.

Today marked the second consecutive day of outflows for ARKB, which lost $300,000 in assets on its first-ever day of outflows on April 1.

Grayscale — which has posted consistent outflows every trading day since converting to a spot ETF — posted yet another daily outflow of $81.9 million.

Bitcoin ETF flows in U.S. dollars. Source: Farside Investors

Notably, this was a relatively low outflow day for GBTC, which has shed an average of $254 million per day over the past five trading days. Grayscale has hemorrhaged around $15.1 billion in total over the past three months.

A $150.5 million inflow for BlackRock’s fund resulted in net aggregate inflows of $40.3 million for the day despite the outflows from ARKB and GBTC.

Despite the past two days of outflows, ARKB remains the third-largest of the nine newly launched spot ETFs — excluding Grayscale — boasting $2.2 billion in assets under management (AUM).

ARKB trails behind BlackRock’s and Fidelity’s funds, which command respective AUMs of $14.1 billion and $7.6 billion.

ARKB is also the sixth-largest holder of BTC among funds, corporations and miners, with 44,662 BTC on its books, according to data from HODL15Capital.

Despite shedding a staggering 291,000 Bitcoin since its conversion to an ETF, GBTC still leads the pack in terms of total Bitcoin held, with around 329,000 Bitcoin on its books at the time of publication.

Related: New Bitcoin ETFs now hold 500,000 BTC, while GBTC outflows slow

The price of Bitcoin has been on the decline since the beginning of this month, falling around 9% from last week's high of $71,500 and briefly dipping below $65,000 on April 3 amid increasing ETF outflows.

In an April 2 post to X, Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas noted the launch of the first-ever 2x and -2x leveraged spot Bitcoin ETFs. The ProShares-based funds trade under the tickers BITU and SBIT.

“Looks like these two ETFs will be in the top 5 most volatile ETFs in the US (out of 3,400) with a standard deviation of about 150%,” he added.

Balchunas also noted that Bitcoin ETFs traded around $111 billion in volume in March, nearly triple what they did in February and January combined.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments — Trezor CEO

Updated (4:55 am UTC): This article has been updated to include BlackRock inflow data."
"[INST] Taiwan’s Ace Exchange founder indicted in $10.6M fraud case [/INST] Update April 11, 07:15 am UTC: This article has been updated to include a quote from Ace Exchange denying reports that the platform operates multiple franchise stores.

Prosecutors in Taiwan are taking action against David Pan, the founder of Ace Exchange, a local cryptocurrency trading platform.

According to an official statement by prosecutors, Pan was indicted alongside six other suspects on April 8. Prosecutors charged him with money laundering and fraud, which led to losses of 340 million New Taiwan dollars ($10.6 million).

The Taipei City police previously arrested Pan and 14 others allegedly involved in the case in January 2024 following raids on several locations, including Ace’s headquarters.

The prosecution found that Pan was one of the persons affiliated with the fraudulent cryptocurrency wallet service referred to as “Alfred” or “Afu wallet” and a related crypto card.

According to prosecutors, the persons defrauded customers by offering a service based on a classic high-reward promise model through offline over-the-counter exchange and fake investment groups.

After depositing funds, the defrauded investors could not withdraw their funds or found their accounts blocked.

A Taiwanese court reportedly ruled that the defendant’s property should be seized, with some confiscated assets amounting to at least 3.5 million NT$, or $110,000.

In response to the indictment, Ace Exchange published a statement on April 8, reiterating that Pan and his fraudulent activity had nothing to do with the platform, as he reportedly ceased to be involved in day-to-day operations in 2022.

Related: Philippines SEC ‘can’t endorse’ ways to retrieve funds after Binance ban

“The wallet product was developed by a third-party team entrusted by the former director Pan and is not a product or service launched by Ace Exchange,” the firm emphasized. It added that Ace was cooperating with local authorities.

The exchange stated the following:

“Please rest assured that the trading and operating conditions of Ace Exchange are normal. We ensure the security of user assets, and deposit and withdrawal services for all cryptocurrencies and New Taiwan dollars operate smoothly.”

Ace Exchange also denied reports alleging that the platform operates multiple franchise stores and facilitates cash transactions of cryptocurrencies through ATMs.

“We want to categorically state that Ace Exchange has never established franchise stores, nor have we engaged in any services involving cash transactions of cryptocurrencies,” a spokesperson told Cointelegraph.

Ace Exchange is a lesser-known centralized crypto exchange based in Taiwan. According to data from CoinMarketCap, the platform was launched in late 2018 and trades around $14 million per day.

According to data from Traders Union, Ace Exchange should be considered a “high-risk cryptocurrency exchange” with a trust score of 2.78 out of 10.

Magazine: Google sues crypto app scammers, Crypto.com in Korea: Asia Express"
"[INST] ‘Money-hungry VCs’ are bad for token launches in the long term — Analyst [/INST] Profit-seeking venture capitalists (VCs) are bad for the long-term sustainability and price action of newly-launched cryptocurrencies.

Despite bringing new liquidity for altcoin launches, VCs introduce significant sell pressure that damages the token’s long-term price action, according to popular crypto analyst Route 2 FI, who wrote in an April 22 Substack post:

“Permissionless token listing and money-hungry VCs are bad for the individual token long term. Every year 100 new tokens launch. Diluting existing ones. It’s now April 2024, and inflows into altcoins seem way more selective and not enough to offset big unlocks.”

One of the main issues with the current token launch trend is their initially high fully diluted valuation (FDV), which promises big airdrop allocations for early adopters but comes with large unlocking schedules for early VC investors. This mechanism will lead to a price decrease for most of these new tokens. According to Route 2 FI:

“I think most new VC scam coins (high FDV coins) eventually will dump hard AF. And that you can use this to your advantage in pair trading or in situations where you want to hedge.”

The total market capitalization of altcoins, excluding Bitcoin (BTC), stood at $1.05 trillion at the time of writing, up 38% year-to-date, from $760 billion at the beginning of 2024, according to TradingView data.

Total altcoin market capitalization, year-to-date chart. Source: TradingView

The issue with large VC unlocks is the lack of demand from crypto investors, which is unable to cover the large increase in a coin’s circulating supply and the selling pressure, wrote the pseudonymous analyst.

“At some point, the supply will outnumber the demand and we will start spiraling downwards due to massive inflation. Early buyers will get trapped, which leads to bearish sentiment among the community, reduced TVL in the protocol, devs (if any) leaving for greener fields, and team members quitting.”

Related: Europe’s largest banks are moving into crypto thanks to regulations — Bitpanda

Is 2024 the end of crypto altseason?

During previous market cycles, altcoins have historically pumped after Bitcoin’s rise to new highs, as profits from Bitcoin selling are rotated into other cryptocurrencies.

Altcoin Hype Cycle. Source: Rekt Capital

However, with over “300 decent projects,” there isn’t enough liquidity for all the top altcoins to rise together, which could be the end of the altcoin season trend. Route 2 FI said:

“We hear a lot about altseason, but this time around I think things will be different… But ask yourself who is going to buy all these tokens. Unless institutions or retail are coming in masses, it will just be a forever PvP fight.”

Related: Bitcoin price breaks above $66K — Has BTC flipped bullish again?"
"[INST] Binance tax evasion trial moved to May 17 in Nigeria [/INST] The tax evasion trial in a Nigerian court involving cryptocurrency exchange Binance and two of its executives has been adjourned to May 17. This delay occurred because the exchange had not yet been formally served with the charges.

According to local news agency BusinessDay, the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) has not served Binance with tax evasion charges. The FIRS lawyer argued that Gambaryan should represent Binance as the primary defendant, had been served, given that both Binance and its executives were charged together.

However, Gambaryan’s lawyer, Chukwuka Ikuazom, objected, citing Nigerian law, stating he couldn’t plead until Binance, the primary defendant, was served. Judge Emeka Nwite adjourned the proceedings for May 17, when he will give a ruling.

Binance and its executives, including Tigran Gambaryan, a 39-year-old U.S. citizen serving as head of financial crime compliance, and Nadeem Anjarwalla, a 37-year-old British-Kenyan regional manager for Africa, were arrested on Feb. 28, and charged with four counts of tax evasion during a visit to Nigeria.

The arrest came after the federal government banned cryptocurrency channels as part of a campaign to curb currency speculation. The court mandated that Binance give the Nigerian government access to data and details of Nigerian traders using its platform.

The charges involve Binance’s failure to register with Nigeria’s Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) for tax remittance. Gambaryan was present in an Abuja court on Friday but did not enter a plea. However, Anjarwalla wasn’t present as he had escaped detention and left the country in March 2024.

Related: USA to forge AI partnership with Nigeria for economic growth

Apart from the tax evasion trial, Binance and its executives face charges of laundering over $35 million by Nigeria’s anti-graft agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The trial is set to resume on May 2.

Binance, which was not represented in court and had no immediate comment, said on Thursday at the Token2049 crypto conference in Dubai, that it is working closely with Nigeria authorities following the detention of Gambaryan.

Meanwhile, a federal high court in Abuja, Nigeria, has again postponed the bail application hearing for Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan, who remains in custody at the Kuje correctional center.

However, Gambaryan is also suing the government for violating his fundamental human rights. Gambaryan’s motion claims that his detention in Nigeria and the confiscation of his passport violates the country’s constitution, which guarantees an individual’s right to personal liberty.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime"
"[INST] Bitcoin Cash price hiccups amid second-ever halving event [/INST] Bitcoin Cash (BCH) stumbled on Wednesday after a three-month-long rally before rebounding shortly after as the blockchain completed its second-ever halving — an event where mining rewards are slashed in half.

Bitcoin Cash is a proof-of-work blockchain network and cryptocurrency that was designed to be faster and cheaper to use than Bitcoin (BTC). The first Bitcoin Cash halving event took place on April 8, 2020, with miner rewards dropping from 12.5 BCH to 6.25 BCH.

There has been speculation in the lead-up to the halving, with the price of Bitcoin Cash increasing 147.85% over the past three months and 24% over the past 30 days.

However, in the day leading up to the halving, Bitcoin Cash's price dipped by 9.94%, falling to $572.21, as per CoinMarketCap data. However, after the halving, it quickly bounced back, reaching $604, a spike of approximately 5.5%.

The recent price decline led to liquidations totaling $3.9 million, predominantly affecting long positions at $3.3 million, while short positions accounted for $569,540, as per CoinGlass data.

Bitcoin Cash long positions were liquidated to the amount of $3.3 million following the price dip. Source: CoinGlass

On March 29, Cointelegraph reported that open interest (OI) in Bitcoin Cash futures perpetual contracts reached all-time highs of $708.75 million.

At the time of publication, the OI has continued its ascent, surging even further to $799.23 million.

Meanwhile, one X user ""DavidShares"" explained to his 17,500 followers that many miners had already switched over to mining Bitcoin ahead of the halving.

He also noted that hash rates have declined since the halving. The network has now validated 840,004 blocks, indicating just four blocks have been validated since the halving event, as per Bitcoin Unlimited data.

In 2017, Bitcoin Cash forked off from Bitcoin due to a group of the community disagreeing over ways of scaling up and decreasing transaction fees to adjust for the growing demand.

Related: Memecoin madness is breaking the Bitcoin halving cycle

Just two years later, it split again which led to controversy amongst the mining community as several had not upgraded to the new chain, resulting in a wasteful allocation of resources.

In November 2019, Cointelegraph reported that miners spent resources mining 14 empty blocks on the old chain that the majority of the Bitcoin Cash network already considered invalid and rejected.

Meanwhile, he highly anticipated Bitcoin halving is scheduled to take place on April 20, just 16 days from now.

Magazine: China will intensify Bitcoin bull run, $1M by 2028: Bitcoin Man, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Trader turns $13K into $2M within 1 hour as memecoin frenzy continues [/INST] A crypto trader turned $13,000 into over $2 million, a gain of 15,700%, on April 3 by investing in the novel memecoin Donotfomoew (MOEW) minted on the Base blockchain.

As told by blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain, the trader first purchased 499.9 million MOEW using 4 Ether (ETH) 10 minutes after the listing of MOEW on decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Less than one hour later, the trader sold 111.65 million MOEW for 99 ETH ($328,000) and currently holds 388.24 million MOEW, worth $1.76 million at the time of publication.

The cat-themed MOEW meme token was created earlier in the day by Bitget Wallet, which stated that MOEW was “just for funsies, nothing too serious, we wanna see what the power of memes can do.” Shortly after its debut on DEXs, however, MOEW surged in value and currently commands a market cap of $31 million. In response to the price action, Bitget Wallet shared a follow-up message telling users, “Do not buy, do not fomo,” adding:

“Please note that 50% of MOEW are for LP addition (permanent lock), the other 50% are allocated for airdrop distribution! Bitget Wallet does not keep any tokens.”

More than 8,000 addresses have received MOEW tokens during the ongoing airdrop, which is eligible for users who held enough BWB points for the exchange wallet’s BWB token airdrop. Over a six-week period, users could earn BWB points, which are swappable for upcoming BWB tokens in Q2, by holding balances in Bitget Wallet or performing in-app cross-chain swaps.

Both old memecoins, such as Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), and newly minted memecoins on Solana and Base have surged significantly in value as part of the ongoing bull market. One such token, Jeo Boden (BODEN) — a Solana memecoin parody of United States President Joe Biden — has surpassed $250 million in market cap. Earlier in the week, Taiwanese music celebrity Machi Big Brother’s Solana memecoin saw wild price action after a $40 million presale.

Related: Meet the Solana memecoin that suffered two rug pulls but still survived"
"[INST] Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison [/INST] Former FTX CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried will serve 25 years in prison following a sentencing hearing in federal court.

On March 28, Judge Lewis Kaplan of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York sentenced Bankman-Fried to 240 months and 60 months for a total of 25 years for his conviction on seven felony charges. SBF was the first person tied to FTX and Alameda Research to face prison time following the collapse of the exchange in November 2022.

Judge Kaplan found that SBF also committed witness tampering based on the events that led him to revoke bail in August 2023 and perjury based on his testimony at trial over FTX user funds. He acknowledged Bankman-Fried’s “social awkwardness” but said, based on former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison’s testimony, SBF knew he was at fault but was “not going to admit a thing.”

“Punishment must fit the seriousness of the crime,” said Judge Kaplan. “And this. Was. A. Serious. Crime [...] When not lying, [Bankman-Fried] was evasive, hair splitting, trying to get the prosecutors to rephrase questions for him. I’ve been doing this job for close for 30 years. I’ve never seen a performance like that.”

A March 28 docket entry for the Southern District of New York suggested the judge would deduct SBF’s time already served from his sentence, meaning 291 months in prison. Judge Kaplan also suggested an $11-billion judgment in addition to SBF’s prison time. He said FTX investors lost $1.7 billion, lenders lost $1.3 billion, and customers lost $8 billion.

According to Inner City Press reporter Matthew Lee, the New York courtroom was packed with members of the public and officials before the U.S. Marshals brought out Bankman-Fried. The former FTX CEO was reportedly wearing light brown clothes — the uniform of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he has stayed since the judge revoked his bail.

“I reject the defense’s argument about loss, both on the law and on the facts,” said Judge Kaplan, according to Inner City Press. “The assertion that customers and creditors will be paid in full is misleading — defendants equate loss with dollar volume in the bankruptcy case.”

The judge added:

“A fortuitous run-up in the value of some cryptocurrencies bears no relation to the gravity of the crimes that were committed. A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets is not entitled to a sentencing reduction.”

Before the judge announced the sentence, Bankman-Fried said he was “sorry about what happened at every stage,” claiming that “FTX would have survived” if it hadn't been shut down. In a final statement, his attorneys seemingly portrayed the former FTX CEO as a misunderstood genius:

“Sam was not a ruthless financial serial killer. He wasn’t predatory. He makes decisions with math in his head, not malice in his heart.”

Sunil Kavuri, a U.K. national who flew in from London for the sentencing hearing, testified that he had “suffered for two years” after the collapse of FTX. Kavuri addressed the court on behalf of other FTX victims, pushing back against the narrative that the “loss was zero” based on the exchange’s plans for repayment.

“If Mr. Bankman-Fried thought mathematics justified it, he’d do it again,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos. He added there was “no acceptance of responsibility” from the former CEO.

Related: Which crypto figures might be going to prison in 2024?

Judge Kaplan’s sentence essentially split the difference between recommendations from SBF’s attorneys and prosecutors, who argued for a maximum of 6.5 and 50 years, respectively. Many experts predicted Judge Kaplan would impose a sentence of between 10 to 30 years based on the facts of the case and the amount of funds involved.

Gary Wang, Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh and Ryan Salame — four other individuals associated with FTX and Alameda charged in the same case as SBF — have pleaded guilty and accepted deals. Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, was the only one of the four to not testify at Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial. He will likely be the next to face sentencing on May 1.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame

Update (March 28 at 6:40 pm UTC): This article has been updated to include information on Sam Bankman-Fried's time already served at sentencing."
"[INST] Hong Kong green lights first spot Bitcoin ETFs: Law Decoded [/INST] The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has reportedly approved three spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

The list includes ETFs from Harvest Global Investments, China Asset Management and a partnership between HashKey and Bosera Asset Management.

Following the initial approval, the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong will require approximately two weeks to finalize listing procedures and related arrangements.

The approval of the first spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs in Hong Kong could catalyze Bitcoin’s post-halving rally, according to Herbert Sim, chief operating officer of crypto exchange Websea, who told Cointelegraph:

“[The] halving is not the only thing to look out for in the price action. But rather the upcoming Bitcoin ETF approval in Hong Kong. The big banks of China will all have to start buying Bitcoin themselves, too.”

Meanwhile, the chief executive of investment firm VanEck says it is unlikely the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will approve spot Ether (ETH) ETFs in May.

In a recent interview, Jan van Eck said his firm’s spot Ether ETF application will “probably be rejected.” He noted that VanEck was the first to file for a spot Ether ETF in the U.S. alongside Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest, with both awaiting final decisions by May 23 and May 24, respectively.

U.S. Treasury wants to tighten crypto crime control

U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Adewale Adeyemo continued advocating for more enforcement powers for his agency in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee.

In a hearing on countering illicit finance, terrorism and sanctions evasion, Adeyemo outlined three proposed reforms to improve U.S. enforcement efforts against international bad actors using crypto.

The proposed reforms include the introduction of secondary sanctions targeting “foreign digital asset providers” engaging in illicit finance. U.S. sanctions prohibit institutions from using U.S. correspondent accounts and transaction processing through banks, Adeyemo said, but crypto exchanges and money services do not always depend on the use of correspondent accounts. “A new secondary sanctions tool” is needed.

Continue reading

Dubai to ease burdens for small crypto firms

Dubai’s crypto landscape is transforming, but smaller players are grappling with hefty regulatory burdens amid the buzz.

Matthew White, CEO of Dubai’s Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA), unveiled ambitious plans to alleviate the compliance costs plaguing small crypto entities.

The VARA official said that getting regulated is a “costly exercise” and that many people lack the resources. White explained a potential fix, where larger participants could “host” smaller ones.

With this structure, costs would be carried by entities with more resources. “The cost of compliance is borne by the larger systemic players, and this allows the smaller players to come into the ecosystem, be regulated, but also not have to suffer the same sort of level of costs of compliance that we’ve got,” he said.

Continue reading

Australia busts unlicensed crypto miners

Hundreds of Australian investors are more than 160 million Australian dollars ($104 million) out of pocket after a group of cryptocurrency mining companies — NGS Crypto Pty, NGS Digital Pty and NGS Group (collectively “NGS companies”) — collapsed into liquidation.

The Australian Security and Investments Commission (ASIC) launched civil proceedings against the companies and their directors, Brett Mendham, Ryan Brown and Mark Ten Caten.

The NGS companies have been accused of targeting local investors to establish self-managed superannuation funds and then convert the funds into cryptocurrency for investment in blockchain mining packages with promised fixed-rate returns.

ASIC alleges that approximately 450 investors entrusted a total of 62 million AU$ ($40 million) to these companies, which also operated without the necessary Australian license.

Continue reading"
"[INST] Grayscale introduces crypto investment fund that prioritizes staking rewards [/INST] Grayscale Investments has announced an investment fund tailored to sophisticated clients eager to expose their portfolios to income generated from staking cryptocurrency tokens.

According to a recent statement, the Grayscale Dynamic Income Fund is only available to clients with more than $1.1 million assets under management or a net worth of more than $2.2 million.

The fund intends to convert staking rewards into United States dollars weekly, with distributions planned quarterly for investors. Additionally, Grayscale claims that careful analysis will be conducted to select the proof-of-stake (PoS) tokens included in the fund’s portfolio.

“Grayscale manages the complexity of staking and unstaking multiple tokens as each token has its own individual timelines and requirements to be staked and unstaked.”

The main priority of the fund is to maximize staking income from the assets, with capital growth as a secondary focus, according to Grayscale.

Crypto staking involves locking up crypto tokens to earn interest or rewards, which in turn ensures the secure and efficient operation of the blockchain network.

Grayscale has named three PoS tokens that will be held in the fund: Osmosis (OSMO) has a 24% share, Solana (SOL) has 20%, and Polkadot (DOT) has 14%, while 43% is categorized under other tokens.

OSMO currently offers a staking reward rate of 11.09%, SOL offers 7.42%, and DOT is at 11.9%, according to data from Staking Rewards.

However, only SOL ranks among the top 10 PoS tokens by market capitalization, as per CoinMarketCap data.

The crypto holdings are subject to change at Grayscale’s discretion. Source: Grayscale

Meanwhile, Grayscale’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), which launched on Jan. 11, has seen billions of outflows.

On March 26, Cointelegraph reported that the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust has seen daily outflows totaling over $14 billion since its launch.

Related: Grayscale’s GBTC Bitcoin holdings have fallen 33% since its conversion

Grayscale’s Bitcoin ETF charges a 1.5% per year management fee, five times that of the 0.30% average of other spot Bitcoin ETFs.

Grayscale has applied for an Ethereum Futures ETF, but the United States Securities and Exchange Commission recently delayed a decision on whether to approve the product.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments: Trezor CEO"
"[INST] China is about to start bidding' — Will Hong Kong Bitcoin ETFs spark the halving rally? [/INST] The potential approval of the first batch of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Hong Kong could be a big catalyst for Bitcoin’s (BTC) halving rally, commentators say.

Hong Kong could approve 4 Bitcoin ETFs before halving

Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) could approve the first batch of spot Bitcoin ETFs by April 15, days before the Bitcoin halving is set to cut the supply issuance rate of BTC.

The Hong Kong regulator has reportedly accelerated the approval process for four spot Bitcoin ETFs, according to local news media reports. The potential approval could attract more buying demand for Bitcoin, by offering BTC exposure to both retail and institutional investors in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong regulators could approve both Bitcoin and Ether ETFs on April 15, according to crypto entrepreneur and investor Lark Davis, who wrote in an April 12 X post:

“Hong Kong likely to approve BOTH Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs as soon as Monday! China is about to start bidding the same week the Bitcoin halving is happening!”

It will take approximately two weeks to finalize ETF listing procedures on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, after the securities regulator greenlights the initial set of spot Bitcoin ETFs.

Related: How high can Bitcoin go? New BTC price prediction sees cycle top at $180K

Can ETFs spark Bitcoin’s post-halving bull run?

The approval of the first spot Bitcoin ETFs in Hong Kong could catalyze Bitcoin’s post-halving rally, according to Herbert Sim, chief operating officer of crypto exchange Websea, who told Cointelegraph:

“Halving is not the only thing to look out for in the price action. But rather the upcoming Bitcoin ETF approval in Hong Kong, which also happens next week. The big banks of China will all have to start buying Bitcoin themselves too.”

Sim noted that Hong Kong-based ETFs will only add to the institutional demand and inflows created by large U.S. ETF issuers such as BlackRock, which he expects to continue. He added:

“And with this supply cut from the Bitcoin Halving, prices will definitely soar.”

Large investors, or so-called mega whales, that are holding at least 10,000 BTC are accumulating Bitcoin at the current price level, in anticipation of next week’s approval, according to popular crypto commentator Bitcoin Munger’s April 12 X post:

“The only cohort that is net-accumulating Bitcoin is the largest whales (>10k). Just ahead of Hong Kong ETF approvals and the halving. A positive contrarian signal if I had to guess.”

Trend Accumulation Score by Cohort. Source: Bitcoin Munger

ETF inflows have been a significant part of Bitcoin’s price rally. By Feb. 15, Bitcoin ETFs accounted for about 75% of new investment in the world’s largest cryptocurrency as it surpassed the $50,000 mark, according to CryptoQuant research.

Bitcoin’s price action has been closely correlated with the net Bitcoin ETF inflows, according to Thomas Fahrer, the co-founder of Apollo, who wrote in an April 12 X post, referencing the below chart:

“I would have thought it was extremely obvious that ETF flows are driving Bitcoin [price]…”

Net Bitcoin Flows, Year-To-Date Chart. Source: Thomas Fahrer

Related: Hong Kong’s in-kind ETF creation could be a significant market opportunity: Analysts

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Coinbase to list BRC-20 token ORDI and Worldcoin perpetual futures [/INST] Institutional clients on the Coinbase International Exchange will soon have access to BRC-20 token Ordinals (ORDI) and Worldcoin (WLD) perpetual futures.

In an April 5 post to X, Coinbase International Exchange announced it would list perpetual futures products for ORDI and WLD as soon as April 11, making them available to institutional investors on both Coinbase International and Coinase Advanced.

ORDI and WLD have witnessed significant price action and trading volumes in recent months.

ORDI soared 1,640% from a price of $5 on Nov. 1, 2023, to a high of $87 on March 5 as a frenzy for Ordinals-related assets took off late last year.

The ORDI token is not officially affiliated with the Bitcoin Ordinals deployer or any of the Ordinals team. It is a separate BRC-20 token that merely derives its namesake from the Ordinals protocol.

Meanwhile, Worldcoin rapidly became one of the top tokens for crypto investors looking to gain exposure to the AI industry, surging from a price of $2.20 on Feb. 7 to as high as $11.70 on March 10, per CoinGecko data.

Worldcoin surged from $2.20 to $11.70 in one month. Source: CoinGecko

WLD is the native token of Worldcoin, a digital identity project that offers cryptocurrency in exchange for users minting their biometric data for a digital ID.

Related: Coinbase secures restricted dealer license in Canada

Friday’s announcement adds to a slew of new perpetual futures contracts being added to the international arm of the Coinbase institutional-targeted exchange.

Perpetual futures, also known as perpetual swaps or perpetuals, are a type of derivative contract that allows traders to speculate on the future price of an asset without an expiration date. The regulatory approval process for perptetuals futures depends on the product being offered.

On April 4, Coinbase International Exchange added futures contracts for Wormhole’s native W (W) token, which was launched alongside an $850-million airdrop to early users of the cross-chain bridge.

Meanwhile, on March 21, Coinbase also quietly made plans to list futures contracts for Litecoin (LTC) as well as the memecoin Dogecoin (DOGE), saying that it had “transcended its origins” as an online joke and had established itself as a legitimate digital asset.

Notably, Coinbase explained that it would invoke the “self-certification” method to launch the futures contracts before receiving any official approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — so long as they followed the regulatory guidelines laid out by the agency.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Hester Peirce blasts SEC, Gurbir Grewal rejects SEC criticism: Law Decoded [/INST] United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce has taken another swipe at her agency, criticizing the regulator’s guidance on crypto custody while calling for more interaction with the public.

Speaking at the annual SEC Speaks conference, Peirce said that a “particularly pernicious weed” had sprung up in the SEC’s “secret garden” of policy guidelines.

Her comments came in response to the Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 (SAB 121), which prevents banks from custodying crypto assets on behalf of clients.

Meanwhile, Gurbir Grewal, the director of the Division of Enforcement at the SEC, has pushed back against criticism that the regulator is making up rules on crypto as it goes along.

At the same SEC Speaks event, Grewal claimed that companies in the crypto industry had made “many creative attempts” to avoid the commission’s jurisdiction by continuing to operate in the United States.

Grewal reiterated that the SEC’s standard for determining security under the Howey test had been “clearly and consistently applied.”

He did not specifically address reports that the SEC had been exploring whether to classify Ether (ETH) as a security rather than a commodity under the U.S. Commodity Future Trading Commission’s purview.

The SEC is currently soliciting comments from the public on proposed rule changes allowing the listing and trading of shares of three spot Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on exchanges.

Upon publication in the Federal Register, the public has 21 days to respond to spot ETH ETF applications from asset managers Bitwise, Fidelity and Grayscale.

Bitwise and Grayscale propose listing their ETH ETFs on NYSE Arca, and Fidelity will launch its ETF on the Cboe BZX Exchange. The latest proposals came ahead of the commission’s final decision on the investment vehicle, which is expected in May.

European Union could ban non-decentralized protocols

According to the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) — the regulatory framework that governs digital assets within the European Union — the European Commission must prepare a report by Dec. 30 evaluating the decentralized finance market and the feasibility of specific regulations for the sector.

The report explores how decentralized systems should be regulated, particularly those without a clear issuer or service provider.

“A significant aspect of this assessment will be to explore the regulation of crypto-asset lending and borrowing, a core activity within the DeFi space,” Maxim Galash, CEO of CoinChange Financials, explained in an analysis.

Continue reading

Argentina obliges crypto firms to register

Argentina’s Comisión Nacional de Valores (CNV) — the country’s equivalent of a securities regulator — said virtual asset service providers would be operating in accordance with recommendations from the Financial Action Task Force.

Certain companies offering crypto-related services must register with Argentina’s government as part of reforms to the country’s Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism laws.

CNV President Roberto Silva said virtual asset service providers that are not registered “will not be able to operate in the country.”

Many users on Strike, a platform popular in Argentina for facilitating Bitcoin (BTC) payments via the Lightning Network, reported the app no longer allows locals to send fiat to bank accounts.

It’s unclear how the requirements may affect businesses operating in Argentina or customers seeking to use their services. In December 2023, Argentina’s minister of foreign affairs said contracts could be settled in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Continue reading

Singapore changes token custody and transfers regulations

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has announced that it will implement amendments to the country’s Payment Services Act (P.S. Act) to expand the scope of regulated services related to digital payment token (DPT) service providers.

Singapore’s central bank said it would bring several activities within the scope of the P.S. Act. This includes providing custodial services for DPTs, facilitating token transfers and exchange and the facilitation of cross-border money transfers.

The regulator also clarified that the law even covers cases where the service provider does not come into possession of the funds or where the money is not accepted or received in Singapore. MAS also said that the new updates would allow it to include additional requirements for DPT service providers.

Continue reading"
"[INST] Ethereum on track for $1B annual profit as DeFi drives Q1 revenue [/INST] Blockchain network Ethereum is on the path to $1 billion in annualized profits after it netted income of $365 million in Q1, coming alongside a year-on-year quarterly revenue growth of 155%.

The network’s 2024 first-quarter income is a nearly 200% bump from the $123 million profit in Q4 2023, according to an April 17 report from The DeFi Report analyst Michael Nadeau.

Ethereum’s fee revenue — earned through users paying for transactions — hit $1.17 billion, up 155% from Q1 2023 and an 80% increase from the prior quarter.

Ethereum’s yearly profit and loss since launching in 2015. Source: The DeFi Report

Increased network activity “primarily driven by a surge in DeFi activity during the quarter” was the cause of the revenue bump, Nadeau said.

The activity surge has seen average daily transactions on the blockchain in 2024 already surpass last year’s figures and are closing in on the results from Ethereum’s peak in 2021.

Ethereum's average daily transactions per year (blue) and Ether burned (pink). Source: The DeFi Report

Over 1.15 million average daily transactions have taken place in 2024, slightly up from the 1.05 million last year and just shy of the 1.25 million recorded in 2021.

Ethereum was launched in 2015 but only had its first profitable year in 2023 — earning $623 million — despite its revenues that year being 75% lower than its peak $9.9 billion 2021 revenues.

“This is largely due to the move to proof-of-stake consensus in September of ‘22 — in which token incentives paid to miners (now validators) dropped roughly 80%,” Nadeau explained.

He added Ethereum’s fees have grown at a rate of 58% since 2017.

“Crypto will outperform everything else” in the years ahead

Nadeau gave his market predictions for the coming years and concluded that “crypto will outperform everything else.”

He expected rising liquidity conditions for the “next few years” as the United States has a large amount of debt needing refinancing this year and the market had priced in three rate cuts this year from the Federal Reserve.

“This should provide a tailwind for risk assets such as tech stocks and quality crypto.”

The U.S. spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds, the Bitcoin halving and what Nadeau called “the innovation cycle” were three additional catalysts “pointing to a bullish setup for the next few years.”

Related: Bitcoin fees top Ethereum for 3 days in a row as halving approaches

The Bitcoin ETFs will serve as a “gateway drug” for increased interest in cryptocurrencies as they enable broad access and the halving — slated for April 20 — “has historically led to a bull run in the year after.”

The “innovation cycle” will also draw in new venture funding and renew retail interest in crypto as it matures, Nadeau believed.

He claimed Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) are “quite correlated” — Bitcoin outperforms early in the bull market as it is the most recognizable cryptocurrency while ETH and altcoins tend to outperform it in the later stages of the cycle.

“It’s noteworthy that altcoins actually rallied so much in the last two cycles that they outperformed Bitcoin across the full length of both cycles,” Nadeau added.

He believed this would continue but only with altcoins “that have clear product market fit.”

Magazine: Joe Lubin — The truth about ETH founders split and ‘Crypto Google’"
"[INST] HashKey follows Coinbase in opening global exchange in Bermuda [/INST] Crypto service provider HashKey Group has joined rival Coinbase in launching a global crypto exchange based out of Bermuda called HashKey Global.

In an April 8 interview with Bloomberg, Hashkey Global managing director Ben El-Baz said that after HashKey saw Coinbase score a Bermuda license to operate its international exchange, it “looked at all the different options, and we found that to be a very, very suitable and good regulatory regime for us to expand from.”

He added that after FTX collapsed in 2022, exchange users now “better understand what counterparty risk looks like for exchanges” and believed there was a gap for HashKey Global to combine the “user experience and product experience” of Binance and the “regulatory and safety back end” of Coinbase.

“Our goal long-term within the next five years is we want to be the largest globally compliant exchange in the world.”

El-Baz added that Hashkey Global’s goal is to “surpass [the volume of] what other competitors have been doing in that jurisdiction,” namely Coinbase International, which reported a 24-hour derivatives volume of $539.4 million

Unlike its Hong Kong-based counterpart, which was the first to win a license to operate in the region, HashKey Global won’t serve Hong Kong, China, the United States and a host of other regions.

El-Baz speaking on Bloomberg’s The China Show. Source: Bloomberg

In January, the Hong Kong-based crypto exchange hit so-called unicorn status after raising nearly $100 million in a Series A funding round at a pre-money valuation of over $1.2 billion.

The exchange said the funds would be put toward its business arms, which include asset management, a blockchain node validation service, a tokenization service and a Web3 incubation arm.

Related: Thailand’s biggest crypto exchange goes on hiring spree ahead of IPO

Over the next six months, HashKey Global will offer spot and futures trading, staking services, a project launchpad and will “have liquidity providers and market makers who are there on day one to ensure that the market is deep enough,” according to El-Baz.

El-Baz was tight-lipped when asked how much money HashKey fronted for its new exchange effort, only saying that it believed it was “adequately capitalized” and that Bermuda has a “very strong awareness of the type of capitalization requirements that are needed for licensed institutions.”

The exchange is, at launch, crypto only. It has 20 cryptocurrencies trading in Tether (USDT) pairs including Bitcoin (BTC) Ether (ETH), USD Coin (USDC) and Dogecoin (DOGE).

Magazine: Chinese police vs. Web3, blockchain centralization continues: Asia Express"
"[INST] Memecoin madness is breaking the Bitcoin halving cycle [/INST] Crypto industry analysts are calling the current Bitcoin halving cycle the “weirdest” bull market on record, following a premature Bitcoin (BTC) all-time high and a massive rush into memecoins.

On April 1, Chainlink community liaison Zach Rynes — aka “ChainLinkGod” — said, “This bull market has been weird” in a post to his 171,000 followers on X.

Historically, bull runs would see liquidity flow into Bitcoin before moving into Ether (ETH) and other high-capitalization coins and finally moving down the chain.

However, the market “skipped a couple of steps that we have seen with previous cycles,” with flows going from BTC straight to memecoins, which is “a bit unusual,” commented Rynes.

Memecoin total capitalization surged to $70 billion on April 1, primarily driven by pumps in newly launched tokens, such as Solana-based Dogwifhat (WIF), Book of Meme (BOME) and older memecoins such as Pepe (PEPE) and Bonk (BONK).

Coinbase layer-2 network Base has also become a hotbed of memecoin speculation.

The recently launched Base-native token DEGEN is one example, which has skyrocketed an eye-watering 2,800% over the past month. The memecoin is an unofficial token that was distributed to the community on the decentralized social network Farcaster.

Rynes added that market fundamentals are not playing much of a role at the moment:

“There’s some retail money that’s entered, but nowhere near the levels we’ve seen before; we’re in an attention economy based on specific narratives, not real fundamentals.”

The sentiment was echoed by Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano on April 1, who said that after around a decade in crypto, “I can say with full confidence that this is, by far, the weirdest bull market crypto has ever had.”

He added that retail is not here “in any meaningful way” until the entire market goes up together:

“Not these isolated sector-specific pumps that are very obviously pushed by crypto natives and just involve a hot ball of money rotating around.”

Related: Memecoin presales hit ‘peak degeneracy’ with over $100M raised in 3 days

Another factor adding to the weirdness of this market cycle is that Bitcoin has reached an all-time high before the halving. In previous cycles, the Bitcoin all-time high arrived the year after the halving.

The asset hit $73,734 on March 14, and the Bitcoin halving is just 18 days away now, due on April 20. Analysts have already predicted that the pre-halving retrace is over.

On April 1, technical analyst Moustache highlighted that BTC had reclaimed a key Fibonacci ratio level seen in previous cycles, but this time it was before the halving.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Bitcoin halving will have to battle with ‘weak time of year’ — Coinbase [/INST] Many crypto traders are eyeing the Bitcoin halving event as a primary driver for a potential price spike, but the time of year will be an obstacle, according to cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

The crypto market will need to find another narrative to further push up prices across the board, Coinbase further explained in its April 5 market commentary report.

“The BTC halving, currently due April 20 or 21, could be a catalyst for higher prices, but it will have to contend with what is typically a weak time of year for crypto markets and other risk assets,” the exchange stated.

Bitcoin (BTC) has typically seen a monthly return of about 2.7% from June to September since 2011, while in the other eight months, it averaged a return of around 19.3%, according to data from digital assets research firm Brave New Coin.

Meanwhile, Coinbase further noted that overall crypto volumes “have also continued to slow as the market tries to find the next narrative to power it higher.”

Over the last 24 hours, the total crypto volume was $61.78 billion, a 33.25% decrease from the previous day, according to CoinMarketCap data.

However, the crypto exchange sees signs pointing toward the likelihood of an increase in new investors entering the crypto market in the near future:

“In our view, bitcoin’s increased acceptance as a form of “digital gold” could enable demand from a new subset of investors in this market regime.”

Bitcoin’s dominance in the overall crypto market is 50.6%, according to CoinStats data, which is the market capitalization of Bitcoin relative to the overall crypto market.

Bitcoin dominance chart. Source: CoinStats

Furthermore, the report explained that those awaiting price declines to invest may find the troughs to be less and less as more investors get involved.

“As a result, we think dips are likely to be more aggressively bought compared to previous cycles, even as volatility persists during price discovery,” Coinbase wrote.

Halving events have frequently been associated with spikes in the price of Bitcoin.

Following the previous halving event in May 2020, Bitcoin’s price surged. Starting at $8,787 during the halving, the cryptocurrency rallied, reaching nearly $69,000 in November 2021.

Related: Coinbase cleared in lawsuit over crypto transactions

On April 6, Cointelegraph reported that the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in favor of Coinbase, confirming that the secondary sales of cryptocurrencies on its platform do not violate the Securities Exchange Act.

The plaintiffs contended that Coinbase was offering and selling unregistered securities. Furthermore, they accused the exchange of violating various provisions of securities laws.

However, Coinbase argued that secondary crypto asset sales didn’t meet securities transaction criteria, disputing the relevance of securities regulations.

Magazine: ‘Crypto is inevitable’ so we went ‘all in’: Meet Vance Spencer, permabull"
"[INST] Near introduces multichain transactions from a single account [/INST] The Near Foundation, the nonprofit organization backing the layer-1 Near Protocol, has revealed that the protocol now enables chain signatures. This advancement allows users to access multiple chains using their Near account.

According to a press release, Eigenlayer, a restaking project developed on Ethereum, is now a launch partner with Near, contributing to the security of the Chain Signatures network.

The Chain Signatures feature is powered by a decentralized multi-party computation (MPC) network and secured by Near’s validators.

Chain Signatures are cryptographic signatures that allow users to sign transactions on one blockchain using a private key associated with an account on another blockchain.

This feature enables cross-chain interoperability and allows users to access and interact with multiple blockchains using a single wallet or account.

The new Chain Signatures feature enables any Near account to control any number of addresses on all blockchains, enabling new use cases around decentralized finance.

In the future, it will receive additional security from EigenLayer as well, according to the foundation. The Near Foundation said:

“Decentralized finance (DeFi) on non-smart contract chains is now possible for the first time on many networks, including Bitcoin. Developers can easily build DeFi products that utilize assets from other chains without bridging these assets.”

According to Near, Chain Signatures works with Ethereum, Cosmos, Dogecoin, Bitcoin and XRP Ledger, with upcoming support planned for Solana, The Open Network, Polkadot and others.

Related: Bitcoin price consolidation preps NEAR, APT, RNDR and MKR for more upside

The feature incorporates a “Multichain Gas Relayer,” eliminating the necessity for the native gas token of another chain for transactions. Users can utilize Near (NEAR) or NEP-141 tokens to cover gas across any chain.

This offering represents Near’s ongoing effort in its “chain abstraction” initiative, seeking to streamline the user experience in crypto by addressing complexities inherent in a multichain ecosystem.

Chain Signatures is currently operational on Near’s testnet, with plans for its mainnet rollout anticipated by early May, according to a Near spokesperson.

Near posted a 1,902% increase in the number of unique active wallets engaged with its Web3 app, according to a Jan. 11 report from blockchain analytics platform DappRadar.

However, the foundation cut its workforce by 40% despite its robust financials.

The Near Foundation disclosed the departure of its CEO, Marieke Flament, on Sept. 21, 2023, without providing specific reasons. Flament, who served from 2021 to 2023, oversaw the organization’s treasury balance growth to 330 million NEAR, valued at $350 million upon her resignation.

Magazine: 6 Questions for 20-year-old Sellix founder Daniele Servadei"
"[INST] ETH price nears 3-year lows vs. Bitcoin — Will an Ethereum ETF stem the tide? [/INST] The price of Ether (ETH) in Bitcoin (BTC) is nearing a three-year low. However, several key technical indicators are flashing bullish, and some analysts are anticipating potential gains ahead for ETH/BTC.

Ethereum down 33% vs. Bitcoin since the Merge

Ethereum price in USD terms has more than doubled in price since switching to proof-of-stake in September 2022. But the picture is very different when priced in Bitcoin as the ETH/BTC pair is down roughly 33% since the Merge.

More recently, ETH/BTC has continued slumping, losing over 9% in the past month with a drop to 0.048 BTC. The last time the trading pair was this low was in May 2021, according to Tradingview data.

Ether price fell over 11% during the past week to $3,239, pushing the relative strength index (RSI) to 44 on the daily time frame, down from the 85 reached on March 11. This suggests that Ether is no longer in ""overbought"" territory.

The RSI is a popular momentum indicator used to measure whether an asset is oversold or overbought based on the magnitude of recent price changes.

Traders should keep an eye on the $3,200 psychological mark, which would liquidate over $97 million worth of leveraged short positions. A move further down to $3,170 would liquidate over $329 million worth of short leverage across all exchanges, according to Coinglass data.

ETH Exchange Liquidation Map. Source: Coinglass

Ether price has been underperforming Bitcoin’s price this year in U.S. dollar terms. Bitcoin is up 49% year-to-date (YTD), while Ether is up 36%. Over the past three months, BTC rose 56% while ETH rose 28%, Tradingview data shows.

Related: 'China is about to start bidding' — Will Hong Kong Bitcoin ETFs spark the halving rally?

Is it a good time to buy ETH?

The last time the ETH/BTC ratio was around 0.048 BTC was at the beginning of May 2021 before ETH price fell two consecutive months in a row, declining 2.5% during May and over 15% to $2,276 by the end of June 2021.

Yet, Ether price could be setting up for a rally, thanks to the approval of Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Hong Kong, according to Andrey Stoychev, the head of Prime Brokerage at Nexo. He told Cointelegraph:

“Bitcoin has its all-important block rewards halving in days, just as Ether balances on exchanges stand at a multi-year low. That setup alone could invite more investor exposure to ETH in anticipation of bigger news from Hong Kong – namely, the approval of local Bitcoin- and Ether-based ETFs. In light of this market situation, it could be argued that Ether could perform a sharp, idiosyncratic catch-up.”

The current Ether price levels could represent a good buying opportunity, said Stoychev:

“Even at current rates, market participants could buy ETH for both a short-term catch-up play, as well a longer-term trade given all the potential developments. With that said, the key levels to watch for now in ETH/USD would be $3,300 on the topside and $3,000 on the downside.”

The focus on Bitcoin ETFs, combined with the high transaction costs on the Ethereum network, has taken the spotlight off Ether, according to Jonathan Caras, the head of communication at Levana perpetual futures protocol.

Caras added that Ether will need a significant catalyst, like an Ethereum ETF, to make a comeback. He told Cointelegraph:

“Ethereum will need a catalyst to catch up, either from its own ETF or some other method of promoting institutional adoption in order to reverse the downward relative trend.”

Related: How high can Bitcoin go? New BTC price prediction sees cycle top at $180K

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Vitalik Buterin wants rollups to hit stage 1 decentralization by year-end [/INST] Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is proposing to raise the bar on what’s considered a rollup in the Ethereum ecosystem — and suggests developers should aim to get their decentralization efforts in order by the end of the year.

The comments came in his latest blog post on March 28, reflecting on the year ahead following Ethereum’s latest Dencun upgrade, which significantly reduced transaction fees for rollups on layer 2s.

Buterin noted that Ethereum was in the “process of a decisive shift” from a “very rapid L1 progress era” to an era where layer-1 progress will still be very significant.

He also said that Ethereum’s scaling efforts have shifted from a “zero-to-one” problem to an incremental problem, as further scaling work will focus on increasing blob capacity and improving rollup efficiency.

He continued to state that the ecosystem’s standards will need to become stricter, adding:

“By the end of the year, I think our standards should increase and we should only treat a project as a rollup if it has actually reached at least stage 1.”

Stage 1 is Buterin’s classification of layer 2’s decentralization progress, whereby a network has advanced enough in terms of security and scaling but is not yet fully decentralized (which would be Stage 2).

He observed that only five of the layer-2 projects listed on L2Beat are at either Stage 1 or 2, and only Arbitrum is fully Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible.

The next steps on the roadmap include implementing data availability sampling to increase blob capacity to 16MB per slot and optimizing layer-2 solutions through techniques such as data compression, optimistic execution and improved security.

“After this, we can cautiously move toward stage 2: a world where rollups truly are backed by code, and a security council can only intervene if the code ‘provably disagrees with itself,’” he added.

Related: Vitalik Buterin is cooking up a new way to decentralize Ethereum staking

Buterin said that further changes such as Verkle trees, single-slot finality and account abstraction are still significant, “but they are not drastic to the same extent that proof of stake and sharding are.”

“In 2022, Ethereum was like a plane replacing its engines mid-flight. In 2023, it was replacing its wings.”

Ethereum is currently at the Surge phase of its upgrade roadmap, with upgrades related to scalability by rollups and data sharding. The next phase, the Scourge, will have upgrades related to censorship resistance, decentralization and protocol risks from miner extractable value, or MEV.

Developers should design applications with a “2020s Ethereum” mindset, embracing layer-2 scaling, privacy, account abstraction and new forms of community membership proofs, he said before concluding:

“Ethereum has upgraded from being ‘just’ a financial ecosystem into a much more thorough independent decentralized tech stack.”

Magazine: ‘Account abstraction’ supercharges Ethereum wallets: Dummies guide"
"[INST] Ethena announces integration with exchange wallets [/INST] Synthetic stablecoin protocol Ethena Labs has integrated with centralized exchange wallets of Binance, Bybit, OKX, and Bitget as of April 10.

“Users locking USDe for at least 7 days through exchange Web3 wallets are eligible for a 20% reward boost starting today,” said Ethena developers.

The incentives, issued in the form of “Ethena sats,” can be converted to its native ENA token at the end of each campaign. To earn sats, users must first deposit Ethena USDe stablecoins into their exchange wallets, connect to the Ethena decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, and stake their holdings. The protocol has a total value locked of $2.274 billion at the time of publication, generating an annualized revenue of $178 million.

The protocol’s ecosystem rewards have attracted considerable attention and usage. As told by blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain, since the start of Ethena Staking Season 2, the top 10 wallets have withdrawn a total of 37.5 million ENA ($51 million) and staked them.

On March 8, less than one month after launching its USDe stablecoin, Ethena became the highest-earning decentralized application in crypto when it offered a 67% annual percentage yield (APY) on USDe. The protocol currently has an APY of 24% on its stablecoins. However, the yield is not without risks, as it relies on trading income of complex Ethereum derivatives to pay out promised returns.

Amid concerns over its high yield, Guy Young, founder of Ethena Labs, told Cointelegraph in an interview on Feb. 22 that comparisons to the failed Terra stablecoin, TerraUSD (UST), were just “knee-jerk reactions” and that the firm’s yields were organic and sustainable.

“The biggest piece we’re trying to get across is that Anchor’s yield was just totally made up,” Young said. “It was just venture capital firms putting money into [USTC yield protocol] Anchor and then paying out a yield, which came from nowhere.”

Meanwhile, Ethena’s yields, which are publicly verifiable, are derived from a combination of Ethereum consensus layer inflation rewards, execution fees paid to Ether (ETH) stakers, maximal extractable value fee captures acquired by Ether stakers, and trading income provided by Ethena Labs. Specifically, the firm opens short derivative positions when it receives long-position collateral assets for minting USDe. The spread, or difference in value between the two positions, is then paid out to USDe holders as yield.

Related: Frax Finance dives into DeFi liquidity with $250M USDe allocation"
"[INST] Web3 game Wilder World gets Epic Game Store listing during alpha testing [/INST] Web3 game Wilder World has been given a listing on the Epic Games Store ahead of its as-of-yet unscheduled launch.

Wilder World is being described as “the ultimate game” by the publisher, also known as Wilder World. Per a press release seen by Cointelegraph, the game features “a free-roam virtual world that begins in Wiami, a metaverse city to explore, race, socialize, and much more.“

All items, equipment, land, and avatars in the world will be “tradable digital assets on the Wilder World marketplace.”

According to Frank Wilder, Co-founder of Wilder World:

“We’re honoured to be listed on the Epic Games store, setting the pace for next-gen gaming in the metaverse. Our mission is to create a novel experience using cutting-edge technology, offering players a virtual space for gaming, socializing, and earning.”

The Wilder World team claims that the game will “combine leading game genres into a single immersive experience” to overcome what they say are the shortcomings of traditional AAA games such as Grand Theft Auto and Cyberpunk.

Per the team’s roadmap, Wilder World will combine the genres of racing, mining, first-person-shooter, into a single comprehensive game.

Wilder World is being built on a proprietary blockchain. According to the press release the team is “working with Polygon and Celestia to build a custom, scalable blockchain to keep its fees low; as well as working with Metagravity to power virtual worlds with thousands of players.”

The creators behind the game also claim that it will eventually run on a proprietary cloud gaming system. Per a blog post on the Wilder world website “with the use of NVIDIA GPUs, we are in active development of our own cloud gaming service that provides increased reliability and hardware guarantees, as well as optimization for metaverse and web3 gaming.”

However, the post notes that this is an early venture and goes on to say that at launch, Wilder World will be available on Nvidia’s streaming gaming service Geforce NOW.

The team’s roadmap indicates that limited functionality will be launched to players over the next 12-18 months with the “racing” portion of the game available during what they’re calling “Act I” and the “combat” portion available with “Act III.”"
"[INST] Upcoming DeFi rules in Europe could ban non-decentralized protocols [/INST] Decentralized finance protocols in Europe could soon be under new regulations as the European Commission evaluates the space.

According to the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) — the regulatory framework that governs digital assets within the region — the European Commission is required to prepare a report by Dec. 30, 2024, evaluating the decentralized finance market and the feasibility of specific regulations for the sector.

“In preparation for this report, we have initiated a number of actions. For instance, we are running a study on embedded supervision. No policy decisions have been taken yet,” a Commission spokesperson told Cointelegraph.

The report is tasked with exploring how decentralized systems, particularly those without a clear issuer or service provider, should be regulated. “A significant aspect of this assessment will be to explore the regulation of crypto-asset lending and borrowing, a core activity within the DeFi space,” Maxim Galash, CEO of CoinChange Financials, explained in an analysis.

DeFi represents a shift from traditional, centralized financial systems to peer-to-peer finance enabled by decentralized technologies built on blockchain. While traditional finance laws often depend on regulating central parties like banks or financial services providers, decentralized systems operate without such intermediaries.

Global total value locked on decentralized finance protocols. Source: DefiLlama.

A potential new regulation has raised concerns about the legal viability of some crypto projects. MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen noted that the rules could place some DeFi interfaces, such as decentralized exchanges, under licensing requirements.

“This would make DeFi frontends on normal internet domains, as we know them today, impossible. Only fully decentralized, local, downloaded frontends or full-KYC online frontends would be possible. Sad,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

In the same vein, XReg Consulting partner Nathan Catania believes that an eventual DeFi regulation would apply to all non-fully decentralized applications, including DeFi frontends. According to Catania, the MiCA regulation does not define what constitutes decentralization, and the extent of DeFi rules would significantly depend on the criteria used to determine the concept.

“Even protocols which are not decentralised enough could be seen to be performing CASP services such as exchanging crypto-assets for other crypto-assets. For front-ends, there are also services such as reception and transmission of orders on behalf of third parties. So it could come down to how strict regulators want to be when enforcing this.”

Under the MiCA regulation, a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) is any entity that provides services related to digital assets to third parties, including exchange services, transfer services, and custodian wallets, for example.

According to Catania, one of the key factors that regulators might consider in evaluating the level of decentralization is whether a professional service is being performed.

“A front-end that simply provides users an interface to access DeFi without any control over users’ funds, and which doesn’t charge a fee is less likely to be at risk than a front-end that adds a fee on top and even then you would need to consider the legal and technical details to be able to determine whether that activity should be licensed under MiCA.”

Another possible route for DeFi regulation would be through the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

According to Coinchange’s Galash, the FATF proposes that in certain scenarios, individuals or entities maintaining control or significant influence over DeFi arrangements may be categorized as Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs). “This classification applies even if the arrangements appear decentralized, underscoring the complexity of defining and regulating DeFi activities,” Galash wrote.

Based on data from DefiLlama, the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols has experienced a substantial increase over the past four years, from $570 million in April 2020 to $96.7 billion at the time of writing, representing a 16,865% growth over the period.

“The key question is whether the DeFi arrangement is simply a technological arrangement or whether there is actually a controlling party behind it that can influence user value,"" said Catania.

Additional reporting by Helen Partz.

Magazine: DeFi’s billion-dollar secret: The insiders responsible for hacks"
"[INST] SEC says Justin Sun ‘traveled extensively’ to US, giving sway to lawsuit [/INST] The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has rejigged its lawsuit against Tron founder Justin Sun, claiming he’s “traveled extensively” throughout the country — thus giving it jurisdiction.

The regulator argues it has “personal jurisdiction” over Sun, Tron and two other businesses he controls, as they “purposefully took actions in and directed toward the United States,” it wrote in an April 17 amended complaint to a Manhattan federal court.

Sun spent a total of over 380 days in the U.S. between 2017 and 2019 on business trips to New York City, Boston and San Francisco, the SEC claimed.

It alleged the trips were on behalf of the Tron Foundation, the BitTorrent Foundation and Rainberry — all named in the suit as Sun’s “alter ego” firms.

The SEC reiterated allegations from its original lawsuit last month that Sun and his businesses sold unregistered securities through the Tron (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) tokens and that Sun engaged in “manipulative wash trading.”

The SEC took care to allege that TRX and BTT were promoted, offered and sold to “consumers and investors located in the United States.”

It added that “Sun traveled extensively to the United States during the time that TRX and BTT were promoted, offered, and sold.”

Highlighted excerpt of the SEC’s amended suit against Justin Sun. Source: CourtListener

It also claimed Sun’s alleged TRX wash trades took place on the Seattle-based crypto exchange Bittrex.

Related: SEC has ‘very low’ odds of winning against Uniswap: Crypto lawyer

In late March, Sun, a Chinese-born Grenadian citizen, asked to dismiss the suit, arguing the SEC applied U.S. security laws to “predominantly foreign conduct” and had no jurisdiction over him or the Singapore-based Tron Foundation.

He claimed the TRX and BTT tokens were sold “entirely overseas,” and the sales took steps to avoid the U.S. market; he added the SEC did not allege the tokens “were offered or sold initially to any U.S. residents.”

Sun’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Magazine: Coinbase ‘is going to win’ says MetaLawMan: X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Blockchains should make money move like email — Stellar Development Foundation CEO [/INST] Blockchain protocols must allow financial assets to move seamlessly across traditional and on-chain infrastructures to achieve mainstream adoption.

Denelle Dixon, CEO of Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), hammered home this crucial point in a conversation with Cointelegraph during Paris Blockchain Week.

“From the beginning, we’ve focused on making money move like email, but we really understood that to do that, you needed the on- and off-ramps and couldn’t rely on transacting with volatile cryptocurrencies,” Dixon said.

The SDF CEO is a former trial lawyer who went on to work at Yahoo and Mozilla. Reflecting on her journey into the blockchain ecosystem, Dixon credited Stellar founder Jed McCaleb for luring her to the layer-1 protocol.

The former Mozilla chief operating officer added that her decision to work with Stellar was driven by the decentralized protocol’s focus on tokenization and fast, low-fee payments that can impact developing economies.

Related: Tokenized asset market could hit $16T on public blockchains — RippleX VP

She said that the ability to tokenize assets on Stellar and link seamlessly to fiat payment rails and gateways has been vital in allowing the protocol to provide utility to its users.

Dixon’s background at Mozilla also remains a guiding compass. She said that driving interoperability between major blockchain protocols is a motivating force behind her work:

“I want this work to be not just for Stellar but to create an interoperability layer across chains and make it so that all blockchains benefit from the hard work that we’ve done.”

The blockchain ecosystem of 2024 is home to hundreds of different protocols that offer users varying and debatable degrees of utility. Communities of these various protocols have also become fervent defenders of their respective blockchains, a point that Dixon said detracts from advancing the utility of the underlying infrastructure. She said:

“It’s really funny. There is tribalism, but sometimes, we continue to promote the tribalism instead of focusing on what’s really true.”

She pointed to recent network outages and congestion issues across major protocols, including the likes of Solana and various Ethereum layer-2 protocols, including Base, Arbitrum and Starknet.

“These challenges are actually bad for the blockchain ecosystem because it makes people look over and say, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t get into this,’” Dixon said.

Related: $250K Bitcoin? Tim Draper says halving, Bitcoin ETFs will drive demand

Social media platforms have become the vehicle upon which this tribalism continues, as users supporting different protocols take potshots at others from time to time. At a higher level, Dixon said there is more thought-share and support than people would realize.

“There is less tribalism than people actually think at the executive level. Like, people are always saying, ‘You and Brad Garlinghouse from Ripple must not get along,’ but actually we do.”

Dixon added that individuals and organizations that are driving the adoption of decentralized protocols share a common belief that the industry is “not a winner-takes-all market.”

“Anybody who’s spent any time on the internet understands that. Look what happened when we actually did have five winners take all the content side of the web. That didn’t play out well for anybody who’s trying to compete,” Dixon added.

Related: ICP’s Schnorr integration ushers in Bitcoin DeFi era

The Stellar Development Foundation launched smart contracts on the Stellar network in February 2024. Dixon said the launch of the Soroban platform was driven by a need for advanced programmability to create a “greenfield space” for developers on Stellar:

“We really need more developers like developers to take the network from 1 billion operations a month to 10 billion a month, and that’s what I would love to see.”

Cool minds will prevail, Dixon concludes while stressing that utility needs to remain a core focus for blockchain and cryptocurrency proponents.

Magazine: Ethereum’s ERC-20 design flaws are a crypto scammer’s best friend"
"[INST] BIS and 7 central banks to explore asset tokenization through Project Agora [/INST] The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has teamed up with the central banks of France, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States Federal Reserve Banks to explore asset tokenization within the monetary system alongside private financial institutions.

Dubbed “Project Agora,” the initiative will build on a unified ledger concept proposed by BIS that bridges tokenized commercial bank deposits and tokenized wholesale central bank money. “This could enhance the functioning of the monetary system and provide new solutions using smart contracts and programmability while maintaining its two-tier structure,” BIS wrote, adding:

“This major public-private partnership will seek to overcome several structural inefficiencies in how payments happen today, especially across borders, which add a layer of challenges: different legal, regulatory and technical requirements, operating hours and time zones.”

Specific instructions and requirements will be issued in due course, with a grace period for private banks to sign up for the partnership. Hyun Song Shin, BIS' economic adviser and head of research, commented that “tokenization combines the record-keeping function of a traditional database with the rules and logic that govern transfers” within a central bank framework.

Meanwhile, Cecilia Skingsley, head of BIS Innovation Hub, spoke of a “common payment infrastructure” that allows payment systems, accounting ledgers, and data registries to be interoperable across digital currencies.

BIS has taken a keen interest in recent crypto innovations tied to financial centralization. On Jan. 23, the BIS Innovation Hub added six new projects exploring the issues of cybersecurity, fighting financial crime, central bank digital currencies and green finance. Another area of exploration is the organization’s Project Promise, which is a collaboration between BIS, the Swiss National Bank, and the World Bank to build a proof-of-concept platform for tokenized promissory notes.

Related: BIS, EU central banks building data platform to track crypto, DeFi flows"
"[INST] What to expect at Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing hearing [/INST] On March 28, former FTX CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried will face a judge and learn whether his time in federal prison is ending or just beginning following his conviction on seven felony charges.

Judge Lewis Kaplan will hear from prosecutors and SBF’s attorneys in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York for one of the last times the former FTX CEO will appear in person as part of his criminal case. The sentencing hearing will likely conclude the matter, which started with the collapse of FTX in November 2022 and continued with Bankman-Fried’s arrest, extradition, trial and conviction.

In November 2023, a jury found SBF guilty of charges that included wire fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud and money laundering. The former CEO’s lawyers were the first to file a sentencing recommendation, suggesting that SBF serve 6.5 years in prison for his actions that led to FTX investors losing access to millions of dollars.

The seven felony counts carry a maximum allowable sentence of 110 years. Prosecutors recommended Bankman-Fried serve between 40 and 50 years to “reflect the seriousness of the defendant’s crimes,” but the decision will come down to Judge Kaplan’s interpretation of the case and consideration of the victims and affected parties.

“I think you’re going to see a sentence of, I’m going to handicap about 30 years, is what I think [SBF] will get — maybe more,” Mark Bini, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York and current partner at law firm Reed Smith, told Cointelegraph. “There’s a big dispute between the government and the defense about the loss number here — what is the actual amount that was lost, because that’s a big driver of the guidelines.”

Bini said the sentencing guidelines would require Judge Kaplan to consider the amount lost at the time of the collapse of FTX rather than any repayment plan the firm has proposed in bankruptcy proceedings. One proposed plan would reimburse FTX users in fiat for their lost crypto based on prices in November 2022 — many have pointed out that this would cause them to miss out on recent surges in the price of Bitcoin (BTC) and other tokens.

“My whole life has been destroyed,” said one unidentified FTX user with two children in a victim impact statement to the court. “I did not agree to the risk that SBF took with my funds.”

Related: Crypto users weigh in on Sam Bankman-Fried’s prison time ahead of sentencing memo

Bankman-Fried’s case is mainly new ground regarding a high-profile figure from the digital asset space going through a full trial and being convicted and sentenced. Ross Ulbricht, creator of the Silk Road marketplace, was sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole in 2015. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, was sentenced to more than 11 years for exaggerating or falsifying claims about the firm’s blood-testing technology.

In the crypto world, former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has pleaded guilty to one felony count related to failure to maintain an effective Anti-Money Laundering program at the crypto exchange and is scheduled to be sentenced in April. Former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, charged with defrauding and misleading customers, is set to go to trial in January 2025.

“I don’t think that we’ll see [CZ’s] case impacted that much because they’re very different types,” said Bini. “The Mashinsky case, it could have big consequences because you’ve got the same defense attorney who’s now representing SBF and both of those being in the Southern District of New York. They’re not exactly the same, but [...] certainly Mashinsky will be watching.”

Bankman-Fried’s sentencing is scheduled to begin at 9:30 am ET in New York on March 28, his first appearance in court since waiving a potential conflict of interest for his lawyers. It’s unclear if SBF’s family will be in attendance.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Bitfarms announces $240M mining upgrade to triple post-halving hash rate [/INST] Bitcoin (BTC) mining company Bitfarms will invest nearly $240 million to upgrade its Bitcoin mining equipment as it aims to remain profitable after the Bitcoin halving in 2024.

Bitfarms’ prep work for the Bitcoin halving revolves around performance and profitability. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Bitfarms chief financial officer Jeffrey Lucas laid out the firm’s drive to procure 88,000 highly efficient Bitcoin miners.

Bitfarms previously purchased 35,888 of Bitmain’s Bitcoin Miner T21. Other efforts include exercising a purchase option to acquire an additional 28,000 T21 miners and further purchases of 19,280 Bitmain T21 miners, 3,888 Bitmain S21 miners and 740 Bitmain S21 hydro miners.

Bitfarms earned 286 BTC through mining in March 2024, with a monthly operating hash rate of 6.5 exahashes per second (EH/s).

In March 2023, the firm mined 424 BTC with 4.8 EH/s — indicating the importance of increasing hash rate capacity to stay profitable in Bitcoin mining.

Bitfarms Bitcoin mining operational data. Source: Bitfarms

Bitfarms sold nearly all the Bitcoin it mined over the past two months as it continues to reinvest into growing its mining fleet. Lucas explained the implications of the fleet upgrade:

“The transformational fleet upgrade propels Bitfarms in scale and profitability amid the Bitcoin halving. This is a game changer that triples our hash rate to 21 EH/s, increases our targeted operating capacity by 83% to 440 megawatts (MW), and improves fleet efficiency by 40% to 21 w/TH.”

Bitfarms holds $66 million in cash and 806 BTC in its treasury, worth $56.7 million at a BTC price of $70,400 as of March 31, giving it a total liquidity of $123 million.

“The success of our upgrade program rests on our proven ability to utilize our operational expertise to achieve industry-leading performance and profitability,” Lucas concluded.

Check out Cointelegraph’s beginner’s guide to learn more about Bitcoin mining.

Related: Wall Street funding has changed Bitcoin mining’s incentive structure: Report

Texas-based Bitcoin miner Giga Energy recently expanded its operations into Argentina to utilize wasted energy from “natural gas flaring” on the South American nation’s oil fields.

Gas flaring is the burning of the natural gas associated with oil extraction. Methane is released as part of the process, which Giga then converts into electricity to power its Bitcoin mining rigs.

However, the firm doesn’t expect to turn a profit as it still awaits the importation of all necessary equipment to scale its mining operations in the region fully.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] EU watchdog warns handful of exchanges may dominate crypto market [/INST] The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has highlighted the highly concentrated nature of crypto trading and the potential risks it poses to the broader financial ecosystem.

ESMA’s research indicates that about 90% of cryptocurrency transactions are processed by just 10 exchanges, with Binance, the largest among them, commanding half of the market.

The report, released on April 10, comes as the European Union (EU) prepares to implement MiCA, the world’s first extensive regulatory framework for crypto assets.

While such concentration may improve efficiency, it also raises concerns about the consequences of a significant exchange failure or malfunction.

ESMA said the concentration is a concern because a single asset or exchange failure could broadly impact the crypto ecosystem. The authority said in its report:

“The top 10 exchanges execute around 90% of total trading volume and, with a volume of over USD 3.7 trillion or a market share of 49%, Binance is the largest exchange. The runner-up, Upbit, recorded only about a seventh of this volume.”

However, over time, this concentration has grown. In 2019, it stood at 54%, and as per ESMA’s latest data, it has surged to 73%.

Related: Upcoming DeFi rules in Europe could ban non-decentralized protocols

The report also highlights that the euro has a limited presence in cryptocurrency trading despite the announcement of the MiCA regulation. However, as it is intended to enhance investor protection, it could constitute a potential growth driver once implemented in 2024. ESMA explained:

“The distribution of involved fiat money reflects a high reliance on the U.S. dollar and the South Korean won as the market’s on- and off-ramp. The euro only plays a minor role and the announcement of the MiCA regulation has not caused an increase in euro transactions so far.”

Additionally, ESMA refutes the idea that cryptocurrencies act as safe havens during times of market stress, citing their correlation with equities and lack of stability relative to gold.

MiCA, first proposed in September 2020 and approved by the European Parliament in April 2023, aims to usher in a new era of crypto asset regulation, underscoring the industry’s growing significance in the financial sector.

MiCA applies to any crypto assets, including securities and e-money, not currently covered by EU traditional finance regulations.

As the EU rolls out its comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto assets– MiCA, ESMA’s findings underscore the importance of oversight and risk management in this rapidly evolving sector.

Magazine: Big Questions: How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?"
"[INST] History of Crypto: Crypto winter and Ethereum landmarks [/INST] The cryptocurrency market has experienced several cycles characterized by periods of rapid price increases known as bull runs, followed by extended downturns referred to as “crypto winters.”

The term crypto winter refers to a phase within the cryptocurrency market characterized by a downturn in investor enthusiasm. This is evident through significant declines in crypto asset prices and trading volumes from their previous highs. Distinct from traditional capital markets, the cryptocurrency sector lacks standardized metrics to identify the onset of a crypto winter.

EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF CRYPTO

Nevertheless, a pattern has been observed that tends to span a four-year cycle. This cycle starts with an increase in the price of Bitcoin (BTC), leading up to the block reward halving. After the halving, a price downturn typically begins after crypto assets achieve new all-time highs.

The term crypto winter is not officially declared by any specific regulatory body or organization but is recognized by a consistent trend of declining prices across various cryptocurrencies.

This phase began in January 2018 and extended through December 2020.

The Great Crash of September 2018

During this period, Bitcoin and Ether (ETH), the two leading cryptocurrencies, experienced a loss of over 80% in value from their all-time highs. Bitcoin had previously reached a peak of nearly $20,000 toward the end of 2017, while Ether had ascended to over $1,400 before both saw a sharp decrease in value by September 2018.

Among the top 100 listed cryptocurrencies, 95% recorded a substantial drop in value.

Multiple inherent industry challenges triggered the crypto winter of 2018. These included the notably high failure rate of initial coin offerings, where over 97% did not meet their objectives, coupled with the issue of individual investors being overly leveraged. Regulatory concerns further complicated the situation, leading to a significant withdrawal of investors from the market.

The aftermath of the 2018 crypto crash profoundly affected the perception of cryptocurrencies. Financial institutions began to view the crypto market skeptically, labeling it as potentially speculative, while governments worldwide advised caution regarding crypto investments.

This period of inactivity shifted in July 2019, when investor enthusiasm began to warm up, propelling the price of Bitcoin beyond the $10,000 threshold. This revival in the market’s fortunes, however, was short-lived.

In March 2020, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a significant liquidity crisis that impacted markets globally, including the cryptocurrency market.

EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF CRYPTO

The Ethereum PoS journey sees new plans and reschedules

Despite the significant downturn in 2018, the year also witnessed pivotal developments for Ethereum. During this period, Ethereum began laying the groundwork for its transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) system despite facing delays and rescheduling efforts.

Early in 2018, network congestion was caused by the popularity of CryptoKitties, a blockchain-based game. This event highlighted the need for Ethereum to improve its scalability. In response, Ethereum explored the concept of sharding, a process that divides the blockchain into several smaller, more manageable segments known as shard chains or data layers. Each shard operates independently, allowing for parallel processing of information, which can significantly enhance the blockchain’s scalability.

However, Ethereum’s transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain was slower than anticipated, with multiple delays along the way.

According to its 2017 roadmap, two significant upgrades were planned from Ethereum — Metropolis and Serenity — to improve scalability by introducing proof-of-stake and sharding. The Metropolis upgrade was to be implemented in two phases: Byzantine, which focused on privacy improvements, and Constantinople, which would introduce a hybrid proof-of-work+PoS system.

Nonetheless, by June 2018, Ethereum abandoned the hybrid approach in favor of a more straightforward PoS system known as Casper 2.0. Although initially expected in 2019, this transition was completed in 2021, illustrating the complexities involved in upgrading such a significant and widely-used blockchain platform.

In a notable development during this period, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) classified Ether as a non-security in June. This decision made Ether only the second asset, after Bitcoin, to receive such a designation, sparking discussions and debates in subsequent years.

2019: The year of mainstream recognition and DeFi

In 2019, Ethereum gained significant attention due to its technical progress and decentralized finance (DeFi) expansion as an ecosystem. Over the course of the year, the DeFi sector experienced considerable growth, with the total value locked in DeFi protocols increasing to $667 million by Dec. 31, 2019.

DeFi TVL chart 2019. Source: Medium

Initially dominated by MakerDAO, which held 1.86 million ETH (approximately $260.4 million in value at the time), the sector saw an influx of new participants by year’s end.

Decentralized Exchanges also experienced significant growth, gaining traction amid the prevailing popularity of centralized exchanges. Uniswap emerged as a key player, with its average daily trading volume increasing from $25,000 to $1.5 million and its liquidity expanding from $500,000 to $25 million.

Moreover, Ethereum began to attract attention from various sectors, including major corporations, financial institutions, consumer brands and celebrities.

Basketball player Spencer Dinwiddie announced a initiative to tokenize his NBA contract on Ethereum, creating 90 Ethereum-based tokens. These tokens allowed holders to invest in a portion of Dinwiddie’s futures contract earnings plus interest. Dinwiddie received $13.5 million upfront from his $34 million contract through this arrangement.

The Sacramento Kings, a professional basketball team, launched a rewards program using a token built on Ethereum to enhance fan engagement through blockchain technology. In the entertainment industry, the Star Trek franchise announced it would issue a series of collectible ships as nonfungible tokens on Ethereum, leveraging the platform for digital collectibles.

EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF CRYPTO

Additionally, Samsung introduced a developer platform focused on Ethereum and announced a new smartphone with an integrated Ethereum wallet."
"[INST] Pac Finance causes $24M in liquidations via sudden parameter change [/INST] Users of the decentralized finance (DeFi) app Pac Finance have reportedly suffered $24 million in liquidations on April 11 because of a sudden parameter change made by a developer wallet, according to multiple reports on social media and the app’s official Discord server. In a post to X, the team stated that the parameter was changed by a smart contract engineer ""without prior notification to our team."" They claimed that they are in contact with affected users and are woring to mitigate the issue.

Pac Finance is a crypto lending app that runs on Blast network. It allows crypto holders to deposit funds and earn interest by lending their capital. To ensure repayment, the app only allows borrowers to take out loans equal to a percentage value of their collateral. This percentage is called the “loan-to-value ratio” (LTV). The LTV can be changed by the development team, but this is usually only done after an announcement is made.

According to Blast network’s blockchain data, a developer wallet called a function on Pac Finance's PoolConfigurator-Proxy contract at 1:06 am UTC on April 11, setting the LTV for Renzo Restaked Ether (ezETH) at 60%.

ezETH parameter change on Pac Finance. Source: Blastscan.

According to smart contract developer Roffet.eth, this parameter change caused “the liquidation of a large number of ezETH leveraging farmers,” as these borrowers were now found to be violating the collateral rules for the protocol. Roffet called the parameter change “arbitrary,” since it was allegedly done without warning.

Parsec Finance founder Will Sheehan also criticized the change, claiming it occurred “seemingly without warning.” Sheehan estimated that borrowers lost approximately $24 million in collateral as their assets were automatically sold off to pay back their loans due to this change.

Related: Curve’s (CRV) price hits a 1-year low amid looming liquidation threat

In response to the cascade of liquidations, Pac Finance users took to the protocol’s official Discord server to complain and demand answers. In response, the team’s Discord moderator, Bountydreams, announced they were attempting to contact the team to get an explanation. By 7:55 pm, they claimed to have still received no response.

Pac Finance users complain of April 11 liquidations. Source: Pax Finance, Discord.

After publication, the team posted to X acknowledging the issue. They stated that the parameter change was made by a smart contract engineer who was asked to make changes to LTV. However, the engineer also made changes to the liquidation threshold, which was not authorized by the team. The team claimed they are working to mitigate the impact to users and to set up a ""governance contract/timelock and forum"" to prevent future incidents like this one.

Mass liquidations are a frequent problem for leveraged traders who borrow cryptocurrency or cash. However, they usually happen because of sudden changes in the price of a cryptocurrency, not because of protocol changes. On April 2, leveraged Bitcoin traders were liquidated for over $165 million when it experienced a flash crash. On April 9, another $110 million in Bitcoin positions were liquidated when the price suddenly rose.

Update (April 12, 2:12 pm UTC): This article has been updated to include a statement from the Pac Finance team."
"[INST] Mango Markets exploiter trial heads to jury [/INST] A jury has begun deliberations for charges related to market manipulation and fraud following an alleged $110 million exploit of the Mango Markets decentralized exchange by Avraham “Avi” Eisenberg.

On April 17 in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge Richard Berman excused the jury for the day following closing arguments by prosecutors and defense attorneys. The individuals will continue deliberations tomorrow on whether to find Eisenberg guilty of commodities fraud and commodities manipulation after a two-week trial.

In October 2022, Eisenberg allegedly executed a series of large purchases on Mango Markets to artificially raise the price of the token relative to USD Coin (USDC), then withdrew the assets from the platform. U.S. authorities arrested Eisenberg in Puerto Rico in December 2022, claiming he “willfully and knowingly” engaged in a scheme involving manipulating the price of perpetual futures on Mango Markets.

During closing arguments on April 17, Eisenberg’s lawyers argued that he did not commit any crimes but orchestrated a “successful and legal trading strategy” resulting in roughly $110 million in gains. Prosecutors claimed he “had to lie” to remove funds from Mango Markets, suggesting fraud was part of his plan.

“My client [...] fully complied with the Mango Markets smart contracts,” said Eisenberg’s attorney, according to reporting from Inner City Press. “He withdrew his own capital. It wasn’t a borrow. And the rest of the money? He returned shortly afterwards. They called Avi brazen. That’s not a crime. He didn’t hack into Mango Markets.”

Following the exploit, Eisenberg returned $67 million worth of crypto to Mango Markets but claimed he had obtained the remainder of the funds legally.

“He had control of $110 million,” said defense attorneys. “But he was seeking to return the funds. Maybe you wouldn’t have done it. But this is how people do it in this world of cryptocurrency. He sent $67 million. What was kept were the profits.”

Related: Mango Markets heist like a fake diamond ring scam: Prosecutor

A jury could come back with a verdict in the case as early as April 18. Reports have suggested that Eisenberg could face up to 20 years in prison if found guilty. He has been held in custody since January 2023.

In addition to the criminal charges, Eisenberg faces civil action brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Both cases have been stayed until the conclusion of the criminal trial.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime"
"[INST] Here’s where you can catch the Bitcoin halving live [/INST] Update (20/04/2024 12:11 UTC): Bitcoin has successfully gone through its fourth-ever halving event.

Bitcoin (BTC) is now just moments away from its fourth-ever halving event since its inception — due to happen on April 20 when Bitcoin’s block height reaches 840,000.

From crypto exchanges to influencers and popular podcasters, live streams and physical events are popping up worldwide, where Bitcoiners are set to celebrate the momentous occasion that many hope will lead to the next crypto bull run.

The event marks the moment when Bitcoin miners’ block issuance rewards are cut in half from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block — a mechanism designed to permanently reduce Bitcoin’s inflation rate until it reaches a maximum supply of 21 billion Bitcoin.

Bitcoin halving livestreams

If you’re after an event giving you a look back at the past four-year cycle with a bunch of Bitcoiners then head on over to BITC0IN’s Discord and YouTube channel, which has 68,700 subscribers.

The team will be passing around the virtual microphone to various Bitcoiners. Anyone can speak at the event, and there’ll even be games of poker running simultaneously, as per a recent statement from several “Bitcoin volunteers” on Reddit.

Crypto traders are also hosting private online parties if you’re brave enough to slide in the DMs for an invite, including professional trader Oliver Velez, who declared he is kicking off his private online Bitcoin halving with 2,000 guests just 6 blocks before the 840,000 block is mined, which is roughly an hour before the halving occurs.

If you can’t manage to get into that, then crypto exchange Kraken has loads of well-known Bitcoiners jumping on its Bitcoin Halving livestream, including Dave Portnoy, Jack Mallers, Dylan LeClair, Anthony Pompliano, and Pete Rizzo.

Philippines Bitcoin payments app Pouch is also hosting an online halving party event, encouraging Bitcoiners to invite their mates to be “orange-pilled.”

And, of course, Cointelegraph has its own countdown on the homepage for those who enjoy a simpler approach.

For those wanting to have the satisfaction of witnessing the 840,000th block being mined, and don’t mind constantly refreshing the page, you can visit one of the blockchain explorer websites such as BTCScan or Blockstream.

There are even a few physical halving parties scattered around the world, including one in Switzerland, hosted by the founder of Swiss crypto broker Bitcoin Suisse, and another in Brisbane, Australia, which is being sponsored by Binance.

What will happen after the Bitcoin halving?

Not a lot, at least immediately, according to analysts,

Crypto.com’s general manager for Asia and the Pacific, as well as the Middle East and Africa, Karl Mohan explained that the event probably won't have an instant impact on Bitcoin the same day, and investors should adopt a broader perspective, at least until toward the end of this year:

“It is unlikely for it to have immediate direct impact from day one, but over the next six months we do believe this will create bullish foundations for Bitcoin; we’ve seen it in the past cycles, and we believe this cycle is going to play out the same way.”

Other analysts note that investors shouldn’t fret over short-term Bitcoin (BTC) volatility and instead focus on the bigger picture.

“I always recommend zooming out with Bitcoin’s price and investing with a long-term view.” Coin Stories host Natalie Brunell told Cointelegraph in the days leading up to the halving.

“There’s usually increased speculation around these times, which can lead to volatile price swings both before and after the halving,” she added.

Bitcoin has been trading between $71,069 and $59,698 over the past seven days. Source: CoinMarketCap

Following the last halving in May 2020, Bitcoin’s price experienced a 5% dip one month afterward, only to surge by 180% by year’s end, as per CoinMarketCap data.

Crypto leaders expect many Bitcoin holders to sell a portion of their holdings after the Bitcoin halving.

Collective Shift CEO Ben Simpson anticipates “another sell-off” after the Bitcoin halving, similar to “when the Bitcoin ETF was announced” in January this year.

Within just 11 days of the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs, the price of Bitcoin plummeted by nearly 15%.

“It was a buy the rumor, sell the news event,” Simpson explained, forecasting that he expects “the same thing to happen here.”

Related: Crypto market ‘underestimates the long-term impact’ of Bitcoin halving: Bitwise

Mohan echoed a similar sentiment that historical data suggests the halving event tends to follow a “buy the rumor, sell the news” pattern.

“Price sensitivity in the short term is going to go through a consolidation phase, again something that we’ve seen in the past cycles. It’s a pattern and trend that is clearly available,” Mohan told Cointelegraph.

In comments to Cointelegraph, Bitget’s managing director Gracy Chen explained that the Bitcoin halving differs significantly in “several key ways” from previous halvings due to how much the market has developed since the last cycle.

“Evolving regulatory landscapes and technological advancements further differentiate this cycle. Additionally, favorable global economic conditions and the recent spot Bitcoin ETFs offer greater market sentiment,” Chen said.

Chen anticipates Bitcoin reaching a six-figure price tag, possibly as early as next year.

“Looking ahead, post-2024, Bitcoin is poised to surpass US$100,000, buoyed by enhanced regulatory frameworks, technological innovations, and favorable macroeconomic conditions,” she stated.

Magazine: China will intensify Bitcoin bull run, $1M by 2028: Bitcoin Man, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] VC Roundup: Investors move into cross-chain, Bitcoin layer-2 and institutional tools [/INST] Venture capital firms are moving to seize market share amid the current bull cycle. March’s developments include the acquisition of quantitative trading firm CFT Capital by Web3-native investment company Borderless Capital.

The move adds artificial intelligence and quant proprietary trading products to Borderless’ businesses, targeting more efficiency in capital deployment across Web3 verticals, said the company, which has$600 million in assets under management.

Borderless is an early investor in Algorand, Blockdaemon and Securitize — the latter of which is BlackRock’s new partner in a tokenized digital fund.

The acquisition will also place Borderless in Latin America. “We are currently actively looking for Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile and Mexico,” Borderless co-founder and managing partner David Garcia told Cointelegraph.

For 2024, the venture firm expects cross-chain standardization to be the next chapter in the evolution of the crypto space. “The advent of modularity in blockchains is a long-term trend, and we anticipate new L1s, L2s, and even L3s will emerge. [...] For mainstream adoption, we believe Web3 needs an aggregation layer that can interoperate across any chain,” Garcia said.

According to Garcia, another key investment focus at Borderless is decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN). “We strongly believe DePIN represents a new coordination and innovation paradigm across many diverse industries, including communication, distributed computation, mapping, and transportation.”

In this edition of Cointelegraph’s VC Roundup, we feature startups that raised capital during the last weeks of March.

Morph receives $20 million in angel and seed funding

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) layer-2 Morph has raised $19 million in a seed round led by DragonFly Capital with additional participation from Pantera Capital, Foresight Ventures, The Spartan Group, MEXC Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Public Works, MH Ventures and Everyrealm. The firm raised an additional $1 million secured in an angel round. The company plans to use the capital toward talent acquisition, developer incentives, and marketing efforts.

The blockchain is built on three pillars: decentralized sequencers, optimistic zkEVM integration and modular design. “Being one of the first to launch with a decentralized sequencer on Ethereum is also an example of our commitment to decentralization from the beginning,” said Morph co-founder and chief operating officer Azeem Khan.

FLock.io secures $6 million seed round to decentralize AI training

London-based Web3 decentralized AI startup FLock.io announced a $6 million Seed fundraising on March 28, co-led by Lightspeed Faction and Tagus Capital. The company aims to deploy its Federated Learning-powered Training Platform with the new funds, designed to decentralize AI agent training, fine-tuning, and inferencing while ending user data collection.

“Now, anyone can contribute knowledge and enrich AI models themselves. The result? Community-owned models built by the many, not just the few, with data contributors being fairly rewarded and far more use cases,” said the startup in a statement.

Keyring Network raises $6 million for digital asset compliance

Keyring Network, founded by a former Nomura quant analyst and a J.P. Morgan investment banker in 2022, has secured $6 million in seed funding, co-led by Gumi Cryptos Capital and Greenfield Capital, with additional support from Motier Ventures, Kima Ventures, UDHC Finance, Eberg Capital and notable angel investors. The platform leverages zero-knowledge technology to address regulatory compliance and market liquidity for financial organizations, enabling private data sharing and identification of qualified participants for secondary market tokenized transactions.

“Keyring’s asset-level solution is the most flexible ZK compliance tool catering to financial institutions’ individual DeFi risk appetite. Users can restrict themselves in terms of counterparty interactions, so they can be as conservative as they would like to,” noted Felix Machart, partner at Greenfield Capital.

Rails secures $6.2 million for self-custodial perpetuals exchange

Crypto perpetuals exchange Rails has raised $6.2 million in a seed round led by Slow Ventures, Round13 Capital, CMCC Global and Quantstamp. The exchange offers self-custody trading of perpetual contracts — a type of futures contract without an expiry date, allowing traders to better employ risk management strategies. The funds will be used to support the development of the platform, which uses smart contracts powered by zero-knowledge proofs.

Rails was created as a result of the FTX collapse, said its co-founder Satraj Bramba in a statement. “In addition to getting rugged on FTX, the harder pill to swallow was the loss of the most efficient, productive trading environment we had ever used. [...] This massive gap in the market led to the creation of Rails.”

Build on Bitcoin raises $10M seed round led by Castle Island Ventures

Hybrid layer-2 solution BOB, or “Build on Bitcoin,” has successfully raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by Castle Island Ventures with contributions from Mechanism Ventures, Bankless Ventures, CMS Ventures, UTXO Management, Asymmetric, Antalpha, Web3.com Ventures, BTC Frontier Fund and Zeeprime.

The funds are earmarked for launching the first Bitcoin layer-2 with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility, designed to stimulate the onboarding of decentralized applications (DApps) on the Bitcoin network. BOB has also formed a strategic partnership with Anduro, a project by Marathon Digital, to collaborate on Alys, a Bitcoin layer-2 solution for institutions.

RACE unveils $5M raise amid testnet launch

Tokenization platform RACE has disclosed a $5 million funding raise aimed at supporting its recently released testnet. The platform offers tokenization of assets such as aircraft, real estate, private credits, art, jewelry and gold to accredited and institutional investors. RACE plans to build Decentralized Investment Committees (DICs) composed of industry experts who will perform due diligence on assets, including underwriting, legal services, asset custodianship and financial analysis.

“The DIC’s primary role is to conduct thorough due diligence of all potential opportunities before they are tokenized and made available on its infrastructure platform,” the company said in a statement. Investors backing the startup’s funding round were not disclosed.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all — Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Why financial infrastructure needs to be open-source — Hyperledger [/INST] Open-source governance and development tools remain prerequisites for governments, organizations and financial institutions that want to leverage blockchain technology.

Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph at Paris Blockchain Week, Hyperledger executive director Daniela Barbosa discussed why open-source blockchain technology is a non-negotiable requirement for global institutions.

Barbosa, who also serves as the general manager of the Linux Foundation, said shifting critical financial infrastructure onto blockchain protocols hinges on the underlying network being open-source and open governance.

Open-source blockchain infrastructure like Hyperledger Besu operates on Ethereum, but enables public and private permissioned use cases. Source: Daniela Barbosa, Hyperledger Foundation.

“All around the world, organizations are selecting Hyperledger families to work with because they know it’s under the Linux Foundation. It’s under that open governance and open development, and it has the backing of major companies, governments and organizations,” Barbosa explained.

The Hyperledger director said that organizations tapping into their technology stack care not only that the tools are open-source but that there is open development and an active community of diverse maintainers and code contributors.

“Nobody wants to build new rails on code that one company owns. If that company goes out of business or changes its mind and says we’re no longer open source, you must pay license fees to continue using what you built.”

Barbosa also believes the Linux Foundation’s focus is on fostering open governance and the development of tools under its umbrella. She highlighted critical infrastructure like Linux Kernel’s use in a myriad of computing systems as an example of the embeddedness of open-source infrastructure.

“For the last 25 years, the Linux Foundation has been building open source communities and the most important code. Think Linux Kernel and Kubernetes. Essentially, all cloud computing runs on Kubernetes,” Barbosa said.

Related: Hyperledger onboards Citi, forms Besu working group headed by DTCC

The Linux Foundation GM said that several organizations have made efforts to open-source their software and code. However, she questioned whether making this information openly useable on GitHub does enough to make the tools openly developed and governed.

“That’s what the foundation does; we bring that open governance and development. Banks who compete with one another can come and collaborate. Companies like Accenture and IBM could collaborate on things for the community,” Barbosa explained.

Related: Tokenized asset market could hit $16T on public blockchains — RippleX VP

She added that this is an essential long-term consideration for the financial services industry in the event that regulators begin to probe who owns what and makes changes to the underlying code.

Barbosa also unpacked the development history of Hyperledger’s blockchain tools. Hyperledger Besu, a prominent Ethereum execution client, has become one of its most important infrastructure offerings.

Hyperledger Besu is an open-source Java Ethereum execution client. It offers public and private functionality and can run all Ethereum smart contracts. Users can use all Ethereum token standards, including nonfungible token standards ERC-20 and ERC-721.

Hyperledger Besu is among the top three Ethereum execution clients by user numbers. Source: Daniela Barbosa, Hyperledger Foundation.

“By 2019, institutions were very interested in Ethereum ecosystem. This was the contribution that came in from Consensys around the time that the Hyperledger Foundation and Ethereum Enterprise Alliance joined forces,” Barbosa said.

Barbosa cited on-chain data that reflects 12% of Ethereum mainnet users running Hyperledger Besu as an execution client. Consensys Linea runs on the client, as well as Hedera Hashgraph.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] KuCoin deemed ‘fine’ by analyst, despite criminal allegations [/INST] The Seychelles-based crypto exchange KuCoin has been declared “fine” by Ki Young Ju, founder and CEO of crypto analytics service CryptoQuant, despite criminal allegations and mounting concerns over its reserves among its users.

“BTC and ETH withdrawals surged, driven mainly by retail users, with a small impact on the overall reserve,” Ju stated in a post on X.

“They appear to not commingle customers’ funds and have sufficient reserves to process user withdrawals,” Ju stated, claiming that from an on-chain perspective, the exchange appears to be “fine.”

Cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin reserves. Source: Ki Young Ju on X

KuCoin’s total portfolio balance across multiple chains stands at $4.889 billion, according to Scopescan data.

On March 26, the United States Department of Justice alleged that KuCoin founders Chun Gan and Ke Tang had willfully failed to maintain an Anti-Money Laundering program at the exchange and claimed the platform was being used for “money laundering and terrorist financing.”

Ju contrasted KuCoin’s reserves with those of the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX, noting that KuCoin appears to have not mixed customer funds with its own reserves.

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX reserves. Source: Ki Young Ju on X

Crypto investors typically withdraw their funds from crypto exchanges when they become aware of legal concerns or issues with an exchange’s reserve status.

Users rushed to withdraw billions of dollars of funds from FTX, when the former CEO of Binance, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, tweeted that Binance would be disposing of all their entire holdings of FTX’s native FTT token.

Related: Bitcoin miner reserves held steady in February, despite $40B flows to exchanges

Concerns with KuCoin’s or another large exchange’s reserves are not limited to its users alone, as these worries can often snowball into a wider market exodus. When news of FTX’s collapse emerged, the price of Bitcoin fell more than 20% within the week.

Yet despite legal action against KuCoin’s founders, the market doesn’t appear to be overly concerned by the news, with the Crypto Fear & Greed Index still indicating an extreme level of greed, currently at a score of 83.

Crypto Fear & Greed Index. Source: Alternative.me

Magazine: Can you trust crypto exchanges after the collapse of FTX?"
"[INST] Worldcoin launches its own ‘human-centric’ blockchain network [/INST] Worldcoin, an identity coin startup founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is furthering its “human-centric” approach to the Web3 space with its new blockchain network, World Chain.

On April 17, Worldcoin announced World Chain, which is a new blockchain initiative designed to prioritize human users, enhance efficiency and foster real-world utility in Web3 applications.

Worldcoin recently surpassed 10 million World IDs created and 75 million completed transactions, signaling the project’s rapid expansion. Its own dedicated network has been designed to scale alongside the broader Ethereum network as a layer 2 to meet the project’s needs.

Cointelegraph spoke with Tiago Sada, the head of operations at Worldcoin, to better understand the project’s intention with its network and how it plans to keep humans in the center.

Related: Worldcoin: Trail of Bits audit shows no direct vulnerability for Orb software

Sada said that while technically, World Chain will act similarly to any other L2 and Ethereum, its nuance is that it prioritizes humans over bots, with blockchains often facing congestion due to bot activity.

“Usually, the way it works is that every account is fighting for block space. Usually, since bots can move faster and they can outbid humans,” he said, “the networks get saturated with all the transactions for bots, and humans have whatever is left — many times, they can’t even get in.”

World Chain’s solution tries to troubleshoot this by favoring transactions completed by verified World ID holders:

“It’s going to be an open and permissions network like everyone else, but we are going to prioritize transactions for humans so that their transactions definitely get in, and then the remainder of the block space is just like any other blockchain.”

Additionally, Sada explained how verified users will receive a free gas allowance, minimizing friction for newcomers. The protocol aims for an equilibrium where bots and power users ultimately cover gas fees for casual users.

He explained how the Worldcoin Foundation would provide an “allowance” to verified humans, which would make their couple of monthly transactions gas free.

“The idea with that is just to make it a lot easier for people to get started, so that one does not need to go through the pains of unwrapping and understanding all these things.”

The network aligns with Ethereum and also collaborates with projects like Optimism and Base. Worldcoin anticipates a full launch in the summer, with a soon-to-be-expected developer preview.

This announcement comes on the heels of a series of changes the project has been implementing, including tightening its privacy checks to improve the protection of user data and ensure that its platform is available only to people over 18 while also allowing permanent deletion of the user’s iris code.

On March 22, Worldcoin even made its orb software open-source and implemented a new “personal custody” privacy feature.

These moves follow scrutiny from world governments over its privacy practices, which have led to some temporary bans on operations in countries such as Portugal, Kenya and Spain.

Responding to the scrutiny, Saba said it is only the natural process of introducing a new protocol that is “fortunately” scaling at Worldcoin’s pace.

“When any project starts getting to scale, it’s the government’s job to go in and make sure that everything that the project is saying is actually true. And I think that’s completely natural.”

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Bitcoin miners could dump $5B in BTC after halving: 10x Research [/INST] There could be a large outflow of Bitcoin (BTC) from miners in the months following the Bitcoin halving as in previous cycles, according to a market analyst.

Bitcoin miners could potentially liquidate $5 billion worth of BTC after the halving, according to calculations by the head of research at 10x Research, Markus Thielen, in an April 13 analyst note.

“The overhang from this selling could last four to six months, explaining why Bitcoin might go sideways for the next few months — as it has done following past halvings,” he added.

Thielen said that the same could happen again, with crypto markets potentially facing “a significant challenge in a six-month ‘summer’ lull.”

Bitcoin prices remained range bound between $9,000 and $11,500 in the five months that followed the 2020 halving.

This year, the halving will occur around April 20, just six days away, so markets may not see any significant upward trajectory until around October if history rhymes.

BTC post-2020 halving prices. Source: 10x Research

Additionally, miners tend to stock up on BTC, “leading to a supply/demand imbalance and a subsequent rally in Bitcoin prices,” leading up to the halving, he said.

This has already occurred, with BTC prices surging 74% in 2024 to reach an all-time high of $73,734 on March 14 before correcting to below $63,000 in mid-April.

Thielen also thinks that altcoins, in particular, could bear the brunt of this situation. Many of them have been falling back heavily over the past week and many remain a long way away from their peaks in 2021.

“Even if there is a correlation between the halving and an altcoin rally, as some predict, historical evidence shows that the rally typically begins almost six months later.”

Related: Bitcoin halving will have to battle with ‘weak time of year’ — Coinbase

Thielen postulated that Marathon, the world’s largest Bitcoin miner, has built an inventory “that will likely be gradually sold after the halving to prevent a revenue cliff from occurring.”

Marathon pre-halving accumulation. Source: 10x Research

As Marathon (currently) produces 28–30 BTC per day, this could result in 133 days of additional supply hitting the market plus the BTC it produces, which would be 14–15 BTC per day after the halving, he said.

“Other miners will likely follow a similar strategy to liquidate part of their inventory gradually.”

The researcher concluded that if all miners have a similar strategy to sell inventory post-halving, “this could result in a maximum of $104 million of BTC selling per day — reversing the supply/demand imbalance that caused BTC to rally pre-halving.”

Last week, Marathon CEO Fred Thiel said that the firm’s break-even rate would be about $46,000 per BTC to remain profitable after the halving, predicting that there is unlikely to be any significant price movements in the six months that follow the event.

Magazine: Altseason on the horizon, SEC targets Uniswap, and BTC halving news: Hodler’s Digest, April 7–13"
"[INST] GBTC sees $166M outflows despite CEO’s ‘equilibrium’ remark [/INST] The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) continues to experience significant outflows, with over $166 million and more than 2,500 Bitcoin withdrawn from the fund’s holdings on Friday, April 12.

According to Farside Investors data, outflows from GBTC have now exceeded $16.2 billion since its conversion to a spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) in January. Throughout April, the daily outflows from GBTC have fluctuated between $75 million and $300 million.

Inflows into other spot Bitcoin ETFs have also slowed, indicating declining investor engagement. GBTC recorded significant outflows of $767 million this week, contributing to the net negative flows from spot Bitcoin ETFs.

BlackRock has maintained strong support, with assets under management for its iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF exceeding $15 billion, narrowing the gap to GBTC.

Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein hinted on April 10 that outflows from the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust might be stabilizing, suggesting optimism among traders and investors, but outflows have continued.

One potential reason behind the massive GBTC outflows is its comparatively high management fee of 1.5%, which is significantly higher than the 0.30% average fee charged by its competitors.

Related: Bitcoin price takes liquidity near $69K as gold surge rattles markets

Sonnenshein noted that markets often exhibit high excitement when commodity or thematic exposure products first emerge. However, these products mature as time passes, leading to market consolidation as investors focus on a few offerings.

According to Farside data, GBTC saw outflows of $17.5 million on April 10, a significant decrease from the $154.9 million outflows recorded on April 9. The previous low was on Feb. 26 when GBTC outflowed $22.4 million. The daily GBTC outflow average since January is $257.8 million.

GBTC launched in 2015 and converted to an ETF in January, alongside the launch of nine other spot Bitcoin ETFs after Grayscale won a lawsuit against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, forcing it to review a GBTC conversion bid it previously denied.

Bankrupt crypto lending firm Genesis recently offloaded approximately 36 million GBTC shares to acquire 32,041 Bitcoin.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments — Trezor CEO"
"[INST] 10 days until halving: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall [/INST] Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall after the upcoming Bitcoin halving, despite a 50% Bitcoin (BTC) supply issuance reduction, Laurent Benayoun, the CEO of Acheron Trading, told Cointelegraph in an interview:

“In dollar terms, it’s not obvious that miners would be worse off after the halving, quite the opposite […] The decrease in mining rewards is going to be compensated by an increase in network fees.”

The Bitcoin halving is set to reduce block issuance rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC on April 19. Following previous halvings, smaller mining firms were forced out of business due to the decreased block rewards.

However, this will be different after the 2024 halving due to the increasing network fees boosted by Ordinals inscriptions and Bitcoin-native decentralized finance, or BTCFi, Benayoun told Cointelegraph:

“We’ve seen NFTs popping up on the Bitcoin blockchain, and we’ve seen a number of projects trying to build DeFi on the Bitcoin network. So all those elements are leading to an increase in network fees.”

Bitcoin network fees are transaction fees paid to incentivize miners to include a transaction in the following block.

FOLLOW BITCOIN HALVING COVERAGE IN FULL HERE

Average Bitcoin transaction fees are currently at $4.88 per transaction, down from $16.13 per transaction a month ago, on March 5. Bitcoin transaction fees rose over 86% during the past year, according to YCharts.

Bitcoin average transaction fees chart. Source: YCharts

Related: BTCFi innovation to match Ethereum DeFi in the future — MerlinSwap co-founder

Bitcoin mining companies would generally stay profitable if the Bitcoin price remained above the $70,000 mark, Joe Downie, the chief marketing officer of NiceHash, told Cointelegraph:

“If the price stays above $70,000, most miners will continue to be profitable since, at current block rewards, they are profitable at a BTC price of over $35,000. Less than that and they likely lose money.”

Bitcoin price fell 4.3% during the previous week to trade at $66,851 as of 10:22 am UTC. BTC has been trading below the $70,000 mark since April 1, according to CoinMarketCap data.

BTC/USDT, 1-day chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Beyond Bitcoin’s price action, a mining firm’s profitability will depend on its mining equipment’s quality and energy efficiency. Downie explained:

“[Bitcoin halvings] make a lot of older hardware less profitable due to less reward received for the work done by the machine. Newer, more energy-efficient models will continue to be profitable though, so it does not depend on the size of the mining farm, but on the type of mining equipment.”

Bitcoin miner revenue recorded its second-best day in history on March 6, reaching $75.9 million a day after the Bitcoin price hit a new all-time high above $69,200.

Thanks to Bitcoin’s price appreciation, combined with the increasing network fees, fewer mining firms will be forced out of business compared to past cycles, says Acheron Trading’s Benayoun:

“We used to see in previous cycles in 2017 and 2021, less efficient mining operations being forced out of business. I don’t think this will be the case this time around, because of this increase in network fees.”

Related: Is the Bitcoin halving the right time to invest in BTC?"
"[INST] Bitcoin halving 2024 — Done and dusted! [/INST] Bitcoin successfully went through its fourth halving event after its 840,000th block was mined. The event slashes mining rewards in half.

The event has the crypto community eagerly awaiting what’s next for the Bitcoin (BTC) price, with some predictions reaching as high as $250,000.

At the time of publication, Bitcoin’s price is $63,960, up 1.16% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data.

From today onwards, Bitcoin miners will receive 3.125 BTC per mined block, down from the previous 6.25 BTC.

The halving is a programmed process in the Bitcoin protocol that happens every 210,000 blocks mined, which is roughly every four years.

The last three halvings occurred in 2012, 2016 and 2020, leading to significant drops in mining rewards over time. The first Bitcoin halving occurred in 2012 when the reward for mining a block was reduced from 50 to 25 BTC.

The primary purpose behind the Bitcoin halving is to ensure scarcity and reduce Bitcoin’s inflation rate over time. Bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, built the mechanism into the code.

Cutting mining rewards in half slows the rate at which new Bitcoin is created.

The halvings will continue until roughly 2140, when all Bitcoin is mined.

Major Bitcoin miners have been getting ready for the event. Marathon Digital recently announced its plans to acquire a 200-megawatt Bitcoin mining facility in Texas for $87.3 million.

Meanwhile, in December 2023, competitor Bitcoin mining firm Riot Platforms purchased 66,560 mining rigs from manufacturer MicroBT in one of the largest expansions of hash rate in the firm’s history.

Related: Bitcoin halving supply shock set to shake up mining sector

M2 CEO Stefan Kimmel told Cointelegraph:

The Bitcoin halving is a pivotal event that historically signals a shift in the market, usually initiating a bullish trend over the following months. As we approached the fourth halving, the anticipation built, suggesting a continued — if slightly more subdued — upward trajectory.

Despite short-term predictions of price volatility within the crypto community, there remains optimism about the long-term potential of Bitcoin’s price.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, billionaire investor Tim Draper believes that the halving is going to help push Bitcoin’s price up to “$250,000 or more,” a forecast he has consistently proclaimed, particularly in 2022.

“The simple reason that Bitcoin price goes up after the halving is that the supply goes down, and with continued upward pressure on demand, the price goes up naturally in a free market.”

Meanwhile, Herbert Sim, aka “Bitcoin Man,” told Cointelegraph that there are currently other elements at play when speculating over Bitcoin’s price.

“Halving is not the only thing to look out for in the price action,” he declared, indicating that the recent approval of the Bitcoin ETF in Hong Kong will also potentially have a major price impact.

“The big banks of China will all have to start buying Bitcoin themselves too,” Sim stated.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Bitcoin halving searches on Google is at its highest point ever [/INST] The level of interest in the Bitcoin halving on Google has soared to its highest point of all time, with predicted data pegging it at more than double that of the last halving in 2020.

Search interest for the term “Bitcoin halving” has already reached a score of 45, according to Google Trends data, with Google predicting it will reach an estimated score of 100 by the end of this month.

Google Trends notes that a value of 100 translates to “peak popularity” for the term.

Search interest for the Bitcoin Halving’has has hit record levels. Source: Google Trends

The Bitcoin (BTC) halving refers to when the rewards paid to miners are halved. The 2024 Bitcoin halving will reduce block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.

The halving is currently slated to occur around 4:00 am UTC on April 20, according to the Cointelegraph countdown timer.

Google Trends shows that the Bitcoin halving is seeing the most interest from Nigeria, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Cyprus.

Search interest in the Bitcoin halving was highest in Nigeria. Source: Google Trends

Related: Bitcoin bull Pompliano says BTC will be bigger than gold and ‘the leader in the recovery’

Record levels of interest in the halving event may not come as a surprise following Bitcoin’s banner performance over the last few months.

Bitcoin began the year at a price of $42,200 and soared 74% to reach a new all-time high of $73,600 on March 13, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Bitcoin’s price action has since cooled off and has traded consistently lower since mid-May. At the time of publication, Bitcoin is changing hands for $61,078 — down 17% from its all-time high.

Despite souring sentiment from market participants, several market commentators have pointed to the historical patterns of Bitcoin price action to suggest that Bitcoin could rally significantly in the months following the halving.

Web3 Gamer: Bitcoin Halving will pump games, Shrapnel’s ‘simple’ secret revealed"
"[INST] Web3 wellness ring lets users own their health data — and wear it too [/INST] Is the future of wellness technology here? A new Solana-based wellness wearable is taking health data on-chain, allowing users to own and monetize their data.

The Cudis ring, developed by BeatBit Wellness Lab, is being touted as a Web3 alternative to the popular Oura ring that has recently taken the health and wellness industry by storm.

It uses decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) technology and allows users to monetize their anonymized health data and feed it back into the ecosystem for more informed personalized health insights.

Wellness data is encrypted and anonymously stored on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) after indexing on the Solana blockchain. This anonymized data fuels the development of customizable artificial intelligence (AI) modules that generate personalized insights into users’ mental and physical well-being.

Cudis CEO Edison Chen told Cointelegraph that the goal of the Web3 wearable is to focus on users first.

“Traditional smart ring companies operate on a centralized model where they collect and store users’ health data on their servers and analyze it to provide personal health insights through an app,” he explained. “Potentially, they monetize the data without sharing financial benefits with the users.”

“We’re empowering individuals to take control of their own health data.”

Related: How DePINs are connecting farmers and businesses via blockchain

He said the ring tracks users’ heart rate, sleep, stress, strain and burned calories. In the beginning, points will be given as rewards for data, which will later become monetizable tokens.

Chen said that users seeking more advanced insights and personalized programs are often forced to pay extra fees for wellness applications. However, “blockchain technology offers the perfect solution” to revolutionize that model.

According to the official announcement for the wearable, it has already had 200 participants at an event at the Solana Hacker House and anticipates the first 10,000 rings to roll out in the second quarter of 2024.

DePINs continue gaining traction in the Web3 space, with new use cases rapidly emerging.

Earlier in 2024, decentralized finance executives were predicting that DePINs and AI together would be a “power duo” that would take the space by storm.

DePINs are already being used to revolutionize internet access in India, weather data collection worldwide and farmers’ connection with consumers.

Magazine: Memecoins make millionaires, Terraform and Do Kwon liable for fraud, and more: Hodler’s Digest, March 31 – April 6"
"[INST] dYdX community approves 20M token stake as network activity soars [/INST] The dYdX community approved staking 20 million DYDX tokens to strengthen security as the decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) experiences a surge in activity.

The proposal passed on April 6 with 91.7% of votes in favor, allowing tokens from the community treasury worth over $61 million at current prices to be staked with liquid staking protocol Stride. According to dYdX, the move is a response to the growing trading activity on the protocol:

“The rate of DYDX being staked to validators has plateaued and deposits to the exchange are growing at a tremendous pace. Over $140M USDC is held in dYdX v4, of which roughly $100M arrived in the past week.”

Staking is the process of locking cryptocurrency to support a blockchain network’s operations, like processing transactions or validating new blocks. Participants, or “stakers,” commit their tokens as stakes in the network. In return for their service and the risks—such as potential token value fluctuation — stakers receive rewards, often in the form of additional tokens.

Staking proposal result. Source: Mintscan

By staking its native tokens, the DEX is seeking to shield its network from a possible control attack, similar to a 51% attack. This type of attack happens when a malicious entity gains control over a significant amount of a blockchain’s hashing power, enabling the network to be manipulated. Decentralizing voting power prevents such attacks from occurring.

dYdX noted that its network architecture enables a scenario where an attacker, with just one-third of the voting power, could pause on-chain operations. Additionally, possessing two-thirds of the voting power could allow such actors to potentially misuse the funds of users and the community within the dYdX Chain.

“Since the voting power today is $456M, a malicious actor must contribute at least $912M in staked DYDX to take control of the protocol, which would allow them to exploit user deposits and community assets. This sounds like a lot today, but it isn’t such a high barrier when we factor in that only 11.5% of the total supply of DYDX are staked.”

Staking rewards on dYdX accrue in the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) and are generated from the fees users pay to trade on the protocol. Stride’s mechanism allows DYDX stakes to increase automatically over time as rewards are recompounded. For the staking service, the dYdX community will pay a 7.5% fee on the staked position.

Data from DefiLlama shows dYdX total value locked on-chain at $504.48 at the time of writing. The network generated over $48.59 million in fees over the past twelve months.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Microsoft pours $1.5B into UAE AI company, sets sights on global expansion [/INST] Microsoft continues its expansion into global artificial intelligence (AI) with a strategic partnership and $1.5 billion investment in the Abu Dhabi-based AI tech holding company, G42.

In an announcement on April 16, Microsoft explained that the investment aims to propel AI development forward and expand the accessibility of cutting-edge technologies in both the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and on a global scale.

As part of the collaboration, G42 will run its AI applications and services using Microsoft’s AI computing platform, Azure. The two entities stressed that the partnership will go beyond the Emirates and provide advanced AI solutions to clients in the “global public sector,” as well as large enterprises.

Additionally, the investment aims to support skill development for workers in the UAE to build a “diverse” AI workforce and talent pool.

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the chairman of G42, said that the investment is a “pivotal” moment in the company’s growth.

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, added that the partnership will also be looking toward areas of the world that are more in need.

“Our two companies will work together not only in the UAE but to bring AI and digital infrastructure and services to underserved nations.”

As part of the collaboration, Smith is also expected to have a seat on the board of directors at G42.

Related: Nvidia eyes Indonesia for $200M AI center amid global AI scramble

This investment comes as the latest in a string of multiple billion-dollar investments Microsoft has been making in countries all over the world.

On Feb. 15, Microsoft pledged to invest the funds to boost AI infrastructure in Germany over the next two years with a $3 billion euro investment.

Only a few days later, the company revealed that it would also invest $2 billion in AI infrastructure development in Spain, aiming to boost local capacity for the technology.

Most recently, on April 9, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said the company intended to make a “significant, long-term investment” in the United Kingdom as it starts hiring “passionate innovators.”

However, Microsoft is not the only AI developer making strides in scooping up investment deals and interactions in the race for AI dominance.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been hosting hundreds of executives from Fortune 500 companies to pitch AI services to diversify revenue streams and tap into new markets, putting it in direct competition with Microsoft, a major stakeholder in the company.

Magazine: AI didn’t kill the metaverse, it will build it — Alien Worlds, Bittensor vs Eric Wall: AI Eye"
"[INST] Metaverse set to revolutionize $54B medical tourism market: Research [/INST] The metaverse — a loose term describing interconnected digital worlds navigable by humans virtually, with no technical regard to geography — is set to upend the medical tourism industry.

Recent analysis from industry experts at Omnia Health, the Iranian Journal of Public Health, and Medical Tourism Magazine shines a light on how nascent telemedicine technology built on the metaverse concept can onboard and streamline patient acquisition and improve patient satisfaction for medical tourists.

Medical tourism is a form of travel in which patients leave their home country to pursue medical treatments in foreign territories. This can be done for quality reasons, if patients believe they can receive better care outside of their home, for financial reasons to help mitigate the costs of local healthcare, or for myriad other reasons.

In 2022, a team of researchers from Shiraz University of Medical Sciences in Shiraz, Iran penned an op-ed in the Iranian Journal of Public Health explaining the benefits of preparing patients for medical tourism via the metaverse.

“Becoming familiar with the tourist attractions of the destination city or country through Metaverse can raise potential tourists’ enthusiasm and excitement to decide for this medical travel,” the researchers wrote, adding that “moreover, Meta-based simulation of the hospital environment can increase patients’ awareness and experiences of the environment that awaits them, thereby reducing their stress, helping them feel more secure, and leading to a better doctor-patient relationship and a higher rate of patient satisfaction.”

According to a report by Omnia Health, the medical tourism industry was worth approximately $54 billion in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic had a slowing effect on the industry’s growth, however, and in 2024, it’s valued at approximately $47 billion. A report from Statista indicates that it’s forecasted to grow to over $111 billion before the end of the decade. This indicates a compound annual growth rate of 19.58%.

In October 2022, the Thumbay Hospital network launched what appears to be the first fully functional metaverse hospital featuring patient services and fees in cryptocurrency.

Related: Average daily active unique wallets reach 7M"
"[INST] Crypto users react to Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year sentence [/INST] More than 500 days after the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, users have an answer for the number of years former CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried will face in prison: 25.

In a March 28 hearing, Judge Lewis Kaplan sentenced the former FTX CEO to 300 months in prison for his conviction related to misusing customer funds. Prosecutors had suggested up to 50 years in prison for SBF, while his defense attorneys requested the judge be lenient and only impose up to 6.5 years. The judge added the former CEO had committed perjury and intimidated witnesses.

Immediately following the announcement in the New York courtroom, crypto users jumped onto social media to express their thoughts. Many suggested that 25 years wasn’t enough time given longer sentences handed down for seemingly less serious crimes.

“[The judge] gave him less than Chelsea Manning (35 years) for a waaaaay worse crime,” said Edward Snowden on X, referring to Manning’s 2013 conviction for violations of the Espionage Act.

Though the sentencing guidelines allowed Judge Kaplan to put SBF in prison for more than 100 years, many pointed out before the hearing that this outcome was unlikely. Several legal experts speculated Bankman-Fried would serve between 10 and 30 years, and others suggested it may be an effective deterrent for figures in the crypto space.

“Judge Kaplan weighed all of the sentencing factors, including the magnitude of the crime, his conclusion that SBF lied on the witness stand and tampered with a witness, and handed down a serious sentence,” Mark Bini, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, told Cointelegraph. “While less than the prosecutors’ request for 40-50 years, it is a very significant sentence and sends a message that people convicted of crimes in the crypto space will face serious consequences.”

Swan Bitcoin Managing Director Terrence Yang largely disagreed, telling Cointelegraph “justice is not served” and 25 years was “too light” based on the number of suicides in the wake of the collapse of FTX, SBF’s perjury, and the misuse of user funds.

“The damage SBF did was permanent and severe,” said Yang. “He ruined a lot of families and lives with his felonious acts and put salt in the deep wounds with his total lack of remorse. I get that he has ADHD and ADHD families filed a statement with the court asking for leniency but SBF is the only person with ADHD in the world who stole billions of dollars in customer funds and destroyed or hurt millions of lives.”

Related: What to expect at Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing hearing

Bankman-Fried was taken out of court on March 28 to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he has been since Judge Kaplan revoked his bail in August 2023. Ryan Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, will likely be the next figure in the case to face sentencing on May 1. Gary Wang, Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh — other former executives associated with FTX and Alameda Research — have already pleaded guilty and accepted deals.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame

Update (March 28 at 6:20 pm UTC): This article has been updated to include a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York."
"[INST] ETH restaking drives DeFi TVL to $100B, Solana releases patch for network congestion: Finance Redefined [/INST] Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you the most significant developments from the past week.

The rise of total value locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols above $100 million was aided by the Ethereum liquid restaking in the first quarter of 2024. Protocols such as Lido and EigenLayer are behind the DeFi TVL resurgence.

Solana developers released a patch for the prolonged network congestion on the blockchain on April 15. They promised more patches in the near future to ensure the network returns to normalcy.

Ethereum liquid restaking drove DeFi TVL to $100 billion in first quarter

Decentralized finance TVL almost doubled in the first three months of this year compared to the previous quarter, partially driven by Ethereum liquid restaking initiatives, according to recent research.

DeFi TVL surged from a Q4 2023 low of $36 billion to peak at almost $97 billion in the first quarter of 2024, according to DefiLlama. Since the beginning of the year, it has increased by 81%, reaching a two-year high of $98 billion last week.

Continue reading

Avalanche home loan tokenization protocol raises $10 million in Series A funding

Homium, a home equity line of credit (HELOC) tokenization protocol built on Avalanche, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Sorenson Impact Group and Blizzard.

“Through shared appreciation home equity loans, Homium introduces a way for homeowners to borrow against their home equity without increasing their monthly debt burden,” wrote Avalanche in an April 15 announcement.

Continue reading

Solana’s mainnet beta update v1.17.31 aims to resolve congestion issues

Solana developers have released a mainnet beta update, v1.17.31, to deal with the ongoing network congestion on the Solana blockchain. The update was released on April 12, and now, after three days of testing, it is being recommended for general use by mainnet beta validators.

This patch contains enhancements that will help with some of the ongoing network congestion and will be followed by further enhancements in v1.18. The current version will help improve network congestion and issues with the open interest jump.

Continue reading

Crypto sleuth warns of scammers behind DeFi protocol

Pseudonymous blockchain investigator ZachXBT warned about a group of scammers attempting to entrap more victims in a new fraud using millions of stolen funds.

In a thread on X, ZachXBT disclosed the findings of an investigation over Leaper Finance, a lending protocol based on Blast. According to the analysis, the group is behind several rug pulls, including those that hit users of Magnate ($6.5 million), Kokomo ($4 million), Solfire ($4.8 million) and Lendora.

Continue reading

DeFi market overview

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a bearish week, with most trading in the red on the weekly charts. The total value locked in DeFi protocols fell below $90 billion.

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space."
"[INST] How DePINs are connecting farmers and businesses via blockchain [/INST] In a bid to revolutionize the global food commodity trade and empower farmers, farmer-centric blockchain Farmsent has revealed a new partnership with the layer-1 decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN)-focused blockchain, Peaq.

The collaboration, announced on April 9, marks a step forward in Farmsent’s goal of decentralizing the agricultural supply chain to enhance transparency in the global food trade and build a global Web3 marketplace that connects farmers directly with consumer-facing businesses worldwide.

By leveraging a DePIN of sensors to track product quality and provenance, Farmsent claims it can eliminate centralized intermediaries and reduce costs for all stakeholders, all while ensuring transparency across the supply chain.

Cointelegraph talked to Yog Shusti, the co-founder and CEO of Farmsent, about the use case of DePINs in the agricultural sector.

Connecting commerce

Shusti called Farmsent’s DePIN use case “particularly exciting for agriculture” because the technology is leveraged to benefit farmers and consumers.

“It provides farmers with secure digital identities for better market access but also empowers them with real-time data about their crops. This includes crucial details like soil moisture, pH content, and humidity.”

He said this information allows farmers to make “data-driven decisions” to optimize crop health and yields. Meanwhile, the DePIN system allows consumers to access information about the food they purchase:

“This could include details about the farm’s practices, the origin of the food, and how it was grown. It empowers consumers to make informed choices about the food they put on their tables.”

Related: Weather forecasting for developing regions: Here’s how Web3 can help

Currently, the state of the global food trade highlights the urgent need for change. Farmers, despite being the backbone of the industry, often receive a disproportionately low share of the value captured in the market.

Scaling for the world

According to Farmsent, it plans to address this by bypassing traditional intermediaries and enabling direct transactions between farmers and consumers and already has over 160,000 farmers onboarded in Indonesia and Colombia.

The platform, currently still in beta, is being used to track coffee, avocados and palm sugar between Indonesia, Colombia, the United Arab Emirates — where it already has a license to operate — and the United States. Farmsent said it is currently working on securing three additional licenses.

Shusti said that storing large amounts of data from sensors, farms and partners can become expensive on traditional blockchains:

“As Farmsent expands its reach to new markets and connects with more farmers and consumers, the volume of data and transactions within the network will inevitably surge.”

Therefore, he said that Peaq was chosen for its ability to cost-effectively store data and scale at large. The Peaq network has been gaining traction, and it recently secured $15 million in a Series A round led by Generative Ventures and Borderless Capital.

In the past, it has worked on DePIN projects alongside major companies such as Bosch and even worked to tokenize 100 Teslas in a decentralized Web3 ride-sharing initiative across Europe.

Data and security

Handling the transactions and data of farmers and business owners worldwide is not only a big feat for scaling purposes but also in keeping all that information safe and secure.

According to the Farmsent CEO, its DePIN network gathers information from three sources. In one, it is entered by humans and then validated. Information on farm practices, harvest details and initial processing can be manually entered by authorized personnel and validated for accuracy.

It can also be collected through Internet of Things (IoT) sensors placed throughout the supply chain (farms, storage facilities, transport) that can continuously monitor conditions like temperature, humidity and freshness.

Lastly, data is procured from third-party partners like logistics companies that provide data relevant to transport and storage conditions.

To keep this data secure, Shusti told Cointelegraph that Farmsent leverages Peaq decentralized identifiers (DIDs) to enhance data privacy further:

“DIDs act like unique identifiers on the blockchain that can be linked to data without revealing the actual data itself. ”

He said that this allows for data verification and controlled access while protecting sensitive information.

Till Wendler, the co-founder of Peaq, said this use case within the agriculture industry is not just exciting but also one of the “most important ones” due to its promise to push back global food insecurity and “deliver cheaper and more quality produce to people around the world” — and in a secure manner.

Magazine: Memecoins make millionaires, Terraform and Do Kwon liable for fraud, and more: Hodler’s Digest, March 31 – April 6"
"[INST] Massive Bitcoin consolidation sparks sell-side liquidity concerns [/INST] CryptoQuant founder and CEO Ki Young Ju believes that the movement and consolidation of 2,000 Bitcoin (BTC) by an unidentified individual or entity into a single wallet indicates a “sell-side liquidity crisis waking up old Bitcoin.”

Young Ju pointed out that the pattern of the transactions suggests the coins were sold via OTC. A sell-side liquidity crisis refers to a situation with a shortage of available assets in a market, leading to difficulties for sellers in finding buyers or executing trades at desired prices. This can result in increased volatility and price fluctuations.

An unidentified individual or entity who received 2,000 Bitcoin in mining rewards in 2010 consolidated them into a single wallet.

The transaction occurred on March 26, as observed by developer Mononautical, on X. It consolidated 40 batches of mining rewards, each comprising 50 Bitcoin, into a single wallet.

Bitcoin miners are compensated for verifying blocks on the Bitcoin network. Initially, each block yielded 50 Bitcoin. However, at intervals of approximately four years, this reward is halved.

The forthcoming Bitcoin halving will decrease block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. It’s anticipated around April 21, but this date may change.

Related: Mysterious Bitcoiner spends $64K to inscribe 9MB of data on Bitcoin

The Bitcoin rewards were valued at around $600 when this unknown entity mined these blocks. Now, they amount to nearly $140 million, as per Cointelegraph’s price index page. Mononautical noted:

“Imagine hodling for 14 years as the value rockets from a few hundred dollars to $140 million.”

During the weekend, there was another significant Bitcoin transfer. The fifth-wealthiest Bitcoin address moved $6 billion worth of Bitcoin to three different addresses. According to data from blockchain analytics firm Arkham, the address was funded with 94,500 Bitcoin in 2019.

This Bitcoin sat unmoved until the weekend when it was split up and sent to the new addresses leaving just 1.4 Bitcoin ($99,000) remaining.

In January, an individual transferred 26.9 Bitcoin (valued at $1.2 million then) from what appeared to be from Binance to the Bitcoin network’s genesis wallet, where retrieval is impossible.

The genesis wallet was the first ever wallet on the Bitcoin network set up by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.

In July 2023, a dormant Bitcoin wallet holding over 1,037 Bitcoin (worth $31 million then) suddenly woke after an 11-year slumber, transferring out the entire stash.

Magazine: Who is ‘Mr. 100’? Mysterious Bitcoin whale becomes 14th-biggest BTC holder"
"[INST] Largest Ethena airdrop recipient gets nearly $2M [/INST] The largest recipient of the Ethena Labs airdrop received nearly $2 million worth of Ethena (ENA) tokens on April 2.

The recipient, wallet 0xb56, received 3.3 million Ethena tokens worth $1.96 million, according to on-chain data analyzed by Arkham Intelligence in an April 2 X post.

Athena Labs airdrop, wallet forensics. Source: Arkham Intelligence

The Ethena Labs airdrop went live on April 2, distributing $450 million worth of ENA tokens among eligible wallets.

The full airdrop allocation had been distributed by 7:17 am UTC on April 2, according to an X post by Ethena Labs.

“The full 5% of $ENA has already been distributed to the claim smart contracts. The core contributors will be working around the clock to support with any questions on the claimable $ENA.”

After the airdrop claim page went live, the Ethena token was listed for trading at 8:00 am UTC on some of the biggest centralized crypto exchanges, including Binance, Bybit, KuCoin, HTX, MEXC and BitMart.

The Ethena token fell over 15% in the 24 hours leading up to 11:30 am to change hands at $0.5824. ENA is currently the 110th-largest cryptocurrency with a $836 million market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap data.

ENA/USDT, 15-minute chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Related: Ethena Labs founder clarifies USDe stability amid high yield worries

Ethena Labs launched its USDe synthetic dollar on the public mainnet on Feb. 19. It became the highest-earning decentralized application (DApp) in crypto on March 8 when it offered investors an annual percentage yield (APY) of 67%.

Ethena’s USDe is currently offering a 35.4% yield to over 123,000 users, with a $1.6 billion total value locked (TVL), according to Ethena Labs’ homepage.

The market cap of USDe rose 1.9% in the past week and 135% in the past month to $1.58 billion, according to DefiLlama data.

The Ethena token was listed for farming on the Binance launch pool last week.

There was widespread concern when a fake, copycat ENA token was exploited for $290,000 worth of BNB on March 29. On-chain security firm PeckShield mistook the fake token for the real ENA coin. The real Ethena token suffered no exploit.

Related: How high can Bitcoin go? New BTC price prediction sees cycle top at $180K"
"[INST] Bitcoin miner stocks drop on ‘unsubstantiated’ post-halving profit fears: Analyst [/INST] Investor confidence in the Bitcoin (BTC) mining sector’s profitability after the cryptocurrency halves its rewards has sent Bitcoin mining shares in the United States and abroad tumbling — but those fears aren’t well founded, an industry analyst said.

“Investors will realize their fears were mostly unsubstantiated,” said Mitchell Askew, head analyst at Bitcoin mining firm Blockware Solutions. He cited post-halving profitability concerns and Bitcoin’s 7.5% price fall over the last week as the main catalysts behind miners’ falling stock prices.

“[The] halving will be a ‘buy the news’ event for public Bitcoin miners and the private ASIC market.”

Marathon Digital (MARA) and Riot Platforms (RIOT), two of the largest BTC miners, have seen their share prices tank around 53% and 54%, respectively, since their February year-to-date (YTD) highs, according to Google Finance.

CleanSpark (CLSK) hit a three-year high of $23.40 on March 25 but has since dropped 38.1% to $14.48, although it’s still up nearly 250% this year.

CleanSpark’s change in share price over the last month. Source: Google Finance

Non-U.S. Bitcoin miners such as Singapore’s Bitdeer Technologies (BTDR) and Australia’s Iris Energy (IRIS), both listed on the Nasdaq, have fallen 40.8% and 47.6% since their mid-February YTD highs of $9.16 and $8.30.

The price falls come as the fourth edition of the Bitcoin halving is expected on April 20, which will see Bitcoin mining rewards cut in half to 3.125 BTC — worth about $200,000.

Askew said the post-halving profitability fears a evidenced by the performance of the Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI), an actively managed fund tracking the Bitcoin mining market, which has had a “near zero” correlation coefficient with Bitcoin in 2024.

WGMI’s price relative to Bitcoin is approaching a previous local bottom; however, Askew expects a “rebound” in mining stocks shortly after the halving.

Related: Riot, TeraWulf and CleanSpark best-positioned miners for Bitcoin halving — CoinShares

Profitability concerns resurfaced in late January when Cantor Fitzgerald reported 11 publicly listed Bitcoin miners wouldn’t mine profitability post-halving if Bitcoin’s price remained around $40,000, its price at the time.

If Bitcoin’s price doesn’t continue to rise post-halving, it could force some U.S. Bitcoin miners to migrate or expand offshore in search of cheaper electricity costs, according to Jaran Mellerud, founder and chief mining strategist of Hashlabs Mining.

Magazine: Wolf Of All Streets worries about a world where Bitcoin hits $1M: Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Ethereum reaches 1M validators, community thinks it’s ‘too much’ [/INST] The Ethereum network recently hit the one million validator milestone, with 32 million Ether (ETH) currently staked, valued at approximately $114 billion based on current market prices.

On March 28, the Dune Analytics dashboard created by Hildobby to track Ethereum staking progress showed that the network achieved a validator count of one million, with the 32 million ETH staked accounting for 26% of the total supply.

The data also showed that around 30% of the ETH is staked using the Ethereum staking pool Lido, a liquid staking platform for proof-of-stake (PoS) cryptocurrencies.

Staking pools like Lido remain popular because they allow users with a smaller amount of ETH to pool their assets and participate.

Ethereum reaches one million validators. Source: Dune

Validators ensure the security of a blockchain by monitoring the network for any malicious transactions, such as double-spending, which is essentially spending the same currencies twice.

In Ethereum, validators participate in proposing and validating transactions within the network. Those who wish to participate in this process are required to stake 32 ETH. In return, they get a small portion of ETH as a reward.

While the number of validators could translate into higher security for a blockchain, some community members think too many validators could pose a problem.

Venture investor and Ethereum advocate Evan Van Ness said there’s arguably already “too much” staked. Gabriel Weide, who runs a staking pool, believes that too many validators can eventually lead to “failed transactions.”

Meanwhile, Peter Kim, the head of engineering at Coinbase Wallet, said that while the number of validators is “impressive,” it’s “artificially inflated by the 32 ETH cap.” However, he suggested this may change soon.

Related: Vitalik Buterin on fix for Ethereum centralization: Make running nodes easier

As the number of validators continues to rise, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a way to improve the network’s decentralization. On March 27, Buterin published a blog post proposing to penalize validators in proportion to their average failure rate.

If many validators fail in a given slot, each failure’s penalties will be higher. Such an approach could potentially reduce the advantage of large ETH stakers over smaller ones, according to Buterin.

Magazine: ETH a security? Celsius clawbacks, SBF says sentence too harsh: Hodler’s Digest, March 17-23"
"[INST] Crypto hacking losses decline in Q1 2024 — Immunefi [/INST] The cryptocurrency industry saw a 23% decline in losses due to hacking and scams in the first quarter of 2024 compared to 2023, according to a March 28 research report by blockchain security firm Immunefi.

According to the report, the total amount lost to hacking and fraud incidents in Q1 of 2024 amounted to approximately $336.3 million, down from $437.5 million in the same quarter of 2023.

The report identifies 46 hacking incidents and 15 cases of fraudulent activities.

Crypto losses from hacks, frauds and scams in Q1 of 2024. Source: Immunefi

With nearly $100 billion of total value locked in Web3 protocols, decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms remain a significant target for hackers, accounting for all of the exploits identified by Immunefi in Q1, compared to zero for centralized finance platforms.

Two projects accounted for the bulk of the losses, totaling $144.5 million, or 43% of the overall amount. The largest attack, amounting to $81.7 million, targeted the cross-chain bridge protocol Orbit Bridge on New Year’s Eve. January saw the highest monthly losses in Q1, totaling $133 million.

Mitchell Amador, CEO of Immunefi, highlighted the susceptibility of DeFi platforms to private key breaches, highlighting the pressing need for enhanced security measures across code and protocol infrastructure.

Related: Remilia founder claims hack after Ether, NFTs transferred

The second-largest attack involved a $62 million exploit on Blast-based nonfungible token game Munchables. However, funds were recovered within 24 hours, as the hacker surrendered the private keys to the wallet containing Munchables’ assets.

Overall, $73.9 million (22%) of the stolen funds from seven exploits in Q1 were retrieved. The number of attacks decreased by 17.6%, from 74 in Q1 2023 to 61 in 2024.

Hacks accounted for 95.6% ($321.6 million) of losses across 46 incidents, while fraud, scams and rug pulls accounted for 4.4% ($14.7 million) in 15 incidents. Ethereum was the most targeted chain ahead of the BNB Chain, with both networks accounting for 73% of total losses combined.

Ethereum had the highest number of attacks, with 33 incidents, accounting for 51% of the losses. BNB Chain experienced 12 attacks, representing 22% of the exploited funds. Other incidents were identified on Arbitrum, Solana, Optimism, Bitcoin, Blast, Polygon, Conflux Network and Base.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Vitalik Buterin is cooking up a new way to decentralize Ethereum staking [/INST] Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a technique to incentivize better decentralization of Ethereum by penalizing correlated failures among validators.

Buterin posted his thoughts on March 27 regarding supporting decentralized staking “through more anti-correlation incentives” to the Ethereum Research forum.

He suggested if multiple validators controlled by the same actor fail together, they would receive a higher penalty than if they failed independently.

“The theory is that if you are a single large actor, any mistakes that you make would be more likely to be replicated across all ‘identities’ that you control,” he said.

Buterin observed that validators within the same cluster, such as a staking pool, are more likely to experience correlated failures — likely due to shared infrastructure.

The proposal suggests penalizing validators proportionally to the deviation from the average failure rate. If many validators fail in a given slot, the penalty for each failure would be higher.

Simulations suggest this approach could reduce the advantage of large Ethereum stakers over smaller ones, as large entities are more likely to cause spikes in the failure rate due to correlated failures.

Potential benefits to the proposal include incentivizing decentralization by having a separate infrastructure for each validator and making solo staking more economically competitive relative to staking pools.

Buterin proposed other options, such as different penalty schemes to minimize the average big validator’s advantage over little validators and examining the impact on geographic and client decentralization.

He didn’t mention the possibility of reducing the solo staking amount from 32 Ether (ETH), which currently equates to roughly $111,500.

Related: 3 reasons why Ethereum’s market cap dominance is on the rise

Staking pools and liquid staking services such as Lido remain popular because they allow stakers to participate with a smaller amount of ETH.

Lido currently has $34 billion worth of ETH staked, equating to around 30% of the total supply.

Ethereum advocates and developers have previously cautioned over Lido’s dominance and “cartelization,” whereby outsized profits compared to non-pooled capital can be extracted.

Magazine: Wolf Of All Streets worries about a world where Bitcoin hits $1M: Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Prisma Finance says $540K still at risk, hacker demands team reveal themselves [/INST] Decentralized finance (DeFi) firm Prisma Finance says there are still $540,000 in funds from accounts yet to revoke the smart contract responsible for last week’s $11.6 million exploit.

Meanwhile, the self-claimed “white hat” hacker behind the exploit says they will hold back the return of funds until the firm apologizes and reveals the team’s identity online.

In a “path forward” post on April 1, core contributor “Frank” said the firm would continue to seek the return of funds, but the top priority is to unpause the protocod and said it needed all users to ensure their wallets and positions were safe first.

The protocol suffered a multimillion-dollar exploit on March 28, which was later revealed to be the result of two MigrateTroveZap contracts, which were designed to migrate user positions from one trove manager to another, according to a post-mortem post from Prisma last updated on March 31.

However, Frank noted that there were still 14 remaining accounts that had yet to revoke the affected smart contract, five of which were still “at risk” with open trove positions totaling over $500,000.

“Of the affected Troves several have revoked the contract containing the vulnerability with ~$540k of collateral still at risk at the time of writing.”

Prisma is a decentralized borrowing protocol that uses “troves” — Ethereum addresses — where users can take out and maintain loans.

The largest “at risk” address contains $484,380, while the other four carry between $7,120 and $22,080.

Remaining affected addresses from Prisma’s $11.6 million exploit. Source: Prisma Finance

Frank explained that part of its “path forward” was to “conserve additional reserves” while Prisma attempted to recover the stolen funds.

A new proposal was made on April 1 to reduce liquidity from POL and staked revenue from vePRISMA.

Prisma also stressed that the exploited contract was isolated from the core protocol and that it plans to restart it once the remaining user funds are safe.

ID yourselves and publicly apologize, exploiter demands

Meanwhile, the self-claimed “white hat” has accused the DeFi firm of failing to act in good faith and claims the funds won’t be returned unless it makes a public apology.

Part of that apology involves Prisma holding an online conference, in which the entire team must show their faces with ID and apologize to all users and investors for failing to properly audit its smart contract.

In a March 30 on-chain message, the exploiter wrote:

“During that session, you must specifically present the mistake you made, which party audited the smart contract, and your plan to improve security in the future.”

The exploiter also wants Prisma to acknowledge they have “no responsibilities” in the ordeal and are only trying to help Prisma rectify its mistake.

On-chain messages sent from the hacker to Prisma Finance. Source: Etherscan

Prisma, however, fired back, pointing out that the exploiter has yet to return any funds to show good faith either, with the two sides then continuing to argue in on-chain messaging.

“There is little evidence that we can judge you on that you are sincere in your intention to return the assets. Most genuine white hats would have returned at least some of the funds by now.”

Related: Ethical hacker retrieves $5.4M for Curve Finance amid exploit

Since the attack, blockchain security firms Cyvers and Peckshield observed that the hacker had started swapping the stolen funds to Ether (ETH), and about 200 Ether was transferred to the United States Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control-sanctioned cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash.

Prior to the exploit, Prisma Finance had about $220 million in total value locked on its protocol, but that figure has plummeted to $87 million, according to DefiLlama.

Magazine: Should crypto projects ever negotiate with hackers? Probably"
"[INST] Fintech funding falls to lowest levels since 2017 as crypto surges [/INST] Global funding for fintech ventures has fallen to its lowest level in seven years, with a 16% quarter-over-quarter dip between Q4 2023 and Q1 2024. This is despite a reported 11% gain for venture funding across sectors.

Analytics firm CB Insights recently released its quarterly venture capital report highlighting activity for Q1 2024. The firm called the quarter a “mixed bag for the venture market,” citing eight straight quarters of decline in equity deals as a negative factor. This was somewhat offset by gains from a handful of massive deals, including Amazon’s $4 billion investment in Anthropic AI.

Venture funding

Venture funding for Q1 2024 reached $58.4 billion, according to the report. This is a net quarter-over-quarter gain of 11% against Q4 2023’s $52.8 billion. This indicates the possibility of a rebound; however, the overall market remains down 21% vs. Q1 2023 and 62% vs. Q1 2022.

Losses were reflected in the number of new unicorns—billion-dollar startups—hitting only 19 for the quarter. The previous quarter brought in 23, indicating a roughly 17% decrease quarter-over-quarter to start 2024.

Fintech decline

Fintech didn’t fare as well as other VC sectors in Q1 2024. According to the report, funding fell 16% quarter-over-quarter between Q4 2023 and Q1 2024, bringing the current fintech venture market in line with 2017’s.

In the United States, the primary geographic funding arena for venture capital in the fintech sector, this decline coincided with increased scrutiny by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation into banking relationships with fintech companies.

Crypto surge

Meanwhile, Q1 2024 has seen unprecedented highs for Bitcoin (BTC) as well as a market cap high for the quarter for all cryptocurrencies of $2.9 trillion — down to $2.71 trillion in Q2, as of the time of this article’s publication.

Related: $102M shorts liquidated as Bitcoin price surpassed $72K

This market movement comes in the final week and a half before the next Bitcoin halving. As Cointelegraph recently reported, some analysts are predicting a lift of as much as 160% in price, bringing BTC from its current mark of about $70,000 to somewhere around $150,000. Other analysts, however, recently called the halving a “sell the news” event."
"[INST] US lawmakers demand SEC clarify position on Prometheum’s plans for Ether [/INST] Lawmakers with the United States House Financial Services Committee and House Agriculture Committee have expressed concerns about how the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) intends to handle Ether (ETH).

In a March 26 letter to SEC Chair Gary Gensler, U.S. lawmakers, including House Financial Services Committee Chair Patrick McHenry and Vice Chair French Hill, urged the commission to address crypto firm Prometheum’s intention to offer institutional custody services for Ether. According to lawmakers, the announcement is at odds with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) stance on recognizing ETH as a “non-security digital asset” under its purview.

“[T]he agencies have an extensive public record identifying ETH as a non-security digital asset,” said the lawmakers. “There are multiple regulatory actions grounded in that position [...] [Prometheum’s] action, if allowed to proceed, could have irreparable consequences for the digital asset markets.”

The SEC has recently made claims suggesting that it intends to classify ETH as a security. Some experts have suggested that this position may lead to the commission denying approval for spot Ether exchange-traded funds. The SEC has already approved investment vehicles tied to ETH futures for listing and trading on U.S. exchanges.

Related: Crypto-focused lawmaker wants to lead House Financial Services Committee in 2025

In contrast, the CFTC has recognized many cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether as commodities. The commission filed a civil enforcement action against KuCoin and two of its founders on March 26, claiming that ETH, BTC and Litecoin (LTC) were commodities and placing the exchange’s actions “squarely within the CFTC’s authority.”

The lawmakers added in the letter to Gensler:

“[T]he SEC’s failure to propose a rule or provide comprehensive guidance that provides clear rules for the digital asset marketplace regarding asset classification has only exacerbated the uncertainty in the digital asset ecosystem.”

Following Prometheum’s ETH custody announcement in February, CFTC Chair Rostin Behnam reiterated the commission’s position on Ether at a House Financial Service Committee hearing, warning of a potential conflict with the SEC over digital asset rules. In November 2023, CFTC Commissioner Kristin Johnson suggested several possible paths forward for regulatory clarity on crypto: through the courts, company policies and legislation from Congress.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime"
"[INST] Wormhole bridge hacker from 2022 was briefly eligible for the recent airdrop [/INST] The hacker behind the infamous $320-million exploit of the Wormhole bridge in 2022 was initially deemed eligible for an airdrop that would have seen them claim $50,000 in newly launched W tokens.

In an April 4 post to X, pseudonymous researcher Pland claimed that the Wormhole team had forgotten to exclude a number of wallet addresses affiliated with an exploit that saw hackers steal $321 million in crypto from the cross-chain bridge in 2022.

According to data from Solana-based airdrop checker Airdrop.link later cited by Degen News in an April 4 post to X, a total of four wallet addresses connected with the exploit were temporarily able to claim Wormhole’s airdrop.

If the hacker had elected to claim their airdrops, they would have been eligible for roughly 31,642 Wormhole (W) tokens worth around $50,000 at current prices.

Cointelegraph independently checked the wallet addresses on Airdrop.link; however, we found that they were no longer eligible, suggesting that the Wormhole team may have already plugged the gap.

Cointelegraph contacted Wormhole but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

All four of the eligible wallet addresses were flagged as being linked to the 2022 Wormhole exploit by Solana block explorer Solana.fm.

Related: Wormhole crosses 1B in cross-chain messages ahead of token launch

The Wormhole bridge was exploited for a staggering $321 million in February of 2022, rendering it one of the largest hacks in the history of the crypto industry.

However, in February 2023, Web3 infrastructure firm Jump Crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Oasis.app conducted a “counter exploit” on the Wormhole protocol hacker.

The two firms managed to successfully claw back a total of $225 million in digital assets from the wormhole exploiter and subsequently returned them to safe wallets.

On April 3, Wormhole announced that it would be airdropping more than 675 million — worth roughly $850 million at current prices — of its new Wormhole (W) tokens to eligible users.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] History of Crypto: NFT mania and digital ownership [/INST] Welcome to the History of Crypto, a Cointelegraph series that brings readers back to the most significant events in the crypto space. Powered by Phemex, the timeline allows crypto community members to explore and look back at the important events that shaped the industry into what it is today.

In the tumultuous landscape of the digital age, where trends come and go at the speed of a click, one phenomenon has risen to prominence like few others: nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The years 2020 and 2021 marked a period of unprecedented growth and widespread adoption of these digital assets, reshaping the way we perceive ownership, art and the internet itself. In fact, in 2021 alone, the NFT market saw approximately $25 billion in trading volume, compared to an almost non-existent metric just a few years prior.

.@blackmirror_xp just launched its Smile Club digital collectibles on @base today



Here's everything you need to know ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/ahim0CLOpw — nft now (@nftnow) March 12, 2024

While the concept of blockchain technology had been around for over a decade, the emergence of NFTs captured the imagination of both creators and collectors. NFTs represent unique digital assets stored on a blockchain, ensuring their scarcity and authenticity. This innovation allowed for the tokenization of digital art, music, videos and even tweets, turning intangible creations into valuable commodities.

The concept of NFTs can be traced back to at least 2012 when the Colored Coins protocol was created on the Bitcoin blockchain. This protocol allowed users to issue custom tokens representing digital or physical assets. However, it wasn’t until later, with the emergence of Ethereum smart contracts and the ERC-271 token standard in 2017, that nonfungible tokens specifically for digital assets became possible.

One of the earliest and most notable examples of NFTs gaining widespread attention in 2017 was CryptoKitties. Developed by Canadian studio Axiom Zen, CryptoKitties is a blockchain-based virtual game that allows players to purchase, collect, breed and sell virtual cats. Following the success of CryptoKitties, numerous other projects began experimenting with NFTs for various purposes, including digital art, virtual real estate, in-game items and more. Platforms like Decentraland and NBA Top Shot gained traction during this period, showcasing the diverse applications of NFTs beyond gaming.

Then, between 2020 and 2021, mainstream adoption exploded.

NFTs reached new levels of mainstream recognition in 2021 as high-profile sales made headlines, including digital artwork selling for millions of dollars and celebrities launching their own NFT collections. In one such case, on Nov. 2, 2021, award-winning writer and director Quentin Tarantino announced he would auction off seven uncut scenes from Pulp Fiction as NFTs, built on the Secret Network.

Other sales, too, mesmerized headlines, such as the $69 million sale of Beeple’s digital artwork “Everyday: The First 5,000 Days” at Christie’s auction house in March 2021. Newly created digital artworks by artists like Pak and Grimes fetched millions of dollars in auctions and private sales upon inception. During this time, iconic collections, such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, were also born.

Each being a part of a 10,000 algorithmically generated profile pictures collection, in March 2021, a CryptoPunk NFT (#7804) sold for over $7.5 million at auction, marking one of the highest prices paid for a single CryptoPunk at the time. Following this milestone, in October 2021, a rare triple Bored Ape set, consisting of three apes sold as a bundle, fetched over $24 million at a Sotheby’s auction. At the same time, the number of NFT marketplaces expanded rapidly during this period. Platforms such as OpenSea, Rarible, Foundation and Nifty Gateway gained widespread popularity, providing avenues for creators to mint and sell their digital assets. OpenSea emerged as one of the largest NFT marketplaces, with monthly trading volumes surpassing $1 billion by mid-2021, a figure since overtaken by Blur and OKX NFT.

Going to sleep tonight like damn. We love you Apes.



Thank you for an incredible night 2 of #ApeFestHK. pic.twitter.com/lfqmmQBypa — Bored Ape Yacht Club (@BoredApeYC) November 4, 2023

However, this surge in popularity also brought criticism regarding environmental concerns due to the energy-intensive nature of blockchain transactions, as well as questions about the intrinsic value of digital assets. Indeed, during the crypto winter of 2022–2023, the trading volume of NFTs fell by a staggering 99% from its 2021 peak.

Legal disputes also emerged over the ownership and authenticity of digital assets, highlighting the need for clear regulations and guidelines. Some platforms implemented verification mechanisms to authenticate the originality of NFTs and protect creators’ rights, while others grappled with defining ownership in decentralized ecosystems. Indeed, following the widespread publicity of the Pulp Fiction NFTs, Miramax sued the Hollywood director in a copyright lawsuit that was settled in September 2022. Yuga Labs, the current owner of both the BAYC and CryptoPunks series, also faced similar legal battles over its digital collections.

Yet, all was not lost; with the ongoing crypto bull market, NFTs trading volume has recovered. New NFT projects, especially in Hong Kong, are surging in popularity, with collections gobbled up shortly after release. New protocols, such as ParaSpace (now Parallel Finance), are developing new tools for the ever-increasing NFT lending market. Meanwhile, new Ethereum token standards, such as ERC-404, seek to fractionalize NFTs and enable their widespread access.

Overall, the NFT space continues to evolve, with ongoing experimentation in various industries and new platforms emerging to cater to different niches within the NFT ecosystem. Additionally, efforts to address environmental concerns and improve the sustainability of blockchain technology are underway as developers and enthusiasts seek to ensure the long-term viability of NFTs as a form of digital ownership and expression.

Punk #305 is home, hanging on the walls of @icamiami next to a Warhol. This is where she belongs. She will be on display until December 20th and remain in the museum's permanent collection. pic.twitter.com/hKe5tmexyx — CryptoPunks (@cryptopunksnfts) December 3, 2022

Related: The different types of NFTs: A beginner’s guide"
"[INST] Bitcoin ‘pretty unlikely’ to revisit $50K price level, says analyst [/INST] The frequency of Bitcoin reaching higher support price levels, as well as the “lack of immediate froth” in the derivatives markets, suggests that its price is unlikely to retrace down to $50,000 anytime soon, according to a crypto analyst.

Senior analyst at digital asset fund UTXO Management, Dylan LeClair, explained in an analyst note on April 7 that if Bitcoin (BTC) rises back into the $70,000–$75,000 price range, it will put significant pressure on short positions.

“As we’ve consolidated, an increasing amount of short liquidations are building from 70-75k,” he stated.

If Bitcoin’s price rises to $70,000, approximately $174.17 million will be liquidated, according to CoinGlass data.

Bitcoin liquidation map. Source: CoinGlass

Should it reach the upper boundary of LeClair’s range ($75,000), around $830 million worth of short positions would face liquidation.

This translates to roughly a 7.8% increase from Bitcoin’s current price of $69,344. Likewise, a similar percentage change of 7.5%, but in a downward movement, occurred on March 15, resulting in $525.2 million in liquidations.

LeClair explained although a decline in Bitcoin’s price to $50,000 — a 27% decrease from its current price at the time of writing — could trigger substantial liquidation of long positions, he doesn’t foresee it, considering the recent price shifts and the increasing support levels.

“While there is a large cluster of longs that could be taken out at ~50k, given the structure of higher lows and the lack of immediate froth in the derivatives landscape currently, I find it pretty unlikely we revisit that level,” he stated.

“Not impossible of course,” he warned. Bitcoin’s price last dipped below $50,000 on Feb. 13, hitting $49,725.

Just a day before, on Feb. 12, it reached $50,000, a level not reached since December 2021.

He backed up his claims by citing the recent action by global asset manager BlackRock, which updated its Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) prospectus on April 5, adding five big Wall Street firms as new authorized participants.

New members include ABN AMRO Clearing, Citadel Securities, Citigroup Global Markets, Goldman Sachs and UBS Securities

Related: Bitcoin’s 2028 halving price target is $435K, historical data suggests

Prominent crypto traders are speculating over Bitcoin’s price ahead of the halving event, which is set for April 20. This event occurs every four years and will cut miner block rewards by 50%, from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.

Cointelegraph recently reported that Bitcoin’s price has risen around 658% since the last Bitcoin halving in 2020. If historical chart patterns were to repeat, Bitcoin’s price would reach $434,280 per coin by the 2028 halving if it performs similarly to the current cycle.

Crypto trader Rekt Capital believes there’s considerable potential for further upward movement in the short term. He told his 443,000 followers in an April 7 post that the market is approximately one-third through the “bull market” phase.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETF guru Eric Balchunas has the last laugh at doubters: X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] ‘Everything will be tokenized’ — Mantra Chain CEO [/INST] In the latest episode of Cointelegraph’s Hashing It Out podcast, host Elisha Owusu Akyaw welcomes John Mullin, the CEO of Mantra Chain, for a deep dive into real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. Mullin breaks down the hype, explores the true potential for investors, and discusses the challenges faced by the emerging technology.

Mullin explains what tokenization means for Web3 adoption and its potential to increase institutional investments, as well as highlighting the state of regulations in the RWA space and what that means for Web3 projects.

The CEO says that the hype around real-world assets is not new to the blockchain industry and is similar to the popularity of security token offerings (STO) during the 2018–2019 cycle.

Mullin says RWA tokenization is taking off because there is more interest from institutions, and projects are finding ways around regulatory issues, which previously impeded the STO sector.

Mullin takes a more nuanced approach to whether everything needs to be tokenized or not. He explains that anyone can tokenize almost anything, but whether that token grants real-world rights is a separate issue.

To create a truly transferable token, projects must merge the technology and token creation with real-world ownership, corporate actions and legal status, Mullins states. This allows projects to mirror and grant the transferable rights of the real-world product in token form.

Mullin quickly points out that this is a challenge because every asset class has different real-world rules, which vary by jurisdiction. Depending on where the project operates, it must consider different things, making it a challenging yet rewarding industry and product suite.

“And I think that in the longer term, tokenization, everything will be tokenized, in my opinion. I think the whole world will be tokenized. My personal perspective is if Web2 was bringing the world online, Web3 is bringing the world on-chain.”

Mullin adds that the tokenization of real-world assets will likely attract more institutional interest than the space has experienced. He adds that RWA tokenization allows institutions to invest on-chain without dealing with unfamiliar and more volatile assets, such as those in decentralized finance.

To hear more from John Mullin, listen to the full episode of Hashing It Out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or TuneIn, and remember to check out Cointelegraph’s full catalog of Web3 podcasts."
"[INST] The 2024 Bitcoin halving is the “most bullish” setup for BTC price [/INST] The fourth-ever Bitcoin halving, which occurred on April 20, could give rise to the “most bullish” Bitcoin cycle, based on historical chart patterns combined with the presence of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

For the first time in crypto history, Bitcoin's (BTC) price reached a new all-time high of above $73,600 on March 13, before the halving event. Historically, Bitcoin price rallied to new highs in 518 to 546 days after previous halving events.

The pre-halving all-time high, combined with institutional inflows from the ten United States spot Bitcoin ETFs, created the “most bullish setup” for Bitcoin, according to Sukhveer Sanghera, founder and CEO of Earth Wallet. He told Cointelegraph:

“The combination of nearly all BTC having been mined, early investor via ETFs, increasing demand for inflation hedges, and increased utility — all fundamental aspects of Bitcoin’s value proposition are stronger than ever before.”

BTC/USD, 1-week chart, with halving events. Source: Rekt Capital

Bitcoin price fell 5.6% on the weekly chart, to trade above $63,600, as of 9:58 a.m. in UTC. The world’s first cryptocurrency only rose 2.85% during the past month but rallied over 50% since the beginning of 2024, TradingView data shows.

BTC/USD, YTD chart. Source: TradingView

While Bitcoin’s price action is expected to be bullish in the long term, halvings are historically preceded by short-term corrections.

Bitcoin price could see the end of the current drawdown if price manages to rise above the $65,000 resistance, according to Temujin Louie, the CEO of Wanchain. He told Cointelegraph:

“Historically, Bitcoin halvings were followed by a slump. Expect to see continued consolidation so long as support around $58,000 holds. If BTC breaks recent highs, look for a rapid increase to $80,000, $90,000, or even $100,000 as investors favor round numbers.”

Related: New Bitcoin whales, ETFs are up only 1.6% in unrealized profit — Is the BTC bottom in?

Bitcoin ETF inflows see temporary slump ahead of the halving

The past month’s lagging price action is mainly attributed to slowing Bitcoin accumulation in the ten U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, as net inflows have turned negative on the week of the halving.

The U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw $398 million worth of negative net outflows during the halving week, down from over $199 million worth of net positive inflows during the previous week, according to Dune.

Bitcoin ETF net flows. Source: Dune

Despite the temporary slump, the ten Bitcoin ETFs cumulatively amassed over 835,000 BTC worth $53.5 billion, which is 4.24% of the current Bitcoin supply.

The narrative around Bitcoin’s price action remains positive, despite the temporary slump in ETF inflows, which signals new investors preparing to gain BTC exposure, according to Jonas Simanavicius, co-founder and CTO at Syntropy:

“Early adopters from large capital institutions have entered the market, and it is taking time for the next wave of institutions to prepare their inflows. While big banks predict some downward movement in BTC post-halving, I see strength in BTC due to potential new money inflows and its positioning as a hedge against inflation.

Simanavicius added that Bitcoin is increasingly viewed as a “hedge against political tensions” amid escalating global conflicts, which could bolster its status as a safe haven asset.

Related: Bitcoin supply to run out on exchanges in 9 months — Bybit"
"[INST] DeepMind CEO says Google to spend more than $100B on AGI despite hype [/INST] Google’s not backing down from the challenge posed by Microsoft when it comes to the artificial intelligence sector. At least not according to the CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis.

Speaking at a TED conference in Canada, Hassabis recently went on the record saying that he expected Google to spend more than $100 billion on the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) over time. His comments reportedly came in response to a question concerning Microsoft’s recent “Stargate” announcement.

Stargate

Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly in discussions to build a $100 billion supercomputer project for the purpose of training AI systems. According to the Intercept, a person wishing to remain anonymous, who has had direct conversations with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and seen the initial cost estimates on the project, says it’s currently being discussed under the codename “Stargate.”

To put the proposed costs into perspective, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the U.S.-based “Frontier” system, cost approximately $600 million to build.

According to the report, Stargate wouldn’t be a single system similar to Frontier. It will instead spread out a series of computers across the U.S. in five phases with the last phase being the penultimate “Stargate” system.

Artificial general intelligence

Hassabis’ comments don’t hint at exactly how Google might respond, but seemingly confirm the notion that the company is aware of Microsoft's endeavors and plans on investing just as much, if not more.

Ultimately, the stakes are simple. Both companies are vying to become the first organization to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). Today’s AI systems are constrained by their training methods and data and, as such, fall well short of “human-level” intelligence across myriad benchmarks.

AGI is a nebulous term for an AI system theoretically capable of doing anything an average adult human could do, given the right resources. An AGI system with access to a line of credit or a cryptocurrency wallet and the internet, for example, should be able to start and run its own business.

Related: DeepMind co-founder says AI will be able to invent, market, run businesses by 2029

Cryptocurrency

The main challenge to being the first company to develop AGI is that there’s no scientific consensus on exactly what an AGI is or how one could be created.

Even among the world’s most famous AI scientists — Meta’s Yann LeCun, Google’s Demis Hassabis, etc. — there exists no small amount of disagreement as to whether AGI can even be achieved using the current “brute force” method of increasing datasets and training parameters, or if it can be achieved at all.

In a Financial Times article published in March, Hassabis made a negative comparison to the current AI/AGI hype cycle and the scams it’s attracted to the cryptocurrency market. Despite the hype, both AI and crypto have exploded their respective financial spaces in the first four months of 2024.

Where Bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency sat at about $30,395 per coin in April of 2023, it’s now over $60,000 as of the time of this article’s publishing, having only recently retreated from an all-time-high about $73K.

Meanwhile, the current AI industry leader, Microsoft, has seen its stock go from $286 a share to around $416 in the same time period."
"[INST] New Bitcoin ETFs now hold 500,000 BTC, while GBTC outflows slow [/INST] Nine of the 10 new spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have accumulated over 500,000 BTC since launching in January, with their holdings now accounting for 2.54% of the current circulating supply.

The nine ETFs, which launched on Jan. 11, hit the milestone following another day of inflows on Thursday, having scooped up $287.7 million in Bitcoin, according to Farside Investors.

This brings the amount of BTC held by the nine ETFs to a current worth of $35 billion over just 54 trading days.

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs. Source: HODL15Capital

In total, all United States spot Bitcoin funds, including Grayscale, hold 835,000 BTC, which is almost 4% of the entire supply, it noted.

This week’s ETF inflows are back in the black this week, with $845 million in inflows measured so far, reversing a trend of outflows that began on March 18.

On March 28, there was a total inflow of $183 million, with BlackRock leading the pack as its IBIT fund saw $95 million coming in.

Fidelity and Bitwise saw similar inflows of around $67 million each, while Ark 21Shares saw $27.6 million following a huge inflow of $200 million on Wednesday.

Grayscale’s GBTC outflow was $105 million, which is the lowest it has been since March 12.

The crypto asset manager has now shed around 284,846 BTC from its GBTC fund since it converted to a spot ETF in mid-January.

Related: Spot Bitcoin ETFs regain traction, posting $418M net inflows

In related news, Bitwise filed an S-1 application with the Securities and Exchange Commission for its spot Ethereum ETF on March 28.

Fellow ETF analyst Eric Balchunas reacted to the news, stating that his odds for ETH ETF approval in May remain a pessimistic 25% but he could go lower. There are seven weeks until the deadline and the radio silence from SEC is bleak, he added.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments — Trezor CEO"
"[INST] New Zealand fears missing crypto train with ‘wait and see’ approach [/INST] A New Zealand ministry focused on shaping the nation’s economic strategy has proposed adopting a more accommodating stance toward cryptocurrency innovations. The ministry made several recommendations to foster the growth of digital assets in the country.

Andrew Bayly, the minister of commerce and consumer affairs of New Zealand, recommended revamping the country’s sluggish approach toward experimenting and adopting innovations on digital assets and blockchain technology. He urged the government to support the development of the crypto industry and consider appropriate policies to manage related risks.

In response to the inquiries by the parliamentary Finance and Expenditure Committee into cryptocurrencies, Bayly’s office said:

“The current ‘wait and see’ approach could risk New Zealand missing out on the benefits of development in the digital asset industry.”

The ministry’s advisers made eight key recommendations for New Zealand to get back on the global crypto wave. The recommendations include adopting policies and regulations to encourage developments in digital assets and blockchain, facilitate greater collaboration between government and industry players and immigration to address skills shortages in digital assets and blockchain.

Other recommendations also made it to the list of friendlier approaches to crypto, such as developing training and educational resources, tax incentives, Anti-Money Laundering provisions and continuing the design work on an in-house central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Bayly noted that most of the recommendations are long-term in nature and highlighted the need for a coordinated global regulatory approach and supervisory frameworks for digital and crypto assets.

Related: Printing money for fools is a ‘great business to be in’ — NZ central bank head

Bayly’s recommendation for an in-house CBDC contradicts the viewpoint of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Governor Adrian Orr.

On Feb. 12, Orr told a parliamentary finance committee that CBDCs are not a true substitute for fiat money and “are not stable.”

Orr (right) speaking on stablecoins. Source: Vimeo

Orr argued that Bitcoin (BTC) is neither a means of exchange nor a store of value or a unit of account when asked about the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s concerns about cryptocurrencies. He added:

“Likewise stablecoins, I think, are the biggest misnomers [...] Stablecoins are not stable. They are only as good as the balance sheet of the person offering that stablecoin.”

“The number one thing we can do is be as transparent and blunt as we can. They are speculative coins, not currency and not central bank cash,” he concluded.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Avalanche home loan tokenization protocol raises $10M in Series A [/INST] Homium, a home equity line of credit (HELOC) tokenization protocol built on Avalanche, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Sorenson Impact Group and Blizzard.

“Through shared appreciation home equity loans, Homium introduces a way for homeowners to borrow against their home equity without increasing their monthly debt burden,” wrote Avalanche in an April 15 announcement.

By using Homium, homeowners pledge a portion of their home’s future appreciation as collateral for loan equity in maintenance and repairs, debt consolidation or inheritance. At the same time, investors receive a tokenized asset tracking the price appreciation of a pool of shared homes on the protocol.

The Homium tokenization overview. Source: Homium

“Homium is building a valuable new asset class for institutional investors, providing a new source of uncorrelated, inflation-protected return in their core portfolios,” said CEO Tommy Mercein in a statement. The first such home tokenization loans are currently available in the United States state of Colorado.

The tokenized assets are backed by second mortgage loans made to owner-occupied single-family homes. Investors of the HELOC tokens are secured to the title like any other mortgage. Homium pledges that every home is “appraised by a third party, hybrid valuation service” with nationwide loan originators.

While the HELOC tokens are built on distributed ledger technology, they are not cryptocurrencies. Instead, the tokens are debt securities compliant with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Rule 144A regarding private placement to institutional investors. Regarding its technology, Homium explained:

“Patented technology gives Homium investors a real time window into every loan in each pool including its origination value and current marked-to-market estimated value. Because Homium loans are underwritten to a uniform standard that secures a % of the underlying home equity, this allows instant securitization of the note from inception. Investors receive pooled exposure to home price appreciation by state.""

Since July 2023, Avalanche has pledged $50 million in investments for on-chain tokenization protocols, with a major focus on those specializing in real estate and digital collectibles. Meanwhile, financial services giant Citi recently described the tokenization market as the next “killer use case” in crypto.

Related: Avalanche and Chainlink collaborate on Australasian on-chain asset settlement"
"[INST] Bitcoin 5% flash crash leads to $165M in leveraged crypto liquidations [/INST] A sudden 5% drawdown in the price of Bitcoin (BTC) on Tuesday has seen traders with leveraged exposure to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rack up over $165 million in losses in less than two hours.

Bitcoin plunged 5% from $69,450 to as low as $65,970 in less than 30 minutes in early hours on March 2 UTC, per TradingView data.

Bitcoin tumbled over 5% in a sudden tumble on April 2. Source: TradingView

According to data from Coinglass, Bitcoin’s sharp wick down saw more than $165 million in leveraged positions wiped out, with just over $50 million in Bitcoin longs and more than $40 million in Ether (ETH) longs accounting for the bulk of that figure.

Roughly $6 million in long positions on Dogecoin (DOGE) and $4 million in Solana’s SOL (SOL) were liquidated, trailing BTC and ETH.

Bitcoin’s sudden drawdown caused a $165million leverage flush. Source: CoinGlass

Around the same time as the drawdown, Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) posted a net outflow of $86 million, breaking a four-day positive inflow streak, per FarSide data.

BlackRock’s ETF stood as the best-performing fund, whose net inflows reached $165.9 million, while Fidelity came in second with $44 million.

Related: Memecoin madness is breaking the Bitcoin halving cycle

However, the inflows were weighed down by Grayscale’s GBTC posting $302 million in outflows, bringing the net daily outflows for all the funds to $85.7 million.

Tether wobbles from its peg

At the same time as the Bitcoin flash crash, the value of the United States dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether (USDT) also wobbled around 1%, briefly falling from its $1 peg to $0.988, according to data from CoinGecko.

Tether experienced a brief wobble on some price tracking sites. Source: CoinGecko

It’s unclear if the USDT wobble was an error in the API of certain data trackers or if the value of the currency suffered a sudden loss; however, the brief depeg did not appear on other price trackers.

Cointelegraph contacted Tether but did not receive an immediate response.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade to make normal wallets ‘smart’ and improve UX [/INST] Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, slated for late 2024 or early 2025, is bringing with it a host of more functionality for crypto wallets and upgrades to their user experience (UX).

Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 3074 was approved for inclusion in the next update, which allows normal crypto wallets to work like smart contracts.

One of EIP-3074’s functions gives standard externally owned accounts (EOAs), normal wallets such as a MetaMask wallet, smart contract capabilities.

This allows functions such as transaction bundling, so users only have to sign once, and sponsored transactions where a wallet can delegate funds for use by another, similar to account abstraction that was introduced in ERC-4337.

Anonymous DefiLlama developer 0xngmi claimed in an April 11 X post that the EIP’s downside is “now it’ll be possible to fully drain an address (all tokens, all NFTs, all DeFi positions...) with only one bad signature.”

Gaslite co-founder Harrison Leggio wrote on X that while there are security concerns with the update, “people will always find a way to lose their money.”

“People literally GIVE THEIR PRIVATE KEYS TO TRADING BOTS,” he added.

Software engineer Laurence Day wrote that the EIP’s “most obviously useful application” was its sponsored transactions, as it allowed users to “store assets in a wallet that doesn’t hold Ether,” and they could sponsor the gas from a contract controlling the wallet.

Other slated functions of EIP-3074 include a social recovery feature that negates the need for the typical 12-to-24-word seed phrase.

Anonymous Web3 adviser Cygaar explained on X that the EIP turns wallets into smart contracts by adding two new operating instructions — AUTH and AUTHCALL.

Related: History of Crypto: Crypto winter and Ethereum landmarks

AUTH verifies signatures and actions. AUTHCALL then “calls the target contract(s) with the originator address as the caller” rather than the message sender, Cygaar wrote.

The planned Pectra update comes after Ethereum developers pushed through the Dencun update last month, which lowered layer-2 transaction fees.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also shared in early April the next steps for the “Purge,” which would remove old and excess network history in order to simplify it.

Magazine: Here’s how Ethereum’s ZK-rollups can become interoperable"
"[INST] BTC halving to fuel ‘raging firesale of crypto assets’ — Arthur Hayes [/INST] April’s Bitcoin halving, combined with a “bag of tricks” from the United States Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury, will “add propellant to a raging firesale of crypto assets” and depress the crypto market for weeks, says BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes.

In an April 8 blog post, Hayes wrote he believed the Bitcoin halving would “pump prices in the medium term” but warned crypto prices “directly before and after could be negative.”

“The narrative of the halving being positive for crypto prices is well entrenched. When most market participants agree on a certain outcome, the opposite usually occurs,” he wrote.

Hayes believes that the halving is also coming at a time when “dollar liquidity is tighter than usual” and outlined his theory on how the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury policies impact the markets.

“That is why I believe Bitcoin and crypto prices in general will slump around the halving [...] It will add propellant to a raging firesale of crypto assets.”

“Could the market defy my bearish inclinations and continue higher? Fuck yeah,” he wrote. “I’m perennially long as fuck crypto, so I welcome being wrong.”

Hayes noted the second half of April would be a “precarious period for risky assets,” as U.S. tax payments remove liquidity, the Fed starts quantitative tightening, decreasing the money supply, and the Treasury’s general account (TGA) — basically, the government’s checking account — is yet to be used. Hayes wrote:

Excerpt from Hayes’ blog post discussing the Fed and Treasury’s “bag of tricks.” Source: Arthur Hayes

After May 1, following the Fed’s meeting on the same day, Hayes said he expects it to reduce the pace of money supply tightening, and the Treasury will release from the TGA “most likely, an additional $1 trillion of liquidity into the system, which will pump markets.”

Related: Bitcoin needs to hold above $80,000 to keep mining profitable post-halving

Hayes said the halving and the Fed and Treasury’s “bag of tricks” is why he’s decided to “abstain from trading until May.”

Bitcoin (BTC) is up over 61% year-to-date, climbing from around $42,200 to trade at $71,170, according to Cointelegraph Markets Pro.

The market sentiment measuring Crypto Fear and Greed Index has also climbed since Jan. 27, remaining in the “Greed” zone above a score of 50 out of 100.

The score for April 9 showed “Extreme Greed,” with a score of 80, up from 76 the day prior.

A three-month chart of the index’s score starting Jan. 11. Source: alternative.me

It started the year at a score of 65, meaning “Greed,” but hit a high of 90 on March 5 — its highest in two years.

Hayes wrote that if the liquidity scenarios he theorized come true, it would give him “much more confidence to ape into all manner of dogshit.”

“If I miss a few percentage points of gains but definitely avoid losses for my portfolio and lifestyle, that is an acceptable outcome,” he added.

Magazine: How to protect your crypto in a volatile market — Bitcoin OGs and experts weigh in"
"[INST] Real-world data for blockchain apps: Gora joins Cointelegraph Accelerator [/INST] Gora, a decentralized blockchain oracle network, joins the ranks of the Cointelegraph Accelerator program.

Smart contracts represent a vastly underutilized cornerstone in the blockchain ecosystem, harboring untapped potential to redefine traditional business processes, legal agreements and automated transactions. Representing a market expected to reach $8.79 billion by 2030, smart contracts have the capacity to increase transparency, reduce costs and enhance efficiency across numerous industries.

Small and medium-sized enterprises are losing out on a $20 billion opportunity in smart contracts. Source: Gora

Despite their potential, the sector is lagging in harnessing the full value of the innovation, underscoring a critical gap in the adoption and utilization of smart contract technology. The integration of decentralized applications (DApps) and smart contracts presents a viable solution for businesses looking to tap into this potential.

Blockchain oracles: Bridging DApps with the real world

DApps, powered by smart contracts, automate transactions and facilitate agreements in a trustless and transparent manner, enabling businesses to streamline their operations. However, for DApps to function effectively, they require reliable and secure access to off-chain data — a capability provided by decentralized oracle networks.

Originally built on the Algorand blockchain, Gora — a blockchain oracle network — aims to spearhead the integration of real-world data into DApps. The project’s goal is to enable developers and organizations to create applications that extend the utility of DApps into everyday activities for millions of users through both data utilization and off-chain computation capabilities.

Source: Gora

Gora distinguishes itself by not limiting its focus to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. It incorporates cross-chain functionalities through Gora.Fi, enhancing its interoperability with other blockchain ecosystems. Gora’s interoperability broadens its applicability, venturing into areas like supply chain management for tracking goods and verifying authenticity and Internet of Things integration, where it connects real-world sensor data with smart contracts to automate processes.

Expanding beyond traditional DeFi with experience

The Gora team, comprised of individuals with experience in Fortune 500 companies, bring knowledge and expertise to the platform. The platform’s experienced backbone contributed to Gora’s notable traction in the blockchain space, achieving $100,000 in annual recurring revenue.

Gora’s growing ecosystem is supported by over 117 active nodes and has attracted more than 20 marketplace sellers, indicating a strong and expanding interest in its decentralized oracle and data integration services.

The project’s vision extends beyond DeFi, aiming to revolutionize industries like supply chain, healthcare and governance through blockchain. Gora also plans to empower developers and businesses with the necessary tools, educational resources and community support, ensuring secure, reliable and private data access in DApps for enhanced transparency and trust.

Gora’s roadmap includes the launch of the Gora.Fi DeFi platform and the introduction of Gora’s ERC-20 token on Ethereum in the second quarter. The platform plans to expand its cross-chain capabilities to BSC and Arbitrum by Q3, with further expansions into the Cosmos and Solana ecosystems slated for the last quarter of 2024."
"[INST] Binance drops Bitcoin Ordinals, medical tourism in the metaverse: Nifty Newsletter [/INST] In this week’s newsletter, read about Binance’s nonfungible token (NFT) arm ending support for Bitcoin Ordinals, check out Dogecoin Ordinals airdropped Runestones, and find out how asset manager Franklin Templeton feels about Bitcoin NFTs. In other news, the metaverse is set to revolutionize the medical tourism market, and don’t forget this week’s Nifty News, featuring NFT collection Doodles collaborating on an animated film with Lil Wayne as a skeleton.

Binance ends support for Bitcoin Ordinals

Binance NFT has halted its support for Bitcoin-based NFTs. On April 4, Binance posted that it would cease support for Bitcoin Ordinals trades and deposits as part of its efforts to streamline product offerings.

The exchange said it will also cease offering Bitcoin NFT airdrops and utilities after April 10. Furthermore, the exchange advised users to withdraw their Bitcoin NFTs from the marketplace before May 18.

Continue reading

Dogecoiners clone hyped Bitcoin Ordinals “Runestone” airdrop

Dogecoin NFT users handed out their version of Runestones in a giveaway similar to Bitcoin Ordinals in March. Over 30,000 Doge Runestones were sent to wallets that held at least one Doginal — Dogecoin’s Ordinals protocol.

The Doge Runestones airdrop mimicked the popular Bitcoin-based Runestone airdrop in March. During the event, a community-run effort allowed 112,000 Runestones to be given to early adopters of the protocol.

Continue reading

Ordinals drive “positive momentum” in Bitcoin innovation — Franklin Templeton

Asset manager Franklin Templeton shared an investor note introducing Bitcoin Ordinals to its clients. The asset manager explained that the protocol spurred a “renaissance” in activity on the Bitcoin network. Franklin Templeton also highlighted that Bitcoin NFTs drove positive momentum in Bitcoin innovation.

While the asset manager showed positivity toward Ordinals, it also warned its investors that there are risks associated with the protocol.

Continue reading

Nifty News: LA’s Bored Ape lovers go hungry, Bitcoiners sell $500 Game Boy dupe and more

NFT collection Doodles announced its upcoming animated film featuring a character voiced by popular rapper Lil Wayne. On April 5, the collection announced it would roll out a storytelling experience through “digital collecting experiences.”

Meanwhile, NFT sales volume for all blockchains has slid for the fifth week after reaching a year-to-date high in March.

Continue reading

Thanks for reading this digest of the week’s most notable developments in the NFT space. Come again next Wednesday for more reports and insights into this actively evolving space."
"[INST] Senators Warren, Grassley want details on CFTC’s communications with FTX [/INST] United States Senators Elizabeth Warren and Charles Grassley have sent a letter to Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chair Rostin Behnam asking for an accounting of Behnam’s contacts with former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried before the cryptocurrency exchange’s collapse. The writers say they want to “renew requests” for that information and cite a letter addressed to Behnam and others by Sen. Josh Hawley.

Warren and Grassley, who represent opposite ends of the U.S. political spectrum, reminded Behnam that he told a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing in December that “My team and I met with Mr. Bankman-Fried and his team [...] over the past 14 months, we met 10 times in the CFTC office at their request.”

Behnam, who was the sole witness speaking at the hearing, used the hearing as a platform to appeal for more authority, saying, “Without new authority for the CFTC, there will remain gaps in a federal regulatory framework, even if other regulators act within their existing authority.” Warren and Grassley wrote in a letter dated April 12:

“Safeguarding the savings and retirements of Americans requires Congress and market regulators like the CFTC to determine how this multi-billion-dollar crime was allowed to happen.”

Behnam also noted that CFTC-regulated and FTX-owned LedgerX was not part of the FTX collapse and remained operational.

The senators are demanding accounts of all meetings, phone calls, written correspondence and conversations between Behnam or CFTC staff and Bankman-Fried, FTX, Alameda or associated executives. In addition, they ask for a “timeline of CFTC’s knowledge of the fraud committed, including but not limited to a description of any proposed or ongoing investigations into those parties.”

Source: Crypto Asset Investor

According to the letter, the senators want to “understand the nature of your [Behnam’s] repeated correspondence with Mr. Bankman-Fried” before knowledge of his crimes became public.

Related: CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam cites LedgerX as success story amid FTX collapse

Republican Hawley wrote to Behnam, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler in November asking if their agencies had begun investigations into FTX or Alameda before their collapse or entered into confidential settlements with the companies or their executives.

Magazine: Sam Bankman-Fried: The crypto whale who wants to give billions away"
"[INST] IRS investigation chief expects uptick in crypto tax evasion this year [/INST] The United States Internal Revenue Service says it’s gearing up for a significant rise in crypto tax crime cases going forward, as U.S. citizens hit the deadline to file their taxes on April 15.

Speaking to CNBC at the Chainalysis Links event in New York, IRS criminal investigation chief Guy Ficco said his agency was getting ready to deal with an uptick in cases of tax fraud and evasion that have come along with it.

“There’s going to be a lot more charged Title 26 crypto cases this year and moving forward.”

A Title 26 tax code refers to citizens who willfully evade paying taxes by lying or obfuscating their reporting documents.

Ficco said that crypto had previously been used mostly as a tool in financial crimes such as fraud, scams, and money laundering — however, he said his agency had recently observed a drastic uptick in “pure crypto tax crimes,” and expected even more in the near future.

Ficco said his agency is prepared for an increase in crypto tax crime. Source: CNBC

“This could be purely not reporting income generated from crypto sales, it could be hiding the true basis of crypto and that’s an area I anticipate an increase in,” Ficco said.

He mentioned that his agency has partnered with blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis as well as several other law enforcement agencies to better crack down on crypto crime.

“My IRS special agents are phenomenal at tracing and following money, but some of the tools and applications that are needed in the crypto world — that’s where the experts at Chainalysis come in,” he said.

Ficco also outlined some basic rules for those looking to file their taxes properly and not get stung by the IRS.

Related: Biden's mining tax is the least sensible part of his 2025 budget proposal

“The basic rule of thumb is that you have a basis in the asset. When you dispose of that asset [...] the point where you sold is your disposition,” said Ficco.

“If you acquire something at $10,000 and you sold it for $20,000 — you have a $10,000 gain and that’s what you need to pay tax on.”

Ficco said his agency had grown more aggressive when investigating and prosecuting U.S. citizens who had either failed to report their crypto taxes in the past as well as those who had actively obfuscated or lied on their tax return.

On Feb. 6, a federal grand jury indicted Texas man Frank Richard Ahlgren III with filing false tax returns avoiding reporting requirements on more than $4 million worth of gains made on Bitcoin (BTC).

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Solana rival Base hits 400 TPS, claims core contributor [/INST] Coinbase Ethereum layer-2 network Base has been hitting high transaction per second (TPS) throughput according to the firm’s head of protocols, Jesse Pollak.

In an April 9 post to X, Pollak reported seeing throughput as high as 300–400 TPS, which he said was being achieved “with no issues.”

However, the Coinbase-backed layer-2 blockchain has a real-time TPS of 26.8 and a maximum recorded TPS of 292, according to Chainspect.

Layer-2 ecosystem analytics platform L2Beat reported that average transactions per second on Base reached a peak of 37 on April 8, more than double Ethereum’s 14 TPS.

In a response to Pollak’s original post on X, pseudonymous trader Wazz claimed that if Pollak’s observations were accurate, then the network could be achieving a similar TPS to the Solana network.

“Correct me if I’m wrong but if true then Base is now doing the same TPS as Solana.”

Wazz added that around 60% of Solana’s reported 1,000 TPS were failed transactions, meaning that the actual TPS was closer to 400.

Solana-based Helius Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz questioned Pollak’s TPS figures, arguing that failed transactions were not included in the Base figures.

He added that the biggest Base block in the data provided had 94% failed transactions, resulting in a real TPS of 41.

The findings come amid rising tensions between proponents of Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions and advocates of the Solana network. In recent weeks, Solana has been plagued by vocal complaints of degraded user experience, failing transactions and other reliability issues.

Mumtaz previously claimed that Solana’s current issues are not due to a fundamental design flaw but rather a specific implementation bug in the networking protocol.

On April 9, Cointelegraph reported that several Solana project launches have been delayed due to ongoing network congestion.

Related: Base TVL doubles in a month as pundits tip memecoins to drive adoption

Base has witnessed a sharp uptick in network activity in recent months, largely driven by an escalating memecoin frenzy.

The total value locked (TVL) on the Base network surged to an all-time high of $1.5 billion on April 9, according to DefiLlama data. This represents an increase of 235% since the beginning of this year as memecoin degens flocked to the network.

Base TVL. Source: DefiLlama

While degens have been racing to find the latest trend in new memecoins, an in-depth analysis of new memecoins on Base found that over 90% had at least one security vulnerability, while 17% were outright scams.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base memecoins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Elections may swing Senate Banking Committee toward crypto, Sen. Lummis says [/INST] Cryptocurrency is increasingly becoming a political issue, and upcoming elections will be decisive in the future of crypto in the United States, Senator Cynthia Lummis told the audience at the Bitcoin Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. Innovations in mining could add weight to the pro-crypto argument, she added.

The current political atmosphere is stifling for crypto. “In this administration, there are a number of high-ranking policy positions that are held by people who are threatened by Bitcoin because they know they can't control it,” Lummis said.

Therefore, “we're trying to view it [crypto] as a negative and foresee how we should regulate the negative side of it,” despite its benefits.

“The banking committee is kind of the obstacle,” Lummis said, and the Senate race is Ohio will be critical in determining the political landscape for crypto:

“You've got a sort of a Blockchain entrepreneur running as a Republican against the sitting chairman of the banking committee, who seems to have Elizabeth Warren whispering in his ear about this topic,” Lummis said.

The current chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, is a vocal crypto skeptic. He is being challenged by Bernie Moreno.

Related: Senate Banking Committee’s priorities for new Congress include crypto: Report

In addition, Montana Senator and Banking Committee member Democrat John Tester also holds a key position and “we're trying to educate his opponent on my side of the aisle about Bitcoin and Blockchain technology.”

Lummis did not name the opponent. There are three Republican candidates who will face off in the Montana primaries in the run-up to the national election.

Source: Cynthia Lummis

“We have better advocacy on the [House] Finance Committee and the Ag [House Agriculture] Committee,” Lummis continued.

Lummis went on to talk about mining, saying Bitcoin miners are starting to get innovative with energy generation. She said, “Essentially we look at Bitcoin mining in two ways. There's grid stabilization — utility scale — and then there's energy harvesting.”

Innovations such as energy harvesting, via methane gas, for instance, can “get capital excited about […] the energy use of Bitcoin and how it can be positive versus viewed as parasitic,” Lummis said.

Magazine: Inside the Iranian Bitcoin mining industry"
"[INST] Senate Banking Committee chair wants to combine stablecoin bill to boost chance of passage [/INST] Sherrod Brown, chair of the United States Senate Banking Committee, has reportedly revealed plans to advance a significant stablecoin bill by combining it with legislation related to marijuana businesses and clawing back compensation for bankers.

According to an April 16 Bloomberg report, Senator Brown said he was open to passing stablecoin legislation in Congress as one of his goals, provided his concerns were addressed. The U.S. lawmaker’s reported plans included placing the stablecoin bill in a package with legislation authorizing banks to conduct business with firms selling marijuana and clawbacks for executives of failed financial institutions.

Lawmakers in both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate have largely failed to advance bills to address regulatory concerns around stablecoins despite support from many in Congress and industry leaders. In February, House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters said Democrats and Republicans were “very close” to a compromise on a stablecoin bill. In the Senate, a bipartisan group headed by Republican Cynthia Lummis and Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand have spearheaded similar legislation efforts.

Many members of both political parties in both chambers of Congress have expressed concerns about establishing the proper framework for stablecoins in a comprehensive bill. In July 2023, one of the proposed bills in the House, the Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act, moved out of committee and was set for a full floor vote. The legislation has seen little if any, movement since that time.

Related: Is a US stablecoin bill just around the corner? Law Decoded

Should lawmakers move forward with digital asset-related legislation in 2024, they will also have to deal with their pro- and anti-crypto constituents in an election year. Control of the House, Senate and the Presidency is up for grabs.

Senator Brown, who has often spoken about the risks of digital assets in committee hearings, will likely face off for his Ohio seat against Republican nominee Bernie Moreno. Representative Patrick McHenry, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, announced in December that he did not intend to seek reelection. Both leadership positions could be crucial in advancing crypto bills starting in 2025.

Magazine: The real risks to Ethena’s stablecoin model (are not the ones you think)"
"[INST] XRPL blockchain plugs into cross-chain DeFi [/INST] Ripple’s underlying XRPL blockchain is set to unlock a wide range of decentralized finance (DeFi) capabilities following the launch of a natively built automated market maker (AMM) protocol.

Ripple recently announced the release of the XLS-30 AMM protocol, built in partnership with the XRPL community, as a feature to benefit its blockchain ecosystem.

The AMM is expected to expand the DeFi capabilities of the XRPL ecosystem and enable cross-chain DeFi use cases across 50 blockchains.

XRPL’s blockchain ecosystem has an existing decentralized exchange (DEX) featuring a conventional order book, which does not include some of the advanced features that new DeFi protocols have pioneered over the past two years.

Related: Ripple CTO seeks community consensus for XRPL AMM feature adoption

A spokesperson from Ripple told Cointelegraph that the AMM lays the foundation for further DeFi development on the XRPL blockchain.

Integration with cross-chain messaging services like Axelar will broaden the reach and utility of XRPL-based DeFi solutions across several blockchain ecosystems.

The AMM has been in development since June 2022, as Ripple chief technology officer and XRPL co-founder David Schwartz reflected on in a recent X post.

The AMM aims to complement and expand the existing order book system with XRPL. XRPL’s DEX previously operated solely on order books, providing a capital-efficient trading mechanism for highly liquid pairs.

Related: Ripple CTO says ‘tide is turning’ on US regulatory environment

Ripple’s team noted that integrating the AMM with order books complements and expands on the existing DEX-powered ecosystem.

“By integrating the AMM with order books, traders can automatically receive the best price across both systems, while liquidity providers can earn yield on their excess liquidity,” the spokesperson added.

The AMM allows developers to enable the creation of liquidity pools for any pair of assets issued on XRPL. Ripple also confirmed that the AMM was not explicitly targeted at institutional trading entities but that its functionality might prove useful for high-volume traders or firms.

“While the AMM does not currently have built-in compliance features, it complements the existing order book DEX, which may be more suitable for large financial institutions trading popular tokens at high volumes,” the Ripple spokesperson said.

Adding the AMM to the existing order DEX is touted to provide a robust trading environment for a range of users, from retail traders to institutions.

Cointelegraph also understands that Ripple and XRPL are exploring incorporating on-chain regulatory compliance features in an effort to support institutional uptake of its protocol.

The AMM allows developers to enable the creation of liquidity pools for any pair of assets issued on XRPL. Ripple’s team believes that cross-chain messaging protocols will be key in attracting capital, crypto developers and traders from other blockchain ecosystems.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Telegram channels eligible for 50% ad revenue, but there’s a catch [/INST] Instant messaging platform Telegram Messenger will share half of its advertisement revenue with owners of public channels globally if they meet a specific condition.

On March 31, Telegram introduced a reward system that would allow channel owners with substantial subscribers to earn 50% of the revenue from ads shown in their channels in Toncoin (TON), the project’s native cryptocurrency.

The catch? Public channels must have at least 1,000 subscribers to be eligible.

The plan was first revealed in February 2024 by Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, when he announced the launch of Telegram Ad Platform to open up revenue streams for channel owners.

Since the announcement, the price of TON has increased 111% — from $2.51 on Feb. 29 to $5.30 on April 1, according to Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView.

TON price jumped after the official announcement of ad revenue sharing on Telegram. Source: CoinMarketCap

According to the company, Telegram channels generate over one trillion views every month, and its owners will be able to withdraw their share of the ad revenue with no fees.

It is also the third-biggest messenger app in terms of monthly downloads, after WhatsApp and Snapchat, according to Statista.

To support the initiative, Telegram added Toncoin as one of the payment methods for purchasing ads on the platform. However, Telegram shows ads exclusively on Telegram channels, depending on the type of content the channel shares.

Prior to the official revenue stream launching, Telegram channel owners monetized their following by selling paid posts, charging fees to join private channels and selling products, among others.

Related: TON blockchain launches $115M community incentive program

In an exclusive Cointelegraph interview on March 29, Justin Hyun, the director of investments at Ton Foundation, said that the blockchain-based mini-decentralized applications (DApps) on Telegram, also known as Mini Apps, could be a “Trojan horse” for mass blockchain adoption.

“That’s our thesis for bringing in more users onto the blockchain without even needing to educate them about the blockchain. It’s a Trojan horse way to say: look, you’re letting in all these user-friendly DApps, and we won’t even necessarily call them DApps [...] It’s just Telegram Mini Apps that they’re using whether that’s inside their channels.”

Hyun plans to bring 500 million people on-chain by 2028 using simple initial use cases where users aren’t necessarily aware of the underlying blockchain interaction.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Prisma Finance eyes protocol restart with DAO support [/INST] Prisma Finance has devised a plan to safely unpause the Prisma protocol, which was halted on March 28 after it suffered a hack of $11.6 million. Re-enabling borrowing on Prisma will require consensus through an ongoing vote.

On April 3, Prisma Finance core contributor Frank Olson proposed a way to “safely” unpause the Prisma protocol and re-enable the ability for users to deposit liquid staking tokens (LSTs) and liquid restaking tokens (LRTs) and borrow overcollateralized stablecoins.

The Prisma Finance DAO subsequently launched a four-day governance vote the next day, which will end on April 7. According to Olson:

“Unpausing the protocol is a critical part of the path to recovery and it will reestablish normal functionality, including complete Vault management and deposits into the Stability Pool.”

At the time of writing, the proposal for re-enabling borrowing on Prisma received 100% “Yes” votes from participating members of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), signaling strong community support for the cause. However, the decision will be finalized after the voting deadline.

Prisma Finance DAO’s proposal for unpausing the protocol following the $11.6 million hack. Source: snapshot.prismafinance.com

Users are advised to revoke the delegate approvals with open positions as unpausing the protocol may result in loss of funds.

The protocol previously said that 14 accounts were yet to revoke the affected smart contract, which could potentially result in a cumulative loss of $540,000.

Olson also noted Prisma’s ongoing effort to mitigate future risks, which involves opting for continuous auditing services, bug bounty programs and security improvements.

Related: Nearly $100M recovered from hacks in March — PeckShield

Nonfungible token (NFT) game Munchables recently devised a plan to avoid a situation it faced recently where it lost and recovered nearly $63 million from a rogue in-house developer.

One of the strategies involves onboarding investment firm Manifold Trading, market maker Selini Capital and blockchain investigator ZachXBT as new multisig signers to ensure the safe return of users’ funds.

“Finally, we will send ETH and future MUNCH donations to those who were involved in the recovery process of keeping our users safe,” the company said.

Magazine: Google sues crypto app scammers, Crypto.com in Korea: Asia ExpressGoogle sues crypto app scammers, Crypto.com in Korea: Asia Express"
"[INST] Kraken ends Monero trading in Ireland and Belgium ahead of ban [/INST] Crypto exchange Kraken has announced that it is winding down support for the Monero (XMR) privacy token for its customers based in Ireland and Belgium.

Kraken posted a notice saying it would halt the trading and deposits for XMR from May 10. The exchange added that all margin trading positions must be closed before that deadline. If not, Kraken will close the positions automatically.

The exchange also said that it will fully delist Monero from its platform on June 10. This means withdrawals for the XMR token for Ireland and Belgium users will be halted on that date.

Kraken explained that users with any remaining XMR tokens on their accounts after the deadline will have their balances automatically converted into Bitcoin (BTC).

The news follows recent developments in the European Union prohibiting crypto asset service providers (CASPs) from providing accounts for anonymous users or using privacy-focused tokens like Monero.

Meanwhile, the token’s price seems unaffected by the new development as it hovers around $132.35. The token recorded a 24-hour high of $136.59 and a weekly high of $139.15, according to CoinGecko.

3-month price chart for the Monero token. Source: CoinGecko

In February, Binance announced that it would delist Monero, sending the token’s price down. On Feb. 6, the XMR token went from $165 to a five-month low of $136 on Binance. The price plummeted further on Feb. 7 to $105 but quickly recovered the next day.

Related: Kraken secures money license registrations in Spain and Ireland

Regulators across the globe have been cracking down on privacy-focused tokens since 2018. Japan was the first to initiate a ban on anonymity-enhanced tokens.

In 2020, South Korea’s financial watchdog also started to ban privacy coins from exchanges, while Australian exchanges has started to delist privacy tokens due to regulatory updates.

On Feb. 7, 2023, Dubai also released guidelines prohibiting the issuance of anonymity-enhanced tokens and all virtual asset activities related to privacy coins.

Apart from Binance and Kraken, exchanges like Huobi and OKX also announced the delisting of Monero and other privacy-focused digital assets. Huobi delisted Monero on Sept. 19, 2022, in an effort to comply with global regulations.

The token has been fully delisted from OKX’s trading platform since Jan. 5. The exchange said that the delisting is part of its efforts to “maintain a robust spot trading environment.” OKX also noted that the decision follows feedback from its users.

Magazine: Synthetix founder: It’s DeFi that’s wrong, not the market"
"[INST] Bank of England and FCA launch Digital Securities Sandbox for DLT testing [/INST] The Bank of England (BoE) and the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have started a consultation on the draft guidance for their Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS), which is designed to allow participants to test distributed ledger technology (DLT) for trading and settlement of digital securities such as shares and bonds.

According to a joint consultation and draft guidance released on Wednesday, April 3, the sandbox will last five years and could lead to a new regulatory regime for securities settlement.

Successful applicants using the sandbox will be able to provide securities depository and settlement services, as well as operate a trading venue under modified regulations.

The BoE and the FCA aim for the inaugural group of applicants to join the DSS by autumn 2024. FCA Executive Director Sheldon Mills said in a statement:

“The new Digital Securities Sandbox reshapes how we regulate by allowing firms to test regulatory changes using real-world situations before these changes are made permanent. We hope this will be a more effective, collaborative and quicker way of delivering regulatory change.”

The initiative, which is to take place over five years, could pave the way for establishing permanent regulations governing the trading and settlement of digital assets down the line.

The U.K. Treasury first started consultations on the DSS in July 2023. Subsequently, the U.K. government said it would enact legislation to implement the initiative by November 2023.

Related: UK regulations will allow stablecoins and CBDCs to coexist, says former BoE fintech lead

Following this, the government introduced new regulations in December 2023, offering the nation’s financial regulators guidelines for overseeing the sandbox. These regulations took effect on Jan. 8 as part of the U.K.’s Financial Services and Markets Act 2023.

After releasing the joint consultation paper, interested parties can now provide feedback until May 29. Subsequently, the BOE and FCA will review the feedback and open applications by the summer, with the first applicants joining the initiative by the autumn.

According to the regulators, the DSS will welcome a diverse array of firms, aiming to optimize learning opportunities and foster innovation within the U.K. financial system.

This inclusive approach could facilitate quicker and more cost-effective methods for trading, settling and utilizing securities among financial market participants.

Magazine: How the digital yuan could change the world… for better or worse"
"[INST] Hacker mints 1B tokens in $16M Curio smart contract exploit [/INST] Real-world asset (RWA) liquidity firm Curio suffered a smart contract exploit involving a critical vulnerability related to voting power privileges, allowing the attacker to steal $16 million in digital assets.

Curio alerted its community of the exploit and highlighted that they are addressing the situation. The company said that a MakerDAO-based smart contract used within Curio was breached.

However, the company assured its users that the exploit only affected the Ethereum side and that all Polkadot and the Curio Chain contracts remained secure.

Web3 security firm Cyvers estimated that the losses from the exploit are about $16 million. The security firm said the exploit involved a “permission access logic vulnerability.”

On March 25, Curio published a post-mortem of the exploit and a compensation plan for affected users. Within the report, Curio highlighted that the problem was a flaw in the voting power privilege access control.

With this, the attacker acquired a small number of Curio Governance (CGT) tokens, allowing them to gain access and elevate their voting power in the project’s smart contract.

With the elevated voting power, the attacker performed a series of steps that ultimately allowed the execution of arbitrary actions within the Curio DAO contract. This led to the unauthorized minting of 1 billion CGT.

In the report, Curio said all the funds affected in the exploit will be returned. The team said it would release a new token called CGT 2.0. With the new token, the team promised to restore 100% of the funds for CGT holders.

Related: Hacker moves $10M from 2023 phishing incident to Tornado Cash

For liquidity providers, Curio said that it will conduct a fund compensation program. The team said it will be paid in four stages, with each stage lasting 90 days. This could mean that full payment could potentially take one year. They wrote:

“The compensation program will consist of 4 consecutive stages, each lasting for 90 days. During each stage: compensation will be paid in USDC/USDT, amounting to 25% of the losses incurred by the second token in the liquidity pools.”

The company also said that it would reward white hat hackers who can help in recovering the lost funds. The team said that hackers could receive a reward equivalent to 10% of funds recovered in the initial recovery phase.

Magazine: ‘Am I sorry? No’ — 3AC founder. $6B BTC laundered for fast food worker: Asia Express"
"[INST] KuCoin plans $10M airdrop of BTC, KCS as Justice Dept., CFTC circle [/INST] Cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin will hold an airdrop of Bitcoin (BTC) and its native KuCoin (KCS) token worth $10 million, according to a letter from CEO Johnny Lyu posted on the exchange’s blog on March 27. The news comes a day after the United States Justice Department announced charges against the exchange and two of its founders.

Lyu did not mention the federal charges, although he alluded to them in the first sentence of his letter:

“I would like to express my gratitude to all KuCoin users, for your support, trust and companionship during the past few days.”

Comparing the airdrop to the exchange’s reimbursement of its investors who lost money in the Confido rug pull, Lyu continued:

“Recently, on March 26th and 27th, some users experienced longer-than-expected wait times during the withdrawal process. […] To express our profound gratitude for your support and patience KuCoin will launch a special airdrop event totaling 10 million USD in KCS and BTC.”

Rules for the airdrop will be released in three days, Lyu wrote. The recent delays in withdrawals were possibly caused by the high volume as wary customers abandoned the exchange. The airdrop thus rewards users who remained loyal to the exchange in its time of crisis.

Related: KuCoin agrees to ban New York residents and pay $22 million settlement

The timing of the airdrop is noteworthy since KuCoin was hit with a barrage of legal actions one day earlier. The Justice Department unsealed an indictment for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act for lacking an Anti-Money Laundering program by the two founders and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business.

Simultaneously, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) initiated a civil case against the exchange for violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations.

Source: Wu Blockchain

KuCoin hastened to assure users that their assets were safe after the charges were filed and KCS fell 12% in 24 hours.

Airdrops come with risks, not the least of which is the possibility of regulatory action. The SEC wrote in its document “Framework for “Investment Contract” Analysis of Digital Assets”:

“The lack of monetary consideration for digital assets, such as those distributed via a so-called ‘air drop,’ does not mean that the investment of money prong [of the Howey test] is not satisfied; therefore, an airdrop may constitute a sale or distribution of securities.”

The DeFi Education Fund teamed up with a small Texas clothing company sued for a declaratory judgment against the SEC to prevent the agency from prosecuting the company for holding an airdrop.

Magazine: Cool green mayor giving a grand in Bitcoin to each resident"
"[INST] Hashing It Out: Can blockchain create a sovereign internet? [/INST] A week after experiencing an internet blackout in his country, Hashing It Out host Elisha Owusu Akyaw looks for answers on how blockchain technology can create a more sovereign internet in an interview with the co-founder of XYO Network, Arie Trouw.

The episode also covers data sovereignty and the importance of privacy in the ever-evolving internet landscape. The conversation between Owusu Akyaw and Trouw explores new issues like elections and fake news, and how blockchain tech could be used to verify the authenticity of information on social media.

Trouw explains that the sovereign internet is based on that idea of the original version of the internet (Web1) but with the functionalities of Web2 and Web3.

On a sovereign internet, users own their own data set, tools and services, which they can share with other users without needing a central server or third-party authority.

“So the sovereign internet is really, to some degree, a step back from Web2 to Web1, where each party has their own services and their own peer-to-peer functionality that they share with somebody else. And the internet works the way it’s meant to be, where it’s resilient to outages.”

With major elections taking place worldwide in 2024, issues like fake news and artificial intelligence-generated deep fakes threaten to widen the polarization in society.

Trouw concedes that blockchain may not be the answer to the problem since dealing with fake information on the internet requires the average person to be a skeptic and have the desire to verify everything they read.

However, when society develops a culture that seeks to verify the credibility of information, Trouw believes that blockchain technology would be the ultimate method to authenticate the origin of information on the internet.

The rest of the podcast explores more use cases of blockchain technology in creating a better internet by using location data and how blockchain technology could play a role in identifying aliens.

Listen to the full episode of Hashing It Out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, TuneIn or your podcast platform of choice, and remember to check out Cointelegraph’s growing catalog of Web3 podcasts.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph."
"[INST] Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years — What happens now? [/INST] A federal judge sentenced former FTX CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried to 25 years behind bars for his multiple felony convictions, eliciting mixed reactions from many in and out of the crypto space.

On March 28, Judge Lewis Kaplan had some harsh words for Bankman-Fried before and after announcing consecutive sentences of 240 months and 60 months, totaling 25 years in prison. The judge compared SBF to a “thief,” said his attempts to promote regulation of crypto was “an act,” found he committed perjury and was “willing to flip a coin as to the continued existence of life on earth.”

How long and where will Sam Bankman-Fried be in prison?

The former FTX CEO has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since August 2023, when Judge Kaplan revoked his bail for intimidating witnesses in the criminal case. A March 28 docket entry for U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York suggested the judge would deduct time already spent in jail, meaning SBF would have a maximum of 291 months in prison — ending in 2048.

According to Judge Kaplan, Bankman-Fried will serve the remainder of his time behind bars at a medium- or low-security prison in the San Francisco Bay Area. Reports suggested possible locations, including the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Herlong and FCI Mendota. It was unclear which one would house the former FTX CEO at the time of publication.

Many reactions from social media following the March 28 hearing expressed doubt that Bankman-Fried would serve the entire sentence length. According to U.S. law, parole is no longer available for those sentenced to federal charges. However, inmates judged to have “good conduct” can receive 54 days off their sentence for each year served.

In Bankman-Fried’s case, that would mean a reduction of roughly 3.75 years: 21.25 years served in total and less than 21 years after sentencing — presumably ending in 2045. The former CEO, now 32 years old, could be in his mid-50s even if he is released early for good behavior.

Appealing the conviction

Before Judge Kaplan announced the 25-year sentence, Bankman-Fried attorney Marc Mukasey said his team intended to appeal the jury’s decision. The lawyers have 14 days to file the paperwork in court.

Many from the crypto space suggested that 25 years in prison was “too light” for Bankman-Fried, given the impact on FTX users. However, some seemed to be surprised at the sentencing hearing,

“I say this would apply to [Alex] Mashinsky as well: I hope that neither actually have to be in prison until the day they literally die,” said crypto influencer Tiffany Fong, who has provided many exclusives related to SBF’s case. “I personally wouldn’t have supported a 40- to 50-year sentence because I think that would basically be a life sentence for someone who’s 32 years old.”

Related: SBF memecoins pump and dump as FTX founder gets 25-year prison sentence

“That is an insanely lengthy prison sentence, and I’m not quite sure that he needs to be in prison for a quarter century,” said Ana Kasparian, a host on progressive media outlet The Young Turks. “25 years… I feel like that is the kind of prison sentence that you would save, or you would implement, toward a violent criminal who’s a threat to the public.”

What about the money?

The FTX bankruptcy case is ongoing in the District of Delaware, where debtors have submitted a possible plan to repay users based on prices at the time of the exchange’s collapse. Judge Kaplan also handed down an $11-billion forfeiture judgment as part of Bankman-Fried’s criminal case.

“This forfeiture is designed to make certain that if SBF ever makes money, it goes not to him but to the government and the victims,” said former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner, according to a March 29 CNN report. “He will never be able to accumulate funds in his life, and forfeiture cannot be eliminated through bankruptcy.”

Epner’s statement suggested that should Bankman-Fried start a successful business making millions of dollars after his release, the government could go after these funds. The same could apply to a sudden windfall, making it less likely SBF will ever achieve the same financial status he had before November 2022.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] US court favors Fed in Custodia Bank case, rejects appeal for review [/INST] The United States District Court for the District of Wyoming has ruled against granting Custodia Bank a U.S. Federal Reserve master account and dismissed the digital asset bank’s plea for a declaratory judgment. However, Custodia claims it is not backing down and is exploring all possible avenues.

“We are reviewing the court’s decision and all of our options, including appeal,” a spokesperson for Custodia Bank told Cointelegraph.

In a March 29 filing, Judge Scott Skavdahl dismissed Custodia’s bid to secure a Federal Reserve master account. The account, often called “a bank account for banks,” facilitates financial institutions’ access to the Federal Reserve’s payment systems.

Court filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming. Source: Eleanor Terrett

Custodia contended that without a master account, it would be unable to offer the same custodial services for crypto-assets as other banking institutions, placing the bank at a disadvantage.

“Without a master account, if Custodia is able to operate at all, it is a second-class citizen, relegated to dependency on and fealty to an intermediary bank,” it argued.

Furthermore, Skavdahl declared that Custodia is not entitled to have the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (FRBKC) decision overturned:

“Custodia is not entitled to its requested writ of mandamus compelling FRBKC to issue its master account, and summary judgment on Claim II must be granted in FRBKC’s favor.”

Related: Federal Reserve lists CBDCs as one of 7 ‘key duties’ to Congress

Custodia submitted an application for a Federal Reserve master account in October 2020. The application, if granted, would allow the bank access to the Fedwire network, which processed over 193 million transactions in 2023.

In January 2023, the Fed rejected Custodia’s membership application, citing its involvement in the crypto space as “inconsistent with the required factors under the law.”

Custodia was one of Wyoming’s first Special Purpose Depository Institutions (SPDIs), also known as “blockchain banks.” SPDIs were set up to help businesses that couldn’t secure Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation banking services due to their dealings with crypto.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] ‘No bridges or wrapping’ — dWallet and Avail are building native Bitcoin rollups [/INST] Bitcoin (BTC) users will soon be able to access smart contract functionality without having to bridge, wrap or relinquish control of their BTC through a new integration between dWallet Network and Avail.

The partnership will enable dWallet’s smart contracts, built on Avail’s data availability solution, to create Bitcoin signatures for the first time while maintaining a user’s complete control of their BTC.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, dWallet co-founder and CEO Omer Sadika said the Bitcoin rollup solution would interact with native BTC without bridging or wrapping, which by design has created considerable incentives to hack or collude to exploit:

“Cross-chain solutions like bridges or federated MPC are broken because users must sacrifice their ownership to use them by giving away their BTC. Since the ownership is transferred, a collusion or hack could easily drain the assets. This issue already results in billions of dollars stolen.”

Related: Bitcoin needs to address scaling as ETFs drive momentum

Sadika adds that the Bitcoin community has long been hyper-critical of Bitcoin rollups or “layer-2s,” with many solutions slammed for “affinity scamming” by duping users into bridging or wrapping BTC in exchange for other tokens.

Jameson Lopp, co-founder and chief technology officer of Bitcoin custody firm Casa, recently highlighted that nearly 30 Bitcoin layer-2 protocols are being tested.

It is a fact that Sadika has aimed to address with the integration with Avail. He claims that dWallets enable programmable native BTC where a user signature is cryptographically required.

“All existing Bitcoin rollups or L2s are using cross-chain solutions like bridges or federated MPC, violating the most sacred principle of Web3 and specifically of Bitcoiners — user ownership.”

Multi-party computation (MPC) is at the core of this functionality. MPC is a set of cryptographic protocols that let multiple parties compute a function together without revealing their inputs to each other.

According to Sadika, a wallet operating on the decentralized MPC dWallet Network can generate a Bitcoin transaction. To do so, a smart contract on an Avail rollup is needed to approve the transaction as well as the user signing for the Bitcoin transaction.

Related: Bitcoin block art? Marathon showcases visualization potential of block building

He explains that the smart contract on an Avail rollup can enforce any logic, including custody, swapping, lending or staking. Sadika adds that the user’s participation cryptographically guarantees that no one can collude or hack and steal the user’s assets:

“The fact that the dWallet generates a Bitcoin signature means the logic will be enforced on native BTC on Bitcoin and not using a representation of BTC, like wrapped tokens.”

The collaboration promises to use dWallet’s MPC infrastructure to broaden Bitcoin’s capabilities by enabling the creation of native rollups. Sadika says this will allow smart contracts to run any logic and utilize native BTC as part of the smart contract without bridging or wrapping tokens.

“So any DeFi [decentralized finance] protocol like swapping or lending can now utilize native BTC. Other use cases such as staking native BTC, DAOs [decentralized autonomous organizations] controlling native BTC, trading a portfolio of ordinals, or gaming can now include native BTC,” Sadika adds.

Related: Bitcoin halving will be a litmus test for inefficient ops: Mining execs

Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail, adds that allowing BTC to be used programmatically on other blockchains via a trust-minimized approach is a novel approach to driving Bitcoin adoption.

“Bitcoin represents a superb base layer from the data availability perspective, with the highest security available in the ecosystem,” Arjun said.

DWallet technology allows a Solidity smart contract on an Avail rollup to create Bitcoin signatures and enables developers to manage a dWallet.

Meanwhile, the dWallet Network mandates approval from the Avail rollup smart contract for logic enforcement, requiring users to finalize the signature to prevent collusion and asset theft.

Magazine: Big Questions: How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?"
"[INST] Sam Bankman-Fried speaks out after sentencing: ‘I never thought what I was doing was illegal’ [/INST] Former FTX CEO Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried has reportedly responded to questioning from news outlets following being sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.

According to an April 1 report from ABC News, Bankman-Fried responded via email to questions from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he has been held since August 2023. On March 28, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York sentenced the former FTX CEO to 25 years after his conviction on seven felony counts.

“I never thought that what I was doing was illegal,” said SBF, according to ABC. “I’m haunted, every day, by what was lost. I never intended to hurt anyone or take anyone’s money.”

Many of Bankman-Fried’s answers to questions seemed to avoid responsibility for the collapse of the crypto exchange in November 2022, claiming he made “bad decisions” but did not act selflessly or selfishly. His statement mirrored that of one he made before sentencing, mainly justifying his actions before FTX declared bankruptcy and claiming the exchange “would have survived” and customers would get repaid.

The statement to ABC may be one of the last SBF made before going to federal prison. Judge Kaplan recommended the former CEO serve the remainder of his time at a medium- or low-security prison in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Related: Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years — What happens now?

A March 28 docket entry suggested that Bankman-Fried would serve roughly 24.25 years, in consideration of the months already spent behind bars after being remanded by Judge Kaplan. Legal experts have suggested that the former CEO could earn years off his sentence for good behavior, but there is no parole in the federal prison system.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said on March 28 they intended to appeal the verdict. No appeal had been filed at the time of publication.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Crypto investment products see outflows for second consecutive week — CoinShares [/INST] Investments in digital asset funds have declined for the second consecutive week, with $206 million in withdrawals between April 15-19, according to data from digital asset investment firm CoinShares.

Bitcoin (BTC) funds led outflows over the past week, with $192 million exiting the market ahead of the halving event. Ether (ETH) investment products also experienced outflows of $34 million, marking their sixth consecutive week of negative flow.

Investment in blockchain equities has also been declining, with the sector recording its 11th consecutive week of outflows, totaling $9 million.

Digital Assets Outflows. Source: CoinShares

According to CoinShares, the downtrend is likely a result of investors’ concerns about rising interest rates in the United States, which can make less risky financial instruments more attractive compared to volatile assets such as cryptocurrencies.

The Federal Reserve anticipated easing its monetary policy in mid-2024 if economic conditions aligned, but recent inflation data have dampened those hopes. The annual Consumer Price Index in March increased by 3.5%, exceeding expectations for the third consecutive month and indicating that lower rates may not become a reality until 2025. The federal funds rate currently sits between 5.25% and 5.50%.

“The data suggests appetite from ETP/ETF investors continues to wane, likely off the back of expectations that the FED is likely to keep interest rates at these high levels for longer than expected.”

Trading volume for Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) declined slightly to $18 billion over the week. Bitcoin fund outflows, however, were not seen as an opportunity to short the cryptocurrency. According to CoinShares, the trend indicates that while investors are stepping away from volatility, they are not necessarily expecting Bitcoin price to crash anytime soon.

“These volumes represent a lower percentage of total Bitcoin volumes (which continue to rise) at 28%, compared to 55% a month ago,” the report said.

Inflows into Bitcoin ETFs have significantly slowed since their peak in March. Meanwhile, BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the largest ETF in terms of assets managed, maintained a steady level of investor interest this month, drawing $1.4 billion in positive flows as of April 19.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Ethereum liquid staking protocol Puffer Finance raises $18M in Series A [/INST] Puffer Finance, a liquid staking project built on Ethereum restaking protocol Eigenlayer, has secured $18 million in a Series A funding round to launch its mainnet.

According to the April 16 announcement, the round was led by Brevan Howard Digital and Electric Capital, with key investments from Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Lemniscap, Franklin Templeton, Avon Ventures (a VC fund affiliated with Fidelity Investments' parent firm), Mechanism, Lightspeed Faction, Consensys, Animoca, GSR and other angel investors.

According to data from DefiLlama, shortly after its early test phase in February, Puffer Finance surpassed a total value locked (TVL) of $1.2 billion. To date, the protocol has raised a total of $23.5 million in venture capital funding.

Puffer Finance’s TVL since launch. Source: DefiLlama

“Following this round, Puffer secured a strategic investment from Binance Labs, enhancing its position within the Liquid Restaking ecosystem,” Puffer Finance said in its announcement, alluding to “technological advancements” in tandem with its mainnet launch.

Puffer Finance’s technology allows Ethereum validators to reduce their capital to just 1 Ether (ETH), down from the 32 ETH required for individual stakers. In addition, users who stake Ether via Puffer receive Puffer liquid restaking tokens (nLRTs), which can then be used to farm yields in other decentralized finance protocols simultaneously with their Ethereum staking rewards.

The process, known as liquid staking, has been long practiced by other blockchains, such as Cosmos, and has only recently moved to Ethereum after the Merge upgrade that shifted the network to proof-of-stake. “We aim to significantly reduce the barriers for home validators to participate, while delivering the most advanced liquid restaking protocol,” Amir Forouzani, core contributor at Puffer Labs, said in a press statement.

On March 6, Cointelegraph reported that EigenLayer shot passed decentralized finance lending protocol Aave in TVL, with $10.4 billion worth of crypto committed to the protocol after temporarily removing a cap on how much users could stake.

Dune Analytics data shows EigenLayer has over 107,900 unique depositors, with DefiLlama stats showing that 74% of staked tokens are Wrapped Ether (wETH) and Lido Staked Eth (stETH). Liquid staking protocols are currently the largest DeFi protocol category with nearly $55 billion in locked value across about 160 protocols — buoyed mainly by Lido, the largest protocol by locked value at $35 billion.

Related: Restaking protocol EigenLayer partially launches on Ethereum mainnet"
"[INST] Meta launches ‘most capable openly available LLM to date,’ rivaling GPT and Claude [/INST] Meta raised the artificial intelligence (AI) bar on April 18 by announcing that its newest large language model, Llama-3, is the “most capable” and “best open source model” currently available.

The company’s statements surrounding the general availability of Llama-3, as well as a new standalone “Meta AI” portal, has the tech world abuzz with declarations that the current space leaders — Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic — finally have some stiff competition from the company formerly called Facebook.

A Meta blog post made no quibbles about the company’s position concerning where its Llama suite of LLMs now lies in the global AI model hierarchy:

“This next generation of Llama demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of industry benchmarks and offers new capabilities, including improved reasoning. We believe these are the best open source models of their class, period.”

Analysts and pundits have long awaited the arrival of Llama-3, with many claiming that preview versions demonstrated better reasoning and performance than contemporary challengers GPT and Gemini, comparable offerings from OpenAI and Google, respectively.

Related: Welcome to the future where on-chain robots serve coffee and crypto rewards

The large language model market continues to expand year over year, with updates to the most popular models seemingly occurring at a steady clip. Current market leader OpenAI is rumored to be on the verge of launching its latest model — GPT-5, if it follows previous naming conventions.

According to a report from Business Insider, the next GPT model will be “materially better” than its predecessors, but these rumors have yet to be substantiated.

As Cointelegraph recently reported, the LLM market is heating up, with Microsoft and Google reportedly trading $100 billion blows. Microsoft and OpenAI pledged $100 billion to build a new AI super data center, while Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has let on that he believes Google will spend more.

While the costs continue to rise, the rewards could be even greater. At stake, according to both Google and Microsoft, is the development of the world’s first artificial general intelligence (AGI). An AGI system, hypothetically speaking, would be capable of doing any task a human could do, given the proper resources."
"[INST] Meta’s metaverse lab has lost $40B since Facebook changed its name in 2021 [/INST] When Facebook changed its name to Meta in September 2021, it became clear that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was fully committed to the pivot from Web2 social media to the metaverse. Now, three years later, one can take a look at just how (financially) committed the company has been, as well as what impact the expansion into virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) has had on Meta’s bottom line ahead of its first-quarter earnings call set for April 24.

Meta posted a reported revenue of $134.9 billion in 2023, up nearly 16% over 2022. Its fourth-quarter revenue of $40.1 billion set a company record and beat analysts’ predictions. This would seem to indicate that the pivot toward the metaverse has panned out well for the company, but there are mixed signals to interpret ahead of the next call.

Metaverse losses

While Facebook, the social media app, is doing quite well, Meta’s Reality Labs — the research division responsible for products such as the Quest VR headset line — has posted successive year-over-year operating losses totaling around $40 billion since 2021.

Essentially, the company’s revenue has come exclusively via Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, its suite of social media and messaging apps.

According to a report from UploadVR, Meta has sold approximately 20 million Quest headsets since 2019, as of March 2023. For comparison, Apple sold about 151 million iPhones in 2023 alone while Sony has sold approximately 50 million PlayStation five consoles since 2020, as of December 2023.

Meta shares gains

In Meta’s case, the figures surrounding Reality Labs don’t seem to have phased investors and shareholders. As The Motley Fool recently pointed out, in the same time period that it’s been pouring money into Reality Labs for research and development on the metaverse, it’s also been buying back its own stock at an accelerating pace.

The company has returned $92 billion worth of its own shares since 2021 and reportedly had a war chest with $31 billion available for purchases at the end of 2023, with another $50 billion earmarked for further buybacks in February.

Related: Meta signals enterprise pivot for metaverse"
"[INST] Australia joins 1,000+ Bitcoin ATM club alongside US, Canada [/INST] Australia, the third-largest hub for Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto ATMs, recorded a new milestone with 1,000 active crypto-fiat machines now in operation.

As of April 24, Australia hosts an active network of 1,002 Bitcoin ATMs, making it the third country after the United States and Canada to achieve this feat. The nation represents 2.7% of the global Bitcoin ATM network.

Crypto ATM distribution by continents and countries. Source: Coin ATM Radar

According to Coin ATM Radar data, the U.S. hosted its first 1,000 crypto ATMs in November 2017, while Canada reached the same in January 2021.

Currently, the U.S. is home to 82.8% of the global Bitcoin ATMs with 31,170 machines, and Canada represents 7.8% of the lot with 2,918 crypto ATMs.

The total number of Bitcoin ATMs installed in Australia over time. Source: Coin ATM Radar

Historically, Australia was an inactive market for crypto ATMs. However, adoption has increased exponentially since the end of 2022, owing to participation from private firms.

In April 2023, Australia’s Bitcoin ATM count surpassed Asia’s, which includes major economies such as China, Japan, Singapore and India.

At the current installation rate, Australia is well-positioned to surpass Europe, which has 4.3% (1,617 machines) of all active Bitcoin ATMs.

Other countries with significant crypto ATMs include Spain (261 machines), El Salvador (215), Poland (211), Germany (194) and Hong Kong (157).

Related: Crypto ATM firm says revenue unaffected by fluctuations in BTC price

Cointelegraph recently reported that hackers who previously leaked El Salvador’s Bitcoin ATM database have released a part of the country’s state-operated Chivo Bitcoin wallet’s source code.

“This time I bring you the code that is inside the Bitcoin Chivo Wallet ATMs in El Salvador, remember that it is a government wallet, and as you know, we do not sell, we publish everything for free for you,” the hacker group known as CiberInteligenciaSV wrote on a public forum.

CiberInteligenciaSV publishing data on a public forum. Source: BreachForums

Local cybersecurity project VenariX took to X on April 22 to warn the public about the upcoming leak. It referred to CiberInteligenciaSV’s Telegram channel, which posted about plans to release the source code.

Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis"
"[INST] Crypto staking rewards are now 450% higher than S&P 500 dividends [/INST] The average crypto staking reward is now 450% higher than the average dividend paid to investors in the S&P 500 despite strong growth across both markets.

On March 31, the S&P 500 — the index that tracks the 500-largest public companies in the United States — recorded its best first-quarter growth performance in five years at 10.16%, per Google Finance data.

However, its average dividend yield rate of 1.35% was the lowest recorded since roughly two and half years prior in Q4 2021. Notably, this represents a difference of 0.23% from the all-time low of 1.12% recorded 24 years ago, during the first quarter of 2000.

Meanwhile, crypto staking — which involves locking up one’s cryptocurrency holdings to earn interest or rewards — currently pays out an annual return average of 6.08%, according to the benchmark reward rate on Staking Rewards.

The S&P 500 dividend yield is the average dividend payout of all the individual stocks within the index. Of the three largest S&P 500 companies, Microsoft recorded the largest dividend yield of 0.71%, followed by Apple with 0.56% and Nvidia Corp with 0.02%.

Of the top 100 cryptocurrencies, Algorand (ALGO) is currently paying the highest staking reward rate of 84.19%, followed by Cosmos (ATOM) at 17.17% and Filecoin (FIL) at 16.34%.

However, high-yield staking carries risks since assets are often locked up, meaning that investors may be unable to liquidate even if the value of the underlying asset were to decline.

Related: Restaking could introduce ‘hidden risks’ to Ethereum — Coinbase

Institutional investors are starting to take note of the substantial difference between crypto staking rewards and dividend yields.

On March 30, Cointelegraph reported that Grayscale Investments had launched an investment fund tailored to sophisticated clients — in a bid to expose their portfolios to income generated from staking cryptocurrency tokens.

Grayscale named three proof-of-stake-based tokens that will be held in the fund: Osmosis (OSMO) has a 24% share, Solana’s SOL (SOL) has 20%, and Polkadot’s DOT (DOT) has 14%, while 43% is categorized under other tokens.

Grayscale is also one of a handful of asset management firms — including ARK Invest and Fidelity Investments — to seek approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to be able to stake Ether (ETH) as part of its Ethereum ETF fund, should it be approved this year.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments: Trezor CEO"
"[INST] Pricing aggregators caused Pax Dollar to depeg [/INST] The recent depegging of the Pax Dollar (USDP) stablecoin was caused by issues with pricing aggregators, not the protocol itself, according to a Paxos spokesperson

The Pax Dollar’s price briefly surged to $1.29 on April 16 before returning to $1 within three hours of the depeg, according to CoinMarketCap data.

A Paxos spokesperson told Cointelegraph:

“These platforms pull pricing data from trading venues. Yesterday, there were sharp spikes in price on certain venues that impacted the price of USDP on pricing aggregators. Paxos does not control markets or trading activity on other trading venues.”

The depegging happened during a significant market cap increase for USDP, which briefly rose from a $140 million market cap to a $181 million market capitalization when the coin hit $1.29, according to CoinMarketCap.

USDP market capitalization, weekly chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

USDP’s market capitalization fell back to $140 million at the exact time it regained parity with the U.S. dollar. USDP currently sits at a $134 million market capitalization.

Despite the temporary price fluctuation, USDP will always remain redeemable at fair value via Paxos, according to the spokesperson:

“Paxos always values USDP as $1, and customers can always create and redeem USDP from Paxos for $1. Paxos offers APIs that offer 1:1 redemption 24/7. If venues choose not to implement these APIs or don’t want to make sure liquidity is supported, it is up to the user to determine the best approach for ordering.”

Paxos’ USDP is currently the 13th-largest stablecoin by market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Related: Bitcoin slips below $60K, but some traders aren’t turning bearish on BTC just yet

Trader liquidated for $529,000 following depegging

An unknown trader was liquidated for $529,000 worth of Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) on April 16, shortly after Pax Dollar surged to $1.18, according to an April 17 X post by on-chain security firm PeckShield.

Trader liquidation. Source: Peckshield

Traders employing different platforms should keep a close eye on the platform’s order book to avoid similar risks. A Paxos spokesperson told Cointelegraph:

“When trading on any venue, users should take a look at the order book before placing a larger order. Particularly for stablecoins, users should make sure they use limit orders”

Pax Dollar has experienced significant price fluctuations on more than one occasion. USDP hit an all-time low of $0.87 on March 13, 2020, and rose as high as $2.02 on Nov. 16, 2021, according to CoinMarketCap.

Related: Binance gets Dubai crypto license following CZ’s departure: Report"
"[INST] Telegram Mini Apps are ‘Trojan horse’ for mass blockchain adoption — TON investments director [/INST] The blockchain-based mini-decentralized applications (DApps) on Telegram, also known as Mini Apps, could be a “Trojan horse” for mass blockchain adoption.

That’s according to Justin Hyun, the director of investments at TON Foundation, who told Cointelegraph:

“That’s our thesis for bringing in more users onto the blockchain without even needing to educate them about the blockchain. It’s a Trojan horse way to say: look, you’re letting in all these user-friendly DApps, and we won’t even necessarily call them DApps [...] It’s just Telegram Mini Apps that they’re using whether that’s inside their channels.”

Telegram Mini Apps launched in 2020 as an open platform allowing Web3 businesses to deploy crypto-friendly apps directly within the Telegram messaging app.

They were launched in partnership with The Open Network (TON) Foundation and Tencent with the intention of creating a super-app platform.

Bringing the next 500 million users on-chain will require simple initial use cases where users aren’t necessarily aware of the underlying blockchain interaction. Hyun says:

“We believe mass adoption really comes in the form of simple use cases in the beginning, and then there will be drop-offs of more sophisticated users going into different types of use cases. But bringing 500 million people on-chain by 2028 — which is our goal — is going to require use cases that interact with the blockchain without the user knowing that in the front end.”

Some Telegram Mini Apps will also offer Web3-specific financial incentives for users, Hyun explained.

Justin Hyun talks about the mechanics of Mini Apps. Source: YouTube

Related: Dencun is a big step towards mass adoption: Metis CEO

Telegram is the world’s third-largest messenger app by monthly downloads, according to Statista. It has over 800 million monthly active users worldwide.

Telegram announced the launch of its advertising platform on Feb. 28. The platform will use the TON blockchain for payments.

Starting this month, Telegram channel owners in over 100 countries can start receiving financial rewards for their work after the ad platform opens for all advertisers.

Channel owners will start receiving 50% of the total advertising revenue generated by Telegram from displaying ads in their channels.

TON launched a $115 million community incentive program on March 20, with $38 million for token mining and user incentives, $22 million for airdrops, $15 million for The League developer ecosystem, and $40 million for liquidity pool boosts.

Related: How high can Bitcoin go? New BTC price prediction sees cycle top at $180K"
"[INST] Crypto Biz: Exchanges face new legal issues, Goldman Sachs’ clients eye crypto, and more [/INST] Crypto exchanges are facing a new wave of regulatory hurdles worldwide, with the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) indicting KuCoin and its founders on March 26 for allegedly operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business and violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA).

The charges coincide with a civil enforcement case by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), alleging multiple violations by the exchange. The DOJ claims KuCoin handled over $5 billion in suspicious and criminal funds.

Staying in the United States, another setback hit Coinbase on March 27. District Judge Katherine Failla denied the exchange’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), arguing that similar transactions have previously been considered securities transactions. Coinbase sought an order to drop the case, challenging the SEC’s authority over crypto exchanges.

In the Philippines, the financial regulator decided to block local users’ access to Binance on March 25, citing concerns over the firm’s unlicensed operations in the country. According to the agency, the exchange offered leveraged trading services and crypto savings accounts to local users without licenses.

Meanwhile, in Russia, Binance’s successor, CommEx, has officially announced that it is shutting down operations and has halted deposits. The company acquired Binance’s Russian business for an undisclosed amount in September 2023.

Along with the exchanges’ challenges, this week’s Crypto Biz explores BlackRock’s Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) inflows, Goldman Sachs’ clients returning to crypto, SWIFT’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) trials, and Mastercard’s forecasts for remittances in Latin America.

BlackRock’s ETF could flip GBTC in Bitcoin holdings within three weeks

BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF is on track to surpass the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) holdings in about three weeks, given the current rate of inflows and outflows. As of March 22, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF held 238,500 Bitcoin (BTC) on its books, worth nearly $15.5 billion at current prices, with daily inflows averaging 4,120 BTC. In contrast, Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust has 350,252 BTC worth $23 billion but is experiencing average daily outflows of $277 million or 4,140 BTC. In another ETF headline, asset manager Hashdex has officially joined the spot Bitcoin ETF market after completing the conversion of its futures ETF to hold spot Bitcoin. Hashdex renamed and converted its Hashdex Bitcoin Futures ETF to the Hashdex Bitcoin ETF with the ticker “DEFI.”

Galaxy Digital reports $296 million net income in 2023 after $1 billion loss in 2022

Digital asset management firm Galaxy Digital has reported a net income of $296 million for 2023, marking a reversal after ending 2022 with a $1 billion net loss. The performance shift is due to the rising prices of major cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. The firm’s assets under management grew from $1.7 billion to $5.1 billion in 2023 and nearly doubled in the first two months of 2024, reaching $10.1 billion by the end of February. The firm also reported $18.7 million in mining revenue for the fourth quarter of 2023, a 31% increase over the previous quarter. “Our average marginal cost to mine in the fourth quarter increased relative to prior quarters due to fewer opportunities to economically curtail our mining operations and a higher network hash rate,” the company said in its statement.

Goldman Sachs hedge fund clients are piling back into crypto

Goldman Sachs’ clients have started to jump back into crypto, with renewed appetite stemming from the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs. Max Minton, head of digital assets for Goldman Asia Pacific, told Bloomberg that many of his firm’s largest clients had recently become active or were “exploring getting active” in the crypto sector. Goldman’s options and futures offerings are the primary source of fresh demand, with hedge funds being the most involved among its clients, according to Minton. Goldman’s clients use their derivatives primarily to gain exposure to crypto volatility and to make long-term predictions about prices, said the executive, adding that Bitcoin-related products stood as the most popular investment vehicles among active clients.

SWIFT declares second sandbox connector tests a success for CBDC and more

The SWIFT messaging network has released the results of the second phase of sandbox testing for its CBDC interlinking solution, which it calls a connector. The project looked at four use cases, not all of which involved CBDC, according to the report it released on the test results. It experimented with digital trading with atomic (instantaneous) settlement using smart contracts. It connected tokenization platforms to facilitate atomic delivery versus payment and worked with financial infrastructure firm CLS Group to show the connector’s capability of connecting existing foreign exchange infrastructures using CBDC. SWIFT now plans to further develop the beta version of its connector.

Before you go: Mastercard has released a white paper on remittances in Latin America, noting that remittance rates are growing faster than the global average in the region. Digital remittances are expected to be worth $20 billion by 2026.

Crypto Biz is your weekly pulse on the business behind blockchain and crypto, delivered directly to your inbox every Thursday."
"[INST] SEC can proceed with Coinbase lawsuit: Court ruling [/INST] A United States court has denied Coinbase’s motion to dismiss the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s case against the exchange.

The decision, made by U.S. District Judge Katherine Failla, allows the SEC to pursue its lawsuit against Coinbase. The SEC alleges that the exchange operates as an unregistered exchange, broker and clearing agency, according to March 27 court documents, which state:

“The Court finds the SEC has sufficiently pleaded that Coinbase operates as an exchange, as a broker, and as a clearing agency under the federal securities laws, and through its Staking Program engages in the unregistered offer and sale of securities.”

The SEC sued Coinbase in June 2023, saying the crypto exchange violated federal securities laws by listing 13 tokens it alleged were securities. The firm was seeking an order to drop the case, questioning the SEC’s authority over crypto exchanges.

Related: Coinbase asks court to reject SEC’s ‘empty chair’ securities judgment

Coinbase argued that the transactions facilitated on its platform do not qualify as financial securities and thus fall outside the SEC’s purview. However, the regulator argues that at least some of those transactions constitute investment contracts:

“At least some of the transactions on Coinbase’s platform and through related services constitute ‘investment contracts,’ which the federal securities laws have long recognized as securities. The parties readily acknowledge that the viability of enforcement action hinges on this difference of opinion.”

The court denied Coinbase’s motion to dismiss the case, arguing that similar transactions have previously been considered securities transactions:

""As explained herein, the ‘crypto’ nomenclature may be of recent vintage, but the challenged transactions fall comfortably within the framework that courts have used to identify securities for nearly eight years.”

The court also cited Coinbase’s lack of registration with the securities regulator:

“The Court concludes that because the well-pleaded allegations of the Complaint plausibly support the SEC’s claim that Coinbase operated as an unregistered intermediary of securities, Defendants’ motion must be denied.”

The two parties were ordered to submit a “proposed case management plan” by April 19, according to the court documents.

Related: SEC will ask for $2B in fines and penalties — Ripple chief legal officer"
"[INST] EigenLayer on the brink of potential yield crisis [/INST] EigenLayer, the largest restaking protocol on Ethereum by total value locked (TVL), could be facing a “major” yield crisis, according to industry watchers.

Due to EigenLayer’s rapid growth in TVL, the protocol may be outgrowing its Actively Validated Services (AVS), which could lead to a major yield reduction, according to Chudnov, a pseudonymous builder at 3Jane derivatives exchange. He wrote in an April 22 X post:

“EigenLayer has >$15B in TVL but AVSs will actually need less than *10%* of that for security, which means yields may fall off a cliff.”

EigenLayer removed the limits on all liquid staking tokens (LSTs) on April 16, according to an X announcement. EigenLayer launched on mainnet on April 10.

When a user stakes an LST via EigenLayer, it is automatically delegated to a node operator, which uses the deposits to secure an AVS on EigenLayer while receiving staking rewards. Part of the staking rewards are passed on to the user.

Yet Actively Validated Services on the protocol require much less staked Ether (ETH) for security, which could lead to issues in the future, according to Chudnov:

“The problem is that none of the AVSs will come close to needing $1.5B in security let alone $15B. The whole point of Proof-of-Stake is that the value of the stake is higher than the potential profit earned from a validator behaving dishonestly.”

Cointelegraph has approached EigenLayer for comment.

EigenLayer is the second-largest protocol on Ethereum after liquid staking protocol Lido. EigenLayer’s TVL rose over 16% during the past month to the current $14.15 billion, according to DefiLlama.

Related: EigenLayer becomes 4th largest restaking protocol, nears $7 billion TVL

The issue could worsen as altcoin prices decline since AVSs won’t be incentivized to hold the excess on-chain capital. The first solution could be a series of token launches to increase the security budget requirements, which could temporarily be “kicking the can down the road.”

However, intertwining EigenLayer into the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem and creating more utility for LSTs could offer a permanent fix. According to Chudnov:

“If [the EigenLayer] ecosystem can more deeply entrench itself in the DeFi ecosystem via [Liquid restaking tokens] and financial primitives on top then this is a much more guardable moat and gives AVS’s more time to figure things out at a fraction of the cost.”

Solana: Expectation Versus Reality. Source: Cointelegraph

Related: The 2024 Bitcoin halving is the “most bullish” setup for BTC price"
"[INST] ChatGPT removes another barrier to human-AI interaction [/INST] Artificial intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI has eliminated the requirement for users to create an account in order to access its widely used generative AI tool, ChatGPT3.5.

OpenAI announced on April 1 that it would no longer require ChatGPT users to sign up to make it “easier to experience the potential of AI.” However, users without accounts will not be able to store their history of previous interactions.

The feature will be rolled out in gradual phases for all countries, starting with the United States.

While overall public sentiment cheered the supposed democratization of AI, Simon Willison, co-creator of the Python-based web framework Django, questioned OpenAI’s capability to prevent data scrapers from “abusing” the free ChatGPT-3.5 API.

OpenAI removes sign up mandate from ChatGPT 3.5. Source: OpenAI

AI developers see the removal of ChatGPT’s sign-up mandate as a catalyst for developing newer large language models (LLM). However, many others raise concerns about the surrounding use cases.

OpenAI estimates that ChatGPT has a weekly active user base of more than 100 million people across the globe.

The number is set to increase, considering that a number of people who were previously reluctant to share personal information with a corporation like OpenAI can now use ChatGPT with relative anonymity.

It is important to note that while ChatGPT-3.5 is not the most powerful “free” generative AI tool on the market currently, BuzzFeed data scientist Max Woolf believes the move is OpenAI’s attempt to keep people from using competitors.

Ranking of various generative AI models. Source: Hugging Face

According to data from Hugging Face, ChatGPT-3.5 ranks 16th globally in terms of its capability. Some other free generative AI tools that perform better include Anthropic’s Claude S and Gemini Pro by Google DeepMind.

Related: Can the future of music be decentralized, community-focused and AI-friendly?

Recently, a generative AI robot landed a teaching job at a school in Kerala, India.

AI teacher greets high school students in India. Source: Makerlabs on Instagram

The AI teacher, Iris, was developed in partnership with e-learning provider Makerlabs as part of the Atal Tinkering Lab project by NITI Aayog, an Indian government agency.

The humanoid can speak three languages and respond to complex questions. “By adapting to each student’s needs and preferences, IRIS empowers educators to deliver engaging and effective lessons like never before,” the company said.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Bitcoin halving will lead to more sustainable BTC mining: Report [/INST] The upcoming Bitcoin halving could lead to a greener Bitcoin (BTC) mining network with more sustainable energy sources.

With Bitcoin block rewards set to be cut from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, paired with a continually increasing Bitcoin hash rate, the profitability of mining firms could take a hit.

In turn, this could lead miners to search for greater capital efficiency via sustainable energy sources, according to Matteo Greco, research analyst at Fineqia International. Greco wrote:

“This dynamic compels mining companies to optimize capital efficiency and seek cheaper electricity sources, leading to an increasing use of renewable energy in BTC mining.”

Bitcoin has often been criticized for its high energy consumption and reliance on fossil fuels. Yet, over 54.5% of the Bitcoin network’s energy consumption has been powered by renewable energy sources since the end of January 2024, according to the Bitcoin ESG Forecast, a monthly research report written by Daniel Batten, the managing partner of CH4 Capital.

Bitcoin mining mechanics are also incentivizing greater efficiency, which could be among the main reasons for the network becoming increasingly more sustainable. Greco added:

“The BTC mining rewards mechanism inherently drives greater efficiency with each step, enhancing network security, reducing carbon emissions, and promoting research into sustainable block confirmation methods.”

Related: With 10 days to the halving, analysts predict $150K Bitcoin top

Chinese Bitcoin mining: Greener after mining ban

Despite a ban on Bitcoin mining, China currently accounts for around 15% of the global Bitcoin hash rate, according to the April 5 issue of Batten’s Bitcoin ESG Forecast.

“No off-grid coal-based mining occurs anymore. It’s too easy to spot, it competes for baseload energy and interferes with the central government’s emission targets. This has caused a significant reduction of the emission intensity of the Chinese mining post-ban.”

China’s Bitcoin mining hash rate. Source: ESG Forecast

Instead, miners in mainland China primarily rely on hydroelectric power, which is abundantly cheap during the wet months in the four regions of Xi’an, Wuhan, Bejing and Xining, noted Batten, referencing the chart below.

China precipitation. Source: ESG Forecast

Lastly, Batten noted that a significant amount of retail participants are mining Bitcoin at a loss, mainly to have an exit from the Chinese financial system. He said:

“They convert Chinese yuan for ASICS and electricity which creates BTC, which gets converted into USD. Many retail miners are happy to take the profitability hit simply to have a way to convert Yuan to USD.”

Will the Bitcoin mining industry implode soon? BTC miners explain. Source: Cointelegraph

Related: 10 days until halving: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall"
"[INST] ZachXBT onboarded as custodian for return of funds in $63M Munchables exploit [/INST] Prominent blockchain sleuth ZachXBT has been onboarded as one of four custodians to a multisig wallet holding GameFi protocol Munchables’ hacked user funds.

“ZachXBT will be joining as the 4th signer on the multisig at this stage, completing the safe return of user funds,” Munchables developers wrote in an April 1 announcement. The other custodians are Manifold Trading, Selini Capital and Munchables. “We will also be onboarding Nethermind to audit all our refreshed contracts before going live again,” wrote Munchables staff in an X post. All users’ assets have been recovered, and refunds will be returned directly to their wallets at the time of exploit.

“Confirming I will be temporarily joining the multisig as a signer for the initial period,” said ZachXBT in response to the nomination, adding, “I just did not want to be on the multisig longterm. Would expect any signers rotated out to be announced by the team.”

For additional compensation, developers also teased “massive multiples on game rewards” for returning depositors. In addition, the platform will “re-release with NFT migration plans and additional features to be revealed soon.” Meanwhile, custodians and users who helped thwart the attack will receive “ETH and future MUNCH donations” for their assistance in asset recovery. Quoting Confucius, an ancient Chinese philosopher, Munchables developers stated:

“We have two lives to munch, and the second begins when we realise we only have one.”

On March 26, Munchables, built on the Ethereum layer-2 network Blast, was exploited for $63 million after allegedly hiring a North Korean developer known by the alias “Werewolves0493,” who subsequently compromised the game’s private wallets.

In a subsequent post-mortem analysis, ZachXBT claimed that the exploiter was impersonating four different developers who all worked for the Munchables team. After the discovery, the malicious Munchables developer has since shared private keys with access to users’ funds with no strings attached.

Related: A beginner’s guide to the GameFi ecosystem"
"[INST] Montenegro’s Supreme Court sends Do Kwon’s extradition case back to lower court [/INST] The Supreme Court of Montenegro has annulled a decision from the country’s lower courts affecting the extradition of Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon to either the United States or South Korea.

In an April 5 notice, Montenegro’s Supreme Court said it had approved a request for a protection of legality against a lower court decision that would have allowed Kwon’s extradition to South Korea. Prosecutors who made the request argued that an appellate court violated procedure in rejecting an appeal from Kwon’s legal team, placing the final decision on the Supreme Court.

“In a situation where it is a matter of competing requests from two states for the extradition of the same person, and not a conflict of requests for the extradition of the same person, as found by the lower courts, the court’s obligation is to determine, in accordance with its powers, whether the legal conditions for extradition have been met the defendant in relation to each petition individually, after which the competent minister, not the court, decides on the permission and order of priority of extradition,” said the ruling.

The Supreme Court said the decision of Kwon’s extradition would return to the High Court in Podgorica, which could decide whether the Terraform co-founder is sent to the U.S. or his native South Korea. He faces criminal charges in both countries but has been in Montenegro since his arrest in the country in March 2023 for using falsified travel documents. Kwon reportedly remains free to travel within Montenegro until the courts decide on his extradition case.

Related: Here are the next biggest crypto court cases with the SBF saga over

With the absence of Kwon, lawyers representing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have moved forward with a jury trial against Terraform and the co-founder in March. Some of Kwon’s previous statements have been read into the record at trial. The case was ongoing at the time of publication.

While Kwon remains in Montenegro, Terraform Labs’ former chief financial officer Han Chang-joon — also arrested in March 2023 — was extradited to South Korea. South Korean authorities have indicted several individuals connected to Terraform Labs, including co-founder Hyun-seong Shin.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Taiwanese music celebrity’s Solana memecoin sees wild price action after $40M presale [/INST] Boba Oppa (BOBAOPPA), a Solana-based memecoin created by Taiwanese music celebrity and blockchain personality Machi Big Brother (aka Jeffrey Huang), has taken tokenholders on a rollercoaster ride after a $40 million presale.

According to GeckoTerminal data on April 2, the Boba Oppa memecoin opened at a high of 0.001474 at launch on March 30 before plunging 74% to a low of 0.0003854 shortly after. At the time of publication, Boba Oppa has somewhat recovered at a price of $0.0007194. On March 28, investors sent over 200,000 SOL (SOL) to the Boba Oppa memecoin address based on one single tweet, raising over $40 million for the venture. The token has since grown to a market cap of $73 million, but not all participants are happy.

“Never buying a presale ever again,"" one user wrote on X, adding: ""My $10K is now worth $129.00, WTF man.” Meanwhile, crypto influencer Borovik.sol, too, chimed in on the investor panic: ""What’s the point of presales if everyone sells after 5 minutes?” he asked.

But the biggest insight into the wild trading action came from Machi Big Brother himself, who explained that unlike a traditional memecoin pump-and-dump scheme, Boba Oppa is instead a “dump-and-pump” token. “We are not the same. Let that sink in,” Huang wrote. “Can I make back the $29977 I lost through the passive income?” asked one user regarding the Boba Oppa price variance. “Only if you pray hard enough,” Huang replied.

Inspired by the recent surge of canine-themed Solana memecoins, Huang created the Boba Oppa token, too, with a backstory. According to the project's official website:

“Once upon a time, Boba Oppa, son of Machi Big Brother, set out on a journey for generational wealth and to lose his virginity. Through his trials and tribulations he created $BOBAOPPA, the memecoin that harnesses the power of DeFi.”

Solana memecoins have been on a wild run, with $149.2 million raised from 33 presales within the past month alone. Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, has since warned investors to “stop doing this” amid the ongoing craze.

Related: Solana struggles to recapture $200, but DApp and derivatives markets remain bullish"
"[INST] SBF memecoins pump and dump as FTX founder gets 25-year prison sentence [/INST] Memecoin degenerates have once again put their money on a swathe of questionable tokens — this time amid the historic sentencing of Sam Bankman-Fried, which saw him wrapped with a 25-year prison sentence.

On March 28, Judge Lewis Kaplan sentenced Bankman-Fried to a total of 25 years in prison on seven counts of fraud, making the former CEO the first person from FTX to face prison for the collapse of the exchange in November 2022 — referred to as one of the biggest corporate collapses in United States history.

A few hours before Bankman-Fried’s sentence was handed down, however, a developer launched a memecoin dubbed Sam Baseman Fraud — humorously sporting the ticker FTX — on the Coinbase layer-2 network Base.

In just seven hours, the FTX memecoin rallied more than 23,300%, with market capitalization peaking to $1.5 million on March 28, per DexScreener data,

As many memecoins often do, the token proceeded to sell off harshly, dumping more than 85% within the span of three hours. At the time of publication, the memecoin’s price has leveled out and is trading around the $0.06 mark, still down 60% from all-time highs.

Sam Baseman Fraud (FTX) rallied before selling off. Source: DexScreener

Roughly 2 hours following the sentencing, another SBF-themed memecoin dubbed Som Bonkmon Fraud launched on Solana (SOL).

The Solana-based SBF memecoin initially surged to a market capitalization of around $20 million, a rally of more than 18,000% from its launch value of $30,000. However, the token sold off rapidly, plunging more than 95% from its high.

Som Bonkman Fraud pumped and then brutally dumped. Source: DexScreener

At the time of publication, it’s trading around $0.0008 — only slightly above its first listed price.

Related: Crypto users react to Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year sentence

The Bankman-Fried-themed memecoins are the latest addition to a roster of topical memecoins inspired by crypto and political figureheads. Several other political memecoins, such as Boden and Tremp have sought to capitalize on the attention around the upcoming United States election.

The memecoin trend witnessed a major resurgence following the upward surge of a Solana-based memecoin called Dog Wif Hat (WIF), which spiked from a market cap of around $50,000 to $3.5 billion in four months.

Several other newer meme tokens, such as the frog-themed Pepe (PEPE) on Ethereum and Rooster-themed Coq Inu (COQ) on Avalanche, have also rallied to the upside.

Memecoins are hyper-speculative investments that ofte offer no utility or base valuation outside of topical interest and hype.

Notably, FTX Token (FTT) — the native cryptocurrency of the now defunct exchange — also nosedived more than 16% on the news of Bankman-Fried’s sentencing, per CoinGecko data.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] ‘Real opportunity’ for Bitcoin Runes will come after first wave of investor hype [/INST] Bitcoin Runes, a new protocol for issuing fungible tokens on the Bitcoin network, is set to go live with the Bitcoin halving later this week.

Yet, the real market opportunity for Runes may only come months after the first wave of investor hype subsides, according to the pseudonymous decentralized finance (DeFi) researcher Ignas, who wrote in an April 17 X post:

“Runestone, RSIC, and PUPS are already pumping, promising holders shiny new Rune token airdrops. And FOMO threads keep coming. But, like the NFT frenzy post-JPEG reveal, the market could soon cool off.”

Rune floor prices could see a significant drop, mainly because they don’t immediately improve the trading experience of BRC-20 tokens and because small traders may be priced out of the increasing Bitcoin transaction fees, according to the pseudonymous researcher.

Daily inscription fees and BRC-20 hype wave. Source: Ignas

Runes and BRC-20 tokens are both new fungible token standards aiming to create more utility for Bitcoin in a new paradigm known as Bitcoin decentralized finance (DeFi), or BTCFi for short.

Asset management giant Franklin Templeton also recognized the emergence of Runes. The asset manager also noted the success of other Bitcoin-native fungible token standards, like Ordinals, in an April 3 research report:

“Bitcoin Ordinals have seen a surge in trading volume over the past several months. This is reflected in an increase in dominance starting in December of 2023 when it surpassed ETH in trading volume.”

Bitcoin surpassed 65 million Ordinals inscriptions on April 11, less than one year and three months since the launch in January 2023.

Ignas expects hundreds of Runes to launch on the market, diluting trader attention and inflows into particular tokens.

Paired with the lack of initial utility around Runes, these aspects will make them akin to memecoin trading, according to the pseudonymous researcher, who wrote:

“Finally, utility-wise runes will trade as memecoins like BRC20s. At least at first, so the excitement of ‘new’ will fade away. Especially if no rune token manages to sustain the pump and degens lose money.”

Despite the bearish short-term outlook, Ignas noted that he is bullish on Runes in the long term:

“If I’m right the real opportunity comes after the hype cools down post the Rune protocol launch.”

Related: BTCFi is an ‘enormous opportunity’ to make Bitcoin a productive asset — Stacks

Bitcoin Runes will drive more activity to BTC layer 2s

Runes could be a net positive for the development of Bitcoin layer-2 networks. Along with Ordinal inscriptions, they could drive more activity to Bitcoin L2 networks, as increasing Bitcoin network fees will price out smaller transactions, according to Andre Serrano, product and partnership manager at Stacks, who told Cointelegraph:

“There’s going to be a lot of asset issuance on [Bitcoin] L1, which will drive up the transaction fees […] This prices out a lot of users and activity […] Ultimately, pushing more of this activity to L2s will become a necessity.”

Bitcoin L2 network Stacks is also preparing to launch a trading solution for Runes, BRC-20s and Ordinals inscriptions.

Related: Bitcoin supply to run out on exchanges in 9 months — Bybit"
"[INST] Levels of consumer trust in crypto increasing: Report [/INST] A new Deutsche Bank survey revealed that consumer skepticism about Bitcoin has fallen slightly, although less than a third of survey respondents still expect a sharp price drop by the end of 2024.

The survey, published on April 8, polled over 3,600 consumers. Slightly more than half (52%) agree that cryptocurrencies as a whole will be an “important asset class and method of payment transactions” in the future.

A similar survey was conducted by Deutsche Bank in September 2023, which showed less than 40% confidence.

The amount of respondents who consider crypto to just be a “fad that will eventually fade” has now dropped to less than 1%, according to the survey.

The survey also looked at the price of Bitcoin (BTC) in light of the upcoming halving. Deutsche Bank analysts said they expect the price to be supported by regulation, central bank rate cuts and anticipation of a spot Ethereum exchange-traded fund (ETF) approval from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Related: 10 days until halving: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall

A third of the survey participants said they expect Bitcoin to dip below the $20,000 price point by the end of 2024. This figure compares to 35% in February and 36% in January.

However, only 10% expect Bitcoin to surpass $75,000 by year-end.

This survey comes after much activity surrounding Bitcoin since the beginning of 2024. In January, the SEC approved the first U.S.-based spot Bitcoin ETFs, which pulled in a record $1 billion daily net inflow on March 12.

In mid-March, the cryptocurrency hit a new $73,794 all-time high and is anticipated to spike even further, with some estimates as high as a 160% increase after the halving, which means it could hit the $150,000 mark, according to some analysts.

The halving is anticipated to occur in mid-April, with many predictions settling on April 20. This event is causing some analysts to take a bullish stance on the cryptocurrency for the year ahead, citing the heightened overall demand and other macroeconomic factors driving the price.

Magazine: Memecoins make millionaires, Terraform and Do Kwon liable for fraud, and more: Hodler’s Digest, March 31 – April 6"
"[INST] Chinese police probe spurs mysterious token movements and platform upgrades [/INST] Filecoin liquid staking protocol STFIL claims that there have been token movements and unexplainable protocol upgrades following an investigation of their team members by the Chinese police.

On April 9, the protocol expressed its belief that Chinese authorities are still investigating its core technical team members. According to the X post, the detained members have already received legal assistance. It wrote:

“We believe that the STFIL core technical team is under investigation by local Chinese police, and we understand lawyers have been hired to understand the current situation and provide legal assistance to the individuals under detention.”

The liquid staking protocol also said that while its team members were detained last week, Filecoin (FIL) tokens on the STFIL platform were transferred to an “unknown, external address.” At the time of writing, the address holds 2.5 million FIL tokens worth about $23 million.

Address holding the tokens from the staking platform. Source: Filecoin Explorer

Furthermore, STFIL also claimed that there were “abnormal, unscheduled upgrades” in the past few days within the protocol amid the investigation.

The staking platform said they are seeking assistance and urged the community to help monitor the address that received the tokens. “We hope that the community can help track this unknown address and discuss ways to protect the interests of stakeholders,” it wrote.

Community members on X claiming to have staked their FIL tokens on the platform have been discussing how they could recover their funds. Some have questioned how the police can take their funds.

Related: Crypto staking rewards are now 450% higher than S&P 500 dividends

Meanwhile, the Filecoin token remains strong despite the issues. On April 9, FIL recorded a seven-day high of $9.32 and had a 24-hour volume of $265 million.

Currently, the token hovers aroun $9.12, according to coin information tracker CoinGecko.

Filecoin’s seven-day price chart. Source: CoinGecko

This is not the first time Chinese authorities have cracked down on crypto projects. In 2023, cross-chain protocol Multichain announced that it was forced to halt its operations due to a lack of funds.

This happened after its CEO and co-founder, Zhaojun He, was taken into custody by Chinese police. With information scarce, the project had no choice but to wind down activities.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Unexplained transfers on LENX protocol spark rug pull concerns [/INST] Rumors of a slow rug pull involving liquidity protocol LENX are flooding social media channels as the community speculates about unexplained transfers of tokens worth millions of dollars.

According to reports from pseudonymous X user AstroBoy and Etherscan data, LENX Finance’s founders, John Kim and a person simply known as Paul, had transferred over $10 million worth of treasury assets to a Binance account without clear justification, draining LENX wallets.

On the protocol’s Discord server, users have complained about the lack of communication since the transactions were first spotted on March 26, along with consistent transfers to Binance and messages about the suspicious withdrawals being removed.

The protocol was launched in January 2024, promising to support native Bitcoin for yield generation or to borrow against it. According to CoinGecko, LENX’s native token, LENX XD (XD), was valued at $0.26 in early January versus $0.02 at the time of writing. LENX is backed by the lending protocol Frax Finance.

Cointelegraph reached out to both co-founders of LENX Finance but did not receive an immediate response. The Frax Finance team was not available for comment.

Community member 0xg4m813 points to issues surrounding the protocol amid debate over funds transfers. Source: LENX’s Discord

Media company Flywheel DeFi reportedly spoke with Kim over a chat, but the co-founder declined to comment. “Sorry, I don’t have much to say at the moment,” Kim wrote. Paul’s last Discord activity was on March 26, when he announced he was investigating the withdrawals. “I’m trying to investigate right now.”

According to reports on Discord, the LENX team was able to freeze the Binance account that received the funds, with $3 million in remaining funds safeguarded. An ongoing investigation is reportedly in progress over Kim’s activities, while Paul is cooperating with legal efforts.

A rug pull is a type of scam where developers suddenly withdraw all funds from a project or liquidity pool, leaving investors with worthless tokens or assets.

In 2023, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that crypto-related investment fraud saw a significant increase in the United States, with losses rising from $2.57 billion in 2022 to approximately $3.94 billion, a 53% increase.

Magazine: DeFi’s billion-dollar secret: The insiders responsible for hacks"
"[INST] Crypto market ‘underestimates the long-term impact’ of Bitcoin halving: Bitwise [/INST] The Bitcoin (BTC) halving is days away now, scheduled for April 20, but price action in the month that follows the highly anticipated event has been historically disappointing, said Bitwise Asset Management.

In an April 16 X post, Bitwise noted past price action in the month after the Bitcoin halving for the past three halvings saw its price drop — but in the year that followed, its price saw a minimum of triple-digit percentage point gains.

In the month after the 2012 halving, Bitcoin gained 9% — but over the next year, it surged 8,839%.

A similar pattern played out in the 2016 halving: Bitcoin fell 10% the month after and gained 285% to peak at $20,000 in 2017. Again, in 2020, it saw a 6% price gain in the month post-halving, then a 548% pump in the year following.

Bitcoin’s gains after its halvings. Source: Bitwise/X

“The data is limited but the picture reveals an intriguing pattern,” Bitwise wrote. “The market prices in the short-term impact of the halving but underestimates the long-term impact.”

The current market cycle is the first time that Bitcoin has hit an all-time high before its halving.

The cryptocurrency hit its current $73,679 peak on March 13, its since corrected 16% to a low of $61,500.

Industry executives are equally pessimistic in the short term. 10x Research head of research Markus Thielen predicted on April 13 that there could be a $5-billion miner sell-off after the halving, putting downward pressure on markets.

Meanwhile, Marathon CEO Fred Thiel said that the halving rally was already factored in, bringing forward what would have been a post-halving rally.

Related: Bitcoin miners could dump $5B in BTC after halving: 10x Research

On April 16, trader and analyst Rekt Capital posted on X a list of market correction magnitudes since the 2022 bear market bottom.

There were five significant pullbacks ranging from 18% to 23%. Currently, markets have corrected 16% and suggested that there could be further to go.

Market corrections since bear market low. Source: Rekt Capital

Meanwhile, fellow analyst Cold Blooded Shiller noted that 30% corrections were not uncommon, hinting that BTC could potentially fall to around $51,000.

Magazine: Altseason on the horizon, SEC targets Uniswap, and BTC halving news: Hodler’s Digest, April 7–13"
"[INST] Tokenization’s next phase requires real-world data integration — Chainlink [/INST] Researchers from the blockchain oracle platform Chainlink believe asset managers have a “sizable” opportunity to jump into tokenization as financial asset infrastructures continue to go digital.

In an industry report titled “Beyond Token Issuance,” blockchain oracle platform Chainlink explained where the opportunity lies and how interoperability and real-world data could unlock the value of tokenized assets.

Industries and markets that could benefit from tokenization. Source: Chainlink

The report laid down the potential benefits of tokenization for asset managers. This includes unlocking dormant capital, giving assets greater availability and creating novel revenue models.

Apart from these, Chainlink said that asset managers could also create unified client portfolios, differentiate their service offerings, and improve their risk management as tokenization allows for more automated risk assessment.

Within the report, Chainlink also argued that blockchains continued to evolve into an “integral component of the existing financial ecosystem.” In addition, the company highlighted that traditional and blockchain-based assets are already merging into a single financial ecosystem.

The researchers believe this resulted from continued digitization, as blockchains offered superior infrastructure for asset storage and transactions.

Related: New crypto users shouldn’t ‘rush into DeFi’ — Security firms

Ryan Lovell, director of capital markets at Chainlink Labs, told Cointelegraph that tokenization has been in a research and development phase for several years.

Lovell explained that institutions were bringing simple account balances on-chain and were trying to figure out the potential impact of tokenization for their businesses only at a basic level. Lovell said:

“This was kind of like building a concept car without an engine or interior — just a basic shell of what the future will hold.”

However, the executive believes that the next phase for tokenization will be more about building foundational infrastructure. This is necessary to make tokenized assets composable and programmable across traditional systems and private and public chains.

Meanwhile, the Chainlink executive believes that enhancing tokens with real-world data and letting them become interoperable across blockchains and traditional systems could unlock powerful applications.

Lovell said these use cases would feature more transparency, lower costs and more streamlined administrative processes than traditional finance infrastructure.

“We’re actively working on several exciting initiatives at the moment to enable institutions to go beyond mere token issuance, manage tokenized assets throughout their entire lifecycle, and transact across the cross-chain economy,” Lovell added.

Magazine: ChainLinkGod was in High School when he started the account! X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Nansen integrates blockchain data from SportFi chain Chiliz and Ethereum rollup zkSync [/INST] Cryptocurrency users looking for the latest “alpha” in SportFi and zero-knowledge rollups can keep close tabs on data and insights from blockchain Chiliz and Ethereum layer 2 zkSync through new integrations on Nansen.

The blockchain analytics platform announced the integration of the two different protocols on March 28, unlocking on-chain data analytics and insights for its users.

Nansen data journalist Martin Lee told Cointelegraph that the integration provides a high-level overview of both ecosystems, allowing cryptocurrency teams to run their own queries and get insights from the raw data itself via Nansen query:

“Users can gain insights into the daily active users and transactions on the chain, as well as which entities and protocols are seeing the most usage via the macro dashboard.”

The functionality will unlock data insights into Chiliz, the proprietary blockchain powering scores of fan tokens licensed by high-profile sports teams and organizations worldwide that operate on the Socios platform.

Related: Man and machine: Nansen’s analytics slowly labeling worldwide wallets

Chiliz and Socios CEO Alexandre Dreyfus says the collaboration will deepen the understanding of the Chiliz ecosystem and potentially drive user adoption and growth of the SportFi ecosystem:

“Having Chiliz Chain on Nansen is a critical step to grow the ecosystem and help developers and industry stakeholders to start looking at Chiliz at a legitimate layer-1 with a very long-term vision.”

According to data from CoinMarketCap, the Chiliz blockchain has a total market capitalization of $1.2 billion. The ecosystem has attracted many of the biggest football clubs, including Manchester City and Paris Saint Germain (PSG).

Chiliz on-chain data as seen on Nansen’s dashboard. Source: Nansen

Cointelegraph reviewed Chiliz’s blockchain through Nansen 2, the latest version of the analytics platform, which reflects an average of 2,100 daily active addresses. Manchester City, Binance, Turkish club Trabzonspor, Galatasaray and PSG are listed as the top five entities on-chain over the past week.

Related: Animoca eyes SportFi ecosystem, becomes Chiliz Chain validator

Ethereum scaling protocol zkSync is one of the major zero-knowledge proof rollups in the ecosystem, processing over a million transactions daily for over 350,000 addresses, according to data from Nansen’s dashboard.

ZkSync saw a noticeable drop in transaction fees following Ethereum’s Dencun hard fork. Source: Nansen

Matter Labs head of business development, Omar Azhar, believes the integration with Nansen will prove valuable to the zkSync ecosystem and wider Web3 space by making processing on-chain data that is actionable and digestible.

“The great benefit of permissionless blockchains such as zkSync is that all the data is public and contains valuable insights for builders, investors and end-users alike,” Azhar said.

Related: Paris Saint-Germain begins Web3 drive as a new blockchain validator for Chiliz Chain

Nansen has garnered a reputation for its wallet-labeling and blockchain analytics. In October 2022, Cointelegraph interviewed its CEO Alex Svanevik at the firm’s Singapore headquarters, where the founder recounted Nansen’s genesis story and estimated that the platform scans nearly a petabyte of data daily from the variety of blockchains it monitors.

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Lido staked SOL holders fret as $24M remains stuck on ‘broken’ contract [/INST] Update April 3, 11.12 UTC: This article has been updated to include a comment from Pavel Pavlov explaining that the issue has now been fixed.

As much as $24 million in tokenized staked Solana (stSOL) has been unintentionally locked on the liquid-staking platform Lido due to a faulty smart contract.

Lido on Solana — which once let users effectively stake any amount of Solana (SOL) for a 5% yield — was sunset in October 2023 due to unsustainable financials and low fees.

Until February, users had been given the option to unstake their Solana through a user-friendly front end — but that too was sunset, leaving them with only the option of manually unstaking via Solana’s command line interface (CLI).

The CLI has proven to be too complicated for some users, according to messages on Lido’s Discord channel in March. Solscan data shows there’s as much as $24 million worth of stSOL still in circulation across 31,588 holders.

Some on Discord have complained the process was too complicated for the “layman,” while others claim they’ve run into unknown errors despite following instructions provided by Lido on So.

“Cannot unstake stSol because none of the 2 solutions provided on the Lido site actually works,” user ericxtang wrote in the Discord channel on March 15.

“I tried unstaking StSOL about a month ago, but it’s still stuck with a validator and never went back to SOL, despite being [burned]” another user, “Number9guy,” wrote.

It turns out the issue may not be the result of user error after all.

In a March 30 Discord message, Pavel Pavlov, a product manager at P2P Validator — the team once behind Lido on Solana — revealed there was an issue with the smart contract behind the withdrawal function.

Solscan data showing the amount of Lido staked SOL in circulation. Source: Solscan

“It is suspected to be associated with alterations in the Rent-Exempt Split logic,” Pavlov said. “The current implementation uses the split function in the withdrawal process of the smart contract.”

Pavlov added while the issue has been identified, P2P also has “no levers of influence in the situation” and it’s now reaching out to the Lido DAO to potentially change the smart contract.

In an update published on the Lido Solana Discord page, Pavlov said that the p2p team had successfully fixed and launched an updated maintainer bot.

He added that stSOL can now be withdrawn using CLI and referred users to an official guide for more information.

Related: Former LDO holder files class-action lawsuit against Lido DAO for crypto losses

“Changing the smart contract is quite significant in terms of complexity and time. So, the technical team will reach out to Lido DAO and sync up on procedures and timelines.”

The team is also looking into options to explore workarounds that do not require changes in the smart contract, he wrote.

“I can imagine how disappointing this news may be, but sadly, there are no ETAs available at this moment. As stated earlier, the team is fully committed and diligently exploring multiple avenues for resolution.”

Meanwhile, some users suggest using on-chain stability protocol Sanctum or Jupiter (which routes through Sanctum) to swap stSOL for SOL or other liquid staking tokens.

Lido Finance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Magazine: NFTs are like nightclubs, crypto is a volatile religion: NFTStats, NFT Collector"
"[INST] Bitcoin mining revenue peaked at $107M on BTC halving day [/INST] Revenue earned from Bitcoin (BTC) mining exceeded the $100 million mark for the first time, recording an all-time high daily earnings on Bitcoin halving day, 2024.

On April 20, Bitcoin miners earned a total of $107.7 million in mining rewards and transaction fees as community members willingly paid exorbitant fees to get their transactions recorded on the 840,000th Bitcoin block.

Total value in U.S. dollars of block rewards and transaction fees paid to miners. Source: blockchain.com

Investors wanting to be a part of Bitcoin’s history spent 37.7 BTC (worth $2.4 million) in fees alone to nab their share of limited space on the Bitcoin block, which triggered the fourth halving event. The block included 3,050 transactions, meaning the average user paid a little under $800.

Users spent $2.4 million in fees to inscribe runes and rare satoshis on the first halving block. Source: Mempool.space

The record-breaking fees were attributed to the race to inscribe and etch rare satoshis on the halving block. Much of the activity stemmed from a frenzy of activity on Bitcoin Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor’s new Runes Protocol, which went live at the same time as the halving.

The previous all-time high revenue for Bitcoin miners was $78.7 million on March 11, when the Bitcoin price broke a new high of $71,415. However, the jump in revenue was directly correlated with Bitcoin’s market price as miners get rewarded in BTC in exchange for confirming transactions over the blockchain.

The Bitcoin halving event on April 20 slashed mining rewards in half for the fourth time, reducing them to 3.125 BTC for every block mined until the next halving reduces them even further.

Related: Where will Bitcoin’s price be at the next halving in 2028?

With declining hype around Bitcoin halving, the average fees paid on Bitcoin have fallen sharply just a day after reaching a record average of $128 on April 20.

Average daily transaction fee on Bitcoin over the last five years. Source: YCharts

As of April 21, Bitcoin transaction fees have fallen to an average of $8–$10 for medium-priority transactions, according to mempool.space.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Andreessen Horowitz to invest $30M in tech-fueled gaming startups [/INST] Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has announced it will be investing $30 million in technology-centric gaming startups, including AI, VR/AR and Web3 games.

“We are investing at the intersection of TECH x GAMES, which means AI/infra, 3D tools, VR/AR, web3 games, gamified consumer apps, and much more,” announced Andrew Chen, a general partner at a16z, who oversees a16z’s Games One Fund.

The $30 million will be invested across the next 45 days via the firm’s early-stage accelerator “SPEEDRUN” program, Chen said in an April 1 X post, with $750,000 handed out to each startup that joins the program.

The program consists of a 12-week program, with participants supported with capital, as well as industry coaches, mentors, and a ""community of ambitious founders,” said Chen.

Chen noted that a16z is open-minded to a range of startups — from teams only in the ideas phase to teams with an established product and real revenue.

Competition into a16z’s SPEEDRUN program is fierce though, with only 1% of applicants admitted into the last cohort. However, Chen said 80% of companies from SPEEDRUN’s first cohort secured funding from investors following Demo Day.

Also, a fun video from SR002 to give y'all a taste of what the Demo Day looks like:https://t.co/QgaWqIv7LR — andrew chen (@andrewchen) April 1, 2024

Applications must be submitted by May 19, with the 12-week course running between July 29 and Oct. 20, 2024, in Los Angeles, California.

Web3 graduates from a16z’s SPEEDRUN program include soccer-themed Matchday and nonfungible token-based Promodium, both Web3 games.

Related: ‘Tens of millions’ to enter Web3 through gaming in 2024 — GameFi execs

Chen oversees the firm’s $600 million Game Fund One, which launched in 2022 and includes investments in Roblox, Sandbox and Sky Marvis — the creators of the blockchain game Axie Infinity.

The Silicon Valley firm has also invested in blockchain-based gaming startups through its cryptocurrency division, such as Mythical Games, Yield Guild Games, Azra Games, CCP Games, NOD games and Voldex.

The Web3 gaming market is projected to grow from $154 billion to $614 billion by 2030, according to a January report by Fortune Business Insights — marking a compounded annual growth rate of 21.8%.

Magazine: Web3 Gamer: Games need bots? Illivium CEO admits ‘it’s tough,’ 42X upside"
"[INST] SushiSwap team treasury takeover looks likely despite heated debate [/INST] A controversial proposal to change SushiSwap’s treasury structure by the team behind the decentralized exchange looks like it may go through despite vocal opposition to the proposal on social media.

The SushiSwap team made a controversial governance proposal on March 26 to “significantly evolve Sushi by adopting a Labs model.”

It aims to restructure the current organization to “enhance operational efficiency and accelerate protocol development.”

However, it includes a controversial tokenomics overhaul that aims to deploy decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)-controlled Sushi Treasury’s assets — around 25 million tokens worth roughly $42.5 million — to Sushi Labs.

“We request that Sushi DAO award a grant of 25 million Sushi tokens to Sushi Labs, including assets from the Arbitrum airdrop, business development, and partner grants, Kanpai 2.0, Sushi 2.0, rewards, stablecoins, and ‘Sushi House’ funds.”

“The revisions will include a singular mint of 25M tokens granted to Sushi Labs and the introduction of a 1.5% APR (baseline) to bolster liquidity, incentivize participation, and fortify the Treasury,” it added.

There is a current maximum supply of 250 million SUSHI (SUSHI) tokens under the existing tokenomics model.

Additionally, Sushi Labs will be the sole beneficiary of future airdrops awarded by protocols and partners.

Voting began on April 3 and is set to end on April 10. So far, around 29 million SUSHI has been pledged, which is more than enough to reach a quorum.

Voting for either outcome was pretty evenly matched until recently when it tipped in favor of the “yays.”

At the moment, only a third of the votes — 9.7 million tokens — have been lodged against the proposal.

Among the whale voters was the Sushi Labs team, which made the proposal and pledged 5.5 million tokens in favor of it. A key opposer went under the “sushicitizens.eth” address and pledged 4.4 million SUSHI against it.

Former SushiSwap contributor Naïm Boubziz claims that the team voted for themselves using the protocol’s multisignature wallet after reporting that it had tried to get 4 million SUSHI from the treasury multisig in early March.

There were also accusations that the Sushi team took out a loan in order to vote for their own proposal. On April 4, Boubziz said that “they borrowed money for a few hours to add liquidity in order to double their voting power for snapshots.”

Sushi “Head Chef” Jared Grey, however, defended against the critics in an April 8 post on X who accused Sushi Labs of manipulating the vote by adding liquidity just before the vote and then removing it afterward, deleting snapshots and voting with the multisig Ops address.

“After consulting our legal counsel, I directed the operations team to execute the YAY vote with the OPs wallet and its holdings due to the threat of a hostile takeover,” he said.

Related: Community on SushiSwap exploit: The $3.3M hack is ‘weird’

The decentralized exchange protocol is no stranger to power struggles. SushiSwap launched in 2020, surging past industry leader Uniswap following a vampire attack.

However, its pseudonymous founder, “Chef Nomi,” reportedly attempted a rug-pull shortly after plunging the protocol into controversy, infighting and the internal chaos that has continued ever since.

SUSHI was trading at $1.70 at the time of writing, down 93% from its all-time high three years ago in March 2021.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Bitcoin’s 2028 halving price target is $435K, historical data suggests [/INST] The Bitcoin price (BTC) rallied approximately 650% since the last Bitcoin halving in 2020. If history repeats, Bitcoin could reach the $435,000 price level before the 2028 halving.

Is BTC price headed to $435,000 by the 2028 halving?

The Bitcoin price has risen around 658% since the last Bitcoin halving in 2020, according to TradingView data, and is currently trading around the $66,000 mark.

BTC/USD percentage increase, one-week chart. Source: TradingView

The 2024 Bitcoin halving will happen in less than three weeks. If historical chart patterns were to repeat, Bitcoin’s current $66,000 price would reach $434,280 per coin by the 2028 halving if it performs similarly to the current cycle.

Nonetheless, Bitcoin’s post-halving rallies have seen diminishing returns throughout the years. Until the first halving in 2012, Bitcoin increased from having virtually no value to $12.50 — an over 12,400% increase. Bitcoin price jumped 5,200% to $650 by the 2016 halving and 1,200% to $8,500 by the 2020 halving.

Related: How high can Bitcoin go? New BTC price prediction sees cycle top at $180K

Thus, Bitcoin’s average price rallies fell by 45% each cycle to the current 658%. If this diminishing returns trend repeats, Bitcoin will deliver a 360% rally during the next cycle, resulting in a roughly $303,600 BTC price at the 2028 halving.

Bitcoin halving or ETFs having a bigger impact?

Bitcoin’s recent price surge is unrelated to the upcoming halving and mainly attributed to the inflows into spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), argues Hao Yang, head of financial products at Bybit, who told Cointelegraph:

“Considering [the] halving and price trends from a very rigorous quantitative point of view, there is no evidence supporting a positive correlation between the halving event and BTC price. But history can be interpreted in many different ways. I certainly hope for $435,000 by 2028 but won’t put too much into it.”

A six-figure BTC price appears even more possible if Bitcoin ETFs overtake gold ETFs, which is something that could happen in the next two years, according to a Feb. 26 research report from Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas.

BTC and gold price chart, five years. Source: TradingView

Additionally, Bitcoin ETFs are growing at a much quicker pace than gold ETFs did when they first appeared in 2004. In fact, Bitcoin is “speedrunning” gold’s price fivefold, says Sam Wouters, the head of contact at River, who wrote in a March 29 X post:

“Bitcoin is basically just 5x speedrunning gold’s trajectory. The last 10 years of Bitcoin look a bit like a squished version of gold’s last 50. No wonder some people get salty.”

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Binance exec will remain in Nigerian custody until May 17 bail hearing: Report [/INST] Tigran Gambaryan, a Binance executive detained in Nigeria since February, will reportedly remain in custody until a bail hearing on May 17.

According to April 23 reports from local news outlets, Gambaryan will remain in Nigeria’s Kuje prison until at least May 17, when a judge will decide whether to grant the Binance executive bail. He initially traveled to Nigeria in February with fellow Binance executive Nadeem Anjarwalla to address claims the exchange manipulated the country’s fiat currency, the naira. Nigerian authorities detained both Binance executives as the crypto exchange announced that it intended to cease all naira transactions.

Gambaryan was expected to return to court on April 19 following an initial postponement, and the question of bail was to be addressed on April 22. He has pleaded not guilty to tax evasion and money laundering charges brought by Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, with a trial scheduled for May 2.

Anjarwalla reportedly escaped Nigeria custody in March, using his Kenyan passport — he is both a British and Kenyan national — to fly out of Abuja. Reports from April 22 suggested that Kenya’s police arrested Anjarwalla and may extradite him to Nigeria to face criminal charges.

Related: Nigeria launches first multilingual large language model in Africa

Many have criticized the government’s charges as lacking merit, as Binance said Gambaryan had “no decision-making power” at the crypto firm. On March 30, Yuki Gambaryan, Tigran’s wife, launched a petition for the U.S. State Department, Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the Nigerian government and U.S. President Joe Biden to to return him to the United States. As of April 23, the petition had 3,960 signatures.

In a separate case in the United States, former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is expected to be sentenced on April 30 following his guilty plea for failure to maintain an Anti-Money Laundering program while leading the exchange. He could face up to 10 years in prison.

Magazine: South Africa’s digital-nomad crypto hub: Cape Town, Crypto City Guide"
"[INST] New crypto users shouldn’t ‘rush into DeFi’ — Security firms [/INST] While the prevalence of hacks within the crypto space might deter new users from jumping in, crypto security professionals say that there are ways for them to avoid the riskier parts of crypto.

On Jan. 22, a market sizing report from Crypto.com showed that the crypto space reached about 580 million users in December 2023, increasing 34% since January 2023.

Growth of cryptocurrency users throughout 2023. Source: Crypto.com

With crypto onboarding more new users, Cointelegraph spoke with security professionals to get insights on what those new to crypto should do to keep their funds safe in the digital asset space.

Luciano Ciattaglia, the director of services at cybersecurity company Hacken, said that new digital asset users should avoid decentralized finance (DeFi) or decentralized exchanges (DEXs) when starting their crypto journey. Ciattaglia said:

“Don’t rush into DeFi or DEXs straight away. Most people use centralized exchanges or wallets for all their crypto investments, and that’s fine.”

Ciattaglia added that when putting funds into a custodian, users “rely on their trustworthiness.” Because of this, the executive advised new users to choose exchanges that have a good track record in terms of security and funds availability.

CertiK co-founder Ronghui Gu shared similar sentiments. Gu also believes that new users who are interested in investing but are concerned about security should opt to use reputable exchanges and wallets. Gu said:

“Consider investing in a hardware wallet for the highest level of security, as these devices store private keys offline and are highly resistant to network-connected hacking attempts.”

Gu added that users should also educate themselves on the basic principles of crypto security before investing. This includes securing private key storage and using strong passwords. In addition, users should also enable multifactor authentication on all accounts related to their crypto activities.

The security professional also highlighted that new crypto users should be wary about sharing their personal data online and be wary of phishing scams.

Number of incidents and the amount lost in the first quarter of 2024. Source: CertiK

On April 3, CertiK released a report highlighting a total of 83 crypto phishing incidents in the first quarter of 2024. Gu said that the sophistication and success of phishing attacks reached “alarming levels” in Q1.

Related: Fiat ramps still the ‘biggest gateway’ to crypto — Exec

Apart from these, Ciattaglia also highlighted that new users should make sure the projects they are investing in have security audits. According to the security professional, audited projects with active bug bounties are “less likely to rug pull.”

Statistics on hacked projects and their security audits. Source: Hacken

In its quarterly report, Hacken shared that 56% of hacked projects from January to March 2024 did not go through security audits. This meant that vulnerabilities were unresolved for a larger percentage of those companies.

Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis"
"[INST] On-chain data — The missing link in Web3 advertising [/INST] On-chain wallet data promises to be a game-changer for companies looking to target Web3 users, developers and traders — but this hinges on infrastructure connecting wallets to social media profiles.

Cointelegraph spoke to Addressable chief technology officer Asaf Nadler during Paris Blockchain Week, who unpacked details of a new partnership with mobile analytics platform AppsFlyer to improve marketing campaigns for Web3 applications.

Nadler said the company is looking to solve user acquisition challenges in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Conversations with more than 300 marketers over the past two years have centered around reaching a target audience based on on-chain activity.

Related: TON continues to attract Web3 firms as Telegram Ad Platform goes live

“They’re looking for traders, for developers that deploy smart contracts on blockchains, for NFT collectors, for gamers playing blockchain games,” Nadler explained.

Addressable’s platform allows advertisers to target specific Web3 wallets from different EVM chains. Source: Addressable

Nadler gave Cointelegraph a first-hand demo of the Addressable platform, showing how users could filter and target wallets from different Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM chains to build a targeted advertising campaign. The process is similar to adding filters like gender, age and geographic location in conventional advertising platforms.

Addressable’s data visualization includes a geographical breakdown of Web3 wallets in a global format. Source: Addressable

Considering that most Web3 wallets are alphanumeric and anonymous, many advertising platforms cannot target wallet owners. Addressable’s infrastructure combines conventional Web2 information with blockchain data to target a niche but growing sector of the internet:

“We’re connecting wallet owners to social profiles so companies can run targeted advertisement campaigns on Twitter [now X] and display ads to a group of wallets.”

The platform is specifically aimed at serving Web3 companies and clients. Conventional advertising platforms provide customizable targeting, but Nadler said that cryptocurrency-related products and services are typically not relevant to a broad audience on social media platforms like X or Facebook:

“The thing about crypto is most products aren’t a commodity. My mother wouldn’t understand most crypto products. So a tweet on X just flies by anybody who is not native and doesn’t understand that.”

Addressable currently supports seven different Ethereum EVM chains, including BNB, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism and Avalanche.

“The key is that we’re able to collect the data to build wallet profiles and associate them to real-world data so that they’re targetable,” Nadler said.

Related: Telegram channels eligible for 50% ad revenue, but there’s a catch

Addressable’s integration with AppsFlyer provides more utility for the targeted advertising platform. Clients can tap into data from Web3 mobile platforms and target users of these mobile applications.

Nadler said the integration includes data sharing from their platform so that mobile advertisers can get more utility than just an increase in application downloads:

“They can optimize for what drives the wheels into their protocol, what drives people that are spending more crypto on their wallets, on their apps, on their games. It’s an industry milestone.”

AppsFlyer is a specialist mobile marketing tool used by TikTok, Disney, Binance and Crypto.com. It aims to optimize mobile app marketing campaigns with granular attribution data. The partnership is touted to allow Addressable to reach a significant percentage of Web3 mobile applications.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Telegram commits to TON blockchain, plans to support tokenized emojis and stickers NFTs [/INST] Telegram founder Pavel Durov has committed the messaging application's future to blockchain technology, announcing major plans to tokenize features, share ad revenue with users and onboard Tether’s stablecoin at Token2049.

Speaking in front of a packed house in Dubai, Durov sang the praises of blockchain’s ability to promote freedom and privacy before outlining ambition plans to build out functionality on The Open Network (TON).

“The reason we love blockchain. It’s a technology of freedom. We care about freedom. Even our logo, the paper airplane symbolizes freedom to move in three dimensions,” Durov said.

The founder of the app, which reportedly has over 900 million monthly users, said the company strives to give its users the ability to build tools, apps and businesses on Telegram.

Related: TON continues to attract Web3 firms as Telegram Ad Platform goes live

Durov said Telegram has adopted a different approach to monetizing user bases than other major messaging and social media platforms, which sell user data to advertisers. Telegram recently announced plans to share revenue with content generators on its platform through its Ad Network.

Durov described the move as one of the most generous revenue-sharing models in the history of social media. He also said that 50% of the revenue Telegram receives from displaying ads and broadcast channels would be shared with channel owners and content creators using TON’s network:

“All these transactions, the payments for ads, withdrawals of ads are powered by blockchain. We will use the TON blockchain exclusively for that.”

Durov estimates that the advertising market running on blockchain rails could be worth tens of billions of dollars and that users, from owners of large group chats to content creators, will get a decent share of the revenue.

Related: Crypto-like communication devices could break gov’t surveillance — Telegram founder Durov

The use of a blockchain protocol will also allow Telegram to mitigate the limited in-app purchase mechanisms enforced by Apple and Google regarding payment processing.

Despite this, Telegram has allowed app developers and merchants to sell physical goods and services by integrating 40 payment providers, including the likes of Stripe.

Pavel Durov announced plans to allow the tokenization of stickers and emojis on Telegram using the TON blockchain. Source: YouTube

Durov also said that Telegram has already experimented with tokenization, becoming the first social media platform to tokenize its user namespace. According to the founder, this in-platform market generated $350 million in sales and he said that tokenizing other elements of its platform is in the pipeline:

“The next step that we are going to undertake is tokenizing Telegram stickers.”

Durov said that Telegram needs the scalability afforded by TON’s network, which can process tens to hundreds of millions of transactions in the future.

Following Durov’s address at the conference, stablecoin operator Tether announced the launch of U.S. dollar-pegged USDT (USDT) token on the TON network. Tether also unveiled the launch gold-pegged Tether Gold (XAUT) stablecoin on TON.

TON was initially developed by Telegram, but a subsequent legal battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission saw the messaging application abandon its development efforts in May 2020.

A small group of open-source developers then took over the project, which led to the establishment of the TON Foundation in May 2021.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Renzo’s ezETH depegs to $688 following end of airdrop farming window [/INST] Renzo Protocol’s restaked Ether token (EZETH) suffered a price depeg on April 24.

The depegging incident saw the token’s price briefly fall to a low of $688 on Uniswap decentralized exchange, before recovering its price parity with Ether (ETH), according to Dexscreener data.

The incident was likely caused by a wider sell-off, following the conclusion of Renzo Protocol’s season 1 airdrop, according to pseudonymous crypto analyst Tommy, who wrote in an April 24 X post:

“Sell-off likely caused by the conclusion of Season 1 Airdrop, users want to get back $ETH to farm other [liquid restaking tokens] LRT/protocols.”

Renzo is the second-largest liquid restaking protocol, with over $3.3 billion in total value locked (TVL), which rose 126% during the past month. Ether.fi is the largest liquid restaking protocol, with over $3.9 billion in TVL, according to DefiLlama.

Similar depegging incidents are a growing pain for liquid restaking tokens (LRTs), according to the popular crypto analyst:

“On the depeg, it is a risk that we need to recognize for all LRTs, even if withdrawal is enabled, the DEX pool can still depeg simply based on the temporary imbalance.”

The depeg led to mass liquidations on leveraged protocols like Gearbox and Morpho Labs, with loopers, or users who repeatedly use LRTs as collateral to borrow ETH for leverage, suffering the biggest losses, according to the analyst.

Renzo protocol has fostered increased interest after its incoming token (REZ) was added to the Binance launch pool on April 23, the same day the protocol announced its incoming airdrop.

Renzo allocated 10% of its token allocation to the season 1 airdrop.

Related: Hong Kong Bitcoin and Ether ETFs officially approved to start trading on April 30

Trader profits nearly $400,000 in two hours on ezETH depeg

Crypto trader czsamsunsb.eth made a profit of 121.65 ETH, worth over $396,000, in just two hours after Renzo’s depegging incident, according to on-chain intelligence firm Lookonchain, that wrote in an April 24 X post:

“czsamsunsb.eth made 121.65 $ETH in just 2 hours after $EZETH (Renzo Restaked ETH) depegged! He spent 4,099 $ETH to buy 4,221 $EZETH successfully, making 121.65 $ETH!”

Czsamsunsb.eth trading history. Source: Lookonchain

Related: ‘Money-hungry VCs’ are bad for token launches in the long term — Analyst"
"[INST] Crypto ATMs to resurge once Bitcoin ‘FOMO’ hits full swing, says CEO [/INST] Bitcoin ATMs will likely see a global acceleration in installations after the Bitcoin halving, a period when crypto FOMO (fear of missing out) typically hits a fever pitch, according to the boss of a major Bitcoin ATM operator.

In 2023, crypto ATM installs had their first-ever yearly decline in a decade, owing to a bear market likely exacerbated by the collapse of several crypto firms.

However, Bitcoin Depot CEO Brandon Mintz notes that 2024 has already started with a bang, with 1,469 crypto ATMs installed in just the first three months, compared to the over 3,000 removed by around the same time in 2023, according to data from CoinATMRadar.

“It’s looking really positive that the industry continues to see a lot of growth in kiosk count,” Bitcoin Depot CEO Brandon Mintz told Cointelegraph.

Over 400 ATMs have been installed between March 1 and March 27. Source: CoinATMRadar

Mintz is now tipping an industry-wide ATM rebound with Bitcoin (BTC) back in swing, which has already twice beaten its all-time high in March.

In past bull markets, Mintz noted that “later in the cycle, especially that period of FOMO that starts happening,” is when crypto adoption surges and, with it, brings more customers.

“The adoption rate is really helpful because if more people are buying Bitcoin, then a portion of those are likely going to Bitcoin ATMs.”

That, however, typically comes later in the cycle and “it’s still pretty early,” according to Mintz.

“We aren’t even at the halving yet,” he said, mentioning the event slated for late April when Bitcoin’s mining rewards are cut 50%.

“In the past, more of the uptick we’ve seen has been after the halving,” he added. “After the halving is when the price skyrockets the most, and that’s when the FOMO phase starts.”

While the ATM count has recently climbed, Mintz claims over the past 18 months, the number of ATM operators has dropped. One of the largest was the 5,000 ATM-strong operator Coin Cloud, which went bankrupt in February 2023.

“A lot more of them were struggling and went out of business than was shown publicly,” he said.

The drop “happened pretty quickly” after crypto exchange FTX collapsed in November 2022 and took the crypto market with it, he added.

Bitcoin Depot’s fourth quarter and full 2023 results released on March 25 saw full-year revenues up 7% year-on-year to $689 million, though net income dropped 54% to $1.6 million.

It also bought 900 ATMs to install in the first quarter of 2024 and has plans for 940 ATMs to go live in convenience stores in 24 United States states.

According to CoinATMRadar, the Bitcoin ATM operator shares the market with a small number of other operators. The runner-up rival operator Coinflip has just over half that with over 4,200, while Bitstop is third with over 2,500.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs are no bother

Of the 37,001 crypto ATMs in the world, the United States is home to nearly 83% of them, with over 30,600, per CoinATMRadar.

In January, the U.S. also approved spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which some have hailed as an adoption catalyst for institutions and retail punters looking to get into Bitcoin.

Mintz was unshaken by what impact the ETFs could have on Bitcoin ATMs. “We view it as a totally different customer base,” he said.

Related: Bitcoin ATM flaw could’ve given hackers ‘total control’

“A large portion of our customer base transacts primarily in cash or only in cash because they’re underbanked or unbanked,” he added.

On the other hand, Bitcoin ETF buyers are “more high-income individuals with brokerages and brokers.”

“[The] vast majority of all of our customers make less than $90,000 to $100,000 a year, so our customer base is not that likely to have a brokerage account or a broker and has not been likely to have just been sitting on the sidelines waiting for [an ETF] when it’s so easy to just buy through a Bitcoin ATM,” Mintz said.

Instead, he thinks the ETFs driving Bitcoin’s price higher could mean more ATM usage as Bitcoin adoption climbs.

“If adoption increases, we think it likely translates to increased usage of Bitcoin ATMs. So in the grand scheme of things, I think it is way more helpful to us in our industry than it is in terms of impacting us in a negative way.”

Big Questions: How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?"
"[INST] GameFi ecosystem makes a comeback amid surging crypto prices [/INST] After a dormant 2022 and much-muted 2023, GameFi projects are making a comeback as the bull market rages.

This week, move-to-earn protocol StepN announced it would partner with Adidas for a 1,000 Genesis Edition nonfungible tokens (NFT) drop on Solana. The launch is part of an ongoing one-year partnership between the two firms that will see a mixture of NFTs and wearable sneaker releases in the future. Each NFT sneaker from Genesis Edition will be valued at 10,000 GMT ($2,200).

Created by FSL in 2021, StepN allows users to earn rewards for walking, jogging, or running. Rewards are available after users purchase a virtual Sneaker NFT and link their smartphones. By interacting with the app, users earn GMT tokens, which have an inflationary mechanism, a supply cap of 6 billion and a current diluted market capitalization of $1.2 billion.

""Partnership between the most widely used lifestyle app and a global brand like Adidas are now a reality indicates the direction lifestyle rewards are going,” commented Shiti Manghani, CEO of StepN. Last week, the move-to-earn protocol also announced a $30 million airdrop for its loyal users.

StepN's NFT sneaker mechanics

For other protocols, it's more about the hardware.

Earlier this month, Ordz Games revealed its first Web3 handheld gaming device, “BitBoy One.” Inspired by the first-generation Nintendo GameBoy from 1989, the device allows players to earn Bitcoin (BTC) via retro-style games.

“Through BitBoy’s native applications connected to the Bitcoin blockchain, users can play a wide variety of video games that are forever inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain as ordinals,” wrote Ordz Games staff. “Choices range from HTML games to on-chain emulators and ROM,” they added. Both Bluetooth and WiFi are supported for multiplayer activity.

In addition, every BitBoy device comes bundled with a one-to-one 3D rendering of the physical device in the form of ordinal inscriptions, which can then be viewed on a VR device such as Apple Vision Pro. The device saw its official unveiling at Paris Blockchain Week.

The BitBoy One game device (X)

Other projects have shifted their attention to video games.

ARPG Seraph: In the Darkness, built on Arbitrum and developed by Seraph Studio, recently achieved sales of over 11,000 Ether (ETH) through multiple in-game NFT sales consisting of heroes, priority passes, gear, and others. Seraph Studio is backed by Korean gaming giant Actoz Soft. Set for pre-season launch on April 19, the game features a dark medieval setting where players can customize their heroes, battle monsters, and earn loot.

The game has teased upcoming features in its pre-season that allow players to rent their in-game NFT equipment to earn rewards as well as discoverable treasure NFTs.

Seraph: In the Darkness has been in development since 2021, with a total of $8 million spent on operations and research. During this time, developers have also been incorporating new technologies, with features such as multiplayer AI companionship available in the final release. The game is scheduled for launch on PC, iOS, and Android.

In the Darkness blockchain gameplay

As per data from DappRadar, the number of unique active wallets in GameFi has more than doubled over the past year to 2.54 million. Last December, gaming studio founders Yat Siu and Johnson Yeh predicted that “tens of millions” of players would enter Web3 gaming this year. Despite their enthusiasm, GameFi projects have also been criticized for prioritizing the “finance” aspect of gaming over fun, with several notable collapses in the past year.

Related: Is GameFi subject to the same market forces as the traditional game industry?"
"[INST] Binance exec’s legal case in Nigeria adjourned until April 19 [/INST] Tigran Gambaryan, a United States-based executive for cryptocurrency exchange Binance who faces tax evasion charges in Nigeria, has reportedly had his case adjourned until April 19.

According to an April 4 Bloomberg report, Gambaryan will remain in Nigerian custody as authorities move forward with charges against the cryptocurrency exchange and two executives, but his case has been adjourned for two weeks. Gambaryan came to Nigeria with Binance executive Nadeem Anjarwalla in February following claims the exchange manipulated the country’s fiat currency, the naira.

Binance announced on March 5 that it intended to cease all naira transactions, effectively exiting the market for Nigerian users. Gambaryan and Anjarwalla — in Nigeria at the time of the announcement — were detained by authorities. Reports suggested that they face charges which include tax evasion and money laundering.

Related: Binance forms board of directors for the first time

Nigeria officials have moved forward with charges against the exchange — reportedly adjourned until April 8 — and Gambaryan, but Anjarwalla reportedly escaped custody on March 22 and was able to board a flight out of the capital, Abuja. Gambaryan’s wife has launched a petition to bring him back to the U.S., which had 1,719 signatures at the time of publication.

“It is deeply ironic that he is being charged with the crimes he spent his life fighting,” said Yuki Gambaryan in her petition. “My husband is an innocent man, a pawn in someone else’s game.”

In an April 3 blog post, Binance said Gambaryan had “no decision-making power in the company” and requested he not be held responsible for the exchange’s activities in Nigeria. Cointelegraph reached out to Binance for comment but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao remains in the U.S. after pleading guilty to one felony count as part of a $4.3-billion settlement with authorities. He is expected to be sentenced on April 30.

Magazine: Lawmakers’ fear and doubt drives proposed crypto regulations in US"
"[INST] Bitcoin halving price influence ‘diminished,’ demand now key driver — CryptoQuant [/INST] The supply shock of the Bitcoin halving won’t impact the price of Bitcoin as much as many investors anticipate, according to a new research report from crypto analytics firm CryptoQuant.

“We argue that the effect of the halving has been diminishing, as the new issuance of Bitcoin gets smaller relative to the amount of Bitcoin selling from long-term holders,” CryptoQuant wrote in an April 9 research report viewed by Cointelegraph.

Instead, the “key driver” affecting the price of Bitcoin (BTC) following the halving this time will be the increase in demand from investors with sizeable holdings of Bitcoin.

Demand from whales holding between 1,000 and 10,000 Bitcoin has grown to “around its highest ever,” seeing 11% growth month-on-month, writes CryptoQuant.

The total amount of wallet addresses holding 1,000–10,000 Bitcoin is significantly increasing. Source: CryptoQuant

While the Bitcoin halving reduces supply — typically putting upward pressure on Bitcoin’s price — there have been a few instances between 2021 and 2023 where the monthly demand from long-term holders has exceeded the supply within the same timeframe.

However, the current gap between them is much larger than ever, suggesting that with an ongoing monthly supply deficit, the halving’s effect on Bitcoin price action might not be as powerful as it has been in the past.

Long-term holders are now accumulating about seven times more Bitcoin per month than new Bitcoin entering circulation.

“Permanent holders are adding as much as 200K Bitcoin per month to their balances, much more than the ~28K Bitcoin issuance. Bitcoin monthly issuance will decrease to ~14K after the halving,” it stated.

Furthermore, the total issuance of Bitcoin plummeted to only 4% of the total available supply, a significantly smaller proportion compared to before previous Bitcoin halvings.

“Issuance represented 69%, 27%, and 10% of total Bitcoin available supply previous to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd halving,” CryptoQuant wrote.

Bitcoin monthly issuance has diminished to 4% of the total Bitcoin available supply. Source: CryptoQuant

After the 2016 halving, the price of Bitcoin increased by about 4,200% to $19,800, and after the 2020 halving, the price of Bitcoin increased by almost 683% to $69,000.

The Bitcoin halving event is when Bitcoin miner rewards are cut in half. The upcoming halving will reduce block rewards from 6.25 Bitcoin to 3.125 Bitcoin.

At the time of publication, Bitcoin’s price is $68,764, representing a 7.12% increase over the past five days, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Related: Bitcoin's halving won't see a 600% return this year — so adjust your strategy

However, other indicators suggest that investors remain optimistic that the upcoming Bitcoin halving — currently slated for April 20 — will be a major catalyst for Bitcoin’s price to rise higher.

Open interest (OI) in Bitcoin is currently at $78.36 billion, just 11 days away from the halving, according to CoinGlass data. This is roughly 30 times higher than the OI volume recorded 11 days before the previous halving in May 2020, which stood at $2.61 billion.

OI measures the total value of all outstanding or unsettled Bitcoin futures contracts across exchanges. An uptick in value suggests heightened market activity and trader sentiment.

Pseudonymous trader Rekt Capital suggested to his 447,000 followers on X that any price dip in Bitcoin between now and the halving is likely to bounce back quickly.

“Do you realize whatever downside Bitcoin experiences before the halving, if any, will be the very last bargain-buying opportunity in the 2024 pre-halving period ever?” Rekt declared in an April 9 post on X.

Magazine: China will intensify Bitcoin bull run, $1M by 2028: Bitcoin Man, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Binance executive tracked to Kenya, extradition underway [/INST] The Nigerian Government has traced Binance executive Nadeem Arjarwalla to Kenya following his escape from custody and is currently taking steps to extradite him back to Nigeria.

According to a report from local media outlet Punch, sources from within the office of the Nigerian presidency disclosed that Arjarwalla went into hiding once he arrived in Kenya.

The Nigerian government is collaborating with Interpol and Kenyan police to bring Arjarwalla back to Nigeria to face charges leveled against him.

Anjarwalla arrived in Nigeria in February following claims that the exchange manipulated the country’s fiat currency, the Nigerian naira. Arjarwalla was detained alongside another Binance executive after a meeting with the Nigerian government.

The county’s Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) heads up the investigation and slammed the exchange and its two executives with five counts bordering on money laundering. However, Anjarwalla reportedly escaped custody on March 22 and was able to board a flight out of the Nigerian capital, Abuja.

Anjarwalla reportedly flew out of Abuja on a Middle East airline. However, it is unclear how he managed to board the international flight, as his United Kingdom passport, with which he entered Nigeria, remains in the custody of the Nigerian authorities.

Related: Nigeria’s government is blaming Binance for its own mismanagement

According to an immigration official, the Binance executive fled Nigeria on a Kenyan passport, and authorities are now trying to determine how Anjarwalla acquired the passport, as he had no other travel documents while in custody.

While Arjarwalla remains out of the country, the other Binance executive, Tigran Gambaryan, pleaded not guilty to the charges, with his wife and others calling for his release after several weeks in detention. Gambaryan’s wife has launched a petition to bring him back to the United States, which had 3,373 signatures at the time of publication. However, Gambaryan’s case has been adjourned until April 19.

On March 5, Binance announced that it intended to cease all naira transactions, effectively exiting the market. Binance also mentioned that Binance’s peer-to-peer platform delisted all naira trading pairs in late February.

On Feb. 27, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria argued that crypto exchanges in Nigeria were suspected of handling illicit transactions, also pointing to “suspicious flows” of funds at Binance.

Magazine: SBF gets 25 years in prison, Fidelity eyes ETH staking, and Coinbase’s court loss: Hodler’s Digest, March 24-30"
"[INST] Crypto VC sees a ‘new class’ of profitable memecoins this cycle [/INST] Memecoins that can capitalize on deeper “culture” this cycle could be far more profitable than standard meme tokens based on animals and simple jokes, according to Mechanism Capital co-founder Andrew Kang.

In an April 7 post to X, Kang said a new class of “culture coins” — memecoins centered around cultural values such as politics, brands, religion and lifestyle — have the capacity to be far more “viral” than the popular memecoins of the last cycle such as Dogecoin (DOGE) or Shiba Inu (SHIB).

“Communities with strong values and identities naturally try to convert others to their beliefs and publicly display what it is they love about their lifestyle. They are inherently viral.”

“The ideologies of these communities can be purely about politics, religion, consumer goods, sport, way of life or can be a mixture of all,” added Kang.

Kang noted two specific Solana-based memecoins — Jeo Boden (BODEN) and Doland Tremp (TREMP) — as recent examples of culture coins that grew rapidly out of communities harboring “anti-woke, anti-Biden, and right-wing views.”

BODEN has grown massively since its launch on March 9, posting gains of well over 700,000% since inception. At time time of publication, BODEN boasts a market capitalization of $473 million and stands as the 191st-largest token by total value, per CoinGecko data.

Boden price action since inception. Source: CoinGecko

The Donald Trump parody coin TREMP has also posted significant gains since its launch on Feb. 27 but didn’t gain as much traction as BODEN. It currently touts a market cap of $73 million, per Birdeye data.

Outside of politics, Kang suggested memecoins that draw their likeness from successful consumer brands — specifically naming ZYN and MOUTAI as his firm’s investments — could ride on the coattails of brands in a “circular economy” of gains.

“Compared to animal coins, coins that represent consumer brands can have the additional advantage of leveraging the associated lifestyle of that brand for added virality,” Kang added.

Related: ZachXBT won’t assist after memecoin devs throw tokenholders under the bus

Overall, Kang suggested that the decision to invest in memecoins wasn’t too far from investing in regular assets that achieve outsized returns.

“The assets that pump the hardest (stocks, real estate, metals, coins, etc) are simply assets that people can best believe in,” he said.

However, crypto industry pundits remain divided on the impact of memecoins on the sector.

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes believes memecoins are a “net positive” for their respective blockchain networks. In contrast, others say they’re a dangerous, speculative mess that betrays the founding principles of blockchain technology.

Regardless of their effect on the ecosystem, memecoins have established themselves as the most profitable sector within crypto for the first quarter of this year.

According to a market report from CoinGecko, the 10 largest memecoins recorded an average gain of 1,312.6% for holders in Q1 2024.

“The memecoin narrative was 4.6 times more profitable than the next best-performing crypto narrative of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) and 33.3 times more profitable than the layer 2 narratives with the lowest returns in Q1 this year,” said CoinGecko analyst Lim Yu Qian.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] $102M shorts liquidated as Bitcoin price surpassed $72K [/INST] Over $102 million worth of leveraged short positions were liquidated in the past 24 hours as Bitcoin (BTC) was trading above $70,400. Is the breakout from BTC’s weekly price range confirmed?

Over $33 million worth of Bitcoin shorts liquidated

Following April 8’s weekly high of $72,668, Bitcoin price retraced to trade above the $70,413 mark, falling 0.55% in the 24 hours leading up to 9:45 am UTC, according to CoinMarketCap data.

BTC/USD, 1-day chart, Source: CoinMarketCap

Following BTC’s rise to its weekly high, over $102 million worth of leveraged short positions were liquidated in the cryptocurrency market during the past 24 hours, with a total of $186.8 million worth of total liquidations, according to Coinglass data.

Liquidation heatmap, 24 hours. Source: Coinglass

BTC liquidations totaled $61.6 million, with over $33.9 million in short positions and $27.7 million leveraged longs. The largest single liquidation order amounted to $4.49 million worth of Bitcoin on Binance, the world’s largest exchange.

Total liquidations, 24 hours. Source: Coinglass

However, the $33 million worth of short Bitcoin liquidations is lower than the $38 million short liquidations on April 2. Moreover, BTC’s sudden 5% drawdown on April 2 liquidated $165 million of leverage in less than two hours.

BTC futures short liquidations, all exchanges. Source: Glassnode

Now, if BTC’s price rallies back to $73,000, over $507 million worth of cumulative short leverage would be liquidated on Binance. Cumulative short liquidations on Binance would reach $666 million at $73,500.

Binance BTC/USDT liquidation map. Source: Coinglass

Traders should also watch the $73,000 level — around the current all-time high — which now acts as significant resistance and a potential short-liquidation zone for the BTC price.

BTC/USDT liquidation map. Source: Coinglass

Related: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall after halving

Following the liquidations, the Bitcoin futures funding rate saw a healthy reset, falling to 0.0163% on April 9, almost three times lower than the previous day. However, this is still significantly lower than the three-week high of 0.0714% on April 1.

BTC OI-weighted funding rate. Source: Coinglass

Bitcoin price breakout confirmed

Now, Bitcoin price has successfully retested the old all-time high of $69,000, breaking out of the weekly range, which was needed to confirm future bullish momentum, according to an April 7 X post by popular crypto analyst Rekt Capital.

In a subsequent post, the analyst wrote:

“Bitcoin Daily Closed above the ~$69,000 level yesterday. And today Bitcoin is enjoying good upside.”

BTC/USD, 1-day chart. Source: Rekt Capital

Bitcoin’s latest price rally can mainly be attributed to the inflows from spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds and the anticipation surrounding the upcoming Bitcoin halving, according to Matteo Greco, research analyst at digital asset firm Fineqia.

Greco expects a sustained Bitcoin rally following the halving, which could last well into the second quarter of 2025. He told Cointelegraph:

“Historically, BTC halving events have marked significant points followed by 9–18 months of uptrend, culminating in cycle peaks. [...] If historical patterns repeat, we may witness an uptrend for the remaining nine months of 2024, leading to a cycle peak expected between Q4 2024 and Q2 2025.”

Related: Bitcoin’s 2028 halving price target is $435K, historical data suggests

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Polygon CEO says L3s are taking value away from Ethereum, sparking debate [/INST] Polygon CEO Marc Boiron riled up the debate on X over the weekend after arguing that layer-3 networks aren’t necessary to scale Ethereum and exist only to rob the mainnet of value.

On April 1, the Polygon CEO said that Polygon Labs, a layer-2 scaling network for Ethereum, does not work on layer 3s because they are not needed to scale existing networks.

“L3s exist only to take value away from Ethereum and onto the L2s on which the L3s are built,” he said.

However, Boiron’s comments didn’t go unchallenged. One respondent commented that layer-2s on Ethereum “ARE value on Ethereum,” to which Boiron replied in partial agreement, adding:

“I disagree that L2 value is Ethereum value. Just take this to the extreme. If all L3s settled to one L2, then Ethereum would capture basically no value and, thus, Ethereum security would be at risk.”

“Also, we don’t care what people do. They can build L3s on anything, including Polygon networks,” he continued, adding: “We just aren’t trying to suck all value onto Polygon networks instead of sharing with Ethereum its fair share.”

Boiron added that Polygon’s mission was to scale Ethereum when nobody else did it, when the right tech was ready, using parallelization of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and with privacy. He argued that “L3s are not consistent with that mission.”

Layer-3 protocols are built on top of L2s to host application-specific decentralized applications, providing a range of solutions for scaling, performance, interoperability, customization and costs.

Current leading players in the L3 ecosystem and solutions from L2 networks include Orbs, Xai, zkSync Hyperchains and the recently launched Degen Chain on Arbitrum Orbit. However, the sector is still small by comparison, with only four L3 tokens listed by CoinGecko.

Related: You can now deploy your own L3 rollup for $50 a month

Meanwhile, the senior partnership manager at Offchain Labs, Peter Haymond, argued that there were many benefits to L3s that don’t take value from Ethereum.

The low cost of native bridging from L2 rather than L1, the low cost of proving on-chain, custom gas tokens, and specialized state transition functions were among some of them.

Arbitrum Foundation researcher Patrick McCorry said he was surprised by Boiron’s take, adding:

“L3s seem like a no-brainer, especially when it allows the L2 to eventually become a settlement layer (ie executing the bridge is cheaper) and ultimately relying on Ethereum as global ordering service + final judge of settlement.”

On March 31, Helus Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz appeared to agree with Marc Boiron in a separate post on X, stating that “L3s are basically centralized servers settling on other centralized servers (L2s) — controlled by multisigs.”

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin ignited the L3 debate in late 2022 when he said that layer-3s will serve a different purpose to scaling by providing “customized functionality.” A third layer on the blockchain makes sense only if it provides a different function to layer-2s, he said at the time.

Magazine: Big Questions: What did Satoshi Nakamoto think about ZK-proofs?"
"[INST] Google sues alleged China crypto app racketeers: Report [/INST] Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has filed a lawsuit against two people based in China for using the company’s platform for scam cryptocurrency apps that amassed over 100,000 downloads.

Alphabet claims that scammers used its platforms, Google Play and YouTube, to upload and advertise fraudulent crypto apps.

The online giant alleges that the defendants engaged in a pattern of racketeering after committing hundreds of acts of wire fraud. The lawsuit was filed Thursday, April 4, in a federal court in New York, according to an April 4 Bloomberg report.

The scam apps were designed to look like genuine digital asset investments aiming to persuade users to deposit their funds, which users could never withdraw.

Despite Google continually removing fraudulent apps, many have bypassed its fraud detection systems. The two scammers first started uploading the racketeering apps in 2019.

The lawsuit is a crucial step for safeguarding the platform’s users, wrote Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s general counsel:

“This litigation is a critical step in holding these bad actors accountable and sending a clear message that we will aggressively pursue those who seek to take advantage of our users.”

Related: Funds hacked in 2024 increased by 15.4% vs. the same period in 2023 — Immunefi

Crypto phishing scams up 50% in March

Approximately $71 million was lost to phishing scammers in March across all chains from 77,529 victims, which is a 50% increase compared to February, according to an April 2 X post by Scam Sniffer.

Stolen funds from crypto scams in March. Source: Scam Sniffer

A total of $173 million worth of digital assets were lost to phishing scams in the first quarter of 2024, with 90% of the stolen assets being ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum network.

Phishing scams are a form of social engineering scams where attackers convince victims to share sensitive information or install malicious software of their own accord.

Hacks and exploits have been a growing concern in the crypto industry, especially for decentralized finance applications. A total of $1.8 billion was lost to crypto hacks and scammers in 2023, of which 17% can be attributed to the North Korean Lazarus Group, according to a Dec. 28 report by Immunefi.

Related: Crypto.com expands in South Korea despite increasing regulatory scrutiny"
"[INST] USDT aims to offer a lifeline to inflation-stricken nations: Tether CEO [/INST] The main purpose of the world’s largest stablecoin, Tether USD (USDT), is to help people in inflation-stricken economies protect their purchasing power, according to Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino.

In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Ardoino said Tether’s main focus is to help the unbanked population who don’t have access to traditional banking gain access to USDT.

“[USDT] is a tool that helps people in places that have been forgotten by the banking industry. These 300 million people are of no interest to the banking industry. These are great people, but they cannot be onboarded by the banking industry because they are too poor to be of interest.”

Rampant inflation is forcing people in emerging economies to increasingly look for external financial alternatives, such as the U.S. dollar. This issue is especially pressing in Argentina, where the national currency lost 98% of its value against the dollar, according to Ardoino.

“What you want to do if you live in Argentina is to buy the U.S. dollar… We think about USDT as the tool that is helping people. So we have to be so focused on making it the safest that it can be. That's why we have T-bills, gold, and Bitcoin. But now our approach is to be 100% in T-bills in the next few quarters.”

Related: Tether USDT stablecoin goes live on TON blockchain

Tether is the world’s largest stablecoin with an over $109 billion market capitalization, compared to Circle’s USDC, with a $33 billion market cap in the second place, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Ardoino attributes Tether’s success to finding the right market fit, which is people who need access to financial services and U.S. dollars. In contrast, other stablecoin issuers are trying to sell their services to the legacy banking industry. The CEO explained:

“So our biggest competitors focus on the banking industry as their customers. But the banking industry has already the best, the best access to the dollar. They have credit cards, debit cards, and banking rails. They work in jurisdictions like Europe and the U.S. where people don't need stablecoins.”

Stablecoin usage in Europe and the United States is “approaching zero,” explained Ardoino, adding that serving the world’s unbanked will remain a top priority for the stablecoin issuer:

“The people that need a stablecoin are the ones that live in emerging markets. And these people need stability. They need to know that whatever happens, they can redeem for $1.”

Tether completed the ‘gold standard’ security audit, the System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC) audit on April 1, This represents the highest level of security compliance that an organization can demonstrate.

Related: BlackRock ETF close to overtaking Grayscale, despite second-lowest daily inflows"
"[INST] Crypto.com’s South Korea launch hit by regulatory roadblock [/INST] Singapore-based crypto exchange Crypto.com decided to postpone its South Korea launch after regulators pointed out money laundering anomalies in the platform’s data.

South Korean authorities found Anti-Money Laundering (AML)-related problems in the data submitted by Crypto.com and launched an “emergency on-site inspection” to monitor the crypto exchange’s activities. An official representing the Financial Services Commission (FSC) told local media Segye Ilbo:

“We found concerns related to the prevention of money laundering activities in the submitted materials.”

The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), which operates under the South Korean FSC, launched an emergency on-site inspection on April 23, just six days before the exchange’s planned launch in the region.

Crypto.com previously obtained a domestic virtual asset business license (VASP) in South Korea after acquiring a local crypto exchange named OKBit.

The company later confirmed that it would delay the upcoming launch due on April 29 and work with the regulators to explain the AML measures it has set in place.

“Korea is a difficult market for international exchanges to enter, but we are committed to working with regulators to advance the industry responsibly for Koreans.”

“We will postpone our launch and take this opportunity to make sure Korean regulators understand our thorough policies, procedures, systems and controls,” the Crypto.com spokesperson added.

Related: Upbit suspends crypto transactions exceeding 1 million won

South Korean financial authorities have also planned to prohibit listing digital assets with hacking incidents on domestic exchanges unless the root cause is thoroughly determined through new guidelines in the near future.

The upcoming regulations will also require all foreign digital assets to publish a white paper or technical manual for the South Korean market before being listed. However, tokens listed on a licensed exchange for over two years may not need to meet these new criteria.

Token issuers that fail to adequately disclose essential information will be subject to getting delisted from exchanges. Since the latter part of 2023, the Financial Supervisory Service has been formulating listing guidelines by soliciting feedback from stakeholders such as the Digital Asset Exchange Association.

Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis"
"[INST] Japan’s Sony Bank tests yen-backed stablecoin for gaming and sports IP payments [/INST] Japan’s Sony Bank — the financial business unit of the Sony Group Corporation — said it has begun experimenting with issuing its own stablecoin pegged to fiat currencies, such as the Japanese yen.

According to a report from local media outlet Nikkei on April 4, the trial is set to occur on the Polygon blockchain and in collaboration with the Belgium-based blockchain company SettleMint.

The reports were confirmed by Jun Watanabe, the president and representative director of Sony Network Communications, in a post on X.

Sony Bank said it will assess any legal issues that may be tied to transferring yen-backed stablecoins. It anticipates these experiments will stretch out over the next few months.

The banking firm said by utilizing stablecoins, it could potentially take advantage of lower fees for individuals when sending money and making payments.

It also said it would consider it as a form of payment for businesses that use intellectual property (IP) owned by the Sony Group, including games and sports.

The Sony Group has recently been experimenting with incorporating other Web3 technologies in its operations, as its video game division filed a patent in March 2023 to adopt nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in an initiative it called “NFT framework for transferring and using Digital Assets between game platforms.”

This move was in an effort to provide its gamers with more opportunities associated with their in-game assets.

Related: Sony developed an AI system to create fantasy NPC personas from dialogue

In September 2023, Sony Network Communications entered into a venture with Singapore-based Web3 infrastructure developer Startale Labs to build Sony’s own blockchain network.

At the time, Watanabe said the company aspires to create a global infrastructure that “underpins the Web3 era” and drives innovation across existing industries. The blockchain is anticipated to launch sometime in 2024.

In a post on X on April 5, Watanabe said that the fastest way to onboard “billions” into Web3 is to work with existing assets.

Japan, Sony’s home country, has also been leaning into the Web3 community in the last year. In February, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said that it is aiming to increase strategic domestic investments into Web3 startups by allowing limited partnership firms to acquire and hold crypto assets.

Magazine: Google sues crypto app scammers, Crypto.com in Korea: Asia Express"
"[INST] Institutional adoption in blockchain and crypto at its highest point, says Blockdaemon strategist [/INST] Blockdaemon’s Barnaby Hodgkins recently sounded off on the future of the blockchain/cryptocurrency sector at the Token2049 event on April 20 in Dubai.

Despite a freak storm delivering the most rainfall the United Arab Emirates has seen in some 75 years, attendees were able to brave the weather.

Hodgkins, Blockdaemon’s Senior Manager of Growth Strategy, sat down with Cointelegraph’s Ezra Reguerra to discuss the current state of the industry as well as what to expect going forward.

As to the current state of the industry, Hodgkins says there’s still room for growth:

“I would probably say that institutional adoption in the space is at its highest point it's ever been, but I wouldn't mistake that with saying that there's loads of institutional adoption.”

He expanded, adding that there was work yet to be done, “It's the highest it's ever been and as a result there's a lot of reason to be bullish around what's happening.”

Hodgkins cited the launch of the first Bitcoin spot ETFs in January and their ensuing adoption rates as bullish indicators. But there appears to be plenty of runway left for adoption:

“When it comes to wide scale adoption in institutions across the spectrum of institutions, from asset managers to pension funds, to hedge funds, to sovereign wealth funds, I think we're still very much at the foot of the hill.”

Blockdaemon, and by extension its growth manager, Hodgkins, are well positioned to garner a bird’s eye view of the blockchain industry. The company, according to Hodgkins, is “the world's leading Blockchain infrastructure provider.”

Its services span “the entire spectrum of infrastructure needs from dedicated node access, API access ability, to run validators and staking rewards, all the way through to MPC wallet technology.”

Hodgkins says the next few cycles could produce even more industry-changing events. “What we might see in the near future is, potentially, an Ethereum ETF,” he told Cointelegraph, adding that the myriad use cases for blockchain and cryptocurrency technology could lead to mass adoption by industries such as the automotive and transportation sectors.

Related: What are memecoins good for? Social signaling, says Avalanche founder"
"[INST] KuCoin says user assets are unaffected by US SDNY indictment [/INST] Cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin claims that its users’ assets are safe amid a series of criminal and civil allegations filed by United States Southern District of New York (SDNY) prosecutors and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on March 26.

“KuCoin is operating well, and the assets of our users are absolutely safe,” the exchange wrote. “We are aware of the related reports and are currently investigating the details through our lawyers. KuCoin respect the laws and regulations of various countries and strictly adheres to compliance standards.” Just hours later, the exchange posted another tweet, appearing unfazed by March 26’s novel allegations:

“You mean KuCoin? That’s where I found my 100x CryptoGems.”

At the same time, KuCoin’s native token, KuCoin Token (KCS), has lost 12% of its value over the past 24 hours and is currently trading at $12.64 at the time of publication. Earlier in the day, the U.S. SDNY announced criminal charges against KuCoin co-founders Chun Gan and Ke Tang, both Chinese nationals. The two are accused of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business and “conspiring to violate the Bank Secrecy Act by willfully failing to maintain an adequate anti-money laundering (‘AML’) program.”

As told by prosecutors, despite having substantial operations in the U.S., KuCoin did not register with the CFTC or the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as a proper money transmitter. In addition, despite its alleged facade of compliance with U.S. regulations, the exchange onboarded U.S. users without prior licensing, and they accounted for more than 18% of the exchange’s user base in 2018.

“Since its founding in 2017, KuCoin has received over $5 billion, and sent over $4 billion, of suspicious and criminal proceeds,” prosecutors wrote. “In other words, KuCoin’s no-KYC policy was integral to its growth and success.”

According to the parallel CFTC complaint, KuCoin “offered and executed commodity derivatives and leveraged, margined, or financed commodity transactions to and for people in the U.S. from approximately July 2019 to approximately June 2023, and failed to implement required know-your-customer (KYC) compliance procedures.” The CFTC alleged that KuCoin imposed no IP verification procedures to block U.S. users’ access during this time.

Both criminal and civil proceedings are ongoing, and its co-founders, Chun Gan and Ke Tang, remain at large. Despite the complaints, neither prosecutors nor regulators alleged KuCoin mismanaged users’ assets.

Related: KuCoin responds to claims of user funds being locked"
"[INST] Logan Paul denies CryptoZoo scam, Munchables boosts security: Nifty Newsletter [/INST] In this week’s newsletter, read about a new documentary where YouTuber Logan Paul talked about his controversial nonfungible token (NFT) project CryptoZoo. Check out OpenSea enabling support for ERC-721C and how the crypto game Munchables is recovering after a hack. And find out how a Web3 game gets listed in the Epic Games Store.

YouTuber Logan Paul argues CryptoZoo “isn’t a scam” in new documentary

In a video documentary published on March 28, YouTuber Logan Paul attempted to lay down his side of the story about the controversial NFT project CryptoZoo. The internet celebrity argued that the NFT project was not a scam because he also lost money.

Furthermore, Paul also said in the documentary that the CryptoZoo saga is “far from over” because he was painted as a villain in a “one-sided story.”

Paul received criticism for endorsing the project, which never took off, leading to disgruntled investors filing a class-action lawsuit against him.

Continue reading

OpenSea enables support for ERC-721C programmable earnings standard

NFT marketplace OpenSea enabled a royalty enforcement tool within its trading platform. On April 2, the NFT marketplace announced that it added support for the ERC-721C token standard, which lets creators set royalties on their collections and enforce them.

Before the token standard, users could bypass creator royalty commissions on secondary markets using platforms that did not honor royalty requirements. However, the new token standard ensures that creators would be able to secure their earnings.

Continue reading

Munchables reworks multisig, contracts and dev hiring after $68 million theft

After the NFT game Munchables lost and recovered millions from a rogue developer, the platform announced a plan to avoid a similar incident happening again. The project highlighted that it had restructured its team completely and brought in entities to help upgrade its security.

The NFT game also reworked its multisig, onboarding Manifold Trading, Selini Capital and ZachXBT as signers to ensure that funds will be returned to users.

Continue reading

Web3 game Wilder World gets Epic Game Store listing during alpha testing

Web3 game Wilder World has been listed on the Epic Games Store before its launch. The metaverse game aims to offer a free-roam virtual world, adds Web3 elements like NFTs, and is built on top of a blockchain.

The project is working with Polygon and Celestia to build a custom, scalable blockchain hosting the virtual world. The game also highlighted that all the items, lands, equipment and avatars within the game will be tradable digital assets in its marketplace.

Continue reading

Thanks for reading this digest of the week’s most notable developments in the NFT space. Come again next Wednesday for more reports and insights into this actively evolving space."
"[INST] Ripple contests $2B SEC fine, says penalty shouldn’t exceed $10M [/INST] Cross-border payment protocol Ripple contested the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) request to impose a $2 billion fine against the blockchain company, saying the penalty should not exceed $10 million.

In a new filing, Ripple Labs opposed the SEC’s request to a federal judge to impose the almost $2 billion fine on the company. Ripple urged the court to deny the SEC’s requests for an injunction, disgorgement and pre-judgment interest.

Ripple also said the court should issue a more reasonable civil penalty, which should not be more than $10 million. The filing said:

“Ripple has every intent of adhering to that guidance in the future and every incentive to do so. The SEC’s Draconian remedial requests are ungrounded in law or principle. This Court should reject them in their entirety.”

The filing highlighted that the SEC asked the court to ask Ripple to pay $876 million in disgorgement, $198 million in pre-judgment interest and another $876 million in civil penalties. In total, the amount reached almost $2 billion.

Ripple revealed the requested fine amount almost a month ago. On March 25, Ripple Labs chief legal officer Stuart Alderoty revealed that the SEC asked a federal judge to impose such fines on the blockchain company. The lawyer said the SEC remains bent on punishing and intimidating Ripple and the crypto industry.

Within the new filing, Ripple described the fine as “unreasonable” and said that $10 million is the actual amount that reflects a portion of their actual revenues. Ripple redacted the actual percentage shared in the document.

Related: Pro-XRP lawyer requests to be amicus curiae for Coinbase customers

The filing also highlighted that such an amount “would be proportionate in both percentage and dollar amount to comparable digital-asset cases where there was no culpable mental state and no substantial harm or risk of harm to others.”

On X, Alderoty suggested that the SEC’s actions and ask for the fine are proof of its “ongoing intimidation against all of crypto” in the United States. The Ripple lawyer said the case had no allegations or findings of recklessness or fraud.

In addition, the legal officer believes that Ripple won on “significant” issues and hoped that the judge would fairly approach the final remedies phase of the case.

Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis"
"[INST] 39% of Canada’s institutional investors have exposure to crypto: KPMG [/INST] Canada-based institutional investors significantly increased their crypto exposure last year compared to the last bull run, a survey from accounting firm KPMG has revealed.

Nearly 40% of institutional investors reported having direct or indirect exposure to crypto assets in 2023 — up from 31% in KPMG’s 2021 study, the company according to an April 24 report.

Source: KPMG

KPMG received 65 responses, 31 of which identified as institutional investors with most managing more than $500 million in assets, while the remaining 34 were financial services organizations.

The survey found that one-third of the institutional investors have allocated 10% or more of their portfolios to crypto assets — up from a fifth two years ago.

Kunal Bhasin, a partner and leader at KPMG Canada’s Digital Assets practice said it “appears” the firms are looking to invest in alternative asset classes that act as a debasement hedge and a reliable store of value in the face of increasing inflation and rising debt in the United States.

A large majority of investors cited a maturing market and improved custody infrastructure as key reasons behind investing in crypto assets while increased client demand for crypto asset services was cited as a key factor for financial firms expanding their offerings.

Canada’s world-first approval of spot Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in February 2021 helped local investors become “increasingly attracted” to the asset class, noted Kareem Sadek, another executive at KPMG’s Digital Assets practice.

But the recent approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States marked a “milestone moment” for many market participants in Canada, Sadek added.

Related: KPMG in Canada adds BTC and ETH to its treasury

The report found that half of the institutional investors surveyed have crypto asset exposure through Canadian ETFs, close-ended trusts or other regulated products, while 58% have exposure through the stock market — such as Galaxy Digital on the Toronto Stock Exchange — up from 36% in 2021.

More institutional investors are also receiving exposure through derivatives markets — now at 42% compared to 2021’s 14%.

The only fall came from venture capital or hedge fund firms, falling to 25% from 2021’s 29%.

Magazine: 7 ICO alternatives for blockchain fundraising: Crypto airdrops, IDOs & more"
"[INST] OneCoin lawyer gets bail pending appeal for conviction and 10-year sentence [/INST] Mark Scott, a lawyer connected to the OneCoin crypto scheme recently convicted for fraud and money laundering, has been granted bail pending an appeal of his case.

In an April 18 filing in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge Edgardo Ramos approved bail for Scott three months after sentencing the lawyer to prison for 10 years. A portion of the court filing had been redacted regarding Scott’s health issues, which his legal team argued did not make him a flight risk.

“Based on the record before the Court, given Scott’s medical conditions and because he has not been charged with a violent crime, the Court does not find that Scott is likely to flee or pose a danger to the safety of any other person or the community if allowed to remain on bail,” said Judge Ramos.

Source: PACER

According to a notice filed on Feb. 7, there were “substantial questions” of law to consider in a possible appeal. Scott’s legal team suggested Konstantin Ignatov — brother of Ruja “Cryptoqueen” Ignatova and a leader of the OneCoin scheme — had perjured himself, but prosecutors still used his testimony in their case.

“[T]he Court believes it is quite doubtful that Scott will obtain a reversal or new trial on both counts,” said the judge. “But the Court cannot say that the questions are frivolous. And they are sufficiently integral to the merits of Scott’s conviction that a contrary appellate holding could likely require a reversal or new trial on all of the counts for which Scott has been imprisoned.”

Related: OneCoin: A deep dive into crypto’s most notorious Ponzi scheme

In November 2019, a jury convicted Scott of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering related to his role in laundering millions of dollars through OneCoin. The lawyer laundered funds at the direction of OneCoin co-founder Ruja Ignatova, who remained at large at the time of publication.

OneCoin co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood was sentenced to 20 years on fraud and money laundering charges in September 2023 and ordered to pay $300 million in restitution to OneCoin victims. Former OneCoin chief compliance officer Irinia Dilkinska pleaded guilty to two felony counts and was sentenced to four years in prison on April 3.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime"
"[INST] Tesla teases robotaxi ride-hailing app ahead of August reveal [/INST] Electric car manufacturer Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday unveiled new details of its long-awaited autonomous ride-hailing service — allowing riders to summon supposedly driverless vehicles via an Uber-like experience.

During a first-quarter earnings presentation on April 23, the company gave a preview of what the ride-hailing app could look like, showing the ability for a rider to summon a vehicle, set the interior car temperature, track its location, and decide what music to play.

Preview of the ride-hailing service within the Tesla app. Source: Tesla

Tesla has long teased the mass rollout of robotaxis. In 2019, Musk said he was “very confident” that Tesla would begin operating robotaxis by 2020 — something that didn’t come to fruition.

The program would let a Tesla owner rent out their vehicle for rides, with Tesla taking a cut of revenue and the rest going to the vehicle’s owner — each car was forecasted to make $30,000 in gross profit per car annually.

During the latest earnings call, Musk clarified the program will work more like a “combination of Airbnb and Uber” where Tesla will operate the main fleet but there will be a number of cars owned by the end-user.

“That end-user can add or subtract their car to the fleet whenever they want, and they can decide if they want to only let the car be used by friends and family or only by five-star users or by anyone,” Musk said.

“At any time they could have the car come back to them and be exclusively theirs like an Airbnb,” he added.

Related: Bitcoin outperforms Tesla stock for the first time since 2019

Musk hinted the initial fleet would be around 7 million vehicles but envisioned it could eventually be in the “tens of millions.”

Tesla is slated to showcase its “purpose-built” robotaxi in August, which Musk has referred to as “Cybercab” in the latest earnings call.

No, Tesla didn’t add more Bitcoin

Meanwhile, the latest earnings report shows Tesla has not touched its Bitcoin (BTC) for the seventh straight quarter, contrary to recent speculation.

Last month, observers noticed that Tesla’s Bitcoin wallet on Arkham Intelligence’s dashboard showed a balance of 11,509 BTC, 1,789 more than the widely reported holdings of 9,720 BTC — as listed on BitcoinTreasuries.

Some speculated that it could mean that Tesla may have added more Bitcoin to its inventory in the quarter.

However, Tesla’s latest balance sheet shows its net digital assets remain unchanged at $184 million.

Tesla balance sheet as of 31 March 2024. Source: Tesla

Telsa shares jumped 13% in after-hours trading despite Q1 earnings missing analyst expectations and the company notching one of its steepest drops in revenue — falling 9% to $21.3 billion.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Nvidia eyes Indonesia for $200M AI center amid global AI scramble [/INST] Nvidia, one of the world’s leading semiconductor producers for artificial intelligence (AI), announced a plan alongside the Indonesian government and telecom provider Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison to build a new AI center in the country.

On April 4, Budi Arie Setiadi, the country’s communication minister, said the center will be worth $200 million and will be located in Surakarta city in the Central Java region.

Setiadi said the AI center will host either telecommunication infrastructure or a human resource center.

Construction is expected to begin in 2024. According to the mayor of Surakarta, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the city was chosen because of its readiness with human resources and 5G infrastructure.

Nvidia signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indonesian government in January 2022, through which it pledged to train lecturers and over 20,000 university students in AI skills over five years in an effort to boost the nation’s AI talent pool.

This was prior to the AI frenzy that ensued after OpenAI released its groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022.

Since the memorandum was signed, the AI market has nearly doubled from $134.89 billion in 2022 to $241.80 billion in 2023, according to recent data.

Cointelegraph reached out to Nvidia for additional information on the development in Indonesia.

Related: Nvidia CEO’s simple solution to AI hallucination could upend crypto — but only if it works

Nvidia’s push in Indonesia follows a trend of trying to broaden its influence in the Southeast Asia region after it made record-breaking revenues from increasing demand for generative AI tools.

In Singapore, local telecom company Singtel also partnered with the chipmaker for a new data center, and Nvidia and the Singapore Institute of Technology have also collaborated on a new AI center.

Major AI developers such as Google and Microsoft have also been pouring billions of dollars into AI initiatives across the globe, creating data centers and training programs for local communities in places like Germany, France and Spain.

This frenzy for companies and countries to get their hands on capable AI models even extends into the crypto space after Tether — the blockchain and cryptocurrency firm behind the Tether (USDT) stablecoin — announced an expansion of its AI focus and recruitment efforts for “top-tier” AI talent.

Magazine: AI will build the metaverse says Alien Worlds, Eric Wall vs Bittensor: AI Eye"
"[INST] Mango Markets heist like a fake diamond ring scam: Prosecutor [/INST] Avraham “Avi” Eisenberg’s alleged $110 million exploit of the Solana decentralized exchange Mango Markets is no different from a fake diamond ring scam, prosecutors have claimed.

United States Assistant Attorney Tian Huang said in opening arguments in a Manhattan federal court that Eisenberg’s actions on Oct. 11, 2022, constituted fraud and market manipulation, according to an April 9 Inner City Press X post.

“Consider this scam. A person sells a fake diamond ring, worthless plastic. The con man disappears and runs off. This case is a modern twist on that. That man, Avraham Eisenberg? He ran.”

“He inflated the price of cryptocurrency by 1,000% in 20 minutes. He convinced Mango Markets he owned a lot, and conned Mango Markets,” Huang added.

“He borrowed over $110 million of cryptocurrency,” he continued. “He wasn’t really borrowing it — he was stealing it. He ran off with crypto.”

Eisenberg has long rejected the assertion he exploited Mango Markets and said he “operated a highly profitable trading strategy” and that his actions were “legal open market actions.”

In court, his lawyer Sanford Talkin rejected the claims and explained Eisenberg risked $13 million of his own funds and could have lost it all had the trade failed.

“During this trading strategy, at any moment, he could have lost everything. It was not a sure bet, and it wasn’t a secretive bet. The bet he made could be seen by anyone,” Talkin said.

The Mango Markets exploit occurred out in the open and the public nature of blockchain transactions meant that anyone could have taken the other side of the trade, he added.

“If his counterparties had seen them and opted to, they could have traded against him,” Talkin asserted. “He executed a successful trade.”

In October 2022, Eisenberg inflated the value of the platform’s native token, MNGO, relative to USD Coin (USDC).

He then took out a series of loans against the inflated MNGO price, which drained Mango Markets’ treasury of around $110 million worth of various cryptocurrencies.

Related: ParaSwap DAO votes to compensate hack victims

Days later, on Oct. 15, Mango Markets confirmed that $67 million in various crypto assets had been returned. Eisenberg publicly confessed on X to his actions on the crypto exchange, saying he believed they were legal and permitted by the platform's smart contract.

Despite some of the funds being returned, the team behind Mango Markets sued Eisenberg for $47 million in damages plus interest.

Crypto lawyer weighs consequences

The final ruling on Eisenberg’s case could be more important to the future of the crypto industry than the criminal trial for Sam Bankman-Fried, said crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro in an April 9 X post.

Shapiro, the former general counsel at Delphi Labs, said he was “fine” with the government’s charge that Eisenberg committed market manipulation but took issue with the specifics around Eisenberg’s requirements.

“The problematic claim against Avi is that he breached some kind of loan agreement implied in his use of the protocol — this is absurd [and] not how DeFi works,” Shapiro wrote.

“Imagine you get liquidated on Aave, but the network was congested, the price of your collateral fell too much and thus the protocol got bad debt — do you want AaveDAO to be able to sue you to collect the debt?”

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Bitcoin slips below $60K, but some traders aren’t turning bearish on BTC just yet [/INST] Bitcoin price briefly fell below $60,000 only a few days before the much-anticipated Bitcoin halving. Yet, many traders remain optimistic about Bitcoin’s long-term price outlook based on historical chart patterns and institutional inflows.

Bitcoin remains in pre-halving “danger zone”

Despite the recent price correction, Bitcoin (BTC) reclaimed a key moving average indicator, which signaled the start of the bull runs during previous market cycles, according to popular crypto analyst Moustache, who wrote in an April 16 X post:

“Many people are expecting much lower prices, but I’m not… BTC reclaimed the [blue] line last month, now backest. When this happened in 2012, 2016 and 2020, Bitcoin was just getting started.”

BTC/USD, 1-month chart. Source: Moustache

Bitcoin has been in the pre-halving “danger zone” for a month since March 14, according to popular crypto analyst Rekt Capital, who wrote in an April 17 X post:

“It has been a month that Bitcoin has been in the ‘Danger Zone’ (orange). In that time, Bitcoin has retraced twice -18% in March and now almost -16% thus far.”

BTC/USD, 1-week chart. Source: Rekt Capital

The pseudonymous analyst added that Bitcoin could already be entering a reaccumulation phase, in an April 17 video posted on X:

“We’ve seen the pre-halving retrace take place because -17% downside has occurred already, so maybe we’re slowly transitioning to the re-accumulation period.

Following the Bitcoin correction, key technical indicators have been reset, suggesting that Bitcoin is no longer overbought now that it fell on the daily chart to 41, down from 58 on April 8.

BTC/USD, 1-day chart. Source: TradingView

Bitcoin price has falle over 7% during the past week. The main reason behind the drawdown could be the recent geopolitical tensions between Iran and Israel, according to John Patrick Mullin, CEO and founder of Mantra, who told Cointelegraph:

“A major event took place this week with Iran and Israel. Crypto markets are more fast-moving than any on the planet, hence events like this reflect almost instantly, which is what we’ve seen. What I will say though, is that a bounce back was seen right after, which is very optimistic long term.”

The current drawdown is considered a healthy correction, as the outlook for the next 18 months remains bullish, according to Mullin:

“Another angle to consider is that historically, miners sell BTC around halving, so short term it could be bearish. But these are healthy corrections, as BTC has been bullish consistently for quite a while, so anything offsetting euphoria is good long term.”

Related: ETH price nears 3-year lows vs. Bitcoin — Will an Ethereum ETF stem the tide?

Bitcoin ETF inflows will drive post-halving rally

Bitcoin traders also remain optimistic thanks to the continued inflows from the 10 spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States and the recent approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in Hong Kong, which are set to launch for trading over the next two weeks.

The Bitcoin ETFs have seen over $12.5 billion in net inflows since launch, amassing over 838,000 BTC, worth $53.7 billion in total holdings, according to Dune.

While the post-halving period is usually followed by short-term price stagnation, this cycle could be different due to the approval of Bitcoin ETFs, according to Ivo Georgiev, CEO of Ambire. He told Cointelegraph:

“[This halving] is different because BTC received institutional approval in the form of an ETF, so there’s a lot more retail and institutions watching this one. It doesn’t happen completely in the background as it did before. It isn’t just a party for crypto natives.”

The listing of the first batch of Bitcoin ETFs in Hong Kong will also contribute to Bitcoin’s price rally, according to Mantra’s CEO, Mullin, who said:

“More and more ETFs announced globally means an inflow of ‘fresh’ funds that weren’t in crypto before, so this is a factor I still see as underrated by most analysts in terms of the scale of the funds coming in. It’s not just BlackRock and Grayscale and Hong Kong, but many more will come, in size crypto hasn’t seen before.”

Related: Bitcoin supply to run out on exchanges in 9 months — Bybit

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Withdrawals from real estate betting platform Parcl hit $74M after airdrop [/INST] Investors providing liquidity to the Solana-based real estate betting platform Parcl have pulled more than $74 million from the protocol following its airdrop snapshot earlier in April.

Parcl distributed its native PRCL tokens to eligible users on April 15 after announcing that it had taken a snapshot of users' point balances on April 3.

Users began pulling funds shortly after the snapshot was taken. Parcl’s total value locked has fallen 39.6% to $112.1 million from its $185.6 million peak on April 2, per DefiLlama data.

Parcl users have withdrawn more than $74 million since the snapshot. Source: DefiLlama

Parcl is a decentralized real estate trading platform that allows users to speculate on the price movements of real estate markets in major cities.

Its users who participated in the airdrop campaign were allocated 80 million PRCL tokens — 8% of the total 1 billion token supply.

The platform’s PRCL token debuted at a price of $0.62 and fell as low as $0.45 in the four hours following the airdrop. It has since slightly recovered to around $0.55, according to CoinGecko.

Parcl’s is down 12.5% over the past 24 hours. Source: CoinGecko

Amid a wider market tumble that has seen Bitcoin (BTC) fall more than 7% on the week, recently airdropped tokens on the Solana network have been among the worst performers.

Related: How Solana developers are tackling network congestion challenges

The native W token of the cross-chain bridging platform Wormhole is currently down 54% from its launch on April 3. At the time, the Wormhole airdrop saw more than $800 million distributed to eligible users.

Similarly, TNSR — the native token of the Solana-based NFT platform Tensor — has tumbled 52.6% from its launch on April 3.

Solana-based tokens have been weighed down by a significant decline in the price of Solana (SOL) itself, which is currently down 30.7% on the month.

Additionally, the Solana network has been plagued by congestion issues, which saw a record 75% of user transactions fail on April 5.

Magazine: The real risks to Ethena’s stablecoin model (are not the ones you think)"
"[INST] SEC pushes decision on Franklin Templeton spot Ether ETF [/INST] The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has postponed a potential decision of an application for a spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded fund (ETF) from Franklin Templeton.

In an April 23 notice, the SEC said it had designated a longer period to approve or disapprove a proposed rule change allowing the Cboe BZX Exchange to list and trade shares of the Franklin Ethereum Trust. The commission will have until June 11 to reassess its decision on the spot ETH ETF — an additional 45 days.

Many analysts have speculated that the SEC will reach a final decision on whether to approve or deny a spot Ether ETF for listing and trading on U.S. exchanges in May, during deadlines for applications from several asset managers. In March, Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart suggested that the current round of Ether ETF applications would “ultimately be denied.”

Related: Ether ETFs may be delayed, as institutions are unprepared — Web3 exec

In January, the SEC began allowing U.S. exchanges to list and trade shares of spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs — a landmark decision that will likely continue to affect how financial institutions handle cryptocurrencies. Though some speculated at the time that the commission was likely to follow suit with a spot ETH ETF, reports have suggested that it may be attempting to classify Ether as a security.

Franklin Templeton’s spot BTC ETF was in the first round of approvals by the SEC. As of December 2020, the firm reported it had more than $1.5 trillion in assets under management.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Circle enables USDC transfers for BlackRock’s first tokenized fund [/INST] Circle, the issuer of major stablecoin USDC (USDC), has enabled transfers of BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) shares to its stablecoin.

Circle officially announced on April 11 a new smart contract functionality that would allow BUIDL holders to transfer their shares to Circle for USDC.

Circle’s smart contract functionality enables the frictionless transfer of BUIDL shares in exchange for USDC to Circle on the secondary market. According to the announcement, the smart contract will enable “near-instant” BUIDL off-ramp that serves investors 24/7.

Launched by BlackRock in March 2024, BUIDL is a tokenized fund that operates on the Ethereum blockchain to offer U.S. dollar yields through tokenization.

BUIDL allows investors to purchase tokens representing shares in the fund, which invests in assets like U.S. Treasury bills. The fund is referred to as the “digital liquidity fund” because it is digitized in the form of tokens on the Ethereum blockchain and operates as an ERC-20 token called BUIDL.

The new investment tool is the first tokenized fund introduced by BlackRock, which is also the operator of the fastest-growing spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the United States.

According to Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire, tokenization of real-world assets is a rapidly emerging product category.

“Tokenizing assets is but one important dimension of solving investor pain points. USDC enables investors to move out of tokenized assets at speed, lowering costs and removing friction,” Allaire stated.

Related: Binance follows Circle and drops USDC support on Tron

BlackRock is one of the biggest players in the cryptocurrency industry, operating the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) spot Bitcoin ETF, which holds 266,580 BTC, worth $18.5 billion as of April 10. IBIT was among the first spot Bitcoin ETFs to launch in January 2024 following historic approval by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

BlackRock’s latest collaboration with Circle follows years of cooperation in the crypto industry. In 2022, Circle started investing in the Circle Reserve Fund to manage a portion of the USDC reserves in cooperation with BlackRock. The firm expected its composition to continue to be around 20% cash and 80% short duration U.S. Treasuries.

The Circle Reserve Fund is a registered Rule 2a-7 government money market fund managed by BlackRock Advisors, and its portfolio consists of cash and short-dated U.S. Treasuries.

Magazine: Synthetix founder: It’s DeFi that’s wrong, not the market"
"[INST] Coinbase requests interlocutory appeal over SEC’s ‘controlling question’ [/INST] Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has requested a United States court to scrutinize a specific “controlling question” raised by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in its ongoing lawsuit against the exchange.

“The question presented here is unencumbered by factual disputes and therefore ripe for immediate review,” Coinbase argued in an April 12 filing with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal explained in an April 12 post on X that the “controlling question” revolves around whether an investment contract requires “something contractual.""

“Whether an “investment contract” can exist absent any post-sale obligation is a pure, controlling question of law,” the exchange claims in the court filing.

Grewal elaborated that while Coinbase holds the view that an investment contract requires contractual obligations after the sale, the SEC argues that it doesn't.

Source: Paul Grewal

This comes after U.S. District Judge Katherine Failla denied Coinbase’s motion to dismiss the SEC’s case against the exchange, alleging that it operates as an unregistered exchange, broker and clearing agency.

However, if the court decides to approve the interlocutory appeal, it could potentially significantly influence the case, which has been ongoing since June 2023.

This is because the SEC asserted that Coinbase crypto transactions were investment contracts “despite an absence of any alleged contractual undertakings,” according to Coinbase.

“Reversal on the question presented would dispose of the SEC’s principal claims, which account for the bulk of the complaint’s factual allegations.”

It further claims that a question of law is controlling if its resolution could “significantly affect the conduct of the action.”

Related: Coinbase cleared in lawsuit over crypto transactions

Grewal highlighted the early filing of Coinbase’s appeal request, submitted just 17 days after the motion to dismiss was denied.

However, he justified the action due to its significance for the wider crypto industry, with the aim of resolving the dispute over crypto transactions as soon as possible.

“We’re asking to take this up on appeal earlier than normal because it's critical to our industry. The SEC’s action against us and other digital asset companies goes way beyond the legal authority granted by Congress and puts an unjust cloud over US digital asset innovation.”

This comes after Coinbase achieved a major victory in a civil lawsuit against plaintiffs claiming that the exchange offered and sold them unregistered securities.

On April 6, Cointelegraph reported that the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in favor of Coinbase, confirming that secondary sales of cryptocurrencies on its platform do not violate the Securities Exchange Act.

Magazine: YouTuber declines ‘7 figure’ sponsorships after FTX scandal: Brian Jung, Hall of Flame"
"[INST] BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF is the only fund with inflows since Friday [/INST] BlackRock’s Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) has been the only United States-based spot Bitcoin fund to see inflows over the past two days, with all other ETFs posting zero inflows or lower.

The iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) posted net inflows of $73.4 million on April 15, down from the $111.1 million the day prior. The eight other ETFs — bar Grayscale’s — posted $0 flows over the past two days, per Farside Investors data.

However, IBIT’s inflows weren’t enough to outpace outflows from the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC). It saw $110.1 million in outflows on April 15, slowing from April 14’s $166.2 million.

IBIT’s two-day flows in the second column with GBTC’s third from the right. Total flows are in the far right column. Source: Farside Investors.

All 10 spot Bitcoin ETFs saw net outflows across April 14 and 15 — $55.1 million and $36.7 million, respectively.

Total cumulative ETF flows to April 15. Source: Farside Investors

The recent outflows for U.S. Bitcoin ETFs follow a rollercoaster weekend for Bitcoin, which is down 11.6% on the week to $63,410, per Cointelegraph Markets Pro.

Related: Hong Kong’s Ether, Bitcoin ETFs will be ‘lucky to get $500m’

Meanwhile, global Bitcoin investment products saw outflows of $110 million for the week ending April 12, which CoinShares’ research head James Butterfill said highlights the “hesitancy amongst investors.”

Butterfill reported all combined crypto investment products saw net outflows of $126 million last week, and week-on-week volumes perked from $17 billion to $21 billion.

TradingView data shows Bitcoin hovering above its weekly low. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

Iran’s April 13 attack on Israel sent Bitcoin into freefall, hitting a three-week low of $61,918.

The cryptocurrency’s April 20 slated halving — where its issuance is cut in half — is also causing price volatility as traders eye how it will affect Bitcoin’s price action.

X Hall of Flame: Expect ‘records broken’ by Bitcoin ETF: Brett Harrison (ex-FTX US)"
"[INST] Bhutan’s DHI to offset halving effects with Bitcoin mining upgrade [/INST] The Kingdom of Bhutan’s sovereign investment arm and its Bitcoin (BTC) mining partner, Bitdeer Technologies, will increase their BTC mining capacity to offset the potential impact of the mining rewards reduction after the Bitcoin halving.

Druk Holding and Investments (DHI), the investment arm of the royal government of Bhutan, and the Nasdaq-listed Bitdeer reportedly announced that they will invest in increasing their mining project’s capacity sixfold ahead of the halving.

Bitcoin mining profitability chart for the first quarter of 2024. Source: BitInfoCharts

Bitdeer’s chief business officer said the planned upgrades will raise Bhutan’s mining capacity by 500 megawatts by the first half of 2025. This would increase the Himalayan kingdom’s total mining capacity to 600 megawatts.

The funds needed to introduce new hardware for the upgrade will be taken from the $500 million fund the duo announced last year. On May 3, 2023, the two entities announced the creation of a closed-end fund valued at $500 million.

Bitdeer chairman Jihan Wu said at the time their company would work with DHI to use Bhutan’s zero-emission energy to support blockchain technologies. Wu said that the fund would help develop international stakeholder networks that could help Bhutan’s technology sector.

Bhutan’s DHI, which manages over $2.9 billion in assets, had quietly grown a crypto portfolio before it was brought to light in the bankruptcy proceedings of crypto firms Celsius and BlockFi.

A Forbes report highlighted that the DHI placed millions in crypto and was a customer of the two bankrupt companies.

Local reports also highlighted that Bhutan has been using hydropower to mine BTC since 2019 when the price was around $5,000.

Related: Once unprofitable BTC miners are turning their machines back on — Analyst

While the two companies are preparing to offset potential losses after the Bitcoin halving, others believe that the halving of BTC rewards would not affect profitability.

Laurent Benayoun, the CEO of liquidity firm Acheron Trading, said that the mining rewards are going to be “compensated by an increase in network fees.”

BNB Chain senior solution architect Jimmy Zhao believes that Bitcoin-based nonfungible tokens could also help with miner profitability after the Bitcoin halving.

As of February 2024, crypto asset manager Grayscale estimated that Bitcoin Ordinals generated over $200 million in transaction fees for miners.

Magazine: Bitcoin hits new highs, SEC delays options decision, and stablecoin bill looms: Hodler’s Digest"
"[INST] DeFi booms as daily active wallets hit 7M, VanEck bullish on Ethereum L2s: Finance Redefined [/INST] Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you the most significant developments from the past week.

The surge in DeFi in recent months saw decentralized application (DApp) activity increase by 77% in the fourth quarter of 2023, with a total daily active user wallet count of seven million.

The European Commission is evaluating the DeFi industry and could require protocols to obtain a license in the near future.

According to analysts from investment manager VanEck, Ethereum layer-2 scaling networks could hit a $1 trillion market capitalization in the next six years.

The top 100 DeFi tokens had a bearish week, with most tokens trading in red on the weekly charts, while the total value locked in DeFi protocols remained below $100 billion.

Average daily active unique wallets reach seven million — DappRadar

The latest report from DappRadar highlights several bullish indicators in the DApp and Web3 sectors for the first quarter of 2024.

DApps saw a quarter-over-quarter usage increase of 77%, with a total daily active user wallet count of seven million. This shows an increase of approximately 40% since February 2024, indicating the highest adoption rates since 2022.

Continue reading

Upcoming DeFi rules in Europe could ban non-decentralized protocols

Decentralized finance protocols in Europe could soon fall under new regulations as the European Commission evaluates the space.

According to the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) — the regulatory framework that will govern digital assets within the region — the European Commission is required to prepare a report by Dec. 30 evaluating the decentralized finance market and the feasibility of specific regulations for the sector.

Continue reading

Ethereum layer 2s to hit $1 trillion market cap by 2030 — VanEck

Ethereum’s layer-2 scaling networks will hit a $1 trillion market capitalization in the next six years. According to analysts from investment manager VanEck, they will comprise thousands of use case-specific chains.

Layer-2 blockchains are set to capitalize on Ethereum’s “primary challenge” — its “limited capacity to process, store, and compute data,” VanEck’s senior digital assets investment analyst Patrick Bush and digital assets research head Matthew Sigel said in an April 3 report.

Continue reading

AssangeDAO’s crypto activities suspicious, analysts urge caution

Analysts at SlowMist raised concerns about a possible “soft rug pull” on March 10 when a 100 Ether (ETH) transaction from an AssangeDAO address went to a recipient seemingly associated with the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

The blockchain forensics firm emphasized that while the true intentions of AssangeDAO are unclear, investors should proceed with caution and conduct comprehensive due diligence before interacting with the organization.

Continue reading

DeFi market overview

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a bearish week, with most trading in the red on the weekly charts. The total value locked in DeFi protocols remained below $100 billion.

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space."
"[INST] Ethereum client diversity improves, non-Geth clients now account for 34% [/INST] The market share of Geth — a major Ethereum execution client — has fallen from a high of 84% in late January to 66% following Coinbase’s recent move to switch around half of its validators to Nethermind, though one commentator says that the fight for decentralization is far from over.

The reduced reliance on Geth helps to address a long-feared centralization risk for Ethereum, with concerns a critical bug in an execution client with a 66% or more share could stop the chain from finalizing. One commentator however, warns that the industry shouldn't decalre victory just yet though.

On March 22, Coinbase Cloud revealed that “roughly 50%” of its validators switched to Nethermind, which helped bump the execution client’s share up to 22%, according to Client Diversity.

Besu owns a 10% share of Ethereum validators, while Erigon — which is also being supported by Coinbase — has a 2% share, bringing the total minority client share to around 34%.

Share of execution clients on Ethereum. Source: Clientdiversity.com

Execution clients on Ethereum play a major role in handling transactions and executing smart contracts on the blockchain.

Geth is widely regarded as the most advanced client. However, its strong preference among Ethereum validators has led to an imbalance in execution client diversity over the last few years.

The fight isn’t over yet

""We can’t declare victory yet,” Lachlan Feeney, founder and CEO of Ethereum infrastructure firm Labrys told Cointelegraph.

Feeney claims the methodology Client Diversity uses to obtain its figures is flawed and that Geth needs to move a “decent amount below the 66% threshold to account for any margin of error before we are confident that a supermajority bug isn’t possible.”

The “real victory” cannot be declared until no singular client controls greater than a 33% share, Feeney added.

He emphasized the importance of solo staking in diversifying executions clients, which would also prevent those stakers from being subjected to a supermajority bug on Geth.

Related: Vitalik Buterin on fix for Ethereum centralization: Make running nodes easier

Ethereum decentralization advocate “Superphiz” recently voiced that a critical bug in Geth could potentially wipeout 80% or more of Ether (ETH) staked on the network.

There are currently 31.5 million Ether staked, according to Beaconcha.in, which is worth about $113.5 billion at current prices.

Meanwhile, Coinbase said it will continue to play its part in diversifying its own validator set to help decentralize Ethereum:

“Ensuring the security of our customers’ assets and contributing to the resiliency of the Ethereum network are — and have always been — of paramount importance to us. Diversifying execution clients on our validators helps us accomplish both.”

Coinbase said it intends to “evenly distribute” its validators between Geth, Nethermind and Erigon over the long term.

Feeney noted that Sigma Prime, Kiln, Octant, Lido, Ankr and Twinstake have also reported a reduced reliance on Geth.

Magazine: Ethereum restaking: Blockchain innovation or dangerous house of cards?"
"[INST] Norway passes data center legislation signaling more scrutiny for Bitcoin miners [/INST] Norway passed new legislation related to data centers, signaling more potential scrutiny for Bitcoin (BTC) miners.

The new legislation will mandate official registration from all data centers in the country, including information about the owners and leaders of these centers and the type of digital services they offer. Norway will become the first European country to establish such a framework.

With the new legislation, the government hopes to offer politicians a better overview of data centers in their municipalities, which will offer a better basis for accepting or declining their operations, said Terje Aasland, Norway’s minister of energy.

“The purpose is to regulate the industry in such a way that we can close the door for the projects we do not want”

The decision could mean more scrutiny for Bitcoin miners in the country, on top of the upcoming Bitcoin halving, which will reduce block issuance rewards in half, endangering the profitability of Bitcoin miners.

The crypto mining industry has been largely unregulated in Norway, added Aasland:

“[Crypto mining] is linked with large greenhouse gas emissions, and is an example of a type of business we do not want in Norway.”

The minister added that they are not interested in businesses looking to extract cheap energy from the country.

Related: Samsung secures $6.4B grant to expand Texas chip manufacturing: Report

Bitcoin miners under pressure

Numerous Bitcoin mining firms are currently operating in northern Norway, where electricity is the cheapest in the country.

Crypto mining firms in northern Norway use nearly as much electricity as the district of Lofoten, according to a 2023 report by local media outlet Dagsavisen.

Yet, Aasland noted that Bitcoin mining firms aren’t desired in the country. The minister stated that he welcomes data centers that fulfill societally beneficial roles, like centers that operate as storage servers, which he called an important part of the social structure of Norway.

The number of Bitcoin mining firms operating in the country is unknown to the government at the moment, but the new legislation will offer more information that will be used to carry on with Norway’s digitalization plan, according to Karianne Tung, the minister of digitalization and public governance of Norway.

Bitcoin miners are already under more pressure following this week’s upcoming halving. Bitcoin miners could liquidate $5 billion worth of BTC in the months after the halving, according to calculations by the head of research at 10x Research, Markus Thielen.

Related: 10 days until halving: Bitcoin mining profitability won’t necessarily fall"
"[INST] Top five BTC miners not selling despite Bitcoin halving [/INST] The five largest Bitcoin mining firms are not selling Bitcoin (BTC), despite the 50% supply issuance reduction of the upcoming Bitcoin halving.

Bitcoin selling by the top five mining firms slowed to a two-year low in the first quarter of 2024, when the five largest miners sold a total of approximately 2,000 BTC, according to an April 10 report by Bitwise.

The last time the top five mining firms sold less than 2,000 BTC was in the first quarter of 2022. In comparison, the five largest mining firms sold over 7,000 BTC in the fourth quarter of 2023.

The report comes days before the 2024 Bitcoin halving, which is set to reduce Bitcoin block issuance rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per mined block.

Paired with a continually increasing Bitcoin hash rate, the profitability of mining firms could take a hit after the halving.

Bitcoin Mined vs. Bitcoin sold by Top Five Miners. Source: Bitwise

Despite a gloomy outlook for some miners, Bitcoin miner revenue saw a 30% increase quarter-over-quarter, tripling the recent lows form the fourth quarter of 2022. Bitcoin miner revenue rose above $4.5 billion according to Bitwise.

Bitcoin Miner Revenue by Type. Source: Bitwise

Despite the upcoming block reward halving, Bitcoin mining revenue won’t necessarily fall in U.S. dollar terms, according to Laurent Benayoun, the CEO of Acheron Trading:

“In dollar terms, it’s not obvious that miners would be worse off after the halving, quite the opposite […] The decrease in mining rewards is going to be compensated by an increase in network fees.”

Yet, Bitcoin miner revenue has historically declined in the months after Bitcoin halvings. Post-halving Bitcoin mining revenue declined 40% in the month after the 2020 halving, while monthly revenue declined over 51% after the 2016 Bitcoin halving.

Bitcoin Halving: Total Miner Revenue. Source: Bitwise

Related: Is the Bitcoin halving the right time to invest in BTC?

Out of the top five mining firms, Marathon Digital mined the most Bitcoin, with over 2,500 BTC generated in the first quarter of 2024, down from over 4,000 BTC in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Bitcoin Production by Top Five Miners. Source: Bitwise

Yet, Marathon Digital also averaged the highest mining cost of $22,249 per BTC, compared to Cipher Mining’s average cost of only $8,626 per BTC during the first quarter of the year. In comparison, Bitcoin’s average price stood at $53,534 during the first quarter of 2024.

Bitcoin miners worldwide currently hold over 700,000 BTC, which accounts for 3.4% of the total Bitcoin supply. The majority, or 57% (12 million) of Bitcoin supply, is held by individuals, according to Bitwise.

Related: Bitcoin supply to run out on exchanges in 9 months — Bybit"
"[INST] Mango Markets exploiter found guilty after jury deliberations [/INST] A jury has found Avraham “Avi” Eisenberg, the crypto user responsible for a $110 million exploit of the Mango Markets decentralized exchange, guilty of fraud and market manipulation.

In an April 18 ruling in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, a group of jurors announced that Eisenberg had been found guilty of wire fraud, commodities fraud and commodities manipulation. The decision followed hours of deliberations after closing arguments on April 17.

During a two-week trial, Eisenberg’s legal team claimed that he did not commit any crimes but orchestrated a “successful and legal trading strategy,” which resulted in roughly $110 million from Mango Markets. He returned roughly $67 million of the funds after the exploit but retained more than $40 million following a governance vote by the community. Prosecutors argued that Eisenberg’s actions constituted fraud.

Judge Richard Berman is expected to sentence Eisenberg at a July 29 hearing. He now faces up to 20 years in prison. After his actions on Mango Markets in October 2022, Eisenberg was arrested in Puerto Rico in December and held in U.S. custody since January 2023.

With a verdict handed down in the criminal trial, Eisenberg will likely face civil enforcement actions filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2023. Both cases had been stayed and could resume two weeks after the conclusion of the criminal case.

Related: Mango Markets exploiter said actions were ‘legal,’ but were they?

U.S. authorities have several ongoing criminal cases pending against high-profile figures in the crypto space. In March, a judge sentenced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison for his conviction on seven felony charges, though his lawyers have filed notice they intended to appeal. Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is scheduled to be sentenced on April 30 for pleading guilty to one felony charge.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame

Update (April 18 at 8:28 pm UTC): This article has been updated to include the date of Avi Eisenberg’s sentencing hearing."
"[INST] History of Crypto: The ICO Boom and Ethereum's Evolution [/INST] In this article, we will venture through one of the most transformative periods of crypto history, known as the initial coin offering (ICO) boom.

ICOs swept onto the crypto scene in early 2017, allowing thousands of new blockchain-based projects to rapidly raise significant amounts of capital by selling pre-released tokens directly to investors. Projects issued their tokens in exchange for funding to launch new networks and decentralized applications (DApps).

EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF CRYPTO

What is an ICO?

An ICO is a token sale that blends the initial public offering (IPO) model commonly used in the world of traditional finance with crowdfunding, selling the tokens to raise funds for a blockchain-based project.

It is important to note that while the ICO boom is looked back upon as a time when projects and investors made some seriously outsized returns, it was also rife with exit scams and rug pulls, something that would later draw the watchful eye of regulators and the relevant financial authorities.

The biggest ICOs of the boom

Despite the ICO boom being riddled with various types of regulatory and financial turmoil, it laid the groundwork for launching some of the larger projects in crypto today including Ethereum, EOS Network (EOS) Chainlink (LINK), Filecoin (FIL), Tezos (XTZ), and Telegram (TON).

The largest ICO was executed by a private company called Block.one, the creator of the EOS network. EOS raised a staggering $4 billion in 2018.

The second-largest ICO was conducted by Telegram, which raised $1.7 billion. However, unlike many of the other ICOs — which were offered directly to retail investors — Telegram’s ICO was largely gated and thus limited to private investors with significant sums of capital.

The decentralized storage network Filecoin is the third-largest ICO, raising over $257 million in 2017.

Ethereum’s role in the ICO boom

Ethereum itself was initially funded through an ICO, raising a total of $18 million between July 22 and Sept. 2, 2014. Investors in the Ethereum ICO received Ether (ETH) in exchange for Bitcoin (BTC), with more than $2.2 million worth of Ether being sold within 24 hours of the ICO going live.

The vast majority of ICOs in the 2017 through 2018 period took place on the Ethereum network, with smart contracts allowing developers to spin up new tokens and launch protocols more easily than any of the other available blockchain networks.

The Ethereum network allowed developers to create new ERC-20 tokens and automatically distribute them to investors once the funding threshold had been met. Then, the projects were governed by DAOs moving forward.

The functionality offered by Ethereum saw the price of the network’s native token Ether rise rapidly in conjunction, skyrocketing from a price of around $10 in January 2017 to a peak of nearly $1,400 in January the following year.

Similarly, the increased use of Ethereum during the ICO boom saw ERC-20 tokens become the industry standard and laid much of the groundwork for Ethereum’s continued prominence in the crypto ecosystem today.

The ICO boom and legal woes

Despite many projects that raised funds from ICOs using their newfound capital for the right reasons, thousands of projects were either poorly planned or downright fraudulent, relying on hype and sketchy marketing tactics with no real roadmap or legitimate plans for development.

It was the gradual rise of these projects revealing themselves to be illegitimate that drew the attention of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The regulator first cottoned on to the issues associated with ICOs in 2017, following an investigation into a 2016 ICO from an organization called “The DAO,” from which the watchdog concluded that the sale in question was illegal and constituted the offering of unregistered securities.

This precedent saw the SEC take legal action against Block.one — the parent company of the EOS network — ordering them to pay $24 million in fines. Similarly, the agency also ordered Telegram to pay $18.5 million in fines and return a staggering $1.2 billion to its ICO investors.

Telegram was forced to abandon the project due to the native TON token being deemed a security. As the project’s codebase was open-source, the TON network was later salvaged by a community of developers.

Follow the History of Crypto!

Despite being on the receiving end of regulatory scrutiny, ICOs played a pivotal role in fundraising for some of the most important blockchain projects in existence today.

Notably, the ICO boom laid the groundwork for Ethereum’s rise to dominance within the crypto ecosystem today, establishing ERC-20 tokens as the industry standard and significantly increasing the use of Ethereum by developers.

EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF CRYPTO

Look forward to the next piece in our History of Crypto series, where we will delve into the crypto winter of 2018 and look at the most important elements in the evolution of Ethereum during the same time. Follow Cointelegraph for insightful updates on the developments in crypto history."
"[INST] Japanese investment firm sees stock price soar after adopting Bitcoin [/INST] Publicly listed Japanese firm Metaplanet has announced it has bought 1 billion yen ($6.5 million) worth of Bitcoin (BTC) as a core treasury asset, following in the footsteps of American giant MicroStrategy.

Metaplanet is an investment firm focused on Web3 and metaverse-related businesses. The decision to adopt BTC as a treasury asset was backed by Sora Ventures, UTXO Management, and notable individuals such as Mark Yusko, founder of Morgan Creek Capital, and Jack Liu, a founding member of Ordiswap.

Metaplanet announcement. Source: Metaplanet

Jason Fang, founder of Sora Ventures, called Metaplanet “Asia’s first MicroStrategy.” He added that the firm’s adoption of BTC would enable Japanese investors to gain exposure to Bitcoin without regulatory risk.

The adoption of BTC has already helped Metaplanet gain major market momentum, with the stock price up 89% in post-announcement.

Metaplanet stock price momentum. Source: Google

In its official X announcement, Metaplanet called the move a significant milestone, anticipating it would help position the firm “as a pioneer in the adoption of digital assets in Japan.”

Related: Billionaire investor Bill Miller puts 50% of net worth in Bitcoin

Using Bitcoin as a treasury asset was popularized by the Fortune 500 company MicroStrategy, led by Michael Saylor.

The United States-based public firm started buying Bitcoin in August 2020 when it traded in the $10,000 range. Over the next four years, the Nasdaq-listed firm has amassed over 214,246 BTC at an average purchase price of $33,706.00 per BTC, totaling $6.91 billion.

The current market value of MicroStrategy’s BTC holding is over $15 billion, giving it over 100% profit.

Even at the peak of the bear market in 2022, when the firm’s BTC holding was running at a loss, Saylor refused to sell; instead, he doubled down by buying more.

Saylor bought Bitcoin as a treasury-hedging asset and motivated other publicly listed companies to adopt it. Saylor claimed he had convinced Tesla CEO Elon Musk to purchase $1.5 billion of BTC in January 2021.

Magazine: How to protect your crypto in a volatile market — Bitcoin OGs and experts weigh in"
"[INST] Dogecoiners clone hyped Bitcoin Ordinals ‘Runestone’ airdrop [/INST] Dogecoin blockchain natives have just finished handing out its own “Runestone” airdrop inspired by the nonfungible token (NFT)-like giveaway done through Bitcoin Ordinals last month.

Finishing up on April 2, a total of 30,272 of the inventively titled “Doge Runestone” Doginals — Dogecoin’s name for its Ordinals — were handed out to wallets that held at least one Doginal from a list of collections outlined by Robo AI, the airdrop’s organizer.

The Doge Runestones are now trading at a floor price of 185 Dogecoin (DOGE), worth about $32, and have seen a 24-hour volume of just over $2,000, according to data from the Ordinals Wallet marketplace.

Doge Runestones, which are all the same, resemble a golden rock etched with the DOGE logo. Source: Ordinals Wallet

The airdrop copied the buzzy Bitcoin Ordinals-based Runestone airdrop in March, where a community-run effort handed out over 112,000 Runestones to the protocol’s early adopters.

Bitcoin Ordinals are NFT-esque assets such as images or documents that are embedded into sats — the smallest unit of Bitcoin (BTC).

Dogecoin is a fork of a fork of Bitcoin — which is why it’s able to have Ordinals — and its Doginals protocol was launched by an anonymous developer in February last year, a month after Bitcoin Ordinals.

The protocol also opened up the possibility for the launch of the DRC-20 token standard in early May 2023, taking its namesake from Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard and Bitcoin’s similar BRC-20 standard.

Related: ‘No such thing as spam’ — OKX exec on Bitcoin Ordinals

There are 149 Doginal collections and nearly 68,000 DRC-20 tokens with a combined market capitalization of $120 million, according to Doginal Explorer data.

The 1993 classic shooter game Doom has also been inscribed on the Dogecoin blockchain as a Doginal — a continuing meme of video game porters that have run Doom on random hardware such as washing machines and toothbrushes.

Doom on Dogecoin. Source: Dogecoin Ordinals

The Doge Runestone airdrop didn’t seem to positively affect DOGE, which is trading at $0.1718 — down 2% in the past day and 20% on the week, per Cointelegraph Markets Pro.

Magazine: Real-life Doge at 18 — Meme that’s going to the moon"
"[INST] 12 Solana presale memecoins abandoned after just a month [/INST] At least 12 Solana presale memecoins have been “completely abandoned” in the last 30 days after raising a combined $26.7 million from investors, according to figures shared by independent blockchain sleuth ZachXBT.

In an April 21 post to X, ZachXBT highlighted 12 Solana memecoin projects that raised funds through the controversial presale method, many of which have plunged significantly since launching and one which appears not to have launched any token at all.

According to ZachXBT, the most costly “abandoned” presale project was a memecoin dubbed “I like this coin,” which sported the ticker LIKE.

The project’s pseudonymous founder, pokeee.eth, raised a staggering 52,220 SOL (SOL) tokens ($7.7 million at current prices) for the memecoin and launched the coin on March 17 with a market capitalization of $577 million; however, the memecoin’s value plunged rapidly, falling more than 90% in the first eight hours.

As of the time of publication, LIKE is down 99.2% from its launch price. Notably, the memecoin’s official X account hasn’t made a single new post since March 31 — and pokeee.eth hasn’t mentioned the coin since then either.

The second-largest alleged abandoned presale is for a token called MOONKE.

Launched by another pseudonymous founder, RockyXBT, on March 20 to an outsized valuation of nearly $500 million, MOONKE soon charted a similar path to LIKE, plummeting more than 99% from its launch price in a matter of hours.

The MOONKE memecoin failed to gain traction. Source: Birdeye

One project that raised 4,567 SOL ($812,000 at current prices) never even launched its token.

Cointelegraph contacted both pokeee.eth and RockyXBT for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

Related: What are memecoins good for? Social signaling, says Avalanche founder

The market’s enthusiasm for memecoins has dwindled somewhat in recent weeks, with several of the larger Solana-based memecoins, including Dogwifhat (WIF), sliding more than 40% since April 1.

Solana memecoin market leader Dogwifhat has tumbled more than 40% since April 1. Source: CoinGecko

At the time, last month’s memecoin frenzy saw several market pundits draw comparisons to the Ethereum initial coin offering (ICO) era boom of 2017 where hundreds of crypto projects raised millions of dollars, but ultimately, most failed to deliver.

One of the most notable Solana presale debacles in recent months came in March when the developer of a memecoin called Slerf (SLERF) claimed to have accidentally burned the entire presale allocation of SLERF in a “fat finger” burn error.

Despite the Slerf dev burning a staggering total of 535,000 SOL (worth around $10 million at the time), the coin soon quickly became a cult favorite among memecoin investors, who rallied behind the token and saw it rally to a market cap peak of around $750 million.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Telegram trading bot Solareum shutters days after $520K exploit [/INST] The Solana-based Telegram trading bot Solareum said it is permanently shutting down after insufficient funding and a recent security breach.

“It is with a profound sense of regret that we announce the closure of the Solareum project,” said the developers on the Telegram Solareum support channel, who also shared on X by trading bot BONKbot co-founder king.sol on March 31.

“Unfortunately, due to a combination of insufficient funds, evolving market trends, and a recent security breach to our systems,” they wrote.

The team added that despite “concerted efforts to secure additional funding, adapt to market changes, and fortify our security measures,” it can no longer “assure the safety of our users due to the lack of funds.”

Solareum is a Telegram messenger-based crypto trading bot with an Ethereum Virtual Machine-Solana Virtual Machine bridge programmed to buy and sell Solana crypto tokens based on certain pre-decided parameters.

Solareum addresses its user base about sunsetting the bot. Source: Solareum Support Channel on Telegram

In late March, the trading bot suffered a security breach that enabled wallet drainers to exploit the vulnerability.

The wallet drainers connected to the exploited trading bot resulted in the loss of more than 2,800 of Solana’s SOL (SOL) worth around $520,000 from more than 300 Solana users, according to a BONKbot analysis.

The Telegram trading bot BONKbot was initially thought to be behind the exploit. However, this was denied on March 30, with the team stating BONKbot is safe before adding, “There has been an exploit with another Solana app.”

The Solareum team stated that there has been no exit scam and that they “DO NOT steal money. But a lot of SOLAR users wallets got drained, but this is part of a widespread exploit thats happening to other bot projects/dapps as well,” it said before finally confirming, “There may be a chance we got exploited.”

The Solareum team stated that it has contacted authorities in an attempt to get the stolen funds frozen if they ever reach centralized exchanges.

“As we wind down all active services and functionalities associated with Solareum in the coming weeks, we urge users to retrieve any relevant data or assets promptly,” the team said.

Related: Largest Solana drainer community has over 6K members

Meanwhile, Solana has been a hotbed of activity for memecoin speculators recently, which has attracted scammers like moths to a flame.

One of the largest online communities devoted to just one popular Solana wallet drainer kit has more than 6,000 members, according to blockchain security firm Chainalysis.

Additionally, Web3 security firm Blowfish detected two new Solana drainers that can perform advanced attacks in February.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Arkham accuses competitors of spreading ‘false rumors’ amid token sell-off [/INST] Blockchain analytics firm Arkham has accused its fellow competitors of “spreading false rumors” in an effort to create fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) after questions arose regarding the firm’s transfer of its native ARKM tokens.

Although Arkham did not name the dissenting competitors, just a few days prior, a post published by fellow blockchain analytics firm Nansen claimed that Arkham “moved over 25.2m ARKM (>$56m) over the past 2 days” to unlabeled wallets and cryptocurrency exchange Binance. “Let’s take a look at what’s going on because they won’t show you,” wrote Nansen, noting that the ARKM was sent to different Binance addresses with no prior activity, as well as to a fresh wallet address.

Meanwhile, Arkham replied in its April 9 post that the ARKM movements “are of unlocked tokens as per the published tokenomics.” In its first transfer, 20 million ARKM were sent to a novel wallet address as per an approved protocol proposal titled “Deploy ARKM-secured Chainlink DON for Intel Verification; Add Support for Solana; Establish Treasury Pool I; Implement Bounty Joining.” At the same time, Arkham stated that 5 million ARKM sent from its ecosystem fund were unlocked as per its tokenomics.

When questioned regarding the discrepancy between the number of tokens in its vesting wallets versus the stated number in its tokenomics paper, Arkham explained that vesting wallets will be “deployed overtime” as it receives addresses from non-crypto investors and as new hires are made. “There have been no early unlocks and all team and investor tokens remain fully locked and trackable using the top holders feature on our platform,” the firm stated.

At the time of publication, ARKM’s fully diluted market cap is $2.047 billion. Despite a spectacular run-up over the past year, in part due to hype surrounding the firm’s use of artificial intelligence in its blockchain analytics, ARKM has lost nearly 40% of its value in the past month. The firm received an undisclosed investment sum from Binance Labs last November.

Related: Arkham Intelligence identifies MicroStrategy Bitcoin holdings pooled with Fidelity"
"[INST] US SEC expected to deny spot Ether ETFs in May [/INST] The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will most likely deny spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds (ETF) in May, according to a new report.

Reuters reported on April 24 that U.S. issuers and other firms expect the SEC to reject spot Ether ETF applications next month following meetings with the regulator in recent weeks, citing four people who participated in the meetings.

The four persons, who asked to be anonymous due to the private nature of the discussions, said recent meetings between issuers and the SEC have been one-sided, and agency staff have not discussed substantive details about the proposed products.

The sources compared the unsuccessful talks regarding Ether ETFs to detailed discussions between issuers and the agency in January, weeks before it approved spot Bitcoin ETFs.

Before the historic approval, the SEC rejected spot BTC ETF filings for over a decade. It only changed its stance after Grayscale Investments won a court victory against the securities regulator in August 2023.

Many analysts agree that the SEC is likely to further delay possible approval of Ether ETFs.

“It seems more likely that approval will be delayed until later in 2024, or longer,” VettaFi ETF data analyst Todd Rosenbluth reportedly said, adding that the regulatory landscape is still too “cloudy.”

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas previously estimated chances of the SEC approving a spot Ether ETF in May at around 35% in March. He also noted that he’d sourced “good intel” to suggest that the SEC may be giving the silent treatment to prospective fund issuers on purpose.

Related: SEC lawyers resign after ‘gross abuse’ of power in crypto case — Report

Balchunas also mentioned that SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s stance on Ether could also impact the decision process as Gensler has refused to give clarity on whether Ether was a security.

While the U.S. is apparently set for another delay, some global jurisdictions have been moving forward with plans to start trading ETF products.

On April 24, Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) officially approved the first batch of spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs, including three BTC and three ETH ETFs by China Asset Management, Harvest Global Investments and Bosera.

Following approval, Hong Kong’s crypto ETFs are expected to start trading on April 30.

Magazine: ChainLinkGod was in High School when he started the account! X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Max pain $51K? Bitcoin options worth over $9.4B set to expire Friday [/INST] Over $9.4 billion worth of Bitcoin (BTC) options are set to expire on the Deribit cryptocurrency exchange on March 29, with some analysts suggesting that Bitcoin’s “max pain” price could be around the $50,000 range.

Max pain Bitcoin price closer to $50,000

Over 134,000 BTC worth of open interest is set to expire on the Deribit exchange at 8:00 am UTC on March 29, suggesting a max pain price of $50,000, according to data shared by Unfolded in a March 27 X post.

Related: Bitcoin price reclaims $70K as Coinbase BTC supply hits 9-year low

The max pain price is the strike price with the most open Bitcoin options contracts (puts and calls), at which the given asset would cause financial losses for most option holders at expiration.

BTC options: open interest by strike price. Source: Unfolded

Bitcoin could potentially see a correction to the $51,000 mark if inflows in spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) slow down, according to Ki Young Ju, founder and CEO of CryptoQuant, who wrote in a March 22 X post:

“New whales, mainly ETF buyers, have a $56K on-chain cost basis. Corrections typically entail a max drawdown of around 30% in bull markets, with a max pain of $51K.”

Bitcoin ETF historical netflow trend chart. Source: Ki Young Ju

After five consecutive days of negative outflows last week, the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw over $15 million worth of net flows on March 25, the same day Bitcoin price recorded its highest daily close of above $69,000 in the past 10 days. The 10 Bitcoin ETFs saw a combined net inflow of $418 million on March 26.

Is the pre-halving Bitcoin correction over?

Bitcoin’s pre-halving price correction occurred in line with previous historical retraces ahead of the halving, according to analyst Rekt Capital, who wrote in a March 25 X post:

“The Pre-Halving Retrace occurred right on schedule. And now Bitcoin is back to $70,000.”

BTC/USD, 1-week chart. Source: Rekt Capital

Bitcoin price could break out toward new all-time highs if the old all-time high of $69,000 is flipped into support, said Rekt Capital in a March 26 video analysis:

“Bitcoin is now peaking beyond this old all-time high, potentially positioning itself for this pre-halving retracement to be over.”

Last week’s Bitcoin price correction suggests that the price has already formed a local bottom, or is close to doing so, according to a research note by Bitfinex analysts shared with Cointelegraph:

“We believe the pullback last week for Bitcoin from its current all-time high of $73,666, and amounting to an approximate 17.5 percent correction, suggests we are close to establishing a local bottom - and indeed may have already done so.”

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] BNB Chain puts up $1M reward to attract memecoin devs [/INST] Smart contract blockchain BNB Chain is attempting to attract memecoin developers amid the explosive growth of meme tokens within the crypto ecosystem.

In an announcement sent to Cointelegraph, BNB Chain said it is allocating up to $1 million to reward eligible developers deploying their memecoin projects in the network.

The company highlighted that this was part of its efforts to “accelerate the growth of the memecoin landscape” within BNB Chain.

Interested developers can apply to participate in the network’s “Meme Innovation Campaign” and deploy their tokens on the network during the campaign period, which will last from April 10 to May 9.

According to BNB Chain, the competition allows its community members to innovate creatively. It wrote:

“Taking place at the intersection of creativity, Web3 culture, and innovation, the campaign is about empowering creators, both seasoned developers and newcomers, to use blockchain technology to bring their ideas to life.”

While the competition seems simple, some requirements may be challenging to achieve. Participants need a minimum trading volume of $2 billion for their memecoins to qualify for the lowest reward. Meanwhile, memecoins with over $30 billion in trading volume can qualify for the $1 million prize.

Reward distribution structure for the memecoin competition. Source: BNB Chain

In addition, there are other eligibility requirements, including completing at least one security audit and open-sourcing the project on BNB Smart Chain’s blockchain explorer, BscScan.

The number of valid new tokenholders must also be above 1,000 and the project must also be on social media platforms, including Telegram and Discord.

Related: Solana memecoin craze continues with Biden parody token reaching $250M market cap

BNB Chain’s memecoin efforts come as meme-focused tokens surged within the crypto space. On April 1, the total market capitalization jumped to $70 billion.

This was driven by pumps in newly-launched tokens like Dogwifihat (WIF) and Book of Meme (BOME), and other older meme tokens like Pepe (PEPE) and Bonk (BONK).

Apart from BNB Chain, other blockchain networks have also started to encourage the development of memecoins within their ecosystems.

On March 22, the Avalanche Foundation continued its memecoin push by offering a $1 million reward for memecoin liquidity providers. Those who provide liquidity to selected memecoins are eligible to get a chunk of the rewards.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] SEC seeks $5.3B judgment against Terraform Labs and Do Kwon [/INST] The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a motion requesting billions of dollars in disgorgement and civil penalties against Terraform Labs and its co-founder Do Kwon following a verdict in its civil case.

In an April 19 filing in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the SEC requested Kwon and Terraform pay roughly $4.7 billion in disgorgement and prejudgment interest after the civil case ruling, as well as a combined $520 million in civil penalties — $420 million from Terraform and $100 million from Kwon. The commission, Terraform and Kwon filed their briefs for potential remedies in the civil case simultaneously, with the crypto firm suggesting a maximum civil penalty of $3.5 million and Kwon proposing only $800,000.

In addition to the monetary judgment, the SEC proposed barring Kwon from serving as an officer or director of a securities issuer and providing complete details of his accounts and assets. If approved, Terraform would also have a “conduct-based injunction” imposed on the firm to prevent “engaging in essentially the same behavior that led to the massive fraud.” The proposed remedies and civil judgment have yet to be ruled on by a judge.

“Defendants have not shown remorse for their conduct, nor can there be any doubt that they are in position where additional violations are not only possible but likely are already occurring,” said the SEC filing. “The Court should send an unequivocal message that this sort of brazen misconduct, and Defendants’ misbegotten attempt to excuse their behavior by crafting new rules and standards of behavior for crypto markets in contravention of the federal securities laws [...] will not be tolerated.”

On April 5, a jury found Terraform and Kwon liable for defrauding investors regarding statements over the offer and sale of TerraUSD (UST), Luna (LUNA) and wLUNA. A Terraform spokesperson said at the time that the firm was “carefully weighing [its] options and next steps.” Cointelegraph reached out to Terraform regarding the April 19 filing but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Related: Terraform Labs was ‘built on lies’ — SEC at trial

The SEC trial went forward without the presence of Kwon, who is currently embroiled in court proceedings in Montenegro. The Terraform co-founder was arrested in March 2023 for using falsified travel documents while attempting to leave the country.

Though later released and allowed to travel within Montenegro, the question of Kwon’s extradition to either the U.S. or South Korea remained unanswered at the time of publication. He faces potential criminal charges in both countries.

Magazine: The real risks to Ethena’s stablecoin model (are not the ones you think)"
"[INST] Memecoins are making millionaires, but are they actually good for crypto? [/INST] The crypto bull market is back, and with it comes everyone’s favorite — or least favorite — symbol that euphoria is returning: memecoins.

Headlines have been abuzz with wild stories of traders turning relatively modest sums of money into multimillion-dollar jackpots by getting in early on a token that ends up exploding. But for everyone who hits a major payday, there is inventively someone else who loses tons of money by betting too much on the wrong coin.

It seems like everyone has a strong opinion on memecoins, whether they think they bring a sense of joy and fun to crypto that is often missing or think they distract from the real-world issues blockchain seeks to solve.

On episode 14 of The Agenda podcast, hosts Jonathan DeYoung and Ray Salmond speak with Andreas Brekken, founder of no-sign-up crypto exchange SideShift.ai, about the positives and negatives associated with the memecoin frenzy, as well as what it all means for crypto as a whole.

The benefits of memecoin hype

Brekken believes that memecoins are overall “a super easy and friendly way for normal people to get involved in crypto just using your phone” and “a completely harmless way to use crypto” with one’s friends.

He argued that memecoins are a net positive for the crypto ecosystem, as they help people engage with blockchain technology and learn more about how cryptocurrencies work. They also function as a real-world testing ground for the technology:

“We’re testing real stuff because the same technology we can use to trade memecoins is literally the same technology we use to trade any other assets on-chain or cross-chain.”

The chain-congesting frenzy on Solana, for example, will force the network to improve its speed and reliability, which will ultimately benefit the blockchain in the long term, said Brekken.

When asked what more serious crypto projects can learn from meme tokens, Brekken said he admires the speed at which memecoins are able to build strong communities. He also pointed out that many memecoin developers burn their liquidity provider tokens so that their initial liquidity cannot be removed, demonstrating their commitment to a project — something other developers might imitate in the future.

Memecoin gambling

Most memecoins admittedly have no intrinsic or real-world value. As such, many people approach them as a gambling opportunity, one where there is the hope of making life-changing money. However, a large number of memecoin projects end up being outright scams and rug pulls, meaning that investors face the very real possibility that their funds will go to zero.

Brekken compared gambling on memecoins to gambling at Vegas or on sports: Some people go to casinos with a small amount of money and have fun with their friends no matter the outcome, while others cash out their life savings, lose it all on black and are left with nothing but regrets.

He added, however, that one must zoom out to get the bigger picture rather than being upset at memecoins themselves:

“Maybe the bigger question is, why are people gambling so much? I think one way to look at this is it may be that people are gambling because they don’t trust the system to give them a fair chance, and they’re looking at the inflation, and your money is becoming worthless all the time, and your salary is not going up. So it could be that it’s just a symptom of a financial system that people don’t trust.”

To hear more from Brekken’s conversation with The Agenda — including his thoughts on token names and free speech, the future of memecoins, and how memecoin seasons influence the broader crypto ecosystem — listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph."
"[INST] North Korean Lazarus hacker group using LinkedIn to target and steal assets: Report [/INST] The North Korean hacker group Lazarus is using LinkedIn to target vulnerable users and steal their assets via targeted malware attacks.

The incident came to light after blockchain security analytics firm SlowMist revealed that Lazarus group hackers are pretending to look for jobs as blockchain developers in the cryptocurrency industry through LinkedIn.

SlowMist claimed hackers steal confidential employee credentials after inviting access to their repository to run relevant code. The code snippets the hacker runs contain malicious code that steals confidential information and assets.

Using LinkedIn for targeted attacks is not a new method, and the North Korean hacker group used a similar tactic in December 2023, posing as a fake Meta recruiter.

After contacting victims via LinkedIn, the fake recruiter requested that the targeted “applicants” download two coding challenges as part of the hiring procedure. These two coding files contained malware, and when they were run on a work computer, they released a Trojan that allowed remote access.

Lazarus has stolen over $3 billion in crypto assets. It is among the most notorious and organized hacking groups that first surfaced in 2009 and continues to target crypto firms despite numerous sanctions against it.

Lazarus is known for using innovative ways to target and steal funds. In August 2023, the group used fake job interviews to steal $37 million from crypto payment firm CoinPaid. The hackers attempted to infiltrate CoinsPaid infrastructure by targeting individuals through fake high-salary job offers.

Related: US Treasury sanctions crypto mixer Sinbad, alleging North Korea ties

The group has been behind some of the biggest heists in the crypto industry. The 2022 Ronin Bridge hack is its biggest, with $625 million stolen.

The hacker group often uses crypto mixing services to launder its stolen funds back to North Korea, which, according to many reports, are used to fund the country’s military operations.

Although crypto firms are often the target of hacker groups, the decentralized nature of blockchain makes it difficult for them to move their funds. Once identified, they are often tracked and blocked with the help of crypto platforms.

In February 2023, Huobi and Binance froze $1.4 million worth of crypto assets linked to North Korea. Similarly, $63 million worth of assets linked to the Harmony Bridge hack was also frozen by crypto exchanges.

Magazine: Deposit risk: What do crypto exchanges really do with your money?"
"[INST] Wormhole, Ethena and Waves are top 3 ‘trending’ tokens right now: Santiment [/INST] The native tokens related to the interoperability project Wormhole and synthetic dollar protocol Ethena Labs, along with the Waves Protocol, are currently the most trending crypto assets on social media, according to data from Santiment.

Wormhole’s W (W) token and Ethena Labs’ governance token (ENA) recently underwent multimillion airdrops, while the Waves (WAVES) token has captured trader attention after it was flagged for a potential delisting on Binance.

Multichain interoperability project Wormhole underwent its “Wormhole Token Generation Event” on March 3, which saw 670 million tokens distributed to nearly 400,000 eligible wallets.

In February, Wormhole described the event as “a crucial step in advancing Wormhole towards a decentralized and permissionless future.”

However, the W token has fallen 27.5% to $1.20 since CoinGecko started tracking its price on April 3.

Reports also emerged that Wormhole’s team also briefly forgot to exclude the address of the exploiter who stole $321 million from the protocol back in February 2022.

ENA is also receiving close attention following its token launch on April 2, which included a massive $450-million airdrop.

The largest recipient received 3.3 million ENA tokens, worth $1.96 million at the time.

ENA has since surged past the $1 mark, meaning the holder’s ENA bag would now be worth over $3.4 million.

Shortly after ENA went live, it was listed on some of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Bybit, KuCoin, HTX, MEXC and BitMart.

Ethena is a synthetic dollar protocol built on Ethereum that will provide a cryptocurrency-native solution for money not reliant on the traditional banking system.

However, eyebrows were raised last month when it started offering a 67% annual percentage yield on its synthetic dollar, USDe.

Related: Memecoin madness is breaking the Bitcoin halving cycle

Meanwhile, the Waves Protocol’s WAVE token has plummeted 32.5% to $2.88 since April 2, sparking trader attention.

Santiment’s “AI Summary” suggests WAVES is trending due to a proposal to invest Neutrino (XTN) treasury funds into the WavesIndex pool, where the protocol would buy tokens using WAVES from Neutrino reserves.

However, WAVES was also added to Binance’s Monitoring Tags list, which means that it may no longer meet the standards and could be delisted at any time.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Bitcoin needs to hold above $80,000 to keep mining profitable post-halving [/INST] According to data from CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju, the current cost of mining using Antminer S19 XPs will rise from $40,000 to $80,000 after the Bitcoin halving in mid-April.

The Bitcoin halving is a milestone event occurring every 210,000 blocks or roughly every four years. The halving event cuts the block reward earned by miners by half.

Apart from indirectly impacting the price of Bitcoin (BTC), the halving event significantly impacts miner behavior, as mining costs double to earn the same amount of BTC.

After the May 2020 halving, the price for miners to continue mining profitably rose above $30,000, but the price of BTC also pumped to a new all-time high of $69,000 during the same cycle.

The average Bitcoin mining cost as of April 6 is $49,902, and the BTC price is above $70,000 at the time of writing. After the halving on April 20, average mining costs will rise above $80,000, and for miners to continue operating profitably, the BTC price must trade higher than that price.

Average Bitcoin mining cost. Source: MacroMicro

Historically, BTC prices have seen a multifold jump in price after the halving. Following the 2012 halving, the price of Bitcoin increased by around 9,000% to $1,162.

After the 2016 halving, the price of Bitcoin increased by about 4,200% to $19,800, and after the 2020 halving, the price of Bitcoin increased by almost 683% to $69,000.

Related: Bitcoin halving will have to battle with ‘weak time of year’ — Coinbase

Thus, miners have remained profitable despite fears of going out of business after each halving. Halving events also make several mining machines obsolete, as they can’t compete with the high hashing power demand.

After each halving, there comes a period when the BTC price remains below the miner’s profitable price. This period is marred by uncertainty and an increased selling of mining rigs, coupled with many small and lone miners often going out of business.

However, as demand increases due to the declining market supply, the price picks up and often rises higher than the average mining costs for miners.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all — Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Anthropic launches external tool use for Claude AI, enabling stock ticker integrations and more [/INST] Anthropic AI has launched a beta of its “tool use” functionality for all Anthropic Message API users for the Claude suite of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The beta allows users to connect Claude to external tools, which enables real-time information lookup, access and integration of third-party features into Claude’s workflow. Essentially, this means users can insert simple code snippets into their account API interface that give Claude the ability to bring outside information into its conversations.

One example given by Anthropic involves the use of about 10 lines of code to integrate a third-party stock ticker into the model.

With this integration, the model would no longer rely on web lookup to discover stock prices — a paradigm that can result in the model confidently displaying incorrect data — but instead can pass along information verified at the source level to be correct.

Because tool use for Claude uses a chain-of-thought reasoning model, the AI system is able to process complex commands requiring multiple third-party access integrations. This allows Claude to answer simultaneous queries and process requests that require step-by-step information seeking and integration.

According to Anthropic, all of the available Claude AI models can handle numerous tool requests:

“All models can handle correcting [sic] choosing a tool from 250+ tools provided the user query contains all necessary parameters for the intended tool with >90% accuracy. These limits apply to the total number of tools, regardless of complexity.”

The crypto, Web3 and blockchain communities could potentially benefit from Claude’s capabilities as, for the most part, any integration developed for the platform should be usable from within the API structure.

The use cases for crypto verticals could range from integrating real-time, trusted price tickers all the way to full decentralized exchange interface interoperability. Users could even connect wallet managers and portfolio trackers to the model and create trading workflows.

It bears mention that AI models can make mistakes and that Claude is a general chatbot not specialized for financial, cryptocurrency, or blockchain uses specifically. This means even the most trustworthy integrations could still end up producing incorrect outputs.

Related: Google eyes paid AI search features, explores subscription model"
"[INST] Ethereum validator P2P.org hits $7.5B TVL, adds new SaaB model [/INST] P2P.org, a validator for the Ethereum blockchain, has hit a new growth milestone and is launching a new staking model designed for businesses.

The Ethereum validator has seen its total value locked (TVL) increase from $5 billion in February to more than $7.4 billion in March, the firm said in an announcement to Cointelegraph on April 10.

P2P.org’s TVL rose from $1.4 billion by the end of the first quarter of 2023 to $7.3 billion at the end of Q1 2024, or a 396% year-over-year increase.

According to data from Dune Analytics, P2P.org’s market share in terms of the total staked Ether (ETH) accounts for 0.75% or 240,832 of staked ETH as of April 8.

In contrast, Lido, the largest Ethereum validator, has a 29% share of the total staked Ethereum, or 9.5 million ETH. According to Dune Analytics, as much as 17% of the market is staked by unidentified validators.

Ethereum stakers by the amount of staked Ether. Source: Dune Analytics

In conjunction with the TVL milestone, P2P.org announced the launch of a new staking model targeting businesses. The new staking-as-a-business (SaaB) model addresses staking difficulties that some businesses face, including those related to functionalities, promotion of staking services and revenue generation.

“Our objective is to assist in the establishment or amplification of staked assets within institutional products, ensuring that staking contributes a minimum of 10% to total revenue, ideally reaching 20%,” P2P.org CEO Alex Esin told Cointelegraph. He added:

“This is not just a service or a solution; it's a partnership model that helps businesses to scale by integrating new DeFi and Staking services into their platforms.”

Ethereum staking is a process of locking up Ether to maintain the Ethereum network and rewarding users with newly minted ETH. Ethereum’s staking mechanism was introduced in September 2022 when the ETH network adopted a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

Related: Fidelity amends spot Ethereum ETF proposal to include staking

Unlike a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism — which is used on the Bitcoin blockchain — the PoS consensus mechanism does not need mining and relies on validation instead.

Ethereum validators are entities that stake a minimum of 32 ETH in the network to participate in running Ethereum’s PoS consensus blockchain. According to data from Beacon Cha, there were 980,000 validators on the Ethereum blockchain as of April 9.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Mt. Gox trustee updates Bitcoin and fiat repayment timetable [/INST] Users of the hacked cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox received another optimistic signal regarding compensation for hacked funds, with Mt. Gox trustee updating some crucial repayment data.

Multiple Mt. Gox creditors have reported that their Mt. Gox claims accounts were updated with information about Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and fiat repayment, with many suggesting that cryptocurrency repayments are coming soon.

Some of the first such reports surfaced on the Mt. Gox insolvency subreddit in mid-April, with users reporting the addition of amounts to be paid in the repayment data table on their accounts.

According to a screenshot shared by one creditor, the Mt. Gox claims accounts now show a table with repayment status and other entries, such as the amount of completed repayment and the amount of incomplete repayment.

Source: Mt. Gox insolvency hub

According to multiple posts on the Mt. Gox insolvency hub on Reddit, some creditors have already received fiat currency in their bank accounts.

“Money received as USD into an HSBC currency account and looks like zero fees,” one Mt. Gox creditor wrote on April 22, adding that the payment came more than a month after the first table update appeared on the claims account.

“Table had been updated March 15 first then April 8 second then April 18 when BTC lines arrived,” the Redditor stated.

The latest additions of Bitcoin on the accounts in the Mt. Gox rehabilitation claims system is a major move for Mt. Gox creditors signaling disbursement of crypto or fiat will happen, one Mt. Gox creditor told Cointelegraph.

Related: Bankrupt Voyager platform secures $484M for creditor repayments

“In comparison, last December Japanese claimants received notes on their page and within two weeks they saw fiat in their accounts via PayPal and private banks,” the creditor said, adding: “Let’s hope the crypto remittance echoes that of its fiat predecessor.”

Founded in 2010, the now-defunct Mt. Gox was once the biggest Bitcoin exchange in the world, estimated to account for 70% of all BTC transactions before implosion. The platform lost 850,000 BTC to a security breach in 2014.

Mt. Gox is expected to repay its creditors 142,000 Bitcoin and 143,000 in the forked cryptocurrency Bitcoin Cash in addition to 69 billion Japanese yen ($510 million) by October 2024.

The latest table updates followed the completion of identity verification of Mt. Gox creditors and their crypto exchange accounts that would be used to repay Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash in January 2024. Some available platforms include Bitstamp, Kraken, Bitbank, BitGo and SBI VC Trade.

Magazine: Bitcoin Halving will pump games, Shrapnel’s ‘simple’ secret revealed: Web3 Gamer"
"[INST] 90% of Bitcoin ETF inflows are still retail — VanEck CEO [/INST] Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have attracted significant amounts of capital in 2024, but traditional banks and institutional investment have yet to enter the fray.

Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph at Paris Blockchain Week, VanEck CEO Jan van Eck said the retail sector has primarily been responsible for inflows into spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs in the United States.

Van Eck said that the initial success of the ETFs, which have on some days seen billions of dollars of inflows since their launch, surpassed his expectations. However, he believes the inflows have not come from significant investments from traditional finance (TradFi) players.

Jan van Eck on stage at Paris Blockchain Week. Source: Gareth Jenkinson

“I was surprised, but I don’t think it’s traditional investors yet. I still think 90% of the flows are retail. You’ve had some Bitcoin whales and some other institutions move some assets in, but they were already exposed to Bitcoin,” van Eck said.

Related: $250K Bitcoin? Tim Draper says halving, Bitcoin ETFs will drive demand

The CEO of the investment management firm added that no U.S. banks have officially approved or allowed their financial advisers to recommend Bitcoin to date.

Van Eck said that the next month could see the arrival of some major institutional investments from banks and traditional firms but that the Bitcoin ETF landscape was still in its infancy:

“There’s a lot of maturation to happen. A lot of technology will be developed on-chain, so there’s a long way to go.”

Cointelegraph also asked why investors would prefer to invest in a Bitcoin ETF over directly buying and managing BTC themselves. Van Eck said convenience was a major reason, as investors look to fund managers to handle their entire portfolios.

“Convenience, safety and affordability. You had 2% spreads on many centralized exchange platforms like Coinbase. We have single-digit spreads for the ETFs and no fees or low fees. It’s easier just to do a buy ticket than anything else,” Van Eck said.

Following in his father’s footsteps

VanEck was founded in 1955 by John van Eck, who would make his name by starting the first gold fund in the United States in 1968 when gold was fixed against the dollar. Van Eck said his father’s fund boomed as inflation soared in the 1970s.

Van Eck said that his tendency to be a “paranoid business person” has kept him alert to any emerging assets that could contend with gold:

“In 2017, we said Bitcoin will not replace gold, but it will significantly complement it in people's portfolios.”

Van Eck said his firm’s “big picture” approach to investing is driven by the understanding that political, economic and technological trends will drive financial markets. Up until the 2010s, there had not been an emerging asset until Bitcoin rose to prominence.

Related: ‘Unsustainable’ deficit, inflation means more demand for Bitcoin: Grayscale

“I started looking at Bitcoin. I’m not like super in love with it or anything. I just think that, at times, you really want to have a store of value in your portfolio. And that’s what I care about, people’s investment savings,” Van Eck explained.

The CEO added that there’s an argument for Bitcoin being a better store of value than gold in contemporary times. He also said that the U.S. has “big budget deficit problems” that it must tackle in the coming year and that market movements are reflecting anticipation of this reality.

While much has been made of the impact of Bitcoin ETFs and the price appreciation of the preeminent cryptocurrency in 2024, Van Eck said their impact might be overstated:

“What I’d like to point out is that it’s not the most earth-shattering thing. The Bitcoin market is more global and much deeper than just being influenced by the ETFs.”

Van Eck pointed to a sharp rise in price in early April that did not occur during U.S. trading hours, which is indicative of the influence of Asian markets.

Magazine: Big Questions: How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?"
"[INST] Singapore amends Payment Services Act to cover token custody and transfers [/INST] The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced that it would implement amendments to the country’s Payment Services Act (PS Act) to expand the scope of regulated services related to digital payment token (DPT) service providers.

On April 2, Singapore’s central bank said it would bring several activities within the scope of the PS Act. This includes providing custodial services for DPTs, facilitating token transfers and exchange and the facilitation of cross-border money transfers.

Excerpt of the amendments to be implemented in Singapore. Source: MAS

The regulator also clarified that the law covers cases even where the service provider does not come into possession of the funds or where the money is not accepted or received in Singapore.

MAS also said that the new updates would allow it to include additional requirements for DPT service providers. MAS wrote:

“The amendments will empower MAS to impose requirements relating to anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism, user protection and financial stability on DPT service providers.”

The amendments will be implemented in various stages starting on April 4. According to MAS, transitional arrangements will be provided for entities affected by the expanded scope.

The regulator urged these entities to notify the central bank within 30 days and apply for a license within six months after April 4 if they wish to continue operations while under review.

MAS also announced that noncompliant companies would be shut down. “Entities that do not fulfill the requirements above are required to cease the activities when the amendments come into effect,” it wrote.

Meanwhile, the regulator will also include amendments related to safeguarding customer assets of payment token service providers.

These will cover the segregation of customer assets and placement in a trust account, maintenance of books and records and ensuring protections for the security of customer assets.

The amendments adding protection to user assets will be enacted six months after April 4.

Related: Singapore police recommend hardware wallets against crypto drainers

Many crypto companies are acquiring licenses as they offer their services to the Singaporean market. Organizations like Crypto.com, Coinbase and Ripple have obtained complete payment institution licenses in the country.

After completing the requirements, Crypto.com obtained its Major Payment Institution (MPI) license in June 2023. Ripple received the formal approval on Oct. 4, while Coinbase acquired the full MPI license on Oct. 2, 2023.

Magazine: KuCoin’s desperate $10M airdrop, 1 tweet raises $37M for memecoin: Asia Express"
"[INST] ‘Unsustainable’ deficit, inflation mean more demand for Bitcoin: Grayscale [/INST] Store of value assets, such as Bitcoin (BTC), will continue to be a hot commodity as the United States government continues to overspend and keep interest rates high, according to Grayscale’s managing director of research, Zach Pandl.

“We expect persistent inflation and unsustainable budget deficits to contribute to continued demand for store of value assets, like Bitcoin,” Pandl told Cointelegraph.

Pandl argued that, given the current high inflation, the Federal Reserve is unlikely to reduce interest rates anytime soon. However, upcoming events like Bitcoin halving, scheduled for April 20, rising economic growth and more crypto adoption will fuel Bitcoin’s price.

“The Fed won’t be able to cut rates for a while with core inflation this high, but booming nominal growth, the Bitcoin halving and adoption trends like tokenization should create a supportive environment for crypto markets.”

The inflation in March rose 0.4% month-on-month and 3.5% year-over-year, versus 0.3% monthly increase and 3.4% year-over-year estimates from the Dow Jones economists survey show.

The outcome has left many disappointed, as commentators resonated with Pandl’s concerns that persistent high inflation rates will hinder the Fed from lowering interest rates in the near future.

Ernst & Young chief economist Greg Daco told Yahoo Finance that the higher inflation rates put more pressure on “policymakers to sustain a higher-for-longer monetary policy stance.”

Pandl, however, also said that while an increase in the real interest rate is a “short-term negative for crypto,” there will be continued demand for store-of-value assets over the longer term.

From a macro perspective, the 10-year real interest rate soared by 19% from the previous month to 1.934, up from February’s 1.616, which might be a catalyst for prompting investors to gravitate toward less volatile assets, such as bonds and term deposits.

There have been several instances over the years when the 10-year real interest rate experienced a major monthly spike, and Bitcoin’s price significantly dropped in correlation.

The 10-year real interest rate. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St.Louis

The 10-year real interest rate surged by 52.35% from December 2017 to January 2018, rising from 0.573 to 0.873, per the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data.

Similarly, Bitcoin’s price fell sharply during this period, from approximately $12,839 at the end of December 2017 to $9,240 by the end of January 2018, representing a 28% decline.

Related: Bitcoin whales ‘buy the dip’ post-CPI as BTC price gains 3.6%

Following the release of the most recent CPI information, Bitcoin experienced a minor downward shift in its price, mirroring a similar sentiment from investors.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that BTC’s price dropped as much as 2.5% on April 10 to an intra-day low of $67,463 on Coinbase.

At the time of publication, Bitcoin’s price stands at $70,640, per CoinMarketCap data.

In an April 11 post on X, crypto analyst Matthew Hyland identified the formation of an ascending triangle on Bitcoin’s price chart, noting that Bitcoin has established a new resistance level above $71,500, reaching $72,329 on April 8.

Magazine: Synthetix founder: It’s DeFi that’s wrong, not the market"
"[INST] Peter Schiff questions Bitcoin ETF demand and $100K BTC price target [/INST] Gold proponent Peter Schiff has questioned market pundits who have set a Bitcoin price target of $100,000 in the current bull run.

Schiff also took a dig at spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the demand created by the products in the current market.

Schiff is a known Bitcoin critic and often questions its market value and real-world use cases. Schiff called out analysts who claimed the BTC price could surpass $100,000, boosted by the significant demand created by spot BTC ETFs.

In an April 16 X post, Schiff cited the bearish performance of some of the key Bitcoin-related equity markets, such as Coinbase, MicroStrategy, Galaxy Digital and a few other crypto-linked stocks.

He questioned why the high demand for BTC is not reflected in the stocks of companies linked to BTC.

Schiff said Coinbase is down 21%, Galaxy Digital is down 26%, MicroStrategy is down 33%, and several Bitcoin mining stocks are down double digits.

However, the gold proponent didn’t specify a timeline for those losses despite most Bitcoin and crypto-linked stocks outperforming traditional market stocks by a significant margin since the start of 2024.

Only in the past week have many of these stocks recorded a downturn due to bearish momentum in the crypto market.

The current bearish momentum in the crypto market is no big surprise either. Market analysts have explained how BTC has historically seen a pre-halving dip and picks up momentum post-halving. The Bitcoin halving is scheduled for later this week.

Related: ETH price nears 3-year lows vs. Bitcoin — Will an Ethereum ETF stem the tide?

Schiff’s dig didn’t go unnoticed, with several Bitcoin proponents responding to his post debunking his selective data. One user pointed out that MicroStrategy stocks are up 300% year-on-year (YoY).

A few others called him out for cherry-picking data while sharing the performance of Bitcoin alongside gold to highlight the growth difference between the two assets.

While gold has risen to new all-time highs in the second quarter of 2024, it pales in comparison to BTC’s rise over the same period. Bitcoin proponents Dan Held and Willy Woo also reminded Schiff how he missed the opportunity to buy BTC in 2013 when it was trading at around $1,000.

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments — Trezor CEO"
"[INST] Banks could flood into stablecoins if new bill passes: S&P Global [/INST] A new stablecoin-focused bill introduced to the United States Senate could “encourage” U.S. banks to step into the stablecoin market, says global ratings firm S&P Global Ratings.

In an April 23 research note, S&P shared that proposals outlined in the Payment Stablecoin Act — introduced to the Senate on April 17 — could encourage banks to get involved in issuing U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins and potentially spell trouble for large non-U.S entities that issue stablecoins such as Tether.

Describing stablecoins as a potential “key pillar of financial markets,” the ratings agency looked to BlackRock’s recently launched BUIDL fund as evidence for the “efficiencies and enhanced settlement security” of stablecoins in tokenizing assets and digital bonds.

Notably, the Lummis-Gillibrand Payment Stablecoin Act proposed introducing a $10 billion issuance limit on non-bank stablecoin firms, banning “unbacked” algorithmic stablecoins, as well as requiring stablecoin issuers to hold one-to-one cash or cash-equivalent reserves.

“Assuming the bill is approved, and that relevant banking regulation follows, the new rules may offer banks a competitive advantage by limiting institutions without a banking license to a maximum issuance of $10 billion,” it said.

The ratings agency also noted that the introduction of a $10 billion issuance on non-bank firms could spell trouble for Tether which — with a market cap of $110 billion — is currently the largest U.S. Dollar-pegged stablecoin issuer on the market.

Related: Crypto advocacy group claims stablecoin bill would ‘violate free speech rights’

Tether, the largest stablecoin by outstanding volume, is issued by a non-U.S. entity and therefore not a permitted payment stablecoin under the proposed bill,” S&P Global said.

“This means that U.S. entities couldn’t hold or transact in Tether, which may reduce demand while boosting U.S.-issued stablecoins.”

S&P noted that much of Tether’s transaction activity occurred primarily outside of the United States and was driven in large part by transactions in emerging markets, retail activity, and remittances.

Democrat Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said passing a regulatory framework for stablecoins was “absolutely critical to maintaining the U.S. dollar’s dominance, promoting responsible innovation, protecting consumers, and cracking down on money laundering and illicit finance,” when introducing the bill last week.

Not everyone was pleased with the proposals outlined in the bill, however.

Crypto advocacy organization Coin Center expressed concerns with the bill, saying it would be “bad policy” to ban algorithmic stablecoins, and described it as an unconstitutional act under protections of the First Amendment.

7 ICO alternatives for blockchain fundraising: Crypto airdrops, IDOs & more"
"[INST] OpenAI makes ChatGPT ‘less verbose,’ blurring writer-AI distinction [/INST] OpenAI has unveiled an upgraded version of GPT-4 Turbo, one of the models that power the conversational ChatGPT experience.

This upgraded version enables the artificial intelligence (AI) tool to engage in more natural conversations. This updated version is now available to premium users subscribed to ChatGPT Plus, Team or Enterprise plans.

OpenAI said that the latest model, “gpt-4-turbo-2024-04-09,” boasts writing, math, logical reasoning and coding enhancements, along with an updated knowledge base.

The latest upgrade was trained on publicly accessible data up to December 2023. The previous version could only draw on material up to April 2023. OpenAI wrote in a post on X:

“When writing with ChatGPT [with the new GPT-4 Turbo], responses will be more direct, less verbose and use more conversational language.”

However, this update could worsen the ongoing challenge of writers sounding like AI despite having written the articles themselves.

On April 7, Paul Graham, co-founder of influential startup accelerator Y Combinator, concluded that an email including the word “delve” must have been written with the help of AI.

Graham argued that the word wasn’t commonly used in everyday conversation, but many Africans — mostly Nigerians — countered, saying they used the word often. The conversation has since shifted to the fact that people from different parts of the world use the English vocabulary in diverse ways.

Graham’s post also implies that writers who speak English as a second language could lose their jobs because their work could be deemed too similar to AI-generated content.

Related: OpenAI set off an arms race and our security is the casualty

The update follows the April 10 launch of new models in OpenAI’s API, including GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, incorporating image understanding features.

According to documentation on its website, the AI developer OpenAI quietly updated the training data set for its GPT-4 Turbo to be relevant from December 2023.

The update was implemented with the intention of reducing what developers call “laziness” in a model in which it doesn’t complete tasks asked of it.

OpenAI has also eliminated the requirement for users to create an account to access its widely used generative AI tool, ChatGPT-3.5. The company announced on April 1 that it would no longer require ChatGPT users to sign up to make it “easier to experience the potential of AI.” However, users without accounts cannot store their history of previous interactions.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Paradigm’s funding takes Farcaster’s dev to unicorn status [/INST] A new funding round is set to lift the valuation of Merkle Manufactory — the company behind the social network Farcaster — to the $1 billion mark, according to a Bloomberg report citing sources familiar with the matter.

Leading the round is crypto investment firm Paradigm, whose portfolio includes major crypto firms, such as Coinbase, Blur, dYdX, Compound and Citadel Securities.

Merkle was co-founded in 2020 by former Coinbase executives Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan. The company’s flagship is the social media application Warpcast, built on top of the decentralized network for social media apps Farcaster.

Romero confirmed in a post on March 28 that Merkle is raising capital. “Wanted to let everyone know that Merkle Manufactory is closing a new round of financing.” Paradigm has not confirmed its involvement. Merkle raised $30 million from venture capital firm a16z crypto in July 2022.

Source: Dan Romero

Since January, the Farcaster platform has seen a significant jump in user activity following Warpcast’s introduction of Frames — a feature that allows apps to run inside posts without leaving the platform. For instance, Frames enables users to mint nonfungible tokens, perform transactions, access external blog posts and respond to surveys directly within the app.

The update has significantly boosted user engagement. The number of daily active users on the Farcaster network increased from approximately 5,000 on Jan. 28 to over 249,000 on March 30, according to data from Dune Analytics.

Farcaster’s daily active users. Source: Dune Analytics

Decentralized social media platforms are a new class of networks that leverage blockchain technology to offer users ownership over their data, content and interactions, moving away from the centralized control seen in traditional social media.

These platforms are characterized by features such as censorship resistance and content monetization without intermediaries. Popular names in this sector include Friend.tech, Minds and Mastodon. According to two industry executives, one of the biggest challenges decentralized social media platforms face is user retention.

Magazine: ‘Treat your first NFT purchase like a first date’ — NFT Collector Suzanne"
"[INST] Circle launches USD Coin on Ethereum zkSync [/INST] Stablecoin issuer Circle has expanded support for its native stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC), to Ethereum zero-knowledge layer-2 solution zkSync.

“Many leading ecosystem apps and DeFi protocols are expected to support native USDC on zkSync for payments, trading, borrowing, lending,” wrote Circle in its April 9 announcement. Developers can use USDC on zkSync to build on a stable foundation that is built to last and officially supported by Circle. With the addition of zkSync, USDC is now supported on 16 blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Arbitrum and others.

Zero-knowledge proofs determine the integrity of a transaction without disclosing the supporting evidence. Meanwhile, rollups bundle transactions off the Ethereum main layer and club them into a single transaction. Together, they form the core of the zkSync technology, which processes transactions at record speed and low cost at layer 2 and sends the finalized proof back to the Ethereum mainnet. As of April 9, 2024, the zkSync ecosystem includes over 180 decentralized applications and over 5.7 million unique active wallet addresses over the last 30 days.

Like USDC on other blockchains, the zkSync USDC can be redeemed one-for-one for U.S. dollars directly via Circle or via digital wallets and exchanges. The zkSync USDC can also be swapped for other USDCs via cross-chain bridges. Institutional investors can also access the stablecoin via Circle Mint. “Businesses and developers use zkSync to benefit from fast, low cost transactions and native account abstraction,” Circle wrote, adding that “zkSync is on a mission to increase Ethereum’s throughput, and to fully preserve its foundational values.”

Circle has been mostly expanding access to USDC to other blockchains, although it has halted such efforts from time to time. On Feb. 21, Circle abruptly ceased USDC minting on the Tron blockchain but did not give a reason for ending Tron support, only saying it “continually assesses the suitability of all blockchains” as part of its risk management process.

Last year, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission sued Justin Sun and the Tron Foundation alleging they offered unregistered securities and conducted manipulative trading, which Sun denies.

Related: Binance follows Circle and drops USDC support on Tron"
"[INST] Scam crypto projects using stolen funds for liquidity disappear [/INST] Three crypto projects disappeared from the internet hours after blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced their liquidity to funds looted from previous hacks.

On April 14, ZachXBT identified a wallet address holding stolen funds that were providing liquidity to three new crypto projects: lending protocol Leaper Finance on Blast (1,800 followers on X), Zebra DAO on Base (3,200 followers) and Glori Finance on Arbitrum (3,200 followers).

Further investigations found that the wallet was previously used to fund a rug pull project and is currently providing liquidity funds to several projects across multiple blockchains, including Base, Solana, Scroll, Optimism, Arbitrum, Ethereum and Avalanche.

Shortly after being called out on X, the projects’ websites and social media accounts were deleted and remain inactive. However, the scammer running the Leaper Finance social media account acknowledged ZachXBT’s ability to trace fake projects.

The scam crypto projects deleted the social media accounts. Source: X

Right before deleting the account, they said, “Nice work! My comrades here at Lazarus fear you yet admire you!” while offering a partnership for a new scam token launch.

According to ZachXBT, the scammers in question are responsible for stealing millions of dollars worth of crypto from projects such as Magnate Finance, Kokomo Finance, Lendora and Solfire, among others.

The trend suggests that the stolen funds are being repurposed to create scam crypto projects primed for pulling off rug pull or exit scams on unwary investors.

Investors are advised to conduct thorough research on crypto projects before investing, including doing background checks on the founders and team and confirming the legitimacy of the audit report.

Related: New crypto scam drains users’ wallets without transaction approval

Ethereum layer-2 protocol Base saw an 18-fold increase in cryptocurrency funds stolen from phishing scams in March compared to January. According to blockchain anti-scam platform Scam Sniffer, approximately $3.35 million was stolen from phishing scammers on Base in March alone.

Scam Sniffer told Cointelegraph it expects even more phishing attacks on Base in April as the number of assets and active users on the chain continues to increase.

The rise in Base phishing scams comes amid a recent memecoin craze on the Coinbase-backed chain, which, according to L2Beat, has helped push Base’s total value locked above $3.2 billion — marking a 370% increase so far in 2024.

Magazine: Altseason on the horizon, SEC targets Uniswap, and BTC halving news: Hodler’s Digest, April 7–13"
"[INST] Nigeria’s crypto reputation will prevail despite recent setbacks — Exchange exec [/INST] Nigeria’s global reputation in cryptocurrency is in potential jeopardy due to recent government crackdowns on local exchanges. However, Oladotun Wilfred Akangbe, the chief marketing officer of the Flincap crypto exchange, believes the country can weather the storm.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Akangbe expressed concerns about Nigeria’s image in the international crypto market following recent events. However, he stated that Nigeria has overcome more severe setbacks in the past.

In February, the Nigerian government used the country’s telecommunication providers to prevent local crypto users from accessing the websites of various crypto exchanges like Binance, OctaFX and others.

Authorities then accused Binance of illegally moving $26 billion out of the country and invited Binance to send representatives to discuss the issue.

Related: Nigeria’s Binance crackdown threatens Web3 industry

Binance executives Tigran Gambaryan and Nadeem Anjarwalla visited Nigeria in February in response to allegations that the exchange manipulated the country’s fiat currency, the naira.

However, the Binance execs were detained and charged with five counts related to money laundering after meeting with Nigerian officials about Binance’s regulatory issues. Anjarwalla subsequently escaped custody and was tracked down to Kenya, where he faces extradition.

Akangbe pointed out that controversies in Nigeria’s crypto sector are to be expected, given the country’s growing crypto adoption. He highlighted Nigeria’s significant role as a cryptocurrency user and blockchain adopter worldwide and remains optimistic about the future of crypto in the country:

“We can turn it around by projecting the fact that we are one of the biggest users of cryptocurrency and adopters of blockchain across the globe. It is normal to have a few controversies in a place where there is so much massive growth. The future remains bright for cryptocurrency in the country.”

Akangbe said the current sentiment in Nigeria toward crypto is a mix of enthusiasm and caution. While there is excitement around the crypto industry’s potential, concerns linger about regulations, cryptocurrency volatility, and the risks of scams and fraud.

Akangbe clarified that the uncertainties are due to the back and forth between the Nigerian government and stakeholders in the crypto space. Local crypto analysts have expressed disappointment with the government’s unfriendly attitude toward crypto in resolving the nation’s foreign exchange challenge.

Magazine: Bitcoin hits new highs, SEC delays options decision, and stablecoin bill looms: Hodler’s Digest, March 3–9"
"[INST] Wall Street funding has changed Bitcoin mining’s incentive structure: Report [/INST] Institutional capital investment in public Bitcoin (BTC) mining companies has disadvantaged individual and small-scale miners and could have lasting implications on network dynamics.

A Bitfinex report delving into market dynamics around the upcoming Bitcoin halving unpacks a changing dynamic in the cryptocurrency mining ecosystem over the past decade.

It suggests that publicly listed Bitcoin mining firms mark a shift away from a decentralized vision of individual miners contributing to the security of the network for personal gain.

“These corporate entities, with their focus squarely on shareholder returns, operate on a vastly different scale and with distinct priorities compared to their smaller counterparts,” an excerpt reads.

The report highlights the imperative to maximize profitability and manage investor expectations as a critical reason for strategic decisions prioritizing financial performance over the Bitcoin community’s altruistic ideals.

Related: Bitcoin halving will be a litmus test for inefficient ops: Mining execs

These are other qualities and ideals inherent to Bitcoin, which include securing the Bitcoin network, egalitarian access to the network and censorship resistance. The current landscape offers both opportunities and challenges the network’s foundational principles.

Infusion of Wall Street funding

The analysts note that the influx of capital and “professionalization” of mining operations by publicly traded firms can lead to increased hashing power, potentially enhancing the overall security and stability of the Bitcoin network.

Conversely, this leads to concerns about centralization and the influence of corporate interests, given that Bitcoin’s network was intended to be open, borderless and resistant to control by single entities.

“As these companies grow and consolidate their position, the Bitcoin community watches closely to ensure that the network’s decentralized ethos and the principles of Satoshi’s game theory design remain intact, even as the mining landscape evolves,” the analysts explain.

The report also suggests that “Wall Street funding” in corporate mining has fundamentally altered the incentive structure of the network.

The resource disparity favors corporate miners’ ability to scale operations, secure more affordable energy contracts, and invest in emerging technology.

The Bitfinex report adds that large-scale miners increase their efficiency and profitability at a scale unreachable by the average individual miner or large independent competitor.

Related: Bitcoin mining battles 2023 — Surging hash rates test industry limits

The analysts also question whether a more centralized landscape could threaten the “decentralized ethos of Bitcoin,” which could potentially affect network security and mining reward distribution.

Survival of the fittest

Questions over the future of independent miners, hobbyists and the geographic spread of the network’s hash rate all come into focus.

The report states that independent miners must innovate and collaborate to ensure viability. Mining pools offer a means for smaller miners to combine computational power for shared rewards to remain competitive.

Hobby mining’s sustainability could hinge on continuous innovation in mining technology and methods, including developing more energy-efficient hardware and exploiting renewable energy sources.

The analysts also highlight the geographical diversification of mining as a critical factor in maintaining the network’s decentralization. Emerging markets with access to renewable or untapped energy resources offer fertile ground for mining operations.

Magazine: Big Questions: How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?"
"[INST] Biden administration takes action to safeguard public from AI risks [/INST] The White House has unveiled its inaugural comprehensive policy for managing the risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI), mandating that agencies intensify reporting on AI utilization and tackle potential risks posed by the technology.

According to a March 28 White House memorandum, federal agencies must, within 60 days, appoint a chief AI officer, disclose AI usage and integrate protective measures.

This directive aligns with United States President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI from October 2023. On a teleconference with reporters, Vice President Kamala Harris said:

“I believe that all leaders from governments, civil society and the private sector have a moral, ethical and societal duty to make sure that artificial intelligence is adopted and advanced in a way that protects the public from potential harm while ensuring everyone can enjoy its full benefits.”

The latest regulation, an initiative by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), aims to guide the entire federal government in safely and efficiently utilizing artificial intelligence amid its rapid expansion.

While the government seeks to harness AI’s potential, the Biden administration remains cautious of its evolving risks.

As stated in the memo, certain AI use cases, particularly those within the Department of Defense, will not be mandated for disclosure in the inventory, as their sharing would contradict existing laws and government-wide policies.

By Dec. 1, agencies must establish specific safeguards for AI applications that could affect the rights or safety of Americans. For instance, travelers should have the option to opt out of facial recognition technology used by the Transportation Security Administration at airports.

Related: Biden administration announces key AI actions after executive order

Agencies unable to implement these safeguards must discontinue using the AI system unless agency leadership can justify how doing otherwise would heighten risks to safety or rights or hinder critical agency operations.

The OMB’s recent AI directives align with the Biden administration’s blueprint for an “AI Bill of Rights” from October 2022 and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Risk Management Framework from January 2023. These initiatives emphasize the importance of creating reliable AI systems.

The OMB also seeks input on enforcing compliance and best practices among government contractors supplying technology. It intends to ensure alignment between agencies’ AI contracts and its policy later in 2024.

The administration also unveiled its intention to recruit 100 AI professionals into the government by the summer, as outlined in the October executive order’s “talent surge.”

Magazine: Real AI use cases in crypto: Crypto-based AI markets, and AI financial analysis"
"[INST] Average daily active unique wallets reach 7M — DappRadar [/INST] The latest report from DappRadar highlights a slew of bullish indicators in the decentralized application (DApp) and Web3 sector for Q1 2024.

DApps saw a quarter-over-quarter usage increase of 77% on the whole, with a total daily active user wallet count of 7 million. This shows an increase of approximately 40% since February 2024, indicating the highest adoption rates since 2022.

According to DappRadar, the influx of new users “signals a robust recovery and the end of the longest bear market we’ve experienced.”

These perceived gains come on the heels of a banner quarter for the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, with Bitcoin reaching new all-time highs on several occasions in the wake of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of numerous spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund applications.

Related: New record: Bitcoin ETFs hit $1B in daily inflow

As Cointelegraph recently reported, much of this recent growth in the DApp sector has been driven by a renewed interest in nonfungible tokens (NFTs) throughout 2023 after a usage decline in 2022.

Wallet counts for unique active daily users rose to 4.8 million in 2023, more than double the previous year’s users. According to DappRadar, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) posted the highest gains last year, with a 166% increase over 2022.

The NFT sector has remained strong through 2024 so far. According to DappRadar, the first quarter saw a 50% surge in trading volume, at $3.9 billion, and a 13% lift in sales to $11.6 million. This was the strongest quarter for NFTs since Q1 2023.

In the first quarter of 2024, however, the social vertical has been at the front of the sector’s growth, with a 324% surge in active wallets. Decentralized finance, gaming and NFTs still performed well, but the uptick in activity for social media DApps could indicate an industry trend.

Finally, while nearly every indicator shows positive momentum for Web3, there is some bad news. Per the report, losses to exploits and hacks are up 9% year over year. This is down 32% over Q4 2024, but losses totaled $407 million for Q1 2024 alone."
"[INST] Bitcoin block art? Marathon showcases visualization potential of block building [/INST] A Bitcoin Core contributor has immortalized Marathon Digital’s logo into the data visualization of a Bitcoin block by using the mining firm’s template building tools.

X user Portland.HODL laid claim to the intriguing piece of “block art”, a custom graphic crafted by ordering transactions in a block that can be then seen on Bitcoin indexer website. Blockchain indexers visualize bitcoin transactions using square blocks and color gradients based on transaction sizes and fee rates.

Marathon Digital shared details of block 836361 which it successfully mined on March 26. The firm dubbed it the M block and wanted the visualization to demonstrate its template building capabilities and technology stack.

The company explained that by owning its mining pool, it can craft the order of transactions to create a form of block art. While not offering this specific output capability as a service, the mining company speculated that this could present a wave of creative potential not yet explored in the Bitcoin space.

Related: Bitcoin halving will be a litmus test for inefficient ops: Mining execs

Marathon also noted that the Bitcoin network should exclude blocks from full pay-per-share (FPPS) calculations to ensure more accurate miner fee estimates. This is to avoid any effect that Marathon’s experiments might have on network fees.

Portland.HODL claims to have successfully crafted the block’s visualization through a long process of trial and error.

The process of creating this block art made use of OP_RETURN transactions in the Bitcoin protocol. This is a type of transaction that allows for a small amount of arbitrary data to be included in a transaction.

The data is typically used for embedding messages or metadata onchain. If a user carefully crafts the content of these OP_RETURN transactions and orders them correctly, an image or pattern emerges when the block data is visualized.

Before a block is mined, all transactions wait in an area called the mempool. A miner can create numerous transactions to generate this kind of art once mined into a block. They would develop transactions with outputs that, when visualized, correspond to the pixels of the desired image.

Creating block art would also require a miner to modify their software to select specific transactions that will form the desired pattern instead of prioritizing transactions that maximize profit based on the fee density or satoshis per byte.

Related: Wall Street funding has changed Bitcoin mining’s incentive structure: Report

There is also the rest of the network to contend with. Mining a block with a specific set of transactions that will form an image or text, requires significant hashing power like that of Marathon.

Cointelegraph has reached out to Marathon and Portland.HODL for further details on the “M block” and the ramifications of block composability.

According to Bitcoin Gandalf, the total fees paid to get the desired output was $122,524, which Marathon paid itself.

Why did Marathon Digital Holdings' MARA Pool just mine a block with their logo on it?



I'll get to that, but first here's some things I haven't seen anyone talk about yet.



1⃣ Each coloured square represents a transaction in the block.



2⃣ To achieve this visual effect, the block… pic.twitter.com/LFIqSfsiSf — ₿itcoin Gandalf (@BTCGandalf) March 26, 2024

The X user, previously worked at Braiins mining, each colored square represents a transaction in the block and its associated fee. The block is constructed to create an image through the mempool space block visualizer.

Marathon launched a direct BTC transaction submission service in February 2024 designed to facilitate and speed up large and complex Bitcoin transactions.

Magazine: Big Questions: How can Bitcoin payments stage a comeback?"
"[INST] Ordinals drive ‘positive momentum’ in Bitcoin innovation — Franklin Templeton [/INST] Asset manager Franklin Templeton’s digital assets division published a note to its investors briefly introducing Bitcoin-based nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

Franklin Templeton Digital Assets said that the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol primarily drove positive momentum in innovation within Bitcoin.

The asset manager said there has been a “renaissance in activity” on Bitcoin in the past year because of Ordinals.

The asset manager also mentioned new fungible token standards like BRC-20 and Runes, Bitcoin-based layer-2 networks and Bitcoin decentralized finance (DeFi) primitives as contributors to driving Bitcoin innovation.

The asset manager also recognized that activities within the Bitcoin NFT space are accelerating. Franklin Templeton pointed out the increase in dominance for Bitcoin within the entire NFT ecosystem. The company wrote:

“Bitcoin Ordinals have seen a surge in trading volume over the past several months. This is reflected in an increase in dominance starting in December of 2023 when it surpassed ETH in trading volume.”

Furthermore, the asset manager highlighted several Bitcoin Ordinals collections starting to “dominate” the NFT space in trading volume and market capitalization. This included NodeMonkes, Runestone, Bitcoin Puppets, Ordinal Maxi Biz and Bitmap.

30-day NFT sales volume by blockchain. Source: CryptoSlam

While the asset manager seemed optimistic about Ordinals, it also highlighted in the note that these assets may lose value and have no bank guarantee.

FOLLOW BITCOIN HALVING COVERAGE IN FULL here

Franklin Templeton also noted that Ordinals assets are not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

In addition, the asset manager reminded its investors that “all investments involve risks, including the loss of capital.” The firm wrote that digital assets are subject to risks because of their “immature” and rapidly developing technology and their vulnerabilities.

Related: Ordinals trader gets Bitcoin back after fat-fingered NFT purchase

Franklin Templeton has been introducing its investors to multiple niches within the crypto space. On March 14, the firm went “full degen” by publishing an investor note on memecoins.

The company recognized the potential of memecoins to produce quick profits but also noted that they had “no inherent value.”

Franklin Templeton was one of exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuers that launched a spot Bitcoin ETF in the United States earlier this year.

The firm has also participated in the race for a spot Ether (ETH) ETF. On Feb. 12, the company submitted an S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Magazine: NFTs are like nightclubs, crypto is a volatile religion: NFTStats, NFT Collector"
"[INST] Stocks and crypto at the edge of ‘significant’ correction: 10x Research [/INST] The stock and cryptocurrency markets could be “ahead of a crucial tipping point” heading for a significant price correction, according to Markus Thielen, the founder of 10x Research.

“We sold everything last night,” wrote Thielen, citing persistent inflation, decreasing rate cuts and a rising bond yield as the reasons behind his bearish outlook. In an April 16 research note, the founder wrote:

“The primary trigger is the unexpected and persistent inflation. With the bond market now projecting less than three cuts and 10-year Treasury Yields surpassing 4.50%, we may have arrived at a crucial tipping point for risk assets.”

The bearish research note comes after Bitcoin’s (BTC) price fell over 9.3% during the week to trade above the $63,400 level as of 9:15 am UTC, according to CoinMarketCap data.

The reason behind Bitcoin’s decline could be the falling expectations for an incoming interest rate cut, according to the research note:

“Most of this 2023/2024 bitcoin rally is driven by expectations that interest rates would be cut, and this narrative is being seriously challenged now.”

Traders are currently expecting rates to remain unchanged — 99% of market participants expect the Federal Reserve to maintain interest rates at the current 5.25%–5.50%, up from 93.6% a month ago, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch Tool.

Target interest rate expectation. Source: CME

Thielen added that the company sold all its tech stocks at the open during Monday’s trading session:

“We only hold a few high-conviction crypto coins. Overall, we are bearish risk assets.”

Related: ETH price nears 3-year lows vs. Bitcoin — Will an Ethereum ETF stem the tide?

Is Bitcoin price overheated?

A key technical indicator suggests that Bitcoin price may be “overbought.”

On the weekly chart, Bitcoin’s relative strength index (RSI) is currently at 67, suggesting that the asset may be overheated. Yet Bitcoin’s RSI has cooled significantly from its 2024 high of 88, hit on March 24, according to TradingView.

BTC/USD, 1-week chart. Source: TradingView

The RSI is a popular momentum indicator used to measure whether an asset is oversold or overbought based on the magnitude of recent price changes.

Investor focus has shifted to the upcoming Bitcoin halving, prompting long-term holders to start selling and moving assets off exchanges.

As long as short-term holders absorb the supply, Bitcoin price could see a recovery, according to a Bitfinex research report shared with Cointelegraph:

“There has been a shift in the makeup of the Bitcoin investor base, with new entrants (Short-Term Holders) absorbing the supply sold by Long-Term Holders (LTHs). This is evidenced by the rising Market Value to Realized Value ratio for STHs, albeit it is still below peak levels seen in previous cycles. If this dynamic of STHs absorbing LTH sell downs persists, then it could indicate room for further price growth.”

Related: ‘China is about to start bidding’ — Will Hong Kong Bitcoin ETFs spark the halving rally?"
"[INST] Munchables reworks multisig, contracts and dev hiring after $68M theft [/INST] Days after nonfungible token (NFT) game Munchables lost and recovered nearly $63 million from a rogue in-house developer, the platform said it has devised a plan to avoid making the same mistake again.

On March 26, Ethereum-based NFT game Munchables was robbed of over 17,400 Ether (ETH) from a hacker, who was later identified as a Munchables developer. The situation de-escalated shortly after the developer decided to return the stolen funds without demanding a ransom.

While Munchables narrowly escaped what would have been an eye-watering loss, the developer announced it is now implementing a number of changes to “upgrade the security of the project’s funds and smart contracts.”

One of the strategies involves onboarding investment firm Manifold Trading, market maker Selini Capital and blockchain investigator ZachXBT as new multisig signers to ensure the safe return of users’ funds.

Munchables announced that developers from Manifold Trading and Selini Capital will also reaudit and upgrade to new contracts and oversee Munchables’ dev hiring process going forward.

Ethereum infrastructure firm Nethermind is set to further audit the refreshed contracts before Munchables goes live again.

After its relaunch, returning gamers will become eligible for higher rewards in the game. The platform has also pledged to provide financial support to the entities involved in the recovery process.

“Finally, we will send ETH and future MUNCH donations to those who were involved in the recovery process of keeping our users safe.”

The company also warned users against interacting with websites to claim a refund, as the company will send the refunds directly to their wallets.

Related: Andreessen Horowitz to invest $30M in tech-fueled gaming startups

The month of March saw nearly $100 million in digital assets stolen, according to blockchain security firm PeckShield.

Total hack losses in 2024 by month. Source: PeckShield

In the month alone, the crypto ecosystem witnessed over 30 hacking incidents, which accounted for $187 million in funds lost. On the bright side, 52.8% of the hacked funds were returned.

The top five security incidents in terms of the value lost include the Munchables incident. The Curio hack, the Prisma Finance incident, the NFPrompt hack and the WOOFi exploit also made it to the list.

Magazine: Creating ‘good’ AGI that won’t kill us all: Crypto’s Artificial Superintelligence Alliance"
"[INST] Crypto.com expands in South Korea despite increasing regulatory scrutiny [/INST] Centralized cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com will launch its cryptocurrency trading app to South Korean retail investors on April 29.

The platform will initially offer access to over 150 cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on the Crypto.com app for South Korean users, which is a significant market segment for the company’s growth, wrote Eric Anziani, the president and CEO of Crypto.com, in an April 2 announcement:

“South Korean regulators are thoughtfully advancing the sector and we look forward to continuing to collaborate with them to help grow the industry responsibly.”

The new platform will take over from crypto exchange OK-Bit, which was acquired by Crypto.com in 2022. OK-Bit will cease services on April 29, the day of the app’s launch.

The new app will exclusively serve retail investors in the country, as South Korean institutions have been banned from investing in crypto since 2017.

Since the country’s financial regulators refuse to recognize crypto as financial assets, institutions are also banned from investing in crypto-related exchange-traded funds.

The launch in South Korea is part of the crypto exchange’s global expansion efforts. Crypto.com has a strong presence in “tier one” jurisdictions such as North America, Western Europe, the United Kingdom and Asia.

The exchange has been working on bolstering its South Korean presence since at least 2022 when it secured an Electronic Financial Transaction Act and virtual asset services provider registration in the country.

Related: Crypto.com president talks up MiCA, allowing exchanges to expand across Europe

South Korea tightens regulatory crypto oversight

The expansion comes despite tightening regulations for crypto exchanges and company executives in the country.

South Korea’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) announced a tightening of regulatory measures for crypto exchanges in the country, including the possibility of expelling platforms that are deemed “unsuitable,” according to a Feb. 12 report.

South Korea’s rising crypto generation. Source: YouTube

The FIU also aims to expand the scope of screening procedures in the crypto market and prevent unfit exchanges from entering the economy.

In February, South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) proposed a new amendment that would mandate new crypto firm executives to obtain regulatory approval before assuming their roles.

If the amendment is accepted, new executives won’t be able to work until the FSC formally approves their applications.

Related: Upbit’s trading volume falls below $4B after reaching yearly high in March"
"[INST] Pro-crypto Super PAC backs winners of Democratic primaries for House seats [/INST] A political action committee (PAC) used $3.7 million toward Democratic candidates in Alabama and Texas for the race to win seats in the United States House of Representatives starting in 2025.

In an April 16 runoff between Democratic candidates to represent Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, Shomari Figures defeated Anthony Daniels with roughly 61% of the vote. Figures is expected to face off against Republican Caroleene Dobson in the general election, scheduled for Nov. 5.

According to data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Protect Progress Super PAC used roughly $1.7 million from donations, including Coinbase and Ripple Labs, to support Figures’ bid for office between July 2023 and February 2024. A Protect Progress spokesperson told Cointelegraph that an additional $950,000 was reported after February, with the funds used to purchase advertisements supporting Figures and polling.

Protect Progress’ website states the Super PAC “supports Democratic candidates committed to securing the United States as the home to innovators building the next generation of the internet,” specifically promoting blockchain technology. The group is affiliated with the Fairshake Super PAC, which was responsible for funding attack ads targeting Democratic Senate candidate Katie Porter in California.

Figures’ campaign website listed cryptocurrency among his issues as part of efforts “to stimulate innovation and technological advancement” and address regulatory concerns related to digital assets. According to the FEC, the Alabama candidate’s campaign raised roughly $400,000 — 14% of what Protect Progress contributed to his election bid.

“Shomari believes in working together to support innovation and create good paying jobs for his community and all Americans,” Josh Vlasto, a spokesperson for Protect Progress, told Cointelegraph. “We are proud to support leaders like Shomari on both sides of the aisle.“

Related: Crypto users could ‘make a difference in a close election’ in the US — CoinFlip CEO

FEC records showed Protect Progress also used roughly $1 million to support Julie Johnson’s bid to represent Texas’ 32nd Congressional District in the House. Johnson won her local Democratic primary with 50.4% of the vote in March but also raised roughly $1.3 million for her campaign.

Her campaign website stated that the U.S. “must lead the development of crypto and blockchain technology” while expressing concern about “clear rules of the road” for the industry. Following the primary election results, Coinbase chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad posted a congratulatory message on X:

The U.S. general election on Nov. 5 will determine the winner of both aforementioned congressional seats and the other 433 in the House of Representatives, 34 in the Senate, and the Presidency. Other elections are seemingly being represented as a microcosm of pro- and anti-crypto views in government, including one between Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and lawyer John Deaton.

Magazine: Opinion: GOP crypto maxis almost as bad as Dems’ ‘anti-crypto army’"
"[INST] ETH to spike post halving, ETF denial would not ‘be bearish’ — Analysts [/INST] Crypto analysts are betting that Ether’s (ETH) price could see a significant upswing within months after the Bitcoin halving despite being down 11.39% over the past 30 days, based on historical data.

One researcher also thinks that a potential exchange-traded fund (ETF) denial won’t necessarily lower prices.

“If the ETF is denied, it will not be that bearish, as the market is not pricing in it yet, and we still have Bitcoin ETFs as the entrance for traditional funds,” Hashkey Capital head of Research Jupiter Zheng told Cointelegraph.

However, Zheng believes if a spot Ether ETF is approved with staking, it will be “really bullish.”

He explained that an approval could trigger a surge in short liquidations, potentially driving up the price further.

The steep decline in Ether’s price this week has led to $39.13 million in long positions being liquidated over the past 24 hours, as per CoinGlass data.

ETH has seen $16.10 million in short liquidations and $39.13 million in long liquidations over the past 24 hours. Source: CoinGlass

Additionally, short positions totaling $15.66 million were also liquidated within the same time period.

At its current price of $3,293, just a 1.5% drop to $3,250 will see $70.96 million in liquidations.

Although he forecasts that it will not have a large impact on ETH futures open interest, as the market is “not betting hard on it.”

There is currently $12.89 billion in Ether futures open interest (OI). Meanwhile, Bitcoin (BTC) is approximately 2.5x larger in OI at $31.744 billion.

Clear pattern identified on Ether’s price chart

Meanwhile, popular trader Jelle has observed a trend in Ether’s price chart leading up to the Bitcoin halving on April 20, which he said is reminiscent of the pattern before the previous Bitcoin halving.

“The last Bitcoin halving was ETH’s sign to start running hard,” crypto trader Jelle stated.

The last Bitcoin halving happened on May 11, 2020, which saw Ether’s price sitting around $210. By Aug. 14, just three months later, ETH had surged to $433, marking a 106% price increase, per CoinMarketCap data.

Jelle identified a clear ascending triangle forming on Ether’s price chart since June 2023, seen on a zoomed-out view from May 2020, signaling a potential surge ahead.

Meanwhile, Zheng forecasted that the “ETH season is yet to come.”

Related: SEC calls for comments on Fidelity, Grayscale and Bitwise spot Ether ETF applications

However, recent reports suggest that there is less optimism about the approval of spot Ether ETFs following the United States Securities and Exchange Commission investigating the Ethereum Foundation.

On March 20, Cointelegraph reported that the SEC issued several subpoenas to companies that have worked with the Ethereum Foundation. Sources familiar with the matter said the commission had launched a campaign to classify ETH as a security in 2022.

Magazine: Jameson Lopp: Skeptical of spot Ether ETFs, BTC price prediction dilemma: X Hall of Flame

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] SingularityNet, Fetch.AI, Ocean Protocol reportedly discuss token merger [/INST] Three prominent artificial intelligence (AI) protocols, SingularityNet, Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol are in discussions to merge their tokens into an AltSignals (ASI) token that would have a fully diluted valuation of $7.5 billion.

The deal could be announced as soon as Wednesday, depending on community approval, according to people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg M&A reported.

While the three platforms would continue to operate as separate entities, the new deal would foster their collaboration under a newly formed Superintelligence Collective, run by Ben Goertzel, the founder and CEO of SingularityNet. Humayun Sheikh, the CEO of Fetch.ai, would be the chairman of the new entity, according to the sources.

Cointelegraph has approached SingularityNet, Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol for comment.

Related: 0G Labs raises $35M pre-seed funding from over 40 crypto investors for on-chain AI

The three protocols are united by the common goal of developing blockchain-based decentralized AI protocols, which can't be controlled by centralized parties or large stakeholders.

The Fetch.ai (FET) token currently sits at a $2.72 billion market capitalization as the largest of the three coins. SingularityNet’s (AGIX) token has a $1.7 billion market cap and Ocean Protocol’s (OCEAN) token sits at a $927 million market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap data.

The potential merger comes during a period of increased interest in AI protocols, a week after reports of the Saudi Arabian government mulling the creation of a $40 billion investment fund to pour money into AI development, in partnership with Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

The fund could take place in the second half of 2024. If approved, this would make the Saudi Arabian government the largest investor in the AI space.

In comparison, Microsoft pumped $13 billion into ChatGPT creator OpenAI over several investments.

In Europe, Google accepted a 250 million euro fine on March 20, after the French competition authority fined the company for breaching European Union copyright laws during the training of its AI model.

Related: FTX to offload $1B Anthropic stake to pay off bankruptcy debts within weeks — report"
"[INST] Bitcoin headed for ‘screwy price action’ after 64% surge in first quarter [/INST] Bitcoin (BTC) recorded one of its strongest quarters in the past three years in Q1, but analysts warn this could lead to significant volatility in the lead-up to the Bitcoin halving.

“Be prepared for some screwy price action as we head into the halving,” crypto analyst Phoenix Desmond told his 11,700 X followers in a post on April 3.

Bitcoin experienced a 64% price increase during the first quarter of 2024, its third-best quarter over the past three years, as per Kaiko Research data.

Bitcoin's price was $44,172 on Jan. 1, and by the quarter’s end, it had reached $71,255.

However, Desmond argues that the consistent pattern of outperforming price performance in weekly and monthly closings signals unprecedented market conditions.

“Never before have we seen such a strong weekly, monthly, and quarterly close above previous ATH only to retrace so far so fast,” Desmond declared.

In the last two weekly closes, on March 17 and March 31, Bitcoin surged by 6.09%, climbing from $67,234 to $71,333, according to Yahoo Finance data.

Bitcoin’s price over the past 12 months. Source: CoinMarketCap

The Bitcoin halving is set for April 20, with speculation arising about whether it could trigger further upward movement in the second quarter of 2024 due to the expected supply shock.

However, investor sentiment regarding the short-term direction of Bitcoin’s price seems to be neutral.

FOLLOW BITCOIN HALVING COVERAGE IN FULL HERE

Over the past 24 hours, liquidations on both short and long positions remained fairly balanced, at $16.27 million and $16.77 million, respectively, as per CoinGlass data.

Short and long positions remain fairly balanced for Bitcoin over the past 24 hours. Source: CoinGlass

If Bitcoin’s price rises by just 1.5% to $66,687, approximately $57.08 million will be liquidated.

If it goes the other way, dropping by just 1% to $65,013, $35.14 million will be liquidated.

Related: Bitcoin is hedge against ‘horrible’ gov’t fiscal policy — Cathie Wood

Popular pseudonymous crypto analyst Rekt Capital believes that Bitcoin may not follow the same trajectory as it did in the previous quarter, and at best, it could see resistance levels close to the all-time highs of the first quarter.

“BTC may consolidate between $60k & $70k for the coming weeks going into the Halving and beyond,” Rekt Capital said in a March 3 post on X.

While the launch of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on Jan. 11 by several of the world’s largest asset management firms has heightened interest and speculation around Bitcoin’s price, some foresee a potential narrative shift.

“Most likely not Bitcoin,” founder of MN trading consultancy Michael van de Poppe told his 710,600 X followers in a post on April 4:

“Pre-Halving Bitcoin interest, Spot ETF launch causing additional liquidity. This is slowing down, back to normal price levels, after which a new narrative is likely going to surge.”

Magazine: China will intensify Bitcoin bull run, $1M by 2028: Bitcoin Man, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] DAO Maker hack victims still await reimbursement 3 years later [/INST] The DAO Maker crypto fundraising platform, not to be confused with the MakerDAO stablecoin protocol, is attempting to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund new Web3 projects in 2024. However, victims of its August 2021 hack say the project never reimbursed them for the losses they suffered in the attack, even though its development team promised to make all victims whole again.

Victims also claim that DAO Maker is liable for these losses, as the hack was allegedly the result of a private key compromise suffered due to its developers’ negligence.

DAO Maker was first exploited in August 2021, when approximately $7 million of users’ funds were stolen. The development team later acknowledged that the exploit had occurred because of a private key hack. At the time, it agreed to partially compensate investors with an immediate airdrop of 500 USD Coin (USDC) per person. The remaining compensation was to be paid through an IOU token called “USDR.” This token would become redeemable for the protocol’s native coin, DAO, at prevailing prices within one year.

However, victims of the hack told Cointelegraph that USDR redemptions were never allowed and that they still have not been compensated for their remaining losses. In addition, decentralized finance (DeFi) researcher SOMA Analytics has claimed that DAO Maker forced through a proposal with its governing body to cancel the reimbursement plan, using its large token supply to ensure the vote’s outcome. According to the researcher, the proposal was deleted after its passage, allegedly as part of an attempt by the team to remove evidence of its failure to reimburse victims.

DAO Maker, based in Prague, is completely separate from and has no relation to the similarly named MakerDAO stablecoin protocol.

DAO Maker gets hacked and offers compensation

DAO Maker is a fundraising platform for technology startups, with a particular focus on raising money for Web3 protocols governed by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). According to its official website, the protocol signed on “more than 75,000 retail users interested in early-stage ventures” in 2020 and has “200,000+ KYC’ed users.”

DAO Maker official website. Source: DAO Maker

As per CoinMarketCap’s description of DAO Maker, the project offers several different systems for investors to participate in new token offerings. One is called a “Strong Holder Offering (SHO),” wherein investors purchase DAO tokens and use them to allocate “DAO Power” to a particular coin offering. The more DAO Power they allocate, the more likely they are to win a participation slot for a particular offering.

If they win a slot, “their allocation will be automatically funded by their USD Coin (USDC) balance” and the investor will be allowed to use these funds to purchase coins in the offering, CoinMarketCap states. The description cites official DAO Maker documents that have since gone offline.

Related: What is a crypto launchpad, and how does it work?

In the 2021 hack, the SHO contract holding these USDC funds was exploited, and $7 million was stolen. In a Medium post on Aug. 12, 2021, the DAO Maker team acknowledged that the hack was caused by “malicious use of one of our wallets with access to admin privileges.”

On Aug. 17, in a separate Medium post, the team announced a plan to compensate investors. The announcement was also shared on the team’s official Telegram channel. The team claimed it would airdrop 500 USDC immediately to each investor impacted by the hack. On Sept. 8, 2021, the remaining losses would be covered through an “IOU token” called USDR. One year later, on Aug. 8, 2022, each USDR token would be redeemable for $1 at a 1:1 ratio plus 10% interest denominated in DAO tokens. “Each USDR token is equal to 1.1 worth of DAO, 1 year after it is airdropped,” the announcement stated.

As an example of how the redemption process would work, the plan considered a user who had lost $1,000 in the hack. This person would “receive 500 USDR tokens on September 8, 2021. [...] After 1 year, they can be redeemed for $550 worth of DAO tokens,” DAO Maker stated.

Both Medium posts were later deleted, but archived versions are still available on the Wayback Machine.

Victims claim USDR redemptions were never allowed

DAO Maker investors told Cointelegraph that the project’s promise to redeem each USDR for $1.10 was never honored by the DAO Maker decentralized autonomous organization nor by its development team.

One investor Cointelegraph spoke with, who used the username “Red Drac” on Telegram and spoke on the condition that their real name not be revealed, claimed they lost $2,000 from the hack. They said they deposited $2,000 in stablecoins to a “pre-deposit” contract. But when the August 2021 hack occurred, this contract was drained, and they lost all of it. Red Drac stated that after the compensation plan was announced, they received 500 USDT (USDT) — and that they also received 1,500 USDR at a later date. However, the USDR was never allowed to be redeemed for DAO as promised.

According to Red Drac, they eventually discovered that a liquidity pool for USDR existed and that they could sell into this pool to cash out early. However, the tokens “were not in a 1:1 ratio to USDT.” Instead, the tokens were being sold at “something like 80%” of their par value. As a result, Red Drac did not sell their USDR into the pool, and these tokens are still sitting in their wallet today.

He claimed that this USDR is nearly worthless now, as there is presently no way to exchange it for other cryptocurrencies. The previously existing liquidity pool was later shut down, leaving holders with no means to cash out. Red Drac acknowledged that they can use the tokens to gain DAO Power within the DAO Maker platform, but they claimed that the tokens “are not that much value because those allocations [don’t] guarantee me that I will actually earn something.”

Telegram user Zztelecom told a similar story, claiming they received 500 USDR as compensation for their loss from the hack. Months later, the token began trading for $0.60 to $0.80 per coin. With such a high discount, they decided to buy roughly 10,000 coins, which they expected to be able to redeem for $10,000 worth of DAO once the tokens became redeemable.

But the tokens never became redeemable and are now worthless on the secondary market.

“The DAO Maker team decided to fool everyone,” Zztelecom said. “Trading stopped. [...] In the end, they said that each USDR = 1 DAO Power and we can participate in sales with their help, but we cannot send them to other wallets because DAO Power will be lost.”

Related: DeFi protocol Unizen to provide ‘immediate reimbursement’ after $2.1M hack

Claims of a DAO Maker cover-up

In addition to these claims from victims, DeFi researcher SOMA Analytics claimed to have evidence that the team tried to cover up its abandonment of the USDR redemption process. The researcher published the work via a Notion workspace and is unaffiliated with the nutritional supplement blog of the same name.

According to SOMA, the DAO Maker team created a proposal to abandon the redemption process for USDR. This proposal was allegedly passed by DAO Maker — but was then deleted from its Snapshot webpage. They claimed that the DAO Maker team likely used its own tokens to outvote the majority of tokenholders, ensuring the vote would turn out the way it wanted. It allegedly distributed tokens to new wallets in an attempt to obfuscate its role in the proposal’s passage.

“Between October 3rd and October 5th, [2022], a unique USDR proposal surfaced on DAO Maker’s official Discord from some user named @Dante.eth,” the researcher stated. SOMA claimed that this proposal has since been deleted but was copied by other community members.

According to this copied version, the mysterious user Dante.eth argued that redeeming USDR would have “a massive impact on the price of $DAO for everyone and the token price might never recover.” Purportedly for this reason, the user called for a vote that offered three options for the redemption process. The original proposal to redeem USDR for DAO at a 1:1 rate was not one of the options listed.

Option 1 was for the decentralized autonomous organization to algorithmically sell DAO tokens and airdrop USDC to holders of USDR at a 1:1 rate. This would have allowed holders to be fully compensated, but with stablecoins instead of DAO tokens. Option 2 was to distribute DAO tokens from a Venture Yield partnership to USDR holders once a year. Option 3 was to redeem USDR at only 50% of its par value.

The option to redeem at 50% of par value (Option 3) passed, with 61.72% of tokens being used to vote in favor of it. However, the researcher claimed these 61.72% of votes were cast by only six wallet accounts. The majority of accounts voted for Option 1, but these small holders reportedly did not possess enough tokens to outvote the six whales that voted for the 50% haircut.

DAO Maker proposal vote count. Source: SOMA Analytics

The hack victims acknowledged that the USDR token allows them to obtain DAO Power, which gives them a greater chance of participating in token offerings they are interested in.

Yet despite the DAO vote for a 50% redemption, SOMA Analytics claimed that even this compensation was never distributed by the team. “From what I recall, there was never any claim portal, and people got simply nothing,” they stated in a message. Instead, according to their report, the team allegedly decided to make USDR unredeemable and allow holders to gain DAO power with it instead. The DAO Power that can be gained from the tokens is not transferable, making the token essentially worthless in the secondary market today.

DAO Maker announcement regarding DAO Power for USDR holders. Source: SOMA Analytics

According to SOMA Analytics, the six wallets that voted for the 50% haircut “were created just 10 days before the voting, received substantial amounts of DAO within the same two days (with funds possibly obfuscated through a CEX), and voted exclusively for Option 3.” In their view, this provided a strong indication that the wallets were created by some person or group that was holding a large percentage of the DAO token’s total supply, such as the protocol’s development team. It also indicated that whoever voted for the proposal did not want their identity to be known, as they went through the trouble of creating new wallets solely to participate in the vote.

Cointelegraph could not independently confirm which wallets voted for the proposal, when they were created, or how they were funded, as the proposal has been deleted.

Cointelegraph contacted the DAO Maker team for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

DAO Maker continues to provide fundraising services to Web3 startups. According to CoinMarketCap, the DAO token has a market cap of $153 million, making it among the top 400 cryptocurrencies.

Related: DAO Maker founder builds game based on abandoned Logan Paul project in just 30 days"
"[INST] Paradigm leads $20M funding round for Ellipsis Labs’ DeFi expansion [/INST] Ellipsis Labs, a developer in the crypto exchange sector, has secured $20 million in Series A funding, with Paradigm leading the investment round.

According to a post on X, Electric Capital also participated in the round, which had additional support from Justin Drake and Mike Neuder of the Ethereum Foundation, Sreeram Kannan from EigenLayer, Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana Labs, Uri Klarman from bloXroute and others

Ellipsis Labs is the developer behind Phoenix, a decentralized exchange (DEX) with an on-chain order book built on the Solana blockchain.

The funding obtained by Ellipsis Labs will be utilized to further advance its decentralized finance (DeFi) technology stack.

In August 2023, the company secured $3.3 million in seed funding, with Electric Capital leading the investment round.

Phoenix currently boasts a total value locked (TVL) of $14.31 million and recorded a trading volume of $238.79 million in the last 24 hours. DefiLlama, a Web3 data tracker, ranks Phoenix as the eighth-largest DEX on Solana based on TVL.

Phoenix achieves trade settlements by eliminating the need for a “crank.” In blockchain ecosystems like Solana, a crank facilitates asynchronous trade settlements, enabling multiple transactions simultaneously without waiting for each to finalize before the next.

Related: Crypto bull run ignites surge in job listings, salary increases

Phoenix also provides comprehensive on-chain market event data, including placed limit orders, fills and canceled limit orders, allowing users to access Phoenix’s complete activity history.

Ellipsis Labs emphasized the necessity for DeFi to combine decentralized benefits with traditional finance’s liquidity and efficiency.

Crypto venture capital firm Paradigm — the leading investor — is reportedly negotiating a raise of up to $850 million for a new fund. Paradigm is discussing raising between $750 million and $850 million with investors as crypto markets have recovered in the past months.

If Paradigm completes the raise, it would be its largest since it announced $2.5 billion for a fund in November 2021 at the peak of the last cycle’s bull run — the largest cryptocurrency fund ever at the time.

Paradigm also led a new funding round that is aimed at elevating the valuation of Merkle Manufactory, the firm behind the social network Farcaster, to the $1-billion mark, leading the round. Paradigm’s portfolio includes major crypto firms, such as Coinbase, Blur, dYdX, Compound and Citadel Securities.

Magazine: The secret of pitching to male VCs: Helping female crypto founders blast off"
"[INST] Crypto giants push to get Bitcoin an emoji [/INST] Crypto platform Nexo and more than 35 organizations in the cryptocurrency space have joined forces to push for an official Bitcoin (BTC) emoji.

According to the announcement made on April 2, the initiative — “Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji” — aims to secure 50,000 endorsements worldwide.

Within a week of the launch, over 10,000 individuals signed the petition, which was addressed to the Unicode Consortium, the governing body responsible for standardizing emojis across platforms.

Among the organizations backing the campaign are Brink, Bitget, Chainalysis, Kraken, Polygon, Brave and BTC Inc.

According to Kosta Kantchev, co-founder and executive chairman of Nexo, Bitcoin’s market dominance and widespread adoption necessitate its representation through a “unified symbol on all keyboards.” Kantchev added:

“With 1.26 billion total Bitcoin addresses and 190,000+ professionals and tech pioneers pushing the global community forward, the Bitcoin Emoji is long overdue.”

The push for a Bitcoin emoji is not only a symbolic gesture but also a reflection of the crypto community’s unity and determination to advance the adoption of Bitcoin worldwide.

Drawing inspiration from past emoji campaigns, such as Taco Bell’s quest for a taco emoji and Tinder’s advocacy for an interracial couple icon, the initiative behind Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji aims to create momentum enough to spark action from Unicode.

Related: Bitcoin exchanges’ BTC balances have dropped almost $10B in 2024

Cointelegraph spoke to Eleonor Genova, the head of communications at Nexo, who called the campaign “the heartbeat of a global movement, resonating with the dreams of a vast community.”

“Emojis, today’s digital lingua franca, play a critical role in how we communicate emotions, intentions, and concepts. For Bitcoin… an emoji would not only symbolize its legitimacy but also serve as an essential tool for education and mainstream acceptance.”

She highlighted that the initiative is not just a call for representation of the crypto community but a step toward Bitcoin’s impact on the world while democratizing its presence and fostering a deeper understanding and appreciation among the global audience.

“While traditional currencies were quick to find their emoji counterparts, the cryptocurrency realm, with Bitcoin leading the charge, remains conspicuously absent from this digital form of expression.”

As Bitcoin becomes more prominent in mainstream discourse — especially after the United States Securities and Exchange Commission approved the country’s first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January — its influence stretches beyond cryptocurrency.

“Now imagine Bitcoin not just living in wallets and exchanges, Crypto Twitter and crypto media,” Genova said, “but living across billions of screens worldwide as its very own emoji symbol.”

She called the moment the “collective responsibility” of the industry to champion this cause and extend it to every Bitcoin user.

“We’ve moved beyond the jargon of past bull runs and the fear of the past crypto winter; it’s time to recognize Bitcoin for what it truly is — a culture, not just a mere fleeting trend.”

The push for an official emoji comes after Bitcoin recently hit an all-time high, and the community prepares for the cryptocurrency’s fourth halving event, which is expected to occur later this month.

Experts debate the odds of Bitcoin hitting $100,000. Source: YouTube

Magazine: Bitcoin ETFs make Coinbase a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and governments — Trezor CEO"
"[INST] Musk to charge new X users to post, but some say it won’t stop the bots [/INST] Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is planning to charge new users to tweet in an attempt to curb an ongoing spam problem on his microblogging platform X, though not everyone is convinced this will stem the tide of crypto-scam-touting bots.

X owner Musk said, “Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots,” on April 15 in reply to a post by the X Daily News account regarding the testing of a spam reduction policy.

The announcement stated that X might be expanding its policy to charge new users to use basic functions such as posting, replying, liking or bookmarking a post.

Musk said tools such as CAPTCHA can already be bypassed by current AI and “troll farms” with “ease.”

Musk has been battling the bots ever since he took over Twitter in a $44-billion deal that was completed in October 2022.

He said the onslaught of fake accounts “also uses up the available namespace, so many good handles are taken as a result.”

A similar policy was already implemented in New Zealand and the Philippines on a trial basis in October. The “Not A Bot” subscription method for new users in those two countries required a $1 payment to access additional features.

“This won’t stop bots completely, but it will be 1000X harder to manipulate the platform,” said Musk at the time.

Many, however, argue that the new potential charges won’t prevent the onslaught of bots.

Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT was among many who didn’t agree with the method, stating:

“There are hundreds of business verified scam accounts every week which scammers pay thousands of dollars for.”

He used a screenshot of a dubious verified Wormhole X account that was posting spurious links for an airdrop.

“There is an entire black market for these accounts,” he said before adding that it will also “kill new user growth.”

Meta Mint team member Roxo said, “The issue has nothing to do with new accounts being made its that X staff are completely useless at terminating fake accounts” before adding that the majority of bots and scam accounts were created years ago.

Related: Elon Musk offers users free premium features on X, crypto scammers included

In late March, Musk said that accounts with 2,500 verified subscribers as followers would no longer need to pay for “Premium” features. However, the ability to purchase verification status on the platform may have opened the doors for scammers, reported Cointelegraph.

Earlier this month, X announced it was starting a “significant, proactive initiative to eliminate accounts that violate our rules against platform manipulation and spam.”

Magazine: ‘SEAL 911’ team of white hats formed to fight crypto hacks in real time"
"[INST] Here’s what happened in crypto today [/INST] Asset manager BlackRock has confirmed it did not play an active role in the tokenization of its $22 billion money market fund on Hedera, which caused a slight dip in the token’s price. Meanwhile, miners have seen a sharp decline in revenues in recent days and Nigeria’s central bank said it would issue a directive instructing banks and financial institutions to hand over details of users of several crypto exchanges and for the banks to block transactions. It later denied the story.

BlackRock has ‘no commercial relationship’ with Hedera, HBAR sinks 32%

BlackRock has confirmed it has “no commercial relationship” with Hedera and that it did not choose the Hedera Hashgraph to tokenize any BlackRock funds, including shares of its $22 billion money market fund.

Hedera’s token (HBAR) rallied over 100% on Tuesday following the HBAR Foundation’s announcement on X stating that blockchain firms Archax and Ownera tokenized BlackRock’s ICS U.S. Treasury Fund on Hedera.

$HBAR Recently Went Up 100% In A SINGLE Day Before Correcting



After news that @BlackRock's ICS Money Market Fund would be tokenized on @hedera



I had @Grodfather on, CEO/Co-Founder at @ArchaxEx (The people that tokenized BlackRock's MMF on Hedera to explain this all!) pic.twitter.com/wVp0J7n6jj — Jesus Martinez (@0xJesusMartinez) April 24, 2024

Some misinterpreted the post to suggest BlackRock played an active role in the tokenization effort, but a BlackRock spokesperson has confirmed to Cointelegraph that was not the case.

“BlackRock has no commercial relationship with Hedera nor has BlackRock selected Hedera to tokenise any BlackRock funds.”

“As we have in the past, BlackRock will communicate directly with the public on the evolution of our digital asset strategy,” the spokesperson added.

As of the time of writing, HBAR has fallen 32.8% in the past 24 hours to $0.118 since it peaked at $0.176 at 5:00am UTC on April 24, according to CoinGecko.

Bitcoin mining profits get squeezed post-halving

Faced with a high network hash rate and lower revenues, Bitcoin miners could be in for a rough couple of months as the market adjusted to the quadrennial halving.

According to crypto analytics firm CryptoQuant, miners’ hash price has declined from nearly 12 cents in early April to 7 cents post-halving. The hash price peaked at 19 cents on halving day, with mining revenue reaching $107 million.

In Bitcoin mining, the hash price refers to mining revenues generated on a per tera-hash basis.

Despite seeing lower revenues, CryptoQuant said overall market conditions remained stable.

“Although it is still too early to see any long-term effects of the halving on the network hashrate, miners seem to be running operations at the same rate as before the halving,” the firm said in a report.

Nigeria’s central bank forced to deny claims of crypto account freeze

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has been forced to deny a report saying it issued a directive requiring all banks and financial institutions to identify individuals or entities engaging in transactions with cryptocurrency exchanges and to ensure that such accounts are put on Post No Debit (PND) instruction for six months.

A “Post No Debit” instruction is a directive issued by a bank or financial institution to restrict certain transactions on a customer’s account. When a PND instruction is in place, the account holder is prohibited from making debit transactions, meaning they cannot withdraw funds or make payments using the affected account.

Confusion occurred when the central bank denied the story on X but then deleted the denial. Some hours later they claimed the allegations were indeed false.

In December 2023, the central bank lifted a comprehensive ban on banks engaging with digital currencies allowing them to facilitate transactions for crypto exchanges.

However, due to the swift devaluation of the naira and the subsequent inflation rate of 29.9%, the government shifted its attention to platforms offering cryptocurrency services. It disabled websites associated with crypto trading that had gained notoriety for setting informal valuations for the naira.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

Additional reporting by Geraint Price, Sam Bourgi and Felix Ng."
"[INST] UK watchdog worries about tech giants’ AI market control [/INST] The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the United Kingdom is apprehensive about Big Tech’s increasing dominance in the advanced artificial intelligence (AI) sector, with its CEO Sarah Cardell expressing “real concerns” over the industry’s development.

In a paper on foundational AI models released on April 11, the CMA highlighted the increasing interconnection and concentration among developers in the cutting-edge tech sector, which is fueling the surge in generative AI tools.

The CMA’s paper highlights the consistent involvement of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple (collectively known as GAMMA) across various aspects of the AI value chain.

While acknowledging the potential benefits of partnership arrangements in the tech ecosystem, the regulator also cautioned against the risks posed by dominant partnerships and integrated firms, which may undermine competition in open markets.

The CMA referred to a form of AI leveraging extensive data and computational resources, potentially serving as the foundation for various applications: “We are concerned that the foundational model (FM) sector is developing in ways that risk negative market outcomes.”

The paper lists three linked risks to fair competition: firms controlling vital inputs for developing general-purpose AI models, tech giants leveraging dominance to influence choices in GenAI services, and partnerships potentially reinforcing market power across the value chain.

Related: Microsoft AI to make long-term investments in the UK — CEO

During a legal event in Washington, D.C., focused on generative AI, Cardell highlighted the “winner-take-all dynamics” reminiscent of earlier web development eras.

She urged regulators to avoid repeating past mistakes in overseeing this next phase of digital evolution. Cardell said:

“By stepping up our merger review, we hope to gain more clarity over which types of partnerships and arrangements may fall within the merger rules and under what circumstances competition concerns may arise — and that clarity will also benefit the businesses themselves,”

The CMA’s update report outlines “indicative factors” that may raise concerns regarding FM partnerships, including partners’ upstream power over AI inputs and downstream power over distribution channels.

In May 2023, the CMA initiated an initial examination of the high-end AI market, releasing a set of principles for the “responsible” development of generative AI. These principles are intended to inform the watchdog’s supervision of this rapidly evolving market.

Since then, the regulator has intervened to examine the close ties between OpenAI, the creator of the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, and Microsoft, a significant investor in OpenAI. Its updated paper addresses the rapid pace of change in the market.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] BlackRock updates Bitcoin ETF, adds 5 Wall Street firms [/INST] Global asset manager BlackRock updated its Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) prospectus on April 5, adding five big Wall Street firms as new authorized participants.

New members include ABN AMRO Clearing, Citadel Securities, Citigroup Global Markets, Goldman Sachs and UBS Securities, according to the document amending BlackRock’s S-1 registration statement with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

Among the previously authorized participants in the ETF are JPMorgan Securities, Jane Street Capital, Macquarie Capital and Virtu Americas.

Authorized participants play a crucial role in the BTC ETF operational mechanism, as they can create and redeem shares of the ETF, which involves exchanging ETF shares for a corresponding basket of securities that reflect the ETF’s holdings or exchanging them for cash.

According to Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas, the new additions indicate that “big time firms now want piece of action and/or are now OK being publicly associated w[ith] this.”

The SEC’s position on a cash creation and redemption mechanism for Bitcoin ETFs was primarily directed at mitigating market manipulation risks associated with transactions. The cash mechanism entails that new shares of a Bitcoin ETF will only be created or redeemed through cash transactions, in contrast to the traditional in-kind model, where market participants handle the underlying assets directly.

This approach was developed to prevent intraday price manipulation, according to initial proposals by asset managers like Hashdex. Following the SEC’s guidance, other asset managers — including giants like BlackRock, ARK Invest and Grayscale — have incorporated this mechanism into their filings.

The Bitcoin ETFs witnessed a spike in trading volume in March, reaching $111 billion, while some analysis suggests the product’s demand is cooling down. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) continues to dominate trading volume and assets under management, followed by Grayscale’s and Fidelity’s funds. According to data from BitMEX Research, BlackRock’s IBIT assets reached $17.6 billion on April 1.

Spot Bitcoin ETF performances. Source: BitMEX Research

Magazine: ‘Crypto is inevitable’ so we went ‘all in’ — Meet Vance Spencer, permabull"
"[INST] Binance co-founder He Yi says CZ received ‘most optimal outcome’ [/INST] Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, often known as CZ, is in a “positive situation,” according to the cryptocurrency exchange’s co-founder He Yi. CZ is set for sentencing in the United States on one felony charge on April 30.

Yi “dispelled concerns over the regulatory status” at the Binance Chinese Meetup held on the sideline of the Token2049 conference in Dubai, according to the company’s newsfeed. The post did not quote her directly, but added Yi said that:

“CZ's current standing in the US is largely peaceful and past regulatory pressures have been internally anticipated. She believes the existing situation to be the most optimal outcome given the circumstances.”

When he is sentenced in the District Court of Western Washington, CZ could receive a prison term of up to 10 years. The sentence recommended in the guidelines is 12 to 18 months. The single charge resulted from a settlement reached in November that also required the company to forfeit $4.3 billion. That settlement forced CZ to resign as Binance CEO.

Related: Facing potential prison time, former Binance CEO hints at new project

CZ is free in the United States on a $175-million bond, with travel restrictions. He twice requested permission to travel to Dubai, where he lives, because of a medical situation involving one of his children. In response, the U.S. Attorney’s Office sought to seize his passports. CZ holds a Canadian passport and is also a citizen of the United Arab Emirates.

Yi is the mother of at least two of CZ’s three children, although she has denied that they are currently romantic partners. She owns an undisclosed stake in the exchange.

Source: CryptoCoins68

Binance has been distancing itself from CZ since his resignation as CEO. He was replaced by Richard Teng, the former Binance head of regional markets outside the United States. Teng has emphasized that Binance is “totally different” under his leadership. The exchange formed a board of directors earlier this month.

According to reports on April 18, Binance received a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) license in Dubai. As a licensing condition, CZ was reportedly required to give up voting rights in the local entity, Binance FZE, although Binance has declined to comment on that claim.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime"
"[INST] How Solana developers are tackling network congestion challenges [/INST] The Solana Foundation has pinned recent network congestion issues on a combination of high demand for Solana block space and a failure to implement patches related to its networking stack in a timely manner.

Solana Foundation strategy lead Austin Federa spoke exclusively to Cointelegraph during Paris Blockchain Week about efforts to address recent issues with user transaction congestion.

“The goal of the Solana project is to build the world’s fastest network that is open, permissionless and decentralized, and that is a tall order. There’s a team of engineers across different core contributor groups working on building the Solana network, and sometimes, they don’t quite get it right,” Federa explained.

Solana Foundation strategy lead Austin Federa (left) with Gareth Jenkinson (right) at Paris Blockchain Week.

According to the foundation’s strategy lead, Solana’s consensus layer continues to operate as designed, but there is agreement that the network is not living up to expectations from a user experience perspective.

“It’s running at about 700 transactions per second now, which is still pretty commendable, even in the sort of degraded state the network is in now. But a lot of work still needs to be done on the Solana core protocol,” Federa said.

Network developers have been planning fixes to “bottleneck” issues in a specific component of its networking stack implementation.

However, the roadmap for implementing upgrades and expected demand on the Solana network “did not line up,” said Federa, adding:

“The charitable view of this is a failure of success. There’s massive demand for the Solana block space, and there’s a huge demand for the network. It’s processing more transactions than Ethereum’s layer 1 and layer 2s combined.”

Federa conceded that a less charitable reading of the situation suggests a failure to plan and implement network upgrades. He added that ecosystem developers may have been able to anticipate the sort of demand spikes based on the network’s past usage.

Related: Solana devs target April 15 for failed TX fix — It’s ‘not a design flaw’

As previously reported, Solana developers aimed to implement a fix for an “implementation bug” that recently caused the transaction failure rate on Solana to skyrocket. Federa said engineers had “not been sleeping much” as they readied patches and tested features before they hit mainnet:

“It has been an ecosystem effort to identify the problem, potential solutions, and short-term and long-term improvements to the network.”

Some protocols should have a beta label

Solana has copped criticism for network outages over the past two years, with the blockchain going down for short periods of time. However, the layer 1 is not the only protocol that has grappled with downtimes, with Ethereum layer-2s Base, Arbitrum and Starknet having experienced issues in recent months.

Federa said that emerging blockchain networks are still in a growth phase, drawing comparisons to the early days of Amazon Web Services and the outages it experienced. Nevertheless, the blockchain industry is being closely scrutinized, and Federa said expectations are not unfounded:

“I think it’s appropriate to be upset about downtimes and outages. The goal is 100% uptime, and that should be the goal for the whole industry. If that comes at the expense of no scale, that’s not necessarily the best trade-off.”

Federa also highlighted various layer-2 protocols’ downtime and outages as an indicator that the industry is still developing and growing. This is part of the reason why Solana still operates under a beta label.

“The beta tag is honest. The network today does not represent the final form of what developers hope it will be in the future, and there might be other networks that probably should also append a ‘beta’ tag to them,” Federa said.

Solana released v1.17.31 for general use by mainnet validators on April 15. The release contains enhancements that are anticipated to alleviate ongoing congestion on the network.

Magazine: 1 in 6 new Base memecoins are scams, 91% have vulnerabilities"
"[INST] Bored Ape floor price sinks, NASA training astronauts in the metaverse: Nifty Newsletter [/INST] ​​Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s Nifty Newsletter. Keep reading to stay up-to-date with the latest stories on nonfungible tokens. Every Wednesday, the Nifty Newsletter informs and inspires you to dig deeper into the latest NFT trends and insights.

Read about how NASA uses virtual reality (VR) technology and the metaverse to train its astronauts in this week’s newsletter. What’s behind the decline in the floor price of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs? And Cointelegraph has exclusive updates from Paris Blockchain Week, including Ubisoft’s blockchain gaming plans.

NASA created a VR metaverse to prep astronauts for life on the lunar space station

While most of us spend our time in the metaverse trading assets or bopping around in virtual reality on legless avatars, astronauts working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and SpaceX are using the metaverse to prepare for life aboard a lunar space station that has yet to be built.

The first humans to make their homes in deep space, according to NASA, will be the team tasked with operating a space station currently under development called “Gateway.”

Continue reading

Ubisoft teases new blockchain game at Paris Blockchain Week

AAA game studio Ubisoft is edging closer to releasing its first blockchain-based game after releasing the first gameplay trailer for Champions Tactics Grimoria during Paris Blockchain Week.

The tactical player-vs-player role-playing game’s lead developers gave Cointelegraph an exclusive playthrough at the conference. The RPG allows players to craft blockchain-based figurines with unique features and characteristics that can be combined into a team of three for the turn-based game.

Continue reading

Bored Ape NFT floor price hits lowest point in over two and a half years

The floor price of BAYC NFTs has fallen over 90% from its peak to 11.1 Ether (ETH) — its lowest point since August 2021.

BAYC is now approaching a sub-10 ETH floor price after a 50% fall since March 1 alone, according to NFT Price Floor.

The NFT collection’s fall from a peak of 128 ETH set on May 1, 2022, is part of an industry-wide decline in popularity for digital art NFTs.

However, it should be noted that a few BAYC NFTs have continued to sell significantly above their floor price, which is calculated by taking the lowest-priced NFT in a given collection.

Continue reading

VeChain announces tokenized gloves in partnership with UFC

According to an April 12 blog post from VeChain, gloves worn by Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighters will soon be tokenized, and their identities will be tracked on the VeChainThor network.

The gloves will contain VeChain near-field communication chips that record fight data, proving the authenticity of each pair, the post stated. After the fight, the athletes will “donate and give away” their gloves, making them into collectors’ items.

The chips inside each pair will allow a buyer to check the item’s authenticity via a VeChainThor network smart contract. Fighters began wearing the gloves at UFC 300 on April 13.

Continue reading

Thanks for reading this digest of the week’s most notable developments in the NFT space. Come again next Wednesday for more reports and insights into this actively evolving space."
"[INST] Dfinity launches Web3 accelerator platform on the Internet Computer [/INST] The Dfinity Foundation, a not-for-profit organization based in Switzerland and major contributor to the Internet Computer blockchain, announced the launch of the Olympus Acceleration Platform.

According to a press release, Olympus represents the first decentralized, on-chain Web3 accelerator. Dfinity said it’s “a first of its kind platform” that will be used by “teams around the world to organize and launch their own accelerator programs.”

The foundation also cites Olympus’ “Open Stake” model, where projects, mentors and investors can “interact freely, enabling permissionless ecosystem inclusivity and unlimited integrations” as a determining factor separating it from similar accelerator programs.

Dominic Williams, founder and chief scientist of the Dfinity Foundation, described the platform as “a global platform for everyone, in a statement:

“By creating a web3-based global platform for everyone, we're able to bring together top talent, projects, investors, and mentors to create a credible and trustless marketplace offering equal opportunity and access to all qualified projects. Traditional accelerator programs are permissioned and operate as silos, many are also not sustainable and rely on grants. Olympus is a new model.”

The new platform will purportedly feature what Dfinity calls a “trustless perpetual loop,” providing on-chain verification of key project growth metrics, via the infrastructure of the Internet Computer Protocol.

Related: Internet Computer users pledge $80M to decentralize its project ecosystem

The Internet Computer is a decentralized computing platform that leverages blockchain technology to host software directly on the internet. According to its mission, the Internet Computer’s supporters aim to democratize internet infrastructure and foster a more “open and equitable digital ecosystem.”

Olympus was developed with support from Hong Kong-based Web3Labs, a blockchain accelerator and with mentorship and other support from investors and partners at VC funds including Fenbushi Capital, Fundamental Labs, Softbank Vision Fund, NewTribe Capital, Cypher Capital, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Summer Ventures, L2IV, Dext Force Ventures, Leadblock Partners, viaBTC Capital, Cipholio Ventures, Chiron Group, 3X Capital, Plutus.VC and others."
"[INST] Clearstream joins ECB wholesale CBDC trials with tokenized securities [/INST] Central securities depository Clearstream, a Deutsche Börse Group subsidiary, will take part in European Central Bank (ECB) trials of digital euro wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Clearstream, which operates the D7 post-trade platform, is the only central securities depository (CSD) participating in the first phase of ECB “preparatory” trials. It, in turn, runs a German CSD, the LuxCSD in Luxembourg and an international CSD. Clearstream’s head of issuer services and new digital markets, Jens Hachmeister, said in the statement:

“We are expanding our D7 digital securities infrastructure with DLT [distributed ledger technology] components and fostering connections with the main digital payment solutions across the Eurosystem.”

Clearstream worked with Google Cloud to expand D7’s capacities. It will test the use of distributed ledger technology for wholesale transactions with tokenized securities and link to three European central bank products: Deutsche Bundesbank’s Trigger Solution, Banca d’Italia’s TIPS Hash-link and Banque de France’s Full DLT Interoperability.

Related: ECB should have DLT wholesale settlements when the market wants it, official says

According to its statement, Clearstream will conduct “euro-denominated issuances and delivery-versus-payment (DvP) transactions across different use cases and payment models.” Tests are scheduled for May to November of this year and will use real central bank money.

The ECB launched the preparatory phase of its digital euro research in October, after a two-year investigative phase. It issued a vendor call in January.

Banca d’Italia and Deutsche Bundesbank began working with similar DLT technology in 2021. At the end of 2023, Banca d’Italia signed a memorandum of understanding with the Bank of Korea to explore settlement systems and CBDC.

Clearstream has over 18 trillion euros in assets under custody. It participated in SWIFT experiments with CBDC and tokenized assets in 2022. No decision on launching a digital euro will be made until after ECB trials are completed and the corresponding legislation is adopted.

The use of tokenized securities is expanding rapidly. In the United States, the market for tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds grew from $114 million to $845 million in the course of last year.

Magazine: Are CBDCs kryptonite for crypto?"
"[INST] Number of new memecoin traders hits record high — IntoTheBlock [/INST] Memecoins have kick-started a new crypto frenzy, attracting investors new to trading and searching for the next big token that could bring massive gains.

Market intelligence platform IntoTheBlock shows that the number of wallet addresses wallet address holding meme-related tokens for under 30 days hit a record high in March.

The analytics platform explained that this indicates a large inflow of new traders buying memecoins in March.

The number of traders jumping into the memecoin sector may be attributed to the huge gains displayed by memecoins in the first quarter of 2024.

On April 3, coin information tracker CoinGecko dubbed the memecoin sector the “most profitable crypto narrative” during the year’s first quarter.

Memecoins displayed 1,312.6% returns on average, the highest among the top tokens by market capitalization. Projects like Book of Meme (BOME) and Dogwifhat (WIF) drove the percentages up amid the memecoin frenzy.

Stories highlighting life-changing gains may have also played a role in attracting traders into the sector.

A trader turned $62 into $2 million in December after buying a Solana memecoin. The crypto user caught wind of a memecoin called Silly Dragon (SILLY), which poked fun at Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko’s Halloween costume.

More recently, another trader turned $13,000 into $2 million within one hour after buying a meme-based token.

On April 3, a crypto trader saw a 15,700% gain after buying a memecoin called Donotfomoew (MOEW) that was minted on the Base network.

Related: Trader gambles $226K on Solana memecoin, hits $1.69M in 5 days

While memecoins have the potential to drive massive gains, not everyone gets too lucky. Some people miss out on gains by selling too early, while others fall prey to scammers using the memecoin presales hype to steal user funds.

On March 15, a trader fumbled potential millions after selling BOME tokens before the prices skyrocketed. The trader bought 170 million BOME for $8,000 and sold the tokens for about $131,000.

At the time of writing, BOME trades for about $0.01615, meaning the tokens could have been worth $2.7 million in the current market.

Presale wallet address of a memecoin project called Condom. Source: Solscan

Meanwhile, a Solana memecoin project called “Condom” pulled out on investors before its launch. The creators of the memecoin abandoned its X page and took almost $1 million worth of Solana (SOL) tokens.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Paraguay to reconsider Bitcoin mining ban, mulls selling energy to miners [/INST] Paraguayan senators have halted progress on the proposed cryptocurrency mining ban introduced last week, with officials now considering the benefits of selling excess energy from its Itaipu hydropower plant to miners instead of exporting it to Brazil and Argentina.

A debate will be held in an April 23 public hearing to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of Bitcoin mining in the country, Senator Lilian Samaniego confirmed in an April 10 Senate session.

It comes about a week after lawmakers introduced a draft law on April 4 to temporarily ban Bitcoin (BTC) mining for 180 days, claiming illegal cryptocurrency mines have been stealing power and disrupting the country’s electricity supply.

However, days later, Paraguayan lawmakers approved a declaration to support local and foreign investment infrastructure four days later on April 8, which Senator Salyn Buzarquis hopes will push the Paraguayan Ministry of Industry to study the economic advantages of selling excess energy to Bitcoin miners instead.

Senator Salyn Buzarquis speaking to Paraguay’s senate on April 10. Source: YouTube

In an April 8 letter to Congress, Buzarquis noted that that 45 licensed cryptocurrency miners are on track to generate $48 million for the National Electricity Administration (ANDE) by 2024 — expected to reach $125 million by 2025 after miners install more equipment.

With the cost of electricity production at Paraguay’s Itaipu’s hydropower plant hovering around the $22-per-megawatt-hour (MWh) range, ANDE could generate a 45% net profit margin by selling off excess energy to local Bitcoin miners at $40/MWh.

This equates to $73 million annually and about $17 million in value-added tax for the treasury, noted Buzarquis, who claimed that Bitcoin mining operations could even save ANDE from filing for bankruptcy.

“This flow of funds is what is going to save ANDE from going bankrupt; to be able to invest more in infrastructure and not to raise the rate for Paraguyans.”

Paraguay currently sells energy to Brazil at a subsidized $10/MWh rate, Buzarquis noted.

Cryptocurrency mining could also generate more employment opportunities for the local economy, Buzarquis added in the April 10 senate session.

Related: Bitcoin’s halving won’t see a 600% return this year — so adjust your strategy

In the earlier April 4 bill, lawmakers argued that there have been 50 cases of interrupted power supply linked to cryptocurrency miners illegally tapping into these electricity sources since February.

If passed, it could impact one of the largest industry players, Marathon Digital Holdings, which expanded into Paraguay last November, deploying 27 MW around the Itaipu hydroelectric power plant.

But Paraguay would be shooting themselves in the foot by banning the entire industry, Hashlabs Mining co-founder and chief mining strategist Jaran Mellerud told Cointelegraph. ""The country would be best off cracking down on illegal mining operations while leaving the legal miners alone.""

In addition to the 45 licensed miners, there are another 20 applicants seeking approval to mine in the country, totaling 2000 MW, according to an April 9 article by Digital Mining Solution's founder Nico Smid.

The controversy in Paraguay comes as Bitcoin miners prepare for the upcoming Bitcoin halving event expected to take place on April 20, which will slice miner rewards from 6.25 BTC ($442,000) to 3.125 BTC ($221,000).

Magazine: Wolf Of All Streets worries about a world where Bitcoin hits $1M: Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Trader hits $6M pay day after spending $8K on Ethereum memecoin [/INST] An Ether (ETH) trader who invested $8,300 in a frog-themed memecoin a month ago is now 750 times richer after the token’s price skyrocketed.

On April 11, the price of a memecoin called Apu Apustaja (APU) surged, sending its market capitalization to almost $200 million.

Blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain flagged a trader’s move to invest in APU a month before its recent price action.

Price chart for the APU memecoin. Source: DEX Screener

The trader made four transactions on March 11, accumulating about eight billion Apu Apustaja (APU) tokens. The crypto trader added another 300 million tokens in two purchases — one on March 13 and another on March 24.

The trader spent a total of 2.38 ETH, currently worth about $8,300, on the memecoin. On April 11, the token’s price surged to a high of $0.0007907, making the tokens worth around $6.5 million.

On April 12, the memecoin trader made six transactions, transferring the funds to a different crypto wallet. This could mean that the trader simply wanted to move it to another wallet or has decided to sell the tokens through a peer-to-peer (P2P) transaction.

Trader transferring the tokens to another wallet. Source: Etherscan

Community members also shared their opinions about what they believed may have happened. An X user praised the tokenholder for “still holding,” while another assumed the crypto wallet belonged to a developer.

Related: Trader hits $2M jackpot after putting $62 into a Solana memecoin

While many traders show patience in their strategies, some quickly cash in on their gains, missing out on potential millions.

On March 14, a trader bought about 170 million Book of Meme (BOME) tokens and sold them for $131,000 before the price surged upward on March 15. Based on current market prices, the trader lost out on a potential $2 million gain.

Meanwhile, another memecoin trader benefited from the frenzy, turning $13,000 into $2 million in just one hour. On April 3, the trader caught wind of a memecoin called Donotfomoew (MOEW) as it debuted on decentralized exchanges (DEXs).

The trader spent 4 ETH ($13,000) to buy almost 500 million MOEW, which became worth about $2 million after an hour.

Magazine: Synthetix founder Kain Warwick: It’s DeFi that’s wrong, not the market"
"[INST] Ethereum ‘BlobScriptions’ lift off and it’s taking Blob fees with it [/INST] A viral new method for minting data to the Ethereum blockchain dubbed “BlobScriptions” is pushing up the price of Blob fees — the amount required for a blob to be included in an Ethereum block.

BlobScriptions were introduced on March 27 by a protocol called Ethscriptions, allowing users to inscribe data — from JPEGs to text — directly onto “blobs,” which were introduced to the Ethereum network as part of the network’s Dencun upgrade on March 13.

Less than five hours after the introduction of BlobScriptions, the gas fees for Blobs soared as high as 585 gwei — equivalent to roughly $18, according to data from Ultrasound.money.

This was a far cry from the average gas price for minting data on a blob before BlobScriptions, which averaged around one wei, equivalent to a tiny fraction of $0.01.

Blob fees soared following the introduction of BlobScriptions. Source: Ultrasound.money

However, Blob fees have since fallen considerably from its newly notched high. At the time of publication, blob fees are running at 35.8 gwei, equivalent to $1.20, per Coinbrain conversion data.

Meanwhile, users have made over 4,500 inscriptions on blobs since the introduction of BlobScriptions, according to Dune Analytics data.

In a March 27 post to X, Ethscriptions founder Tom Lehman — who goes by the alias Middlemarch — noted the spiking cost of “blobspace,” and urged users to mint BlobScriptions via the official blobscription protocol.

Much in a similar way to the early days of Bitcoin Ordinals, Ethereum users are opting to mint small pieces of text and seemingly random assortments of images to blobs, with the most recent activity on blobscription.io showing hundreds of new images added in the last few hours.

Ethereum users are flooding the protocol to mint data on blobs. Source: BlobScriptions

Notably, blob data is only stored on Ethereum nodes for around 18 days meaning that after that period, BlobScriptions data will be removed from the network. However, Lehman added that the Ethscriptions indexer would store the data “indefinitely.”

Related: Starknet targets increased throughput, lower fees with parallel transactions in 2024

Blobs were introduced by way of EIP-4844 — a core data-saving feature of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade — which was focused primarily on reducing transaction costs on layer-2 networks by a significant margin.

Transaction fees on Ethereum L2s fell drastically following the Dencun upgrade, with swap fees on Arbitrum plunging from around $1.25 to below $0.02, while Polygon fees fell by a similar amount.

As a way of lauding the decreased fees that came with blobs, one developer Ethereum managed to mint the entire script of the Bee Movie on an Ethereum blob less than 15 minutes after the upgrade went live all for less than $13 in ETH gas fees.

Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins"
"[INST] Crypto advocacy group claims stablecoin bill would ‘violate free speech rights’ [/INST] United States-based cryptocurrency advocacy organization Coin Center has expressed concerns about a bill recently introduced in the Senate to establish a regulatory framework and guardrails for payment stablecoins.

In an April 19 notice, Coin Center claimed that the Lummis-Gillibrand Payment Stablecoin Act — introduced by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cynthia Lummis — would be “bad policy” and unconstitutional for its proposed prohibition on algorithmic stablecoins. The group argued that banning such stablecoins essentially targeted code, seemingly an unconstitutional act under the protections of the First Amendment.

“[I]t may make sense to require issuers of products like Terra to register with the SEC and make appropriate disclosures (which for all practical purposes would make their use as a stablecoin infeasible), but an outright ban on a particular business model is unnecessary and anti-innovation,” said Coin Center. “If one can comply with the securities laws, one should be able to bring a product to market.”

Coin Center Executive Director Jerry Brito said that attempting to create a regulatory framework for stablecoins in the U.S. was a “laudable effort.” According to the text of the proposed bill, only U.S.-approved issuers would be allowed to issue dollar-backed stablecoins.

Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate are working toward legislative solutions to stablecoins. Coin Center suggested that the Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act — a bill set for a full floor vote in the House — had a “not unreasonable” approach to algorithmic stablecoins by proposing a two-year moratorium rather than an outright ban.

Related: Elizabeth Warren supports enhanced US sanction options for stablecoins

The depegging of TerraUSD (UST) from the U.S. dollar was one of the events that contributed to a crypto market downturn in 2022. Several firms filed for bankruptcy, and U.S. authorities and regulators continued to pursue criminal and civil charges against individuals involved in illicit activities.

Senator Sherrod Brown, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, reportedly said on April 16 that a stablecoin bill would be one of his goals in the legislative session, provided his concerns were addressed. There were no plans in the House to schedule the Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act for a floor vote at the time of publication.

Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom"
"[INST] Not just the halving: Why analysts are bullish on Bitcoin in 2024 [/INST] The Bitcoin (BTC) halving in April will only be one small part of why the cryptocurrency could see phenomenal gains this year, according to multiple industry analysts.

Next month, the Bitcoin halving will reduce daily BTC production by about 450 BTC from the current average daily amount of 900 BTC, investment researcher Lyn Alden told Cointelegraph.

However, Alden said the amount of supply cut pales compared to daily fiat flows in and out of crypto exchanges and Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

“In fact, inflows or outflows can easily exceed 10x of that value,” Alden said, adding that overall demand for Bitcoin is a “bigger factor than tightening supply.”

Historically, demand for Bitcoin has been more correlated with measures of global liquidity, such as the global broad money supply, Alden stressed, referring to a chart reflecting the BTC price versus global monetary supply (M2).

Bitcoin price vs. global liquidity (M2). Source: Look into Bitcoin

“So I think the halving is important, but it’s only one factor out of many that determines the occurrence and timing of a bull market. Various measures of global liquidity, HODL waves, and other catalysts combine to serve a larger role,” Alden said, adding:

“I am bullish for the next two years due to a combination of the halving, expectations for improved global liquidity, and the fact that so many coins have rotated to strong hands in the bear market, and so a relatively minor increase in demand can move the price quite a bit.”

10x Research CEO and head analyst Markus Thielen says the current rally is “undoubtedly on par” with the 2020 and 2021 bull market, which initially peaked in April 2021.

Referring to tools like quantitative analysis, Thielen has been bullish on the price of Bitcoin after the cryptocurrency crossed its multi-year highs on March 13, 2024.

Based on historical price changes and Bitcoin’s recent new highs, 10x Research projected that Bitcoin would reach $77,000 by early April and $99,000 by May 2024.

“When Bitcoin made a new high at $68,300, we saw a wave of intraday selling, but every attempt to push down prices has been met with relentless buying,” Thielen wrote in an email to Cointelegraph on March 14.

The analyst noted that each time Bitcoin made new price breakouts in February 2013, February 2017, and November 2020, the price could grow s much as 189% after 180 days. Eventually, Bitcoin would top after nine to 11 months following the breakouts historically, Thielen noted.

Bitcoin 90 days after making new bull market highs. Source: 10x Research

Thielen forecasted that between December and February 2025 — or in nine to 11 months following the March 13 breakout — Bitcoin could move to an eye-watering $146,000.

“Although corrections and retracements could occur at any time, traders could use the breakout level — $68,300 — as their new line in the sand, where we can argue that above this level, Bitcoin could be materially higher over the next few weeks and months,” the analyst said, adding:

“Despite the possibility that Bitcoin could climb to 146,000 this summer, we keep our 125,000 price target for now as we expect this bull market to continue until 2025.”

The current Bitcoin rally is the first time Bitcoin has posted a parabolic rise and hit a new all-time high before the block reward halving, eToro crypto analyst Simon Peters emphasized.

According to Peters, the main reason for such a breakout is the launch of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETF) in the United States on Jan. 11, 2024.

“Demand for Bitcoin is fast outstripping the new supply, and this is something we’ve never really had in previous cycles,” Peters stressed. Before the introduction of ETFs, the demand was previously driven mainly by retail, while the ongoing cycle is going to be “more institutional,” he added.

According to Peters, Bitcoin miners are the only natural sellers, as they have been actively dumping BTC since August 2023.

“This suggests to me that miners have already been selling into the current rally in preparation for the upcoming block reward halving,” the analyst said, adding that all selling is “well bid” because of the high demand from spot ETFs,"" said Peters, adding:

“If we do see a slowdown in spot ETF inflows, this could be an indication of the market topping out and running out of steam, but it’s important to note that whilst the ETFs have been a major contributor to the rally so far, they are not the only participants in the space. Other entities such as MicroStrategy and Bitcoin whales continue to accumulate too.”

Meanwhile, Exness financial market strategist Li Xing sees macroeconomic developments driving the Bitcoin price this year.

Apart from the spot Bitcoin ETF launch, other economic developments, like expectations of a softer monetary policy and lower interest rates in the U.S. and elsewhere, could boost Bitcoin’s appeal as an alternative store of value, the analyst said.

Related: Bitcoin to enter pre-halving ’danger zone,’ but crypto CEOs remain bullish

“Moreover, geopolitical risks and uncertainties surrounding the U.S. elections could continue to buoy demand, marking the beginning of a sustained bull run in the future,” Li added.

Programmed to occur once per 210,000 blocks or roughly every four years, Bitcoin halvings are designed to maintain Bitcoin’s deficit and counteract inflation.

Since its launch in 2009, Bitcoin has come through three halving events in 2012, 2016 and 2020, cutting its miner incentive from the initial 50 BTC to the current 6.5 BTC. The soon-to-come Bitcoin halving in 2024 will further decrease the mining reward from 6.5 BTC to 3.125 BTC.

Historically, Bitcoin halvings have been associated with post-halving rallies. For example, Bitcoin skyrocketed about 3,000% in 17 months after halving in 2016, reaching a historic milestone of $20,000 in December 2017.

Magazine: ‘Crypto is inevitable’ so we went ‘all in’: Meet Vance Spencer, permabull"
"[INST] Fiat ramps still the ‘biggest gateway’ to crypto — Exec [/INST] Despite a shift in volume in fiat on- and off-ramps, they remain the biggest gateway for leading Web2 users into crypto, according to Aviessa Khoo, executive director at crypto ramp solutions provider Mercuryo.

At the recent Token2049 event in Dubai, Khoo told Cointelegraph that between 2017 and 2022, there were more transaction volumes for their on-ramp solutions as they were coming from centralized exchanges.

The executive explained that, more recently, their crypto volumes have been diverted into noncustodial wallets, which suggests that users are buying and holding on to their assets.

Main stage of the recent Token2049 event in Dubai. Source: Cointelegraph

Even though ramp solutions have seen a shift, Khoo still believes that it’s an important tool that can help non-crypto natives get into the world of Web3. She said:

“On-ramp is definitely still the biggest gateway to onboard Web2 users into Web3, bridging these non-crypto users into Web3. If you talk about fiat on-ramp, the infrastructure is good for non-crypto native people.”

However, Khoo also recognized that crypto-native users may not be as thrilled about using on-ramp solutions because of the higher fees when paying with Visa or Mastercard debit cards. Khoo explained that these users prefer peer-to-peer (P2P) solutions.

“There’s still a lot of crypto native people who will go to P2P or just any other offline, on-ramp solutions, which are cheaper, maybe higher risk,” Khoo added.

When asked what improvements the crypto space should implement to attract more users, the executive shared that user experience is still crucial to adoption. She explained:

“Because I’m from the payment infrastructure side, I think user experience is very important. And this is something that all the product managers that I have been working with are the most concerned on.”

Khoo also shared her interaction with an investor with a Bitcoin wallet from around 2017 who could not remember their password. “These are like investors, but they are non-crypto natives,” she explained.

“If you ask me how are we able to onboard all these users easily to boost the conversion rate of Web2 users into Web3, I definitely think that UX plays the most important part,” Khoo added.

Related: Here’s how crypto game Notcoin onboarded over 30M users — Founder

Apart from Khoo, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov spoke about user experience at Token2049. Nazarov said that the current user experience in the crypto space is “nowhere near what it needs to be.”

The executive believes that there’s still a lot to be done in that regard and explained that crypto must still improve its usability to achieve mainstream adoption.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Hong Kong regulator fast-tracks Bitcoin spot ETF approvals [/INST] The Securities Regulatory Commission of Hong Kong (SFC) has reportedly expedited the approval process for four spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

According to local news outlet Tencent News, the first batch of spot Bitcoin ETFs is set to be approved in the region by April 15.

The report cites multiple sources close to the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, stating that the Hong Kong regulator initially planned to approve only four spot Bitcoin ETFs in the first batch.

Recent announcements suggest that while Boshi Fund and Value Partners Financial are poised to join pending regulatory approval, Harvest International and China Asset Management have already made progress in leading this cryptocurrency investment advancement.

After the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong greenlights the initial set of spot Bitcoin ETFs, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange will require approximately two weeks to finalize listing procedures and related arrangements.

The upcoming endorsement of spot Bitcoin ETFs in Hong Kong heralds numerous prospects for institutional and individual investors. As retail investors are granted entry to Bitcoin investments via ETF purchases, the investment landscape stands on the brink of a significant shift.

Julia Leung, CEO of the SFC, emphasized the need for responsible use of innovative technologies like distributed ledger technology and tokenization to improve efficiency in the financial industry while ensuring investor protection during a keynote speech at the HSBC Global Investment Summit.

Additionally, Leung highlighted efforts to align corporate reporting standards with sustainability disclosure standards and promote informed investment decisions aligned with sustainability goals.

Related: Dfinity launches Web3 accelerator platform on the Internet Computer

The anticipated approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in Hong Kong would happen about three months after the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the first batch in the United States.

Currently, the top 10 spot Bitcoin ETFs manage roughly $57 billion in assets, with the leading trio representing more than 88% of the total.

Traditional institutional investors show greater interest in cryptocurrency as stock market performance becomes lackluster.

To boost local Web3 adoption, Hong Kong’s ZA Bank recently planned specialized banking for stablecoin issuers, offering secure custody for fiat reserves to collateralize digital assets, announced on April 5.

Magazine: SBF gets 25 years in prison, Fidelity eyes ETH staking, and Coinbase’s court loss: Hodler’s Digest, March 24–30"
"[INST] Binance exec arrested in Kenya, could face extradition to Nigeria: Report [/INST] Nadeem Anjarwalla, a British and Kenyan national who works at cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has reportedly been detained in Kenya after fleeing Nigeria in March.

According to several Kenyan news outlet reports from April 22, local police arrested Anjarwalla and may extradite the Binance executive to Nigeria to face criminal charges. Anjarwalla reportedly escaped custody in Nigeria on March 22 after he was taken to a mosque for prayers, fleeing the country using his Kenyan passport.

Cointelegraph was unable to confirm reports of Anjarwalla’s arrest in Kenya. He initially traveled to Nigeria in February with fellow Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan following claims the exchange manipulated the country’s fiat currency, the naira. Authorities detained both men after Binance announced that it intended to cease all naira transactions.

It’s unclear how Anjarwalla escaped Nigeria. Reports have suggested that he was able to board a plane out of Abuja — Nigeria’s capital — using his Kenyan passport, as authorities confiscated only his U.K. travel documents.

Related: Binance exec remains in jail as bail appeal fails again

Nigerian officials have moved forward with charges against the exchange and Gambaryan in Anjarwalla’s absence. The Binance executive has pleaded not guilty to tax evasion and money laundering charges, with the case returning to court on April 19 after a brief adjournment.

Gambaryan’s wife has also launched a petition to return him to the United States, claiming he was “an innocent man, a pawn in someone else’s game.” Binance claimed he had “no decision-making power in the company” and requested that he not be held responsible for the exchange’s activities in Nigeria.

Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of Binance, is expected to be sentenced in the U.S. on April 30 in a separate case after pleading guilty to one felony charge. He could face up to 10 years in prison.

Magazine: ‘Less flashy’ Mashinsky set for less jail time than SBF: Inner City Press, X Hall of Flame"
"[INST] Social sim Today closes seed round to build Animal Crossings-like game with AI NPCs [/INST] Today, a Web3 firm creating a gaming experience also called “Today,” has raised $5 million in seed funding to build its ambitious Animal Crossings-like “social sim” featuring tradeable digital assets and nonplayer characters (NPCs) powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI).

The basic premise of Today revolves around the sim’s digital real estate. Players use “seeds” of varying rarity to create their own island environment to explore. Depending on the rarity of the seed, the island will have different features, characters and objects to explore.

The game is set to launch in early 2025, but a steady stream of work-in-progress videos shows off a gaming world reminiscent of the so-called “cozy games” genre. This includes titles such as Animal Crossings, Stardew Valley and Sun Haven, which are notable for providing a simulated social experience.

This is usually accomplished through the use of compelling nonplayer characters — agents that exist in a game to propel the story and challenge or assist the player characters controlled by human users — capable of imitating conversation through the use of scripted dialogue trees.

In Today’s case, the company says it intends to power its nonplayer characters with generative AI technology.

Generative AI includes popular tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude models. These systems are capable of generating compelling speech on myriad subjects. Ostensibly, they could empower NPCs capable of endless conversation. However, it’s worth noting that even the most powerful generative AI systems have a tendency to output responses that contain false or nonsensical information.

Related: Bitkraft launches $275M gaming fund, bringing total managed assets to $1B

In an interview with GamesBeat, Michael O’Connor, co-founder of Today, said the team’s intent is to replicate real-life relationship dynamics within the game:

“Social simulation games lack deep, realistic NPC interactions which limit player immersion and reduce relationships to superficial exchanges. We’re transforming expectations by replicating the nuances of real-life dynamics using advanced AI that gives our NPCs unparalleled depth and responsiveness.”

Done well, this could offer players a happy medium between the eventual banality of NPCs who’ve exhausted their scripted dialogue and the often-cacophonous experience that accompanies multiplayer gaming with other players."
"[INST] BlackRock could open the door to US-regulated stablecoins [/INST] Wall Street firms’ escalating involvement in the stablecoin market could speed up the development of regulations in the United States, creating a private alternative to a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

According to crypto investor Ryan Sean Adams’ analysis, the recent launch of off-ramps in USD Coin (USDC) for BlackRock's tokenized fund is just another step in the ongoing integration of traditional finance and stablecoin providers.

“Stablecoins will happen in the U.S. because BlackRock and the banks want them to happen. This could not be more obvious,” Adams said on X.

Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, announced on April 11 the launch of functionality that enables holders of BlackRock's USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) to transfer their shares to Circle in exchange for USDC. In other words, the functionality allows investors in the tokenized fund to convert their shares into stablecoins 24 hours a day, thus enhancing shareholder liquidity.

BlackRock is a major investor in Circle. In April 2022, the companies announced a strategic partnership that included BlackRock investing in Circle’s $400 million funding round. BlackRock also manages the Circle Reserve Fund, a government money market fund in which Circle is the only eligible investor.

“The new BlackRock BUIDL fund on Ethereum is a high bandwidth pipeline between U.S. Treasuries and USDC,” Adams noted, adding that Circle’s planned initial public offering (will also help stablecoins integrate with traditional markets.

“The banks will backdoor themselves into stablecoins - by acquiring/partnering/controlling crypto native companies - and they’ll lobby for stablecoin legislation and make it happen along the way. The US does not have the political will to build a central bank digital currency. They're create one defacto through private bank issued stablecoins on public crypto networks like Ethereum.”

BlackRock is already one of the biggest players in the crypto industry. The asset manager is behind the iShares Bitcoin Trust spot Bitcoin ETF, worth $18.5 billion as of April 10. The company recently launched its tokenized fund, BUIDL, enabling investors to buy tokens that represent shares in a fund investing in assets like U.S. Treasury bills.

Magazine: Inside Pink Drainer — Security analyst defends his crypto scam franchise"
"[INST] Bollinger Band suggests further Bitcoin downside, but bull market still on: Traders [/INST] The price of Bitcoin (BTC) could see further downside in the near future without shutting down bull market momentum, according to traders using a widely used momentum indicator.

Bollinger Bands are a technical analysis tool that uses price volatility to indicate potential entry and exit opportunities in trading. Traders essentially aim to buy near the lower band and sell near the upper band.

Traders forecasted that the increased daily volatility in the price range indicates that Bitcoin is positioned for further downward movement.

“Bollinger Band squeeze being released slowly, only thing you need is close below the support and you will see expansion to 50Ks,” pseudonymous crypto trader Aqua told their 16,500 X followers in an April 17 post.

Crypto trader Aqua highlights Bitcoin’s expanding Bollinger Bands as an indicator of near-term price volatility. Source: Aqua

In a series of X posts on April 17, Stockmoney Lizards predicted a “continued correction” despite the imminent Bitcoin halving on April 20. However, they reassured that the market maintains long-term bullish momentum.

“No the bull market is not over. Just taking a break. Which is ok after such a 1-year up-only move,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, technical analyst Tony Severino suggests that Bitcoin’s price may experience significant volatility if the market cycle resembles that of 2017.

“If this cycle is like 2017 then the worst-case scenario is $53K at the Bollinger Band basis,” he stated in an April 16 post on X.

On the same day, pseudonymous crypto trader Rekt Capital declared in a post on X that Bitcoin needs to maintain its current support levels “to avoid breaking down and equalling the lows of the March 2023 18% pullback.”

Related: Bitcoin price falls under $62K amid wavering spot BTC ETF demand

Trading resource Material Indicators explained that the buy-side support is forming strongly at approximately 5% below Bitcoin’s current price of $64,242.

“Fire Charts shows bid liquidity based support is building in the $59k–$61k range with secondary support laddered down to $50k,” it wrote.

If Bitcoin’s price goes right down to the lower end of that range at $59,000, approximately $2.2 billion of long positions will be liquidated, per CoinGlass data.

Furthermore, Bitcoin’s price has minimal wiggle room before a significant amount of short positions are wiped out. If Bitcoin’s price rises just 1.15% from its current price to $65,000, $551 million in short positions will be liquidated.

Magazine: Bitcoin Halving will pump games, Shrapnel’s ‘simple’ secret revealed: Web3 Gamer

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision."
"[INST] Crypto VC funding breaks 2-year downturn in Q1 2024 [/INST] Venture capital (VC) funding flowing to the crypto space showed a positive shift in the first quarter of 2024, breaking a two-year slump.

Data analysis platform Crypto Koryo posted a report on X, highlighting that the total amount invested and the number of projects that received VC funding have increased since Q4 2023.

The platform noted a 38% increase in the funds invested in the quarter.

Amount invested by crypto venture capital funds per quarter. Source: Crypto Koryo

In addition, there was a 49% increase in the number of projects that received funding. The number of projects receiving funding has not been seen since Q4 2021.

This means that crypto VC funding is going into an upward trajectory.

Number of projects getting crypto VC investments per quarter. Source: Crypto Koryo

Crypto Koryo believes this could be “the start of a new wave.” The analysis platform noted that the recent uptrend shows similar patterns to the fourth quarter of 2020 before massive VC investments flowed into the space.

Crypto Koryo also highlighted that, unlike previous quarters where banks and non-crypto VCs led the investments, this quarter showed more interest from crypto-focused venture firms.

Top 50 investors in the first quarter of 2024 in the amount invested. Source: Crypto Koryo

Crypto-native VCs like Andreessen Horowitz Crypto, OKX Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Paradigm and Polychain dominate the funds invested in the quarter.

In March alone, crypto VC funds invested over $1.1 billion across 180 investments. VC funding in crypto jumped by 52.5% month-on-month in March, with investments flowing into infrastructure and decentralized finance projects.

Related: Venture capital exec says ‘lack of innovation’ drives funding away from crypto

The uptick in funding in Q1 2024 also follows an upward momentum from Q4 2023.

In Q1 2023, crypto VC investments showed a 2.5% increase compared to Q3 2023. This marked the first VC investments in crypto projects that have risen since March 2022.

Crypto had a tough year in 2022, with a decline in venture capital funding flowing into the sector accompanied by bleak market conditions. The year showed consecutive quarterly drops when it came to venture capital investments.

Magazine: Asia Express Google sues crypto app scammers, Crypto.com in Korea: Asia Express"
"[INST] Bitcoin users spend record $2.4M in fees on halving block [/INST] Bitcoin users have spent a staggering 37.7 Bitcoin (BTC) in fees — worth just over $2.4 million at current prices — to nab their share of limited space on the fourth-ever Bitcoin halving block.

At 12:09 m UTC on April 20, Bitcoin miner ViaBTC produced the 840,000th block, triggering the automated protocol that cuts miner rewards by 50% from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block.

Block 840,000 rapidly became the most sought-after piece of digital real estate in Bitcoin’s history with users dropping a total of 37.67 BTC on fees, according to data from Bitcoin block explorer mempool.space.

Including the miner subsidy of 3.125 BTC, a total of 40.7 BTC — worth $2.6 million — was paid to Bitcoin miner ViaBTC for producing the halving block.

Users spent $2.4 million in fees to inscribe runes and rare satoshis on the first halving block. Source: Mempool.space

The record-breaking fees were attributed to degens racing to inscribe and etch rare satoshis on the halving block — with much of the activity stemming from a frenzy of activity on Bitcoin Ordinals creator Casey Rodmarmor’s new Runes Protocol which went live at the same time as the halving.

Runes have been marketed as a more efficient way to create new tokens on the Bitcoin network when compared to the BRC-20 token standard — an Ordinals-based method for creating Bitcoin-based tokens.

Much like BRC-20s, Runes leverages the Bitcoin network and pays fees in Bitcoin to create new tokens. However, the similarities end there. The major difference between Runes and BRC-20s is that Runes utilizes an Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model to ""etch"" new tokens on Bitcoin. This stands in contrast to the ""inscription"" account model used by Ordinals, according to a protocol explainer from Rodarmor.

In an April 20 post to X, pseudonymous Ordinals developer Leonidas claimed that the fees on the five most recent Bitcoin blocks following block 840,000 had surpassed the Coinbase reward.

“Runes degens have single-handedly offset the drop in miner rewards from the halving,” wrote Leonidas.

A total of $3.82 million in fees — excluding miner subsidies — was spent on the five blocks following the halving, according to aggregated data from mempool.space.

Related: Bitcoin halving 2024: How to keep BTC mining efficient as rewards decrease

Outside of the battle to inscribe one of the first Runes, Bitcoin mining pools were also vying to grab what’s known as an “epic” satoshi. An epic satoshi is the very first satoshi — the smallest possible denomination of Bitcoin — mined on the halving block.

On April 15, Trevor Owens, the managing partner at The Bitcoin Frontier Fund wrote that he was willing to put up a bounty of between $500,000 and $1 million to “buy out” the first Bitcoin block.

Crypto X reacts to the Bitcoin halving

Amid the chaos, pseudonymous trader Hsaka posted a meme that summed up much of the wider sentiment towards the halving event — a brief moment of celebration followed by an immediate return to business as usual.

Source: HsakaTrades

Outspoken Bitcoin critic Peter Schiff also took to X to throw some shade at Bitcoiners amid the halving event.

“I think halving is an appropriate name for what's happening as soon Bitcoin HODLers will experience a halving of their net worths,” said Schiff.

Web3 Gamer: Bitcoin Halving will pump games, Shrapnel’s ‘simple’ secret revealed"
"[INST] Web3 dev platform Mirror World launches first gaming rollup chain on Solana [/INST] Web3 application development platform Mirror World is launching the first gaming rollup on Solana.

According to the March 29 announcement, the novel Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) computation engine, dubbed “Sonic,” will allow developers to deploy game engines or virtual machines of their choice on Solana via its software development kit (SDK) and power in-app transactions. At the same time, HyperGrid, the core technology of the Sonic SVM developed by Mirror World, enables gaming platforms to create their own on-ramp and cross-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregators for Solana in-game interactions.

Currently, the Mirror World SDK has been deployed to 50 gaming clients as initial distribution nodes. Three games, Mahjong Meta, Matr1x Fire and Seraph/ActozSoft, with over $30 million raised in their series rounds, have seen more than 200,000 traffic and transaction engagements generated during their gaming sessions after incorporating the Mirror World SDK. “Sonic provides natively integrated tools for payment & settlement infrastructure, as well as user engagement tools necessary to build a successful Web3 game,” Mirror World wrote.

Chris Zhu, CEO of Mirror World, explained that the firm has worked with hundreds of games within the Web3 ecosystem to aid in their monetization and listing. “Sonic’s vision is to expand the existing Solana Gaming Ecosystem and process millions of requests per second per game and settle them back onto Solana L1,” Zhu stated. Another of Mirror World’s products, the Smart Marketplace SDK, allows developers to deploy a namesake nonfungible token marketplace within their decentralized application for $299 per month with a limit of $1 million in monthly transaction volume.

Mirror World’s Sonic launch event. Source: World Store (by Mirror World)

Solana has emerged to become a top five blockchain by market cap with a gain of 824% over the past year. However, gaming activities on Solana have lagged so far in development relative to Ethereum, with the most popular game, MomoAI, having only 80,680 unique active wallets. That said, the blockchain is gaining traction in other initiatives. In February, Solana hit an all-time high of $5 billion in nonfungible token sales.

Related: Solana to outpace Ethereum in consumer applications — Former head of growth"
"[INST] Magic Eden overtakes Blur, Yuga Labs offloads NFT games: Nifty Newsletter [/INST] In this week’s newsletter, nonfungible token (NFT) platform Magic Eden surpassed Blur in trading volume in March, and Yuga Labs is offloading two NFT games. In other news, find out how Manchester City football fans could get limited edition jerseys through NFTs and how a former Disney executive launched a Web3 game publishing company. And don’t forget this week’s Nifty News, featuring PayPal removing buyer and seller protections for NFTs.

Magic Eden passed Blur as leading NFT marketplace in March: CoinGecko

Solana-based NFT marketplace Magic Eden recorded a 194.4% increase in monthly trading volume, surpassing the leading platform Blur in March. The NFT trading platform recorded $756.5 million in trading volume last month, while Blur recorded $530.4 million.

According to a CoinGecko report, Magic Eden’s rise was partly due to its newly implemented Diamond reward program and its continued partnership with NFT company Yuga Labs. Magic Eden’s rise in March marked its sixth consecutive month when its trading volume increased.

Continue reading

Yuga Labs offloads two NFT games amid effort to “unshackle” BAYC team

Yuga Labs, the creators of popular NFT collections Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC), sold the intellectual property (IP) rights for two of its games: HV-MTL and Legends of Mara. According to Yuga Labs, the Web3 gaming studio Faraway acquired the IP.

The move was seen as part of the company’s efforts to “unshackle” the team, giving it the ability to execute its vision, and is in line with previous statements from its CEO, Greg Solano.

Continue reading

Man City and OKX release limited-edition jerseys tied to rare NFTs

Football club Manchester City launched a new NFT collection that allows fans to win limited-edition jerseys and matchday experiences.

Through its partnership with crypto exchange OKX, Manchester City allows users to mint NFTs on OKX, which gives them a chance to win the jerseys depending on the NFT’s rarity.

The jerseys feature hand-painted designs by artist Christian Jeffrey, incorporating the Lancashire rose and the Manchester worker bee.

Continue reading

Former Disney boss launches Web3 game publisher with Marvel, Star Wars talent

A former Disney executive joined forces with a team of Hollywood and gaming professionals to launch a Web3 game publisher based in the United Arab Emirates. The company is called Galactic Entertainment Publishing, which represents the first arm of the Galactic Group.

The company’s first project, PlanetQuest, has been in development since 2022. Loren Roosendaal, CEO of Galactic Entertainment and founder of PlanetQuest, said the game had already amassed 200,000 NFT holders before its launch.

Continue reading

Nifty News: PayPal removes NFT protections, Adidas NFT sneakers and more

Payment services company PayPal will take down protections for NFT-related purchases starting May 20. The fintech firm published amendments to its Purchase Protection Program to remove the eligibility of NFT transactions.

Meanwhile, Adidas partnered with Stepn to release limited edition NFT sneakers on the Solana network.

Continue reading

Thanks for reading this digest of the week’s most notable developments in the NFT space. Come again next Wednesday for more reports and insights into this actively evolving space."
"[INST] Optimism sets aside $3B for grants to its blockchain builders [/INST] Ethereum layer-2 scaling network Optimism is putting aside $3.3 billion worth of its Optimism (OP) token for its community to grant to projects or people deemed important contributors to the blockchain’s ecosystem.

On March 26, the chain’s governance and community arm, Optimism Collective, said that some of the 850 million OP would be doled out over four categorized rounds starting in May and continuing throughout 2024.

Optimism Foundation chief operating officer Bobby Dresser told Cointelegraph that the 850 million OP — 20% of the initial OP token supply — is allocated for funding, with 40 million OP, worth around $158 million, being doled out across three past rounds.

On-chain builders will kick off the fourth round for Optimism’s retroactive public goods funding (RPGF), or retro funding — where some of its community votes on what projects get tokens if they’ve shown value.

Rounds five through seven will see infrastructure, governance and dev tooling contributors rewarded with “everyone, anywhere putting the work in to improve Optimism” eligible for the funds. The last round wraps in mid-November.

Public goods in crypto are service projects or people giving to a blockchain or crypto community for free, and retro funding aims to reward them for their demonstrated contributions.

Related: Ethereum Dencun upgrade lowers transaction fees for L2s

Retro funding has cropped up as a funding source for such contributors who typically can’t raise capital from other means, like venture capital, as their contributions aren’t expected to turn a profit.

In the last round of funding in January, a share of the 30 million OP tokens on offer was given to data aggregators DefiLlama and L2Beat, token approval revoking tool Revoke.cash and blockchain sleuth ZachXBT, among hundreds of others.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in an X post after the round that he was “really impressed” by Optimism’s commitment to public goods funding.

“Hope to see more projects doing [Quadratic Funding] QF and RPGF rounds in the future!” he added.

Magazine: Here’s how Ethereum’s ZK-rollups can become interoperable"
"[INST] X payments details released: App to become your bank account [/INST] X users will one day be able to use the platform to send money to other users, purchase goods from stores, and even earn interest on the money in their accounts as one would do with a bank account, said the head of payments at X.

In an April 22 post, X payments chief information security officer Christopher Stanley said the payment capabilities of X would go beyond “just tipping” and expand to include an in-app wallet capable of storing and sending money to any other X users.

“Think Venmo at first. Then, as things evolve, you can gain interest, buy products, eventually use it to buy things in stores (think Apple Pay),” said Stanley.

Stanley added that the “end goal” of payments on X was to create a fully functioning financial ecosystem where users never have to withdraw funds to conduct typical transactions.

“The end goal is if you ever have any incentive to take money out of our system, then we have failed, you shouldn’t ever need to take money out because you should be able to do anything you need on our platform.”

Stanley’s comments come just three days after X secured a money transmitter license in the state of Tenessee on April 19. With the latest license secured, X has now received money-transmitting licenses in 25 states in the United States, according to the Nationwide Multi-State Licensing System (NMLS).

X has been approved for money transmitter licenses in 25 states. Source: NMLS

On Dec. 21, 2023, X’s executive chairman, Elon Musk, told ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood that he plans to launch in-app payment services on X midway through 2024.

Related: X launches dedicated payments account, crypto community speculates

At the time, he said he’d hoped to launch financial services on the app sooner but had been “weighed down” by bureaucratic processes.

Several commentators have shared that X’s upcoming payments feature will initially only offer support for fiat currencies; however, Musk has reportedly instructed developers at X to build the platform’s payments system in such a way that crypto functionality can be added in the future.

Despite Musk showing a high level of enthusiasm for cryptocurrency in the past, with Tesla still holding 9,720 Bitcoin (BTC) on its books and Dogecoin (DOGE) being an accepted currency in the electric car company’s merchandise store, Musk has splashed cold water on any hopes of crypto integration on X.

In December, he told Wood that he spends “hardly any time” thinking about cryptocurrency. Since then, he has not made any statements confirming that crypto would be used for X payments.

Magazine: How to get better crypto predictions from ChatGPT, Humane AI pin slammed: AI Eye"
"[INST] Bitcoin fees crash after record daily average of $128 on halving day [/INST] The average fees paid on Bitcoin have sharply fallen just a day after reaching a record average of $128 on April 20 — the day of the fourth Bitcoin halving.

As of April 21, Bitcoin (BTC) fees have fallen to an average of $8–$10 for medium-priority transactions, according to mempool.space.

Average daily transaction fee on Bitcoin over the last five years. Source: Y Charts

Only one day before, Bitcoin clocked $78.3 million in total fees, beating Ethereum by over 24 times, according to Crypto Fees.

The day included a staggering 37.7 BTC ($2.4 million) paid to Bitcoin miner ViaBTC in the Bitcoin halving block at block height 840,000 — making it the most sought-after piece of digital real estate in the network’s 15-year history.

Much of the demand at block 840,000 came from memecoin and nonfungible token enthusiasts competing to inscribe and etch rare satoshis via the Runes protocol, a new token standard that launched at the halving block.

3,050 transactions were included in that block, meaning the average user paid a little under $800.

Largest fees by blockchains and decentralized finance projects on April 20. Source: Crypto Fees

The higher-than-normal block fees continued until about block 840,200, according to mempool.space; however, block fees have since fallen to around 1–2 BTC.

Related: Bitcoin halving 2024: How to keep BTC mining efficient as rewards decrease

The large block fee payouts to miners throughout on halving day meant they weren’t initially impacted by the block subsidy halving from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.

But that’s no longer the case now that the average block fee is well below 3.125.

Total fees for block 840,266 came out at 1.64 BTC. With the new block subsidy of 3.125, total rewards came out at 4.76 BTC. Source: mempool.space

Meanwhile, fees on Bitcoin have now topped Ethereum for six consecutive days between April 15 and 20, with its seven-day fee average now at $17.8 million.

The halving event didn’t have a material impact on Bitcoin’s price, which is up 1.5% since then to $64,840, according to CoinGecko.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto"
"[INST] Hong Kong approves first Bitcoin and Ether ETFs [/INST] Update April 15, 1:10 pm UTC: This article has been updated to include comments from OSL chairman Patrick Pan.

Hong Kong has become the latest country to approve spot exchange-traded funds (ETF) for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), with local regulators issuing approvals to at least three local issuers.

The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) conditionally approved its first spot BTC and ETH ETFs on April 15, Reuters reported.

At least three offshore Chinese asset managers, including Hong Kong units of Harvest Fund Management, Bosera Asset Management and China Asset Management (ChinaAMC), will launch their spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs soon.

Bosera will launch its spot crypto ETFs in collaboration with Hong Kong-based HashKey Capital. OSL Digital Securities, a licensed digital asset platform in Hong Kong, will act as the sub-custodian for ChinaAMC and Harvest.

Hong Kong’s securities regulator issues a conditional authorization letter to an ETF application if it generally satisfies its requirements, subject to various conditions, including fee payments, document filing, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s (HKEX) listing approval.

The Hong Kong regulator reportedly approved that the spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs will be launched as in-kind ETFs, meaning new ETF shares can be issued using BTC and ETH.

The in-kind creation model is opposed to the cash-create redemption model, which allows issuers to create new ETF shares only with cash. Spot Bitcoin ETFs currently use the cash-create model in the United States as local securities regulators opted for this redemption method.

Related: Hong Kong regulator fast-tracks Bitcoin spot ETF approvals

“The in-kind subscription model for the spot BTC and ETH ETFs in Hong Kong represents a substantial innovation,” OSL board chairman and CEO Patrick Pan told Cointelegraph. “This mechanism enhances market liquidity by allowing the direct exchange of the asset for ETF shares, reducing reliance on cash settlements and facilitating uninterrupted trading flows,” he added, stating:

“This principle is essential for ensuring market stability and is consistent with practices in both digital and traditional asset ETFs.”

Pan noted that receiving an approval in principle signifies that the firms have cleared most of the crucial vetting processes and brings them closer to the launch. However, it’s still early to expect when exactly the spot Bitcoin ETF will start trading in Hong Kong, he noted, adding:

“The dates are not yet confirmed. However, all parties involved are diligently working to expedite the launch. The initiation of these ETFs is expected to significantly boost capital inflow into the digital asset market in Hong Kong.""

Cointelegraph approached the SFC, Bosera and Harvest for a comment regarding the ETF approval but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

The new approvals follow expectations that the SFC will green-light the first batch of spot Bitcoin ETFs on April 15. According to reports, HKEX will need roughly two weeks to finalize listing procedures and other arrangements after the SFC’s approval.

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"[INST] Charles Hoskinson points to 2 major upgrades amid Cardano ‘dunking’ [/INST] Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has his eye on two major upgrades — at least one of which is slated for this year — for the Cardano network amid a recent flood of criticism over its native token and ecosystem.

“We are holding all the cards as an ecosystem,” Hoskinson said in an April 7 post on X in response to recent pessimism about the blockchain.

“We have the best path for scalability, governance, and innovation. We also have the best community,” he added in response to “all the dunking on Cardano.”

Hoskinson’s optimism was fueled mainly by the upcoming Chang hard fork, seen as one of the network’s biggest hard forks since the 2022 Vasil upgrade and slated for the second quarter of this year.

Cardano governance roles. Source: Essential Cardano

Chang is the first hard fork of the Voltaire era of Cardano’s roadmap, which will introduce the concept of community-run governance to the blockchain by enabling on-chain community consensus and allowing Cardano’s ADA (ADA) holders to use their tokens to vote on proposals.

It’s seen as enabling the network to become fully decentralized by introducing community governance.

“Chang is coming soon as measured by progress on SanchoNet.”

Throughout the rest of this year, the transition will introduce Delegate Representatives (DReps), involve a Cardano Constitution Convention event, and a Cardano community vote to ratify the first draft of the Cardano Constitution.

“Ouroboros Leios is the biggest step forward toward solving the blockchain trilemma ever,” Hoskinson added.

Ouroboros Leios is a new version of the proof-of-stake consensus model designed to increase throughput, scalability and transaction speed on Cardano while maintaining the current level of decentralization.

Hoskinson’s comments came in response to an April 7 video from Ben Armstrong — aka BitBoy — who was contemplating whether Cardano was “dead.”

He compared Cardano to Solana, Sui and Toncoin, which were “blowing up” and “killing it” in terms of users, activity and price action, whereas the numbers for Cardano were “not fantastic.”

Hoskinson argued that the crypto industry has a problem with short-term narratives.

“The problem with our industry is that we let short-term narratives and carnival barkers dominate the conversation. AI has the same issue.”

Related: Cardano refutes rumors it abandoned its scaling project Hydra

“Most hate for Cardano is emotional,” commented zenGate Global founder and CEO Daniel Friedman on X on April 8. “My decision to build on Cardano and Ergo was a business and architecture decision. Not an emotional tantrum,” he added.

Crypto Capital Venture founder and Cardano advocate Dan Gambardello suggested that the FUD was because ADA’s price was not back above $1.

“Even Cardano people who say they don’t care about price, care about price. If price was up, you wouldn’t see these comments.”

ADA prices have been lackluster this year and have actually dipped slightly since the beginning of 2024.

The coin was trading down 10% over the past seven days at $0.584 at the time of writing. It is also down 81% from its September 2021 all-time high of $3.09, according to CoinGecko.

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"[INST] ZKasino users fuming as $33M in promised refunds are instead sent to Lido [/INST] Blockchain-based gambling project ZKasino is being slammed on X for moving $33 million worth of investor and user funds to staking protocol Lido — a sudden change from its original plan to return the funds.

In an April 20 blog post, ZKasino announced its network had gone live. More than 10,000 users who had bridged a collective 10,515 Ether (ETH) to the network in a bid to collect more of its ZKasino (ZKAS) tokens were expecting they could get their ETH back as initially promised.

Instead, ZKasino’s post said it “made changes from our initial plan,” with all bridged ETH converted to ZKAS at a “discounted rate of $0.055” on a 15-month vesting schedule.

It claimed the changes were “done as a favour” so it could “provide a seamless transition” as its chain doesn’t use ETH. Users also noticed it had changed the wording on its website, removing a statement that said the ETH “would be returned.”

These concerns were further intensified after an on-chain transfer showing ZKasino moved all of its users’ 10,515 ETH into the staking protocol Lido.

Meanwhile, an anonymous crypto developer known as “cygaar” claims that the blockchain ZKasino released was “an Arbitrum Nitro chain that took 2 minutes to deploy” and didn’t use zero knowledge technology or EigenDA despite its claim that it would.

On X, hundreds of posts from apparent ZKasino users who pitched money toward the project are now alleging the project is an exit scam.

Some have even spread the personal information and address of ZKasino’s founder, known on X as “Derivatives Monke,” using it to call for legal action.

More controversy

Venture capital firm Big Brain has added to the controversy as well, claiming in an April 21 X post that ZKasino “appears to be fraudulent” and it “never invested in ZKasino” but was offered a pro-rata token distribution that it had not received and “will not opt to receive.”

This came after ZKasino claimed in an X post in March to have closed a Series A investment round at a $350 million valuation with backing from crypto exchange MEXC and venture firm Big Brain Holdings, among others.

Meanwhile, crypto outlet TechFlow reported on April 21 that MEXC said (translated) it was “just one of the investors” and ZKasino’s “behavior has nothing to do with us. As an investor, we are also victims.”

Related: Solana memecoin frenzy raises questions about crypto utility, reputation

ZKasino, its founder, its parent firm ZigZag Labs and MEXC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

ZKasino has been largely mute on X through the backlash. The project posted a humdrum update about integrating EIP-3074 on X.

Derivatives Monke has replied to an X user who criticized Monke over ZKasino’s recent decision and, in another post, shared his project’s latest X post with the caption “keep building.”

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