Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project that gives free tokens to users that are willing to scan their eyeballs, has integrated its World ID verification protocol with Okta in Germany.
German developers can now select a “sign in with Wolrdcoin” option from Okta’s Auth0 marketplace to adopt it for their apps. The eyeball scanning hardware — dubbed “The Orbs” — will also be available to purchase around the country.
The suit alleges Friedberg enabled Sam Bankman-Fried and others to misappropriate billions in customer funds leading up to the catastrophic collapse of the company late last year, according to Bloomberg. The fall of FTX was just one part of the ongoing crypto winter.
The suit lays out the allegations:
Friedberg and others facilitated the routing of billions of dollars in purported profits of the FTX Group to the FTX Insiders, and their families, friends, and other acquaintances through purported personal ‘loans,’ bonuses, ‘investments,’ and all other means of transfer, including real estate purchases and hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable and political contributions.
A judge has permanently blocked Mason Rothschild from creating and selling MetaBirkins, a line of handbag NFTs modeled after the Birkin brand. Hermès won its case against Rothschild earlier this year, which alleged the Birkins-themed digital collectibles “rips off Hermès’ famous Birkin trademark.”
According to our survey results, as much as people are sure AI technology is going to have a significant impact on society, most of them don’t feel that way about non-fungible tokens.
Joseph James O’Connor, aka PlugWalkJoe, is a UK citizen connected to a massive 2020 breach on Twitter that pushed crypto scam ads through accounts for Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Apple, and others, as well as other social media account breaches.
Today a New York federal court judge sentenced him to five years in prison for his crimes minus 28 months for time already served. TechCrunch reports he will also forfeit at least $794,000 to his victims.
Yep, it uses ChatGPT. It only raised $5 million of the $10 million it wanted earlier this year so it seems like I’m not the only who’s a little skeptical of this.
The Block cites a source who claims to know the people behind recent phishing attacks with “NFT drainers” targeting high-value accounts. According to OpenSea employee “Plum,” it’s high school kids who “all play Roblox for the most part. So they’ll buy the coolest gear for their Roblox avatar, video games, skins and things like that.”
And they’re not even old enough to check out everything Roblox has to offer!
In most normal markets, market making and prop trading are done by independent companies. One of the reasons the SEC is mad at Binance is that they allege Binance’s entities may have manipulated crypto markets.
Also:
One of the people with direct knowledge about the teams said that Crypto.com executives gave other, external trading houses “absolutely dramatic sworn statements that Crypto.com was in no way involved in trading”, while another said that employees were asked to “say there is no internal market maker type operation.”
In response to questions from the Financial Times, Crypto.com said that employees had not been asked to lie to other market participants.
[FinancialTimes]
...but for passport shenanigans, not Terra / Luna. He’s been found guilty of forgery by a Montenegro court. The time he’s served since being arrested in March will count toward the sentence.
It’s about the restraining order, not the larger case. Last night, a judge approved the deal to make sure that only US employees have access to Binance.US funds:
According to the proposed agreement, Binance.US will take steps to make sure that no officials from Binance Holdings, the global exchange, have access to private keys for wallets or hardware wallets, or root access to Binance.US’s Amazon Web Services tools. The U.S.-based crypto trading platform will share detailed information about its business expenses, including estimated costs, in the coming weeks.
Remember when we talked about how the SEC has showed up on a horse, guns blazing, to regulate crypto? Here’s a nice report on how they’re also coming for the VC firms that poured money into crypto with a new rule change:
Legal executives at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote that “absent a suitable self-custodial exception, the proposed Rule would effectively ban RIAs from holding and transacting in crypto assets for clients,” while Paradigm wrote that the rule could result in an effective “shadow ban” of crypto.
a16z could be particularly hard-hit by this change.
[The Information]
Bloomberg has some details on the stablecoin. Highlights include: a “sizeable loan” to the Celsius Network, extensive third party loans, and its banking network which, whew buddy. Tether made loans to parties such as Bitfinex — and lent $5.1 billion at one point, a significant amount of Tether!
I wonder how much Tether has cleaned up their act! Perhaps the team will release recent details to — ahahahahaha just kidding. Let’s see what else comes out.
Hot on the heels of the SEC regulatory crackdown on crypto, Blackrock has filed paperwork for a Bitcoin ETF, with Coinbase custodying. The SEC has never approved a spot Bitcoin ETF, and is embroiled in a lawsuit with Grayscale about rejecting their attempt at a Bitcoin ETF. (A ruling in that case is expected later this year.)
Controversial stablecoin Tether has dropped its objection to a CoinDesk Freedom of Information lawsuit in such a way that I’m like 👀👀👀:
Tether has nothing to hide and we hold utmost confidence in the accuracy of our financial figures. While the sensitivity that we had to a government agency releasing confidential data—at least as it pertains to Tether’s reserves—is lower now than it was in 2021, we remain vigilant about customer data. While we cannot count on fair coverage from CoinDesk, which often misrepresented Tether’s position in the market in favour of its main competitor, we call upon them to set their bias aside and to not publicly share any past or current customer names and not to thereby put anyone in the community at physical or digital risk.
This is an unjustified smear of great journalists. I wonder what Tether is afraid of.
[Tether, Tether Gold]
A brief guide to the politics behind the Binance and Coinbase SEC cases.
