From the erratic ups and downs in bitcoin and ethereum value, to the explosion in initial coin offerings, and the unstoppable demand for mining-ready GPUs, cryptocurrency has become an inescapable story. It’s also become increasingly difficult to make sense of — as the industry expands, new currencies sprout up, and companies form overnight. Check here for the complete coverage of bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, monero, Venezuela’s petro, cryptocurrencies at large, and the ways that ICOs and the underlying blockchain technology are helping shape a burgeoning industry and giving life to a new wave of startups and entrepreneurs.
The London Review of Books surveys the gambling landscape: how “prediction markets” have been handed the CFTC, market manipulation, and the blurring of reality. To state the obvious: “Prediction markets don’t produce truth. They are high-stakes wait-and-see machines, that’s all.” Do stay to read the very end.
[London Review of Books]
The Altruists focuses on the relationship between former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (Anthony Boyle) and former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison (Julia Garner). It debuts on November 19th.
Bitget says $351.6 million in crypto was stolen by hackers on Thursday, and reportedly suspects the breach may be linked to North Korea. Meanwhile, Protos reports three other DeFi projects that posted about being hacked on Thursday, with losses totaling $7 million at Duelbits, $2.3 million at Meter, and $1.8 million at Payy Network.
As reported by CoinDesk, the memecoin peaked at $190.81 two minutes after it debuted on Wednesday. Its value tumbled quickly after that, with LAPTOP now sitting at around $2.16 — a more than 98 percent drop.
President Donald Trump’s memecoin has similarly dipped in value, resulting in more than $3.8 billion in losses.
$LAPTOP plays on the infamous device that dragged him into the political spotlight. It also takes aim at Donald Trump’s similar crypto currency by distributing tokens to wallets that have lost money on $TRUMP, and pledging more if the Democrats win in 2028 or Biden’s crypto market cap overtakes the Trump coin’s.
[Wall Street Journal]
The servers for Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, which launched in 2024, will close down on October 30th, Kotaku reports. The shutdown follows an earlier announcement that the game would “progressively transition away from blockchain functionality.”
This 24-year-old first-time hedge funder screwed up his AI fund with one weird trick.
The latest evolution in prediction market technology is Kalshi’s “professional-grade desktop trading workstation,” a web UI now available publicly in a beta test that takes its styling cues from stock trading terminals instead of sportsbooks.
According to the company, Kalshi Pro is part of its “transformation from a retail app for prediction market trading into a full-service financial exchange for all types of investors.”
The President’s annual disclosure noted that companies owned by Trump and his family received more than $800 million from the WLFI token and $635 million in royalties from Trump memecoins, report Reuters, WSJ, and CNBC.
CoinDesk points out the more than $50 million in Bitcoin, $25 million in ETH, investments in Coreweave and Coinbase, and $6 million from an NFT licensing agreement.
[DocumentCloud]
In a post spotted by TechCrunch, Polymarket says “a 3rd party vendor had been compromised, injecting malicious script into our frontend for some users.”
The update comes just hours after blockchain security firm PeckShield notified users of a potential phishing campaign targeting Polymarket users. Around $3 million worth of Polymarket’s crypto token was drained from user wallets, PeckShield says.
The convicted FTX fraudster serving a 25-year prison sentence now has a formal filing for the presidential pardon he’s been openly seeking, plus a new jailhouse phone interview with Fox Business. He presumably hopes that was seen inside the White House, despite Donald Trump’s comments in January that he had no plan to pardon SBF.
Gudtrip is the most ridiculous AI/crypto/weed product to ever touch the internet. Could it possibly be real?
As Reuters reports, the crypto exchange is laying off around 700 employees. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote in a letter to staff that crypto is “currently in a down market,” which, along with increasing use of AI, is pushing Coinbase to reduce costs.
Jack Dorsey’s Block has launched a follow-up to its coaster-like Bitkey wallet, featuring an OLED touchscreen display that crypto holders can use to verify transactions and “authorize every security-critical operation in the wallet,” according to a post on X. The hardware wallet costs $250 and is available to preorder now.
Once championed by the Trump family after heavily bankrolling their crypto ambitions, Justin Sun is now unhappy with his chosen bedfellows. Suing Trump-linked World Liberty Financial, Sun alleges in a federal lawsuit that his former allies maliciously froze his $75 million investment, denouncing the platform as “World Tyranny.”
Inventing the future requires a future people want.
Yuga Labs, the creator of the now-depreciated line of NFTs, settled its lawsuit against artists Ryder Ripps and Jeremy Cahen, who were accused of launching a copycat RR/BAYC NFT collection, as reported by CoinDesk.
The parties settled to avoid a trial after a court reversed Yuga Labs’ $9 million win last year.
The New York Times thinks it found the elusive person behind the pseudonym credited with creating Bitcoin. It relied on a combination of textual analysis and in-person tells to narrow a pool of suspects “from 34,000 down to one”.
Spoiler: it’s Adam Back, a cohort of Jeffrey Epstein and early “cypherpunk” who helped lay the groundwork for cryptocurrency.
[nytimes.com]
The CFTC insists it’s the sole authority on prediction markets — but can the agency police insider trading?
Apparently he wasn’t satisfied with just the book. Sort of a shame McKenzie couldn’t release it on April 1, don’t you agree?
David Morris expands on his Verge story about Jeffrey Epstein and cryptocurrency in an interview with writer Wajahat Ali:
Kalshi and Polymarket are cosplaying as the news, even as gambling on Iran, Venezuela, and nuclear war runs rampant.
Epstein may not have fully understood crypto, but he helped shape its culture anyway.
And neither one had noticeable AI. T-Mobile brought the actual Backstreet Boys in, while Coinbase broke things up with a weird karaoke-style presentation of “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” to highlight its crypto exchange without actually mentioning crypto.
Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek is getting in on the Super Bowl AI commercial break craze by launching his new AI.com website during the game. A press release describes the site as a way for users to “generate a private, personal AI agent that doesn’t just answer questions, but actually operates on the user’s behalf.”
Even after his 2008 conviction as a sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein still had friends in Silicon Valley. The New York Times details the companies that took his money — including Coinbase, wearable manufacturer Jawbone, and Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures — along with more he considered investing in, including Palantir, SpaceX, and Spotify.
[The New York Times]
Crypto bros are crashing out after finding that Epstein was a prominent early figure in cryptocurrency, with investor Patrick Riley remarking that “74.79 percent of the Bitcoin core development and code was committed after Jeffery Epstein took over the defacto senior management role as benefactor.”
Apparently, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon did not take kindly to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong accusing them of ruining the Clarity Act, and interrupted Armstrong’s coffee date with Tony Blair to say so:
“You are full of s—,” said Dimon, a longtime crypto skeptic who previously called bitcoin a fraud, his index finger pointed squarely at Armstrong’s face. Dimon, in a nutshell, told him to stop lying on TV, according to people familiar with the conversation.
[The Wall Street Journal]
In a 12-11 vote along party lines, the Senate Agriculture Committee, which regulates commodities, voted on Thursday to advance its portion of the crypto market structure bill to a Senate floor vote. This is not a good sign for the crypto industry, which had hoped that the bill would pass with bipartisan support. (In the meantime, the Senate Banking Committee’s half of the bill, which handles securities, remains stuck in markup limbo.)
The NFL has added prediction markets to its list of “prohibited categories” for commercials in Super Bowl LX. However, as Front Office Sports points out, sports betting isn’t on that list. While there will be limits on the number of sports bettor ads allowed, the league seems to be drawing a distinction between the two categories.
[Front Office Sports]
