Month: October 2023

In a world increasingly anxious about privacy and exploitation of one’s personal data by governments, corporations, social media platforms and banks, zero-knowledge proofs may offer some relief.  Indeed, this emerging cryptographic protocol could partially remedy two rapidly growing global deficits: privacy and truth. ZK-proofs have already found a home within the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector
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A Bitcoin developer has proposed a new way to bring more expressive off-chain smart contracts to Bitcoin without needing a soft fork. Announced in an Oct. 9 white paper titled “BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin” by ZeroSync project lead Robin Linus, BitVM enables Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts without altering Bitcoin’s consensus rules. “Any computable function can be
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The hacker responsible for stealing over $400 million from FTX and FTX.US in November could be using the hype around Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud trial to further obfuscate the funds, said CertiK director of security operations Hugh Brooks. Only days before the start of Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial, the FTX hacker, known as “FTX Drainer,” began moving millions
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US dollar stablecoin issuer Circle has announced that it has begun minting USD Coin (USDC) natively on Ethereum layer 2 scaling protocol Polygon. USDC is accessible to both users and developers without the need to bridge the stablecoin from Ethereum or other blockchain. Circle Mint and Circle’s developer API’s now support Polygon-based USDC, tapping into
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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) of the United Kingdom has placed restrictions on peer-to-peer lending platform Rebuildingsociety, the firm with which crypto exchange Binance partnered for compliance with the regulator’s marketing regime.  In an Oct. 10 notice, the FCA said Rebuildingsociety was not authorized to “approve the content of any financial promotion for a Qualifying
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Day six of the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried saw the conclusion of former FTX chief technology officer Gary Wang’s testimony and the beginning of former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison’s. Wang testified about his plea deal, among other things. According to Inner City Press on X (formerly Twitter), Assistant United States Attorney Nicolas Roos asked
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A Brazilian congressional committee has recommended local law enforcement move to indict Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” and three other Binance executives following a probe into financial pyramid schemes in Brazil. On Oct. 10 the committee released a 500-page final report accusing Zhao and local Binance executives Daniel Mangabeira, Guilherme Haddad Nazar and Thiago Carvalho of
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A bipartisan parliamentary committee has urged the British government to protect creators from copyright infringement associated with nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and address potential harms from sporting groups issuing digital assets. In an Oct. 11 press release, Culture, Media and Sport Committee members warned the “most pressing issue” was the risk to artists’ intellectual property rights
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