Crypto

Brazil’s ANPD found on Friday that Altman’s biometric data-collecting project may interfere with Brazilians’ ability to freely consent to having their biometric data processed by offering crypto in exchange for the scans, according to a Reuters report syndicated at The Economic Times.

New executive order just dropped from the crypto-owned administration. A fun little committee will decide if we should have a strategic crypto reserve. Also, the government should make it easier for crypto companies to get bank accounts — because that ended so well last time.

Something tells me he’s not going to divest himself of it.

Melania’s “Official Meme” coin debuted this afternoon, a day after Trump launched his own cryptocurrency. An appended community note warns, “buying this token is incredibly risky and will likely result in the loss of funds.”

A federal grand jury indicted three Russian nationals for allegedly running Blender.io and Sinbad.io — two crypto-mixing services that make it harder to trace transactions on the blockchain.

You wanna go down a rabbit hole? The corporate structure alone is bizarre:

Kwon has been extradited to this US to face fraud charges. The charges contain a description of the overlapping network of allegedly fraudulent entities Kwon juggled before Terra / Luna came crashing to Earth.

If the phrase “Hawk Tuah girl” means nothing to you, I urge you to continue in blissful ignorance. If “Hawk Tuah shitcoin scam” resonates, you’ll enjoy Katie Baker’s rundown of what, exactly, happened.

Welch said as much in a post on Friday, breaking a two-week silence after she abruptly signed off an X Spaces event to address investor concerns over the abrupt implosion of her newly launched Hawk Tuah-themed meme coin, according to Rolling Stone.

Tether, one of crypto’s longstanding mysteries, is dropping more than three-quarters of a billion dollars on Rumble, the far-right video sharing platform. Do click through for the statements from both companies’ CEOs, which definitely sound like normal human speech.

As a longtime admirer of CoinDesk’s journalism and ethos, I was disgusted that their new owners, Bullish — more like Bullshit, am I right? — pulled a story about Justin Sun. Now top editorial staff have been fired.

Someone has, for some reason, launched a campaign on Enron.com claiming a “bold new vision.” However, as many have pointed out, the site’s TOS identifies its information “first amendment protected parody,” in addition to what Sean O’Kane points out about its crypto / merch pitch.

The controversial head of the SEC was targeted by Donald Trump during Trump’s presidential campaign. It is customary for the SEC chair to resign when a president from the other party is elected. That cheering you hear? It’s the crypto lobby.

During trial, prosecutors pressed Wang for creating code that allowed Alameda to have a negative balance in FTX’s database.

A new tidbit about the prediction markets startup from last week’s issue of Command Line:

Bernie Moreno, an Ohio car dealer and blockchain entrepreneur, unseated Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) with a little help from his friends.

As the vote count increasingly points toward Trump, who courted the crypto industry throughout his campaign, the price of Bitcoin has hit a new all-time high of over $74,000.

Forbes reports on “evidence of rampant wash trading on Polymarket,” a prediction market site backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Wash trading is a form of market manipulation. “The suspicious activity on Polymarket raises questions about the accuracy of the site,” Forbes writes.

Singh, now the fourth FTX executive to be sentenced after Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, and Ryan Salame, will receive three years of supervised release.