Crypto

A University of Washington experiment with “a machine to create clouds” was shut down by the city of Alameda — because the scientists didn’t bother to tell the locals what they were up to, Politico writes. They were 20 minutes into the test when city officials ended the experiment.

It’s launching the new payment method for US-based merchants “in the coming weeks,” allowing them to accept than 100 types of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether.

More than $2.17 billion has been stolen from crypto services this year, more than the entirety of 2024, according to a report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. Then again, most of that came from a single hack — a $1.46 billion heist of Bybit linked to North Korean hackers, the largest crypto theft in history — and without that, the numbers would look a little rosier.

The House voted against a procedural step to advance a slate of three President Donald Trump-endorsed crypto bills that would regulate stablecoins, determine who can regulate cryptocurrency, and prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency. Thirteen Republicans defied Trump’s encouragement to advance the legislation amid disputes about whether the bills should be combined in a vote. It’s not clear what happens next, but Crypto Week might not be done just yet.

The airline giant has been promising to accept Bitcoin as a payment method since 2022, but it might finally happen next year thanks to a preliminary deal with Crypto.com to explore integrations with the crypto trading platform’s payment service.

In Ubisoft’s latest strange NFT project, each “Niji Warrior NFT” from Captain Laserhawk: The G.A.M.E. can become “a persona-driven AI agent” that’s capable of “discussing, reasoning, and voting on real community proposals — even when its owner is offline,” according to a blog post.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s director has ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare a framework for considering crypto as an asset in homebuying. “Pulte also instructed the agencies that their mortgage risk assessments should not require cryptocurrency assets to be converted to U.S. dollars.” Great to see crypto is getting what it paid for! If only we all could buy elections, am I right?

Actually, please don’t. The venture capital fund’s X account seems to have been hacked. (Update: Andreesen Horowitz later confirmed that their account had been compromised.)

Amid the announcement of a “Trump Mobile” phone service, Trump’s media company has revealed that it submitted an SEC filing seeking approval of an exchange-traded fund (ETF) with 75 percent of assets invested in Bitcoin and 25 percent in Ether. Crypto.com will store and trade the assets on Trump Media’s behalf.

There was prominent placement along the route for some of the Big Tech companies backing Trump’s military parade, as long as they haven’t been removed from the list of sponsors for America250.

The retail giants are looking into ways they could use or issue stablecoins — a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar or another asset, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. As noted by the WSJ, the move could allow Amazon and Walmart to receive payments faster, while avoiding fees from credit card transactions.

”It’s a huge giveaway to Big Tech,” the Missouri Republican and longtime foe of the tech giants, tells The New York Times. His concerns: tech companies would be able to issue their own stablecoins that would compete with the U.S. dollar, and it would incentivize these companies to collect more of their customers’ financial data. “It allows these tech companies to issue stablecoins without any kind of controls. I don’t see why we would do that.”

Earlier today, Molly White at Citation Needed broke the news that the Trump family was expanding their reach into the world of crypto, partnering with a company called Magic Eden to launch the “Official $TRUMP Wallet by President Trump,” as well as a dedicated crypto trading app.

The National Science Foundation — which developed tech such as the literal internet — now has a 23-year-old to veto funding to projects he doesn’t understand. That’s DOGE’s Zachary Terrell, who can barely pretend to pay attention in meetings. Anyway, this is who’s deciding which grants go forward — some guy with no experience in anything except getting a company acquired by Coinbase. Scientific experts? Those are a luxury for functioning countries.

the committee organizing Donald Trump’s 250th anniversary celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

During Code and Country at the Bitcoin Conference, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) mentioned that as soon as stablecoin bills are passed through Congress and signed into law, the Republicans were ready to gun on creating the Reserve. “It’s gonna be a heavier lift than I thought,” she added, because after watching her colleagues debate the GENIUS Act, it was clear that many of them “don’t understand” crypto.

Recently, the comedian behind Adam Ruins Everything made a promotional video for World that he’s since taken down. Now, he’s addressing blowback he received by calling his ad for the eyeball-scanning crypto company “one of the dumbest things I have ever done” and saying what he “honestly” thinks about the company.

37-year-old John Woeltz was arrested Friday after a man escaped a Manhattan townhome and told authorities that Woeltz and another man had kidnapped him and were “beating, shocking and torturing him for weeks” after he refused to give them his Bitcoin password, reports The New York Times.

That was a message Akasha Song, aka Joseph Clements, shared with customers in April 2022 on the closed dark web profile pages for his DMT storefront, Shimshai, as the feds were closing in on his operation.

New Hampshire just passed a law establishing its own “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” paving the way for the state to start investing in digital assets such as Bitcoin. It’s the first state in the country to do so, beating several other states to the punch.

Of the roughly 2 million crypto wallets that have bought Trump’s meme coin, a very lucky 58 of them have managed to make more than $10 million a piece off it. Everyone else hasn’t been as fortunate. In fact, 764,000 wallets have lost money on the coin.