Hong Kong Monetary Authority: Entering the "Sandbox" is not a prerequisite for applying for a stablecoin issuer license in the future
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) emphasized in an explanatory article that entering the "sandbox" is not a prerequisite for applying for a stablecoin issuer license in the future. Even if participating institutions that have entered the "sandbox" intend to obtain a license in the future, they must submit a formal application after the regulatory system is implemented.
Earlier news, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority today announced the list of participants in the "sandbox" for stablecoin issuers.
SEC Chairman Gary Gensler issues fraud warning involving “crypto-asset securities”
Gary Gensler, chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), issued an investor warning on the X platform, saying that fraudsters may use five methods to lure victims into participating in scams involving crypto asset securities, and that fraudsters often use emerging technologies such as encryption to commit investment fraud. The link cited by Gensler is an investor alert issued by the SEC on May 29 this year. The five methods mentioned include contacting victims through social media platforms or text messages and winning their trust, using the hype of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), fraudsters impersonating or using reliable sources, raising prices and then selling, and paying additional fees to falsely claim that they can help victims withdraw cash.
Pelosi says Biden may soon be persuaded to drop out of race
According to foreign media reports cited by First Financial Daily, three Democratic officials familiar with former House Speaker Pelosi's private conversations said that she told some House Democrats that she believed President Biden would soon be persuaded to withdraw from the presidential race because there were serious doubts about his ability to win the November election. Biden's intermittent performance in the debate had previously caused panic among Democrats, and Pelosi played a powerful role behind the scenes, trying to resolve this political crisis, acting as a middleman for emotionally disturbed ordinary Democrats and conveying this information to the White House.
In addition, according to Global Markets, a person familiar with the matter revealed that some members of US President Joe Biden's cabinet have privately discussed whether it is time for Biden's closest advisers to consider the increasingly bleak election prospects with him. The person, who spoke anonymously to discuss private conversations, said that senior officials themselves did not try to abandon Biden, but discussed whether his re-election campaign this year has reached a critical point. These cabinet members admitted in the conversation that voters have doubts about the president's health and his ability to defeat former President Donald Trump again. However, like many prominent Democrats, cabinet officials ultimately concluded that it was up to the president and a small group of close long-term assistants to discuss the issue carefully. However, another person familiar with the matter emphasized that there is no indication that Biden is incapable of completing the remainder of his term, nor is there any indication that the cabinet may take action to remove him from office.
South Korea’s first cryptocurrency law takes full effect, focusing on investor protection
South Korea's first cryptocurrency regulatory framework is now fully effective, with a focus on investor protection, The Block reported. The new law, the Virtual Asset User Protection Act, was officially approved on July 18, 2024, and a one-year grace period was given to refine the regulatory details. The bill imposes stricter requirements on digital asset exchanges, and South Korean crypto exchanges are now required to store at least 80% of user deposits in cold wallets, thereby isolating user deposits from the exchange's own funds. Exchanges must also entrust user cash deposits to local licensed banks for safekeeping and hold cryptocurrency reserves of the same amount and type as customer deposits. In addition, crypto services in South Korea are now required to purchase sufficient insurance or establish reserve funds to deal with hacker attacks or liquidity crises. In addition to measures to protect user funds, the bill also requires exchanges to establish a real-time monitoring system to report abnormal trading activities that may be illegal. Companies that fail to comply with the new regulations may face penalties from the Financial Services Commission (FSC) of South Korea or have their services suspended.
Industry insiders: Trump may announce Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset for the United States at the Bitcoin Conference
According to Cryptoslate, industry insiders revealed that former US President Donald Trump will make a landmark statement at the upcoming Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, and may plan to use Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset for the United States. Satoshi Action Fund co-founder Dennis Porter and BnkToTheFuture founder Simon Dixon both shared the rumors on social media and said the sources were reliable. However, these claims have not been confirmed by Trump, his team, or any external public sources. Until official confirmation, these assertions should be considered speculation.
OpenAI launches new GPT-4o mini for free, replacing GPT-3.5
According to Titanium Media, in the early morning of July 19th, Beijing time, the US OpenAI company launched a new AI model "GPT-4o mini", which is a smaller parameter and simplified version of GPT-4o. OpenAI said that GPT-4o mini is currently the most powerful and cost-effective small parameter model, with performance close to the original GPT-4, and the cost is more than 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo. It supports 50 different languages and replaces the GPT-3.5 version of ChatGPT, but the company did not disclose its training parameter scale information. OpenAI said that at the API level, GPT-4o mini supports 128k and 16k input tokens (images and text); at the price level, GPT-4o mini is 15 cents (about 1.09 yuan) per million input tokens and 60 cents (about 4.36 yuan) per million output tokens. According to the plan, GPT-4o mini is now open to ChatGPT free users and ChatGPT Plus and Team paid subscribers, and will be open to ChatGPT Enterprise customers next week. In addition, OpenAI will also open a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o mini in the next few days. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also revealed that just two years ago, the best model in the world was the text-davinci-003 version of GPT-3, which performed much worse than today and was 100 times more expensive. In other words, in just two years, the cost price per token of the GPT large model has dropped by 99%.
Binance HODLer Airdrop Launches the First Phase of Banana Gun (BANANA)
Binance announced that the first phase of the HODLer airdrop project Banana Gun (BANANA) will be launched. From 8:00 on June 23, 2024 to 7:59 on July 6, 2024 (Eastern Time 8), users who use BNB to subscribe to the regular and/or current products of the coin earning platform will receive airdrop allocations. The BANANA HODLer airdrop page is expected to be launched within five hours, and the new tokens will be distributed to users' spot wallets 1 hour before trading begins. Binance will list BANANA at 17:00 on July 20, 2024 (Eastern Time 8), and open BANANA/BTC, BANANA/USDT, BANANA/BNB, BANANA/FDUSD and BANANA/TRY trading pairs.
Grayscale Reduces Fee Rate for Ethereum Mini Trust to 0.15% in Revised S-1 Filing
Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart said on the X platform that Grayscale has just submitted a revised S-1 document, reducing the fee rate of its Ethereum Mini Trust (code ETH) from 0.25% to 0.15%. Grayscale also changed the details of the fee reduction: initially, similar to BlackRock, the fee was reduced to 0.12% for 12 months, but now the fee has been reduced to 0% for 6 months.
WazirX called the attack a force majeure event but is working to track and recover the funds
Crypto exchange WazirX released preliminary findings of a cyberattack on the X platform, saying that one of its multi-signature wallets suffered a cyberattack, with funds lost exceeding $230 million. The wallet has been operating using Liminal's digital asset custody and wallet infrastructure services since February 2023. Regarding the wallet configuration and attack mechanism, the wallet has six signers - five from the WazirX team and one from Liminal, who are responsible for transaction verification. A transaction usually requires approval from three WazirX signers (all of whom use Ledger hardware wallets for security), and then final approval by Liminal's signer. To enhance security, WazirX also implemented a policy of whitelisting destination addresses. These whitelisted addresses are marked and set by Liminal on the interface, so the WazirX team has the ability to initiate transactions to these whitelisted addresses. Regarding the nature of the cyberattack, the cyberattack stems from the difference between the data displayed on the Liminal interface and the actual transaction content. At the time of the attack, the information displayed on the Liminal interface did not match the actual signed content, so it is suspected that the attacker replaced the payload to control the wallet.
WazirX said: “This is a force majeure event beyond our control, but we are working tirelessly to track and recover the funds. We have blocked several deposits and contacted the relevant wallets for recovery. We are working with the best resources to help us complete this task. While this is the result of our initial investigation, we will continue to provide further updates.”
Injective Labs and 21Shares Launch First INJ-Pegged ETP on Euronext
According to Cryptoslate, Injective Labs, in partnership with 21Shares, announced the launch of AINJ, an Injective pledge exchange-traded product (ETP) linked to INJ, which will include a pledge function. The fund will enable users to access INJ tokens through major traditional financial exchanges and brokerage firms while earning pledge rewards. The ETP will be traded on Euronext Amsterdam (AINJ NA) and Euronext Paris (AINJ FP). It will be supported by 25 different banks and brokers, including Interactive Brokers, Saxo Bank, Swissquote and eToro.
Founder of crypto exchange Bitzlato sentenced to 18 months in prison
According to Bloomberg, Anatoly Legkodymov, founder of the crypto exchange Bitzlato, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for operating an unlicensed remittance business and laundering more than $700 million in illegal gambling and drug trading proceeds. Given that Legkodymov has been detained since his arrest in January 2023, his sentence has expired and he will not have to serve any more time in the future. Last December, Legkodymov pleaded guilty, admitting that he had known for years that Bitzlato was used as a conduit for dark web transactions, including the notorious drug market Hydra Market, which was shut down by authorities in 2022. Prosecutors from the office of Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Breon Peace believed that Legkodymov should be sentenced to at least four years in prison because he "established a clearing house for dirty money." But at the sentencing hearing, Judge Eric Vitaliano called the Metropolitan Detention Center, where Legkodymov was held, "a terrible place," a factor in the decision not to let him continue to serve his sentence. In the past five weeks, there have been two cases of murders of detainees at the prison. The judge also said Legkodymov was "aware of the illegal nature of what he was doing" and called him "an entrepreneur and a visionary" who had "led an admirable life" before his arrest. Legkodymov, who had lived in Russia and Shenzhen, had moved to Pennsylvania at the time of his arrest. As part of his plea agreement, he also agreed to waive his claim for $23 million in cryptocurrency seized by French authorities.
Bloomberg Terminal has added some Ethereum ETFs in preparation for next week’s trading
Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart said on X Platform: “We added a number of Ethereum ETFs to Bloomberg (Terminal) today. These include ETHW from Bitwise, CETH from 21Shares, and FETH from Fidelity. Other funds will likely be added tomorrow and Monday. Trading remains on schedule to begin next week.”
Musk: I did create a political action committee, but I didn't promise any donations to anyone
Musk responded to the news about political donations on Twitter. He said that he did create a political action committee (PAC) focused on supporting US presidential candidates, but did not promise any donations to anyone. So far, the funds donated are "well below" the previously reported level of $45 million per month.
LI.FI releases security incident report, saying "human error" led to protocol attack
In its latest security incident report, cross-chain bridge protocol LI.FI said that "human error" during the smart contract update process exposed the protocol to an attack. An estimated 153 wallets were affected, with a loss of approximately $11.6 million in USDC, USDT, and DAI stablecoins. The team went on to say that they quickly detected the security vulnerability, launched an "incident response plan," and disabled the faulty code, thereby containing the threat and preventing "any further unauthorized access." According to the report, the vulnerability occurred shortly after the new smart contract was deployed. A vulnerability in the upgrade allowed attackers to gain unauthorized access to user wallets within minutes of the contract being deployed. The vulnerability stems from the ability of contract callers to arbitrarily call any contract without verification. Due to human error in the oversight deployment process, verification checks were missing. LI.FI said its current priority is to assist in recovering user funds and work with law enforcement and Web3 security companies.
Coinbase International will launch perpetual contract trading for TAO, TON and TRB
According to the official Twitter account of Coinbase International Exchange, Coinbase International Exchange and Coinbase Advanced will support perpetual contract trading for Bittensor, Toncoin and Tellor. TAO-PERP, TON-PERP and TRB-PERP markets will begin trading on or after 9:30 AM UTC on July 25, 2024.
Google and other tech giants launch safe artificial intelligence alliance
According to Jinshi, Google launched the Coalition for Secure Artificial Intelligence (CoSAI), whose founding members include Amazon (AMZN.O), Intel (INTC.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O), Nvidia (NVDA.O), IBM (IBM.N), Cisco (CSCO.O), Paypal (PYPL.O), OpenAI, artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, Cohere, cybersecurity startup Chainguard, WIZ, GenLab, etc. Google pointed out in a blog post that artificial intelligence needs a security framework and application standards to keep up with its rapid growth. This is why it shared the Secure Artificial Intelligence Framework (SAIF) last year. But to implement any industry framework, you need to work closely with others. Therefore, Google launched CoSAI together with its industry peers.
Social graph protocol Lens plans to migrate to ZKsync network in Q4 this year
According to The Block, the social network graph protocol Lens plans to migrate to the ZKsync network in the fourth quarter of this year, with the goal of achieving privacy control of user data and AI data monetization. Lens V3 will be launched after the mainnet migration, providing early privacy settings, and users can choose to share data. The ultimate goal is to use zero-knowledge proofs to let users control data and get rewards by allowing AI models to access data. Lens will use other networks to store data to reduce costs, considering multiple data availability networks including Celestia.
Reddit will stop supporting its Polygon-based Collectible Expressions feature on August 5
According to Decrypt, Reddit announced that it will stop supporting its Polygon-based Collectible Expressions feature on August 5, 2024. The feature provides animated expressions for users' Collectible Avatars NFTs. Reddit said that while these animations can still be seen in past comments, they will no longer be available in the future. Collectible Avatars is an NFT series based on the Polygon blockchain that has been popular since its launch. To date, more than 33 million Collectible Avatars have been minted, with a market value of $43 million. Reddit plans to continue supporting its NFT ecosystem through new community partnerships and more activities.
Blockchain data network Chainbase completes $15 million Series A financing, led by Matrix Partners China
According to The Block, blockchain data network developer Chainbase has completed a $15 million Series A financing round led by well-known Internet companies and Matrix Partners China. Other investors include Folius Ventures, Hash Global, JSquare, Mask Network and Bodl Ventures. Chainbase plans to launch its mainnet and governance token CBT in the fourth quarter of this year. This round of financing will be used to build global local communities and increase developer and user participation and network awareness. Chainbase's network supports more than 15,000 developers and 8,000 projects, and manages more than 500 billion data calls.
Blockchain data provider Allium Labs completes $16.5 million Series A financing, led by Theory Ventures
According to CoinDesk, Visa's data partner Allium Labs has completed a $16.5 million Series A financing led by Theory Ventures, whose founder Tomasz Tunguz will join the board of directors. Kleiner Perkins and Amplify Partners also participated in the financing. Allium Labs said it has raised a total of $21.5 million and plans to invest in data infrastructure and listing plans to provide services that enable financial institutions to accept digital assets. Allium Labs provides enterprise-level blockchain data to companies such as Visa, Stripe and Uniswap Foundation, and plans to use the funds for data infrastructure construction and market expansion. The latest data from the Visa OnChain Analytics Dashboard, launched by Allium Labs in cooperation with Visa, shows that the demand for stablecoins will pick up in 2024, with a circulating supply of nearly $150 billion and 27.5 million monthly active users.
People familiar with the matter: Crypto market maker Wintermute is negotiating a new round of financing
According to The Information, citing people familiar with the matter, cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute Trading is discussing a round of financing. The company plans to sell $100 million in shares, with some of the funds going to existing shareholders. Wintermute will also issue new shares, but the exact amount has not yet been determined. The people familiar with the matter added that negotiations are still ongoing and details have not yet been finalized.
Polymarket data: Biden's chances of withdrawing from the election have risen to a record 88%, and his chances of winning the election are only 5%.
Polymarket data shows that Biden's chances of withdrawing from the election have risen to 88%, a record high. In addition, in the prediction of the "winner of the 2024 presidential election", Harris's chances of winning have risen to 22%, ranking second, and Biden's chances of winning have dropped to 5%, ranking fourth.
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