Tether stablecoin operator is strengthening ties with Telegram’s Web3 ecosystem by launching its stablecoins like Tether (USDT) on The Open Network (TON).

Tether Operations announced on April 19 the launch of its U.S. dollar-pegged Tether USDT stablecoin and the gold-pegged Tether Gold (XAUT) stablecoin on the TON blockchain.

The announcement came in conjunction with Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino and Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s keynote speeches at the crypto event Token2049 in Dubai.

At the same event, Tether also announced restructuring and introduced four new business divisions: Tether Data, Tether Finance, Tether Power and Tether Edu.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino at Token2049 in Dubai. Source: Tether

According to Ardoino, TON and Tether share the vision of an open and decentralized internet and a borderless financial system.

“The launch of USDT and XAUT on TON will allow seamless value transfer, increasing activity and liquidity while offering users a financial experience that can match those found in the traditional financial system,” the Tether CEO stated.

The new USDT-TON development marks another milestone in Tether’s expansion across multiple blockchains, bringing its coverage to 15 blockchains, including Tron and Ethereum.

The milestone is also essential for the TON network, which overtook Dogecoin (DOGE) as the ninth-largest blockchain and cryptocurrency by market value on April 16.

“The TON blockchain works with Telegram, meaning USDT and XAUT on TON have the potential to provide a simple, borderless experience for peer-to-peer payments for Telegram’s user base which Telegram estimates at over 900 million global users,” the announcement reads.

Related: Crypto-like communication devices could break gov’t surveillance — Telegram founder Durov

The unique thing about USDT’s launch on TON is that the TON ecosystem enables transfers between fiat and crypto and has ambitions to beat traditional finance in efficiency and ease of use, TON Foundation’s marketing head, Jack Booth, told Cointelegraph. He said:

“With built-in on-ramps for fiat at the launch and global off-ramps to bank cards and accounts coming soon. This will be the first time a mass audience will be able to use crypto infrastructure for global payments.”

USDT’s launch on the TON blockchain isn’t the first instance of the two ecosystems intersecting. Since at least 2023, USDT has been one of the default cryptocurrencies available on Wallet, a third-party custodial wallet available to Telegram users, alongside other coins like Bitcoin (BTC) and Toncoin (TON).

At the time of writing, the Tron network is the default blockchain available for USDT on Wallet, enabling TRC-20 USDT. According to Halil Mirakhmed, chief operating officer of Wallet in Telegram, TON-based USDT will become another option on Wallet, while TRC20 USDT will stay.

The Tron blockchain accounts for the biggest share of issued USDT at the time of the announcement, according to data from Tether transparency.

Screenshot from Wallet on Telegram messenger. Source: Cointelegraph

The news comes a few weeks after Tether launched a recovery tool allowing users to migrate USDT between different blockchains in March 2024. Previously, Tether’s USDT stablecoin crossed an all-time high market cap of $100 billion on March 4.

Additional reporting by Felix Ng.

Magazine: The real risks to Ethena’s stablecoin model (are not the ones you think

Every four years, the Bitcoin (BTC) community celebrates the Bitcoin halving. Many BTC market analysts view this as a quadrennial milestone event due to its historically bullish impact on the cryptocurrency market as a whole.

As the market edges closer to Bitcoin's fourth halving on April 19, let's dive into five fascinating facts about this phenomenon that even seasoned crypto-enthusiasts might not know.

Bitcoin price's up over 650,000% since the first halving

Historically, Bitcoin’s price has increased following a halving, though this largely hinges on the balance of supply and demand.

Historical data provides some insights: After Nov. 28, 2012, the day of Bitcoin’s first halving, its price climbed from $11 to the then-record high of $1,240 a year later. Similarly, after the second halving in July 2016, Bitcoin’s price surged from around $650 to a new record high of $20,000 in December 2017.

In May 2020, after the third halving, Bitcoin's price boomed from around $8,8000 toward $69,000 in November 2021. So, Bitcoin's returns since the first halving stand at an astounding 650,000%.

Multiple catalysts have spurred demand for Bitcoin following its halving events. For instance, during 2020-2021, a generally dovish stance by global central banks significantly contributed to Bitcoin's price rally.

Related: Crypto market ‘underestimates the long-term impact’ of Bitcoin halving: Bitwise

Halvings test miners' economic resilience

Each halving reduces the income that miners receive for verifying transactions, making profitability more challenging, especially for those with higher operational costs. This situation pressures miners to either upgrade to more efficient technology or cease operations.

For instance, after the third Bitcoin halving in May 2020, the average cost to mine one BTC rose, as the blue wave in the chart below illustrates. 

The rise in operations costs squeezed smaller players out of the market, potentially increasing network centralization. 

Pre-halving price rallies can be speculative

The anticipation of a Bitcoin halving often leads to speculative price increases.

For example, in the six months before the 2020 halving, Bitcoin's price increased by over 40%, from around $7,000 in November 2019 to approximately $10,000 by May 2020.

BTC/USD weekly price chart. Source: TradingView

These gains are often driven by speculative investors hoping to capitalize on the post-halving price increase, reflecting historical patterns and leading to volatility.

The theory behind a post-halving price increase is based on a supply shock. With each of the first three halvings, the daily production of Bitcoin decreased from 50 to 25 to 12.5, and most recently in 2020, to 6.25 BTC per block. This reduction can lead to significant price movements if demand remains strong.

For instance, the year following the 2016 halving saw a nearly 300% rise in Bitcoin's price, partly attributed to this supply shock.

Macroeconomic impact on Bitcoin halving cycles

The broader economic environment plays a crucial role in shaping the impact of Bitcoin halvings on its price.

For example, the 2020 halving coincided with the period of loose monetary policies, including near-zero interest rates in the U.S. This unique situation contributed to Bitcoin's appeal as a "digital gold," helping its price to soar from around $8,000 at the time of the halving in May 2020 to an all-time high of nearly $69,000 by November 2021.

BTC/USD vs. U.S. M2 supply weekly performance chart. Source: TradingView  Last Bitcoin halving will occur next century

Thanks to the halving process, the final Bitcoin is projected to be mined around the year 2140. After the last halving, miners will no longer receive block rewards in new BTC but will rely solely on transaction fees for revenue.

This shift could fundamentally change Bitcoin's security and economic model, influencing everything from miner participation to transaction costs.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

Open-source governance and development tools remain prerequisites for governments, organizations and financial institutions that want to leverage blockchain technology.

Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph at Paris Blockchain Week, Hyperledger executive director Daniela Barbosa discussed why open-source blockchain technology is a non-negotiable requirement for global institutions.

Barbosa, who also serves as the general manager of the Linux Foundation, said shifting critical financial infrastructure onto blockchain protocols hinges on the underlying network being open-source and open governance.

Open-source blockchain infrastructure like Hyperledger Besu operates on Ethereum, but enables public and private permissioned use cases. Source: Daniela Barbosa, Hyperledger Foundation.

“All around the world, organizations are selecting Hyperledger families to work with because they know it’s under the Linux Foundation. It’s under that open governance and open development, and it has the backing of major companies, governments and organizations,” Barbosa explained.

The Hyperledger director said that organizations tapping into their technology stack care not only that the tools are open-source but that there is open development and an active community of diverse maintainers and code contributors.

“Nobody wants to build new rails on code that one company owns. If that company goes out of business or changes its mind and says we’re no longer open source, you must pay license fees to continue using what you built.”

Barbosa also believes the Linux Foundation’s focus is on fostering open governance and the development of tools under its umbrella. She highlighted critical infrastructure like Linux Kernel’s use in a myriad of computing systems as an example of the embeddedness of open-source infrastructure.

“For the last 25 years, the Linux Foundation has been building open source communities and the most important code. Think Linux Kernel and Kubernetes. Essentially, all cloud computing runs on Kubernetes,” Barbosa said.

Related: Hyperledger onboards Citi, forms Besu working group headed by DTCC

The Linux Foundation GM said that several organizations have made efforts to open-source their software and code. However, she questioned whether making this information openly useable on GitHub does enough to make the tools openly developed and governed.

“That’s what the foundation does; we bring that open governance and development. Banks who compete with one another can come and collaborate. Companies like Accenture and IBM could collaborate on things for the community,” Barbosa explained.

Related: Tokenized asset market could hit $16T on public blockchains — RippleX VP

She added that this is an essential long-term consideration for the financial services industry in the event that regulators begin to probe who owns what and makes changes to the underlying code.

Barbosa also unpacked the development history of Hyperledger’s blockchain tools. Hyperledger Besu, a prominent Ethereum execution client, has become one of its most important infrastructure offerings.

Hyperledger Besu is an open-source Java Ethereum execution client. It offers public and private functionality and can run all Ethereum smart contracts. Users can use all Ethereum token standards, including nonfungible token standards ERC-20 and ERC-721.

Hyperledger Besu is among the top three Ethereum execution clients by user numbers. Source: Daniela Barbosa, Hyperledger Foundation. 

“By 2019, institutions were very interested in Ethereum ecosystem. This was the contribution that came in from Consensys around the time that the Hyperledger Foundation and Ethereum Enterprise Alliance joined forces,” Barbosa said.

Barbosa cited on-chain data that reflects 12% of Ethereum mainnet users running Hyperledger Besu as an execution client. Consensys Linea runs on the client, as well as Hedera Hashgraph.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto

Can blockchain-based location mapping replace GPS mapping?

The global positioning system (GPS) calculates a person’s location, merges it with their environment, and displays it live on their mobile device via a real-time interface. Blockchain-based systems make it transparent and resistant to interference.

Using GPS-based navigation devices has become ubiquitous. People use tools such as Google Maps, OpenStreetMap and Foursquare, which rely on GPS. However, these services are plagued by a common fault — centralization — which makes them prone to opaque functioning and a central point of failure when it comes to hacking.

Blockchain technology offers several advantages over centralized systems and helps users tide over the limitations of traditional tools like GPS mapping. It improves transparency, increases resilience to hacking attempts and enables faster data processing. Unsurprisingly, several businesses have begun to use blockchain technology or are actively exploring its application.

The inefficiencies in current interactive maps

Though the current system of GPS-based interactive maps has been around for more than a decade, it has its share of inefficiencies. The data from these systems may sometimes be inaccurate and slow to load on devices.

GPS mapping entails processing and storing enormous amounts of data, usually on centralized servers, which might cause delays when accessing and sharing. As these technologies track a person’s whereabouts in real time, they may jeopardize user privacy. Traditional GPS system development and maintenance might also be prohibitively expensive for businesses.

Centralized mapping relies on proprietary data that may be outdated, failing to adequately reflect recent advances in roads, highways and infrastructure due to rapid change. GPS also faces difficulty in adequately mapping dense metropolitan areas. Creating interactive maps in regions with narrow lanes necessitates hard work from the mapping provider to document each area, which is both time-consuming and costly. Moreover, in civil applications such as surveying and transportation, GPS is unencrypted, lacks proof-of-origin or authentication features and is susceptible to cyberattacks, jamming and spoofing. 

Most mapping projects use crowdsourcing to enable their operations. In OpenStreetMap, for instance, a large number of contributors use GPS devices, aerial imagery and low-tech field maps to update map data. As the world pushes into the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), new crowdsourcing use cases are likely to emerge. However, problems like difficulty with accuracy and top-down policy implementation — which crowdsourcing projects have generally grappled with — may pervade. Blockchain-based mapping provides a viable alternative.

How blockchain augments interactive digital maps

The decentralized structure blockchain technology works on may provide effective answers to common difficulties in the usual interactive digital maps.

GPS mapping requires processing and storing large amounts of data, usually stored on a single or a few servers. The centralized nature of GPS mapping can lead to processing and delivery delays due to the strain of handling large amounts of data on limited servers. Decentralized apps (DApps), however, distribute data over several network devices (nodes), reducing latency and allowing for smooth data access.

As these applications rely on a decentralized network of nodes to continuously validate transactions and data updates rather than a single centralized authority, they can keep location information more current and accurate. The blockchain’s consensus process, which needs confirmation from several nodes before accepting changes, preserves data integrity and protects it from illegal changes.

Better privacy is another advantage of using blockchain for mapping. Traditional GPS mapping compels consumers to send their location data to major organizations, which can then monetize this geotagged information without the users’ consent. On the other hand, Blockchain functions without centralized authority that can make unanimous decisions, with data spread across multiple nodes, improving user privacy.

Can blockchains be used for spatial verification?

Spatial verification in blockchain is the process of authenticating the physical location of an event, object or user within a decentralized network.

Spatial verification refers to the confirmation that things are at the place where they claim to be. It is very useful in various industries, especially supply chain management.

For instance, when an Amazon delivery drone drops off a package at an owner’s door, the cost is charged to the owner’s account, relying on spatial verification. This eliminates problems with dishonest delivery persons and disagreements over charges for products that go missing.

Similarly, if someone has a broken windshield, they can use blockchain-based spatial verification to back up their insurance claim by sending a photo and documentation proving the time and location. This helps streamline insurance claim processing, reduces disputes and helps combat fraud.

When one creates a new bank account remotely, spatial verification allows them to verify the residence by merely being present at their home rather than providing proof of address such as utility bill copies.

A smart contract built in a blockchain-based proof-of-location (PoL) protocol would do spatial verification in these use cases. By providing a trustless way to prove location, PoL systems enhance transparency and efficiency in various industries.

What is proof-of-location protocol?

PoL uses a combination of cryptographic algorithms and consensus procedures to ensure the authenticity of a user’s location data without relying on a single authority.

In blockchain, PoL is the validation of a user’s physical position within a decentralized network. PoL assures the precision of location-based transactions and services in a range of applications, including supply chain management, asset tracking, decentralized finance and more. 

One frequent approach to PoL is to use a network of trustworthy nodes or oracles to collect and validate location data from an array of sources, including GPS satellites, WiFi signals and cellphone towers. These nodes then verify the user’s location by broadcasting signed messages or proofs to the blockchain. 

By implementing PoL into blockchain systems, users can securely engage with location-conscious smart contracts and DApps while maintaining privacy and trust. This technology expands the possibilities for location-based services and enables innovative use cases that require verifiable location data on the blockchain.

Core elements of a PoL smart contract

Location data submissions, verification mechanisms, data storage, and linking spatial verification to specific actions are the core elements of a PoL smart contract.

Location data submission

The smart contract would define how users or devices submit location data, including: 

Geotagged photos or videos.

GPS coordinates from a mobile device.

Sensor readings from IoT devices confirming a location.

Verification mechanisms

The contract would need ways to verify the submitted location:

Using reputation systems to assess the reliability of data providers.

Cross-checking with multiple data sources.

Employing cryptographic techniques to prevent location spoofing.

Data storage

A tamper-proof record would be created by securely storing the verified location data on the blockchain.

Triggering actions

The spatial verification would be connected to particular activities by the smart contract, such as paying out in supply chain situations, approving claims made by insurance, or granting access upon verification of physical presence.

What are the limitations of a proof-of-location protocol?

Despite its potential, PoL has several drawbacks, including reliance on external data sources, scalability difficulties and variable applicability across geographies, among others.

While PoL offers several advantages, it has significant limitations. One problem is the reliance on external data sources, which can lead to vulnerabilities for manipulation or spoofing. Additionally, PoL may face scalability concerns because confirming location data for a large number of transactions demands significant processing resources.

Moreover, PoL solutions may not be universally applicable across geographic regions or situations, resulting in inconsistent verification accuracy. There are no standardized methods for incorporating geographic locations, physical addresses or coordinates into smart contracts. 

Each developing platform has its own hardware infrastructure, protocols and business models. Addressing these restrictions is critical to the general adoption and efficacy of PoL in blockchain applications.

Bitcoin (BTC) saw flash volatility on April 19 as geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East spilled into financial markets.

BTC/USD 1-hour chart. Source: TradingView BTC price whipsaws into halving

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed new seven-week BTC price lows of $59,630 hitting after the April 18 daily close.

These accompanied renewed tensions between Iran and Israel — a particularly sensitive topic for Bitcoin this month which fueled a major drawdown from $70,000.

As Cointelegraph reported, the day prior, a modest recovery had been underway, this swiftly undone as markets reacted to the latest developments.

Amid rumors that the situation might not escalate further, BTC/USD staged an equally impressive rebound from the lows, reaching local highs of $65,190.

Source: WhalePanda

In ongoing coverage on X (formerly Twitter), popular trader Skew noted that both long and short BTC positions were being burned by the volatility.

“Shorts blown out here & now seeing more interest from longs aka longs opening,” part of his most recent post read.

Skew added that spot demand was currently driving the rebound, which was only around an hour old at the time of writing. Bids filled during the trip below $60,000, he said, were “sizable.”

Bitcoin liquidations heatmap (screenshot). Source: CoinGlass

The latest data from monitoring resource CoinGlass meanwhile revealed the extent of shorters’ surprise.

Sell-side liquidity between $64,000 and $65,000 had been taken in an instant, with no significant blocks left near the spot price beyond a new wall of bids at $61,200.

“Doesn't look like much but thats $100M in $BTC bids just moved up below price to support the move up,” fellow trader Credible Crypto continued in part of his own X commentary.

“Good luck getting back in if you sold the bottom because of some news headline.”

Crypto liquidations (screenshot). Source: CoinGlass

Total cross-crypto short liquidations for the past 24 hours stood at $138 million.

Battle for Bitcoin weekly close is on

With so much attention focused on short-term price moves, Bitcoin’s imminent block subsidy halving received surprisingly little consideration.

Related: $70K BTC price by the halving? 5 things to know in Bitcoin this week

"Today is the eve of the BTC halving and the market appears to have formed a clearly defined baseline support level around the recent lows," trading firm QCP Capital wrote in part of its latest Asia Morning Color market update sent to Telegram channel subscribers.

With under 15 hours left until the seminal event, anticipation for a potential rally slowly returned to the radar.

“Operation ‘save the weekly’ started early this week,” trader Jelle summarized, referring to the upcoming weekly candle close.

BTC/USD 1-week chart. Source: TradingView

For Crypto Ed, creator of trading platform CryptoTA, downside targets had been hit, leaving the door open for a sustained recovery.

“Okay, let me call the bottom here!” he told X followers.

“IF (big IF) no more big news coming from Middle East, I believe the bottom is in and BTC starting its next leg up and do a nice relief/halving rally!”

BTC/USD chart. Source: Crypto Ed/X

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

A Federal High Court in Abuja has once again postponed the bail application hearing for Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan, who remains in custody at the Kuje correctional center. 

Originally set for April 18, the court has rescheduled the hearing for April 22, according to local news agency Nairametrics.

After being previously adjourned until April 18, the court has further stalled the bail application hearing, to April 22, local news agency Nairametrics reported.

During the court session, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) told the court that Gambaryan’s lawyer submitted an additional affidavit to his bail application on April 16.

Senior counsel E. Iheanacho highlighted new points raised by the defense, requiring time for a proper response in the pursuit of justice.

The judge presiding over the case, Justice Emeka Nwite, agreed to postpone the proceedings. However, Gambaryan’s lawyer, Mark Mordi, emphasized that his client has been held in federal government custody for over 14 days.

He criticized the prosecution for failing to file a response to the additional affidavit submitted with his bail application

Tigran Gambaryan leaving the court as his bail hearing it adjourned at the federal high court in Abuja, Nigeria on April 18.   Source: Nairametrics

The trial judge remanded the Binance executive after he pleaded not guilty to money laundering charges by the EFCC. The agency accused Binance, Gambaryan, and Nadeem Anjarwalla of concealing the source of $35.4 million revenue in Nigeria, alleging it was the proceeds of unlawful activity.

Following the court’s acceptance of the EFCC’s arraignment of the defendants, Mordi requested the court to provide his client bail under lenient conditions.

Related: Nigeria’s crypto reputation will prevail despite recent setbacks — Exchange exec

The court allowed the EFCC to hold the Binance executives for 14 days and ordered Binance to give the government access to data and details of Nigerian traders using its platform.

Binance and its executives are dealing with two distinct lawsuits: one from the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) related to tax evasion and another from the EFCC accusing them of money laundering and foreign exchange violations.

However, Tigran Gambaryan is also suing the government for violating his fundamental human rights. Gambaryan’s motion claims that his detention in Nigeria and the confiscation of his passport violates the country’s constitution, which guarantees an individual’s right to personal liberty.

On Feb. 28, Nigerian officials arrested the two high-ranking Binance executives: Nadeem Anjarwalla, a 37-year-old British-Kenyan overseeing operations in Africa, and Gambaryan, a 39-year-old American, during a visit to Nigeria.

The arrest came after the federal government banned cryptocurrency channels as part of a campaign to curb currency speculation. However, Nadeem Anjarwalla escaped detention using a fake passport.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime

Akira, a year-old ransomware group, breached more than 250 organizations and extracted approximately $42 million in ransomware proceeds, top global cybersecurity agencies alerted.

Investigations conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) found that Akira ransomware has been targeting businesses and critical infrastructure entities in North America, Europe and Australia since March 2023. While the ransomware initially targeted Windows systems, the FBI recently found Akira’s Linux variant as well.

The FBI, along with Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), and the Netherlands’ National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NL), released a joint cybersecurity advisory (CSA) to “disseminate” the threat to masses.

According to the advisory, Akira gains initial access through pre-installed virtual private networks (VPN) that lack multifactor authentication (MFA). The ransomware then proceeds to extract credentials and other sensitive information before locking up the system and displaying a ransom note.

“Akira threat actors do not leave an initial ransom demand or payment instructions on compromised networks, and do not relay this information until contacted by the victim.”

The ransomware group demands payments in Bitcoin (BTC) from the victim organizations to restore access. Such malware often disables security software after initial access to avoid detection.

Cybersecurity best practices against ransomware attacks. Source: cisa.gov

Some of the threat mitigation techniques recommended in the advisory are implementing a recovery plan and multifactor authentication, filtering network traffic, disabling unused ports and hyperlinks and system-wide encryption.

“The FBI, CISA, EC3, and NCSC-NL recommend continually testing your security program, at scale, in a production environment to ensure optimal performance against the MITRE ATT&CK techniques identified in this advisory,” the agencies concluded.

Related: Mystery malware targets Call of Duty cheaters, stealing their Bitcoin

The FBI, CISA, NCSC and the National Security Agency (NSA) previously issued alerts about malware that was being used to target crypto wallets and exchanges.

Directories where information were extracted by the malware. Source: National Cyber Security Centre

The report noted that some of the data extracted by the malware included data within the directories of the Binance and Coinbase exchange applications and the Trust Wallet application. According to the report, every file in the directories listed is being exfiltrated regardless of type.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto

Blockchain protocols must allow financial assets to move seamlessly across traditional and on-chain infrastructures to achieve mainstream adoption.

Denelle Dixon, CEO of Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), hammered home this crucial point in conversation with Cointelegraph during Paris Blockchain Week. 

“From the beginning, we’ve focused on making money move like email, but we really understood that to do that, you needed the on- and off-ramps and couldn’t rely on transacting with volatile cryptocurrencies,” Dixon said.

The SDF CEO is a former trial lawyer who went on to work at Yahoo and Mozilla. Reflecting on her journey into the blockchain ecosystem, Dixon credited Stellar founder Jed McCaleb for luring her to the layer-1 protocol.

Source: Denelle Dixon

The former Mozilla COO added that her decision to work with Stellar was driven by the decentralized protocol’s focus on tokenization and fast, low-fee payments that can impact developing economies.

Related: Tokenized asset market could hit $16T on public blockchains — RippleX VP

She said that the ability to tokenize assets on Stellar and link seamlessly to fiat payment rails and gateways has been vital in allowing the protocol to provide utility to its users.

Dixon’s background at Mozilla also remains a guiding compass. She said that driving interoperability between major blockchain protocols is a motivating force behind her work:

“I want this work to be not just for Stellar but to create an interoperability layer across chains and make it so that all blockchains benefit from the hard work that we’ve done.”

The blockchain ecosystem of 2024 is home to hundreds of different protocols that offer users varying and debatable degrees of utility. Communities of these various protocols have also become fervent defenders of their respective blockchains, a point that Dixon said detracts from advancing the utility of the underlying infrastructure. She said:

“It’s really funny. There is tribalism, but sometimes, we continue to promote the tribalism instead of focusing on what’s really true.”

She pointed to recent network outages and congestion issues across major protocols, including the likes of Solana and various Ethereum layer-2 protocols including Base, Arbitrum and Starknet.

“These challenges are actually bad for the blockchain ecosystem because it makes people look over and say, ‘maybe we shouldn’t get into this,’” Dixon said.

Related: $250K Bitcoin? Tim Draper says halving, Bitcoin ETFs will drive demand

Social media platforms have become the vehicle upon which this tribalism continues, as users supporting different protocols take potshots at others from time to time. At a higher level, Dixon said there is more thought-share and support than people would realize.

“There is less tribalism than people actually think at the executive level. Like people are always saying you and Brad Garlinghouse from Ripple must not get along, but actually we do.”

Dixon added that individuals and organizations that are driving the adoption of decentralized protocols share a common belief that the industry is “not a winner-takes-all market.”

“Anybody who’s spent any time on the internet understands that. Look what happened when we actually did have five winners take all the content side of the web. That didn’t play out well for anybody who's trying to compete,” Dixon added.

Related: ICP’s Schnorr integration ushers in Bitcoin DeFi era

The Stellar Development Foundation launched smart contracts on the Stellar network in Feb. 2024. Dixon said the launch of the Soroban platform was driven by a need for advanced programmability to create a “greenfield space” for developers on Stellar:

“We really need more developers like developers to take the network from a billion operations a month to 10 billion a month and that’s what I would love to see.”

Cool minds will prevail, Dixon concludes, while stressing that utility needs to remain a core focus for blockchain and cryptocurrency proponents.

Magazine: Ethereum’s ERC-20 design flaws are a crypto scammer’s best friend

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has rejigged its lawsuit against Tron founder Justin Sun claiming he’s “traveled extensively” throughout the country — thus giving it jurisdiction.

The regulator argues it has “personal jurisdiction” over Sun, Tron and two other businesses he controls as they “purposefully took actions in and directed toward the United States,” it wrote in an April 17 amended complaint to a Manhattan federal court.

Sun spent a total of over 380 days in the U.S. between 2017 and 2019 on business trips to New York City, Boston, Massachusetts, and San Francisco, the SEC claimed.

It alleged the trips were on behalf of the Tron Foundation, the BitTorrent Foundation and Rainberry — all named in the suit as Sun’s “alter ego” firms.

The SEC reiterated allegations from its original lawsuit last month that Sun and his businesses sold unregistered securities through the Tron (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) tokens and that Sun engaged in “manipulative wash trading.”

The SEC took care to allege that TRX and BTT were promoted, offered and sold to “consumers and investors located in the United States.”

It added that “Sun traveled extensively to the United States during the time that TRX and BTT were promoted, offered, and sold.”

Highlighted excerpt of the SEC’s amended suit against Justin Sun. Source: CourtListener

It also claimed Sun’s alleged TRX wash trades took place on the Seattle-based crypto exchange Bittrex.

Related: SEC has ‘very low’ odds of winning against Uniswap: Crypto lawyer

In late March, Sun — a Chinese-born Grenadian citizen — asked to dismiss the suit arguing the SEC applied U.S. security laws to “predominantly foreign conduct” and had no jurisdiction over him or the Singapore-based Tron Foundation.

He claimed the TRX and BTT tokens were sold “entirely overseas” and the sales took steps to avoid the U.S. market — he added the SEC did not allege the tokens “were offered or sold initially to any U.S. residents.”

Sun's lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

X Hall of Flame: Coinbase ‘is going to win’ says MetaLawMan

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hinted his firm is making progress on its first “consumer neural interfaces” — non-invasive wearable devices that can interpret brain signals to control computers. 

“One of the things that I’m pretty excited about, I think we’ll start getting some consumer neural interfaces soon. I think that’s going to be pretty wild.”

However, unlike Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip, Zuckerberg explained that these devices wouldn’t be something that “jacks into your brain” but something wearable on the wrist that can “read neural signals that your brain sends through your nerves to your hand to basically move it in different subtle ways.”

Meta first began discussing the development of "wrist-based interaction" in March 2021, as part of Facebook Reality Labs Research.

Meta’s wristband works using electromyography (EMG) to interpret brain signals about desired hand gestures and translate them into commands to control devices.

“We’re basically able to read those signals and use them to control glasses or other computing devices,” he added.

The most recent comments came during an interview on April 18 between the Facebook co-founder and tech entrepreneur and YouTuber Roberto Nickson.

“We’re still at the beginning of the journey because we haven’t rolled out the first version of the product, but playing with it internally its … its really cool … really interesting to see,”

Earlier this year, the Meta CEO said that this neural wristband could become a consumer product in just a few years, using AI to overcome the limitations of camera-based gesture tracking.

Mark Zuckerberg on consumer neural interfaces. Source: YouTube

He has also envisioned the neural interfaces to work with Meta’s Ray-Ban augmented reality smart glasses.

Commenting on the firm’s smart glasses, he said the “hero feature” was integrating AI into them. “We’re really close to having multi-modal AI [...] so you don’t just ask it a question with text or voice, you can ask it about things going on around you and it can see what’s going on and answer questions [...] that's pretty wild,” he added. 

Related: Meta’s AI boss says LLMs not enough: ‘Human level AI is not just around the corner’

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the United States are already working on legislation aimed at protecting privacy in the nascent field of neurotech.

The Protect Privacy of Biological Data Act, which expands the definition of “sensitive data” to encompass biological and neural data, was passed in Colorado this week, according to reports.

In other news, Meta has just released a new version of Meta AI, the assistant that operates across the firm’s applications and glasses. “Our goal is to build the world’s leading AI,” he added.

Meta AI is being upgraded with the new “state-of-the-art Llama 3 AI model, which we're open-sourcing,” he said.

Magazine: How to get better crypto predictions from ChatGPT, Humane AI pin slammed: AI Eye

Coinbase (COIN) shares have plummeted 16% over the past five days mirroring broader volatility in the crypto and stock markets, though one analyst suggests that investors may not be seeing the potential buying opportunity.

“The street isn’t really pricing in the crypto native revenue that I think a lot of the crypto natives understand,” crypto analyst Will Clemente. said in a recent Unchained Crypto podcast.

“I think Coinbase is the biggest kind of venture-style bet in public markets since maybe Tesla about five years ago,” Clemente added.

Clemente claimed that traditional investors still view Coinbase “purely as an exchange,” despite it making many changes to its business structure over the past twelve months.

“Throughout the bear market, they made a lot of strategic pivots, to shift toward what I’m calling a crypto super app,” he declared.

In particular, he noted Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network Base which now has a total value locked (TVL) of $5.35 billion and oversees 30.81 daily transactions per second:

“Over the last 30 days BASE has done $30 million of top-line revenue for Coinbase, just based on the sequencer fees, which annualizes out to like $360 million a year,” he explained, while suggesting that traditional investors are overlooking the significant activity taking place on-chain.

“The street doesn't even know what Base is and they’re definitely not extrapolating out the potential of a ton of activity taking place there and the sequencer fees that Coinbase may benefit from that.”

At the time of publication, COIN is currently trading at $218.08, down almost 16% over the past five days, as per Google Finance data.

COIN has plummeted 15.96% over the past five days. Source: Google Finance

Coinbase is expected to release its earnings report for the first quarter of 2024 in the next few weeks.

Over the past 5 days, the S&P 500 is down 3.12%, while Bitcoin (BTC) has declined approximately 4.67%.

Meanwhile, more downside is expected for both markets as geopolitical tensions escalate in the Middle East after there were reports of explosions at Isfahan airport in central Iran.

Related: Coinbase cleared in lawsuit over crypto transactions

The news comes amid Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest continuing its selling spree of COIN.

On April 15, it was reported that ARK sold 3,689 COIN shares worth approximately $824,000.

It was only a month ago that ARK sold off a staggering amount of the stock amid its price seeing a year-to-date increase at the time of approximately 54%.

On March 21, Cointelegraph reported that ARK sold 199,526 Coinbase shares from its ETFs.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto

Blockchain network Ethereum is on the path to $1 billion in annualized profits after it netted income of $365 million in Q1, coming alongside a year-on-year quarterly revenue growth of 155%.

The network’s 2024 first-quarter income is a nearly 200% bump from the $123 million profit in Q4 2023, according to an April 17 report from The DeFi Report analyst Michael Nadeau.

Ethereum’s fee revenue — earned through users paying for transactions — hit $1.17 billion, up 155% from Q1 2023 and an 80% increase from the prior quarter.

Ethereum’s yearly profit and loss since launching in 2015. Source: The DeFi Report

Increased network activity “primarily driven by a surge in DeFi activity during the quarter” was the cause of the revenue bump, Nadeau said.

The activity surge has seen average daily transactions on the blockchain in 2024 already surpass last year’s figures and are closing in on the results from Ethereum’s peak in 2021.

Ethereum's average daily transactions per year (blue) and Ether burned (pink). Source: The DeFi Report

Over 1.15 million average daily transactions have taken place in 2024, slightly up from the 1.05 million last year and just shy of the 1.25 million recorded in 2021.

Ethereum was launched in 2015 but only had its first profitable year in 2023 — earning $623 million — despite its revenues that year being 75% lower than its peak $9.9 billion 2021 revenues.

“This is largely due to the move to proof-of-stake consensus in September of ‘22 — in which token incentives paid to miners (now validators) dropped roughly 80%,” Nadeau explained.

He added Ethereum’s fees have grown at a rate of 58% since 2017.

“Crypto will outperform everything else” in the years ahead

Nadeau gave his market predictions for the coming years and concluded that “crypto will outperform everything else.”

He expected rising liquidity conditions for the “next few years” as the United States has a large amount of debt needing refinancing this year and the market had priced in three rate cuts this year from the Federal Reserve.

“This should provide a tailwind for risk assets such as tech stocks and quality crypto.”

The U.S. spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds, the Bitcoin halving and what Nadeau called “the innovation cycle” were three additional catalysts “pointing to a bullish setup for the next few years.”

Related: Bitcoin fees top Ethereum for 3 days in a row as halving approaches

The Bitcoin ETFs will serve as a “gateway drug” for increased interest in cryptocurrencies as they enable broad access and the halving — slated for April 20 — “has historically led to a bull run in the year after.”

The “innovation cycle” will also draw in new venture funding and renew retail interest in crypto as it matures, Nadeau believed.

He claimed Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) are “quite correlated” — Bitcoin outperforms early in the bull market as it is the most recognizable cryptocurrency while ETH and altcoins tend to outperform it in the later stages of the cycle.

“It’s noteworthy that altcoins actually rallied so much in the last two cycles that they outperformed Bitcoin across the full length of both cycles,” Nadeau added.

He believed this would continue but only with altcoins “that have clear product market fit.”

Magazine: Joe Lubin — The truth about ETH founders split and ‘Crypto Google’

Degen Chain, a new Ethereum layer-3 network, has recorded the highest transaction per second (TPS) count in the Ethereum ecosystem over the last 24 hours.

Degen’s TPS count increased 62% over the last day to notch 35.7 TPS — beating out the blockchain it was built on, Base, at 29.7 TPS, according to L2BEAT.

Arbitrum One, Ethereum and zkSync Era rounded out the top five.

TPS by Ethereum-based blockchain over the last 24 hours. Source: L2BEAT

Multiplying Degen’s 35.7 TPS by 86,400 seconds in a day means the memecoin chain processed 3.08 million transactions over that timeframe.

But Degen Chain has only notched $819,600 in trading volume over the last day, placing it 35th out of 44 blockchains tracked by CoinGecko.

This means the average value per transaction was a mere $0.27 — which is much lower compared to Ethereum and Base at $1,867 and $170 respectively.

While TPS is widely used to measure a blockchain’s scalability limits, several industry leaders say it is a flawed metric — as it fails to consider the computational size of each transaction.

“[It] is a bit like counting the number of bills in your wallet but ignoring that some are singles, some are twenties, and some are hundreds,” explained Steven Goldfeder, a founder at Offchain Labs who recently spoke with Cointelegraph Magazine.

Related: Memecoin sector’s continued growth hinges on long-term utility

The memecoin turned chain is powered by the Degen (DEGEN) token, which initially started out as a tipping token for users interacting with Degen’s channel on Farcaster — a decentralized social media platform.

This is a textbook example of how a memecoin can actually accrue social value, according to Thomas Tang, a vice president of investments at cryptocurrency venture capital firm Ryze Labs.

“It’s gained massive mass popularity because everyone’s tipping each other, and everyone holds it,” Tang told Cointelegraph.

“So they built a layer 3, based on that.”

Ian Lee of blockchain infrastructure firm Syndicate believes Degen Chain is paving the way for applications on layer 3s. Source: Ian Lee

There is currently $4.1 million in total value locked on Degen Chain, while the three-month-old DEGEN token boasts a market capitalization of $326 million, according to CoinGecko.

Degen Chain is considered an ultra-low-cost, application-specific layer 3 blockchain which was built with Arbitrum Orbit and leverages the settlement layer of Base, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution.

Magazine: Is measuring blockchain transactions per second (TPS) stupid in 2024? Big Questions

Decentralized finance total value locked (TVL) almost doubled in the first three months of this year compared to the previous quarter, partially driven by Ethereum liquid restaking initiatives, according to recent research. 

DeFi total value locked surged from a Q4 2024 low of $36 billion to peak at almost $97 billion in the first quarter of 2024, according to DefiLlama. Since the beginning of the year, it has increased by 81% to a two-year high of $98 billion last week.

Messari reported slightly higher TVL figures on April 18, noting that DeFi collateral increased by 65.6% quarter-on-quarter to reach $101 billion. However, it attributed this growth to the prices of the underlying assets increasing and liquid restaking.

“This uptick was primarily driven by asset price appreciation and liquid restaking, led by Ethereum's TVL growth of nearly 71%.”

DeFi total value locked between Q4 2023 and Q1 2024. Source: DefiLlama

The findings were echoed in an April 18 report by Web3 infrastructure and developer platform QuickNode, and institutional crypto data platform Artemis.

“Staking, liquid staking, restaking, and liquid restaking have all been catalysts of DeFi’s recent explosive growth,” it stated before adding that this “explains why staking now represents a large portion of DeFi’s TVL.”

Liquid staking TVL skyrocketed to an all-time high of $63 billion on March 13, primarily driven by Ether (ETH) liquid staking protocol Lido which currently has a 62% market share of the liquid staking ecosystem, according to DefiLlama.

Additionally, liquid restaking protocols such as EigenLayer exploded in popularity and usage during the period. EigenLayer TVL surged a whopping 990% during the first three months of 2024 to end the quarter with $12 billion.

EigenLayer allows ETH to be staked more than once for additional yields.

Liquid staking TVL, Q4, 2023-Q1 2024. Source: DeFiLlama

Related: DeFi TVL reaches $100B as Bitcoin pumps sentiment

QuickNode also reported that a substantial 291% quarter-on-quarter rise in user activity “has roused hopes of a second ‘DeFi Summer’ as there are signals for growth and a transformative shift despite the SEC’s best efforts.”

Nevertheless, since the recent crypto market retreat, DeFi TVL has declined 11% to $86.6 billion at the time of writing.

Magazine: China and the crypto ETFs, Thai NFT music fest, KuCoin’s 1.3M new bots: Asia Express

Bitcoin's (BTC) price has dropped below its critical $60,000 support level once more, falling 5.44% in just two-hours, amid geopolitical tensions escalating in the Middle East.

On April 19, Bitcoin's price briefly slumped down to $59,698 before quickly recovering to $61,352. It's a crucial breakdown to note, given that if its price slumps down to $59,000 then approximately $243 million in long positions will be liquidated, as per CoinGlass data. 

This comes amid Iranian state media reporting that explosions had been heard at Isfahan airport in central Iran, as per a recent local report.

On April 13, Bitcoin price experienced similar volatility, plummeting 8.4% after Iran launched an attack on Israel, escalating geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East.

At the time, the price decline wiped out over $130 million in market capitalization within minutes following news of the attack.

Bitcoin holders are also bracing for heightened volatility as the halving event, which slashes miners' rewards in half every four years, approaches on April 20.

The Crypto Fear and Greed Index — a major tool tracking the market sentiment in cryptocurrency markets — is down 13 points since last week's greed index of 79.

Bitcoin’s price has been threading above the $60,000 mark over the past 7-days, but briefly fell from an opening of $63,814 on April 17, dropping as much as 7.5% to an intra-day low of $59,648, as per data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro.

Open Interest (OI) in Bitcoin has also experienced a slump over the past 7-days dropping approximately 17.6% to $28.06 billion.

This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.

Hardcore Bitcoin (BTC) holders added a record $1.7 billion worth of BTC to ‘accumulation’ wallet addresses in a single day as the price of Bitcoin fell below $63,000 earlier this week. 

More than 27,700 BTC — worth $1.75 billion at current prices — was sent to accumulation addresses in a single 24-hour period between April 16 to 17, a new daily record for Bitcoin, per the latest data from CryptoQuant.

The previous record — where 25,500 BTC was sent to accumulation addresses in a single day — was notched on March 23 this year, when the price of Bitcoin was also hovering around the $63,500 mark.

A record number of Bitcoin was sent to ‘accumulation addresses’ in 24 hours. Source: CryptoQuant

This data shows that there has been an elevated level of motivated buying around the $63,000 range — suggesting that large, dedicated investors maintain their confidence in accumulating and holding Bitcoin for the long term.

An accumulation address is a Bitcoin wallet that shows no previous withdrawals and holds a balance of over 10 BTC. These addresses have been screened to exclude wallets known to be affiliated with Bitcoin miners and crypto exchanges.

These addresses must have also been active at some point in the last seven years.

Related: Is Bitcoin’s negative futures funding rate a sign of an upcoming BTC price crash?

Several market analysts including pseudonymous trader Rekt Capital have suggested that the first few months of this year may be the last time investors can pick up Bitcoin at “bargain prices” before a post-halving rally event.

In an April 17 post to their 453,000 X followers, Rekt Capital said that Bitcoin price action was currently playing out in a similar pattern to previous halving cycles.

Rekt explained that the recent dip — which has seen BTC tumble more than 14% from its all-time high of $73,600 on March 13 — was an expected part of a “pre-halving retrace.”

They predicted that Bitcoin could enter into a “re-accumulation phase” following the halving event — currently slated for April 20.

Source: Rekt Capital “Once Bitcoin breaks out from the re-accumulation area breakout into the parabolic uptrend.”

“Historically, this phase has lasted just over a year (~385 days) however with a potential Accelerated Cycle occurring right now, this figure may get cut in half in this market cycle,” added Rekt.

Web3 Gamer: Bitcoin Halving will pump games, Shrapnel’s ‘simple’ secret revealed

Fees on Bitcoin have surpassed Ethereum for three consecutive days as miners and traders prepare for the upcoming Bitcoin halving, and, to a lesser extent, the introduction of Runes on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin miners hav cashed in $7.47 million in fees on April 17 — about $160,000 more than the $7.31 million paid to Ethereum stakers, according to Crypto Fees.

Bitcoin miners also raked in $9.98 million and $5.91 million across April 15 and 16 — beating out Ethereum stakers by $3.5 million and 1.1 million on those respective days.

Ethereum, however, maintains a narrow lead on a 7-day average fee basis at $8.55 million compared to Bitcoin’s $7.57 million.

Largest fees by blockchains and decentralized finance projects. Source: Crypto Fees

Bitcoin transaction fees are determined by the size or data volume of the transaction and blockspace demand at the time of the transaction request.

The uptick in Bitcoin (BTC) fees comes at a crucial time for Bitcoin miners as April 20’s Bitcoin halving event will result in the mining subsidy being sliced from 6.25 BTC ($398,000) to 3.125 BTC ($199,000).

Currently, about 900 Bitcoin are mined per day, which equates to about $57.2 million at current prices.

Using April 17’s $7.47 million fee count, this means transaction fees accounted for 11.5% of the Bitcoin mining industry’s total block rewards.

However, the share of block rewards from transaction fees will increase considerably after the halving event as approximately 450 Bitcoin will be mined then.

Miners will therefore be relying more on higher fees and a continued increase in Bitcoin’s price to make up for the revenue fall that it will experience — at least in the short term — from the halving.

Meanwhile, the introduction of NFT-like Ordinals inscriptions in January 2023 has helped Bitcoin miners chalk up more revenue from transaction fees — and a new revenue stream will become available when Runes, a new Bitcoin token standard, is released when the halving occurs at block 840,000.

Related: China has a Trojan Horse in US Bitcoin mining infrastructure

Runes will compete with Ordinals by aiming to make it easier to create fungible tokens on Bitcoin for memecoin enthusiasts and other community-driven audiences.

Its creator, Casey Rodarmor, who also invented Ordinals, says Runes are fully UTXO-based and therefore should not spam Bitcoin to the same extent that Ordinals has.

Source: Casey Rodamor

The recent uptick in Bitcoin fees may have been partially driven by a decline in BRC-20 token prices in recent days as some trader attention shifts to Runes.

Ordinals (ORDI) and Sats (SATS), the two largest BRC-20s by market capitalization, have seen falls of 38% and 43% respectively over the last week, according to CoinMarketCap.

Magazine: Get Bitcoin or die tryin’: Why hip hop stars love crypto

On April 18, Bitcoin (BTC) futures contracts exhibited significant demand for short (sell) positions, sparking speculations of further bearish momentum. This trend was influenced by the lack of inflows into spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the expectations of rising interest rates in the U.S., all contributing to a negative market sentiment.

Bitcoin funding rate flips bearish after 6 months

Retail traders often favor perpetual futures, a type of derivative that closely mirrors the price movements of regular spot markets. To maintain balanced risk exposure, exchanges implement a fee every eight hours, known as the funding rate.

This rate turns positive when buyers (longs) demand more leverage, and negative when sellers (shorts) seek additional leverage. Typically, a neutral funding rate is around 0.025 per 8-hour period or 0.5% weekly. Conversely, negative funding rates, though infrequent, are seen as highly bearish indicators.

Bitcoin perpetual futures 8-hour funding rate. Source: Laevitas.ch

The BTC funding rate notably flipped negative on April 15 and again on April 18, marking the lowest levels in over six months, which indicates a reduced appetite for long positions. This shift in market sentiment typically becomes evident after significant price movements, as seen with the 13.5% decrease in Bitcoin’s price between April 12 and April 18.

Market dynamics often show that the strongest impacts occur when confidence among bears intensifies. For example, some analysts interpret the $72,000 double-top formation as a sign that the downtrend could persist until June.

Source: CyclesFan

From a broader economic perspective, recent U.S. data showing stronger-than-expected inflation and robust retail sales have reduced investors' aversion to risk. The Consumer Price Index rose 3.8% annually in March, well above the Fed’s 2% target, with retail sales also up by 0.7% year-over-year.

A thriving economy lessens the likelihood of the Federal Reserve reducing interest rates, which tends to favor fixed-income investments. As Reuters points out, a strong labor market has supported consumer spending despite concerns over financial strains among lower-income households.

Bitcoin spot ETFs flows dictate the market sentiment

Farside Investors reports that there was a $165 million net outflow from spot Bitcoin ETFs on April 17, marking the fourth consecutive day of withdrawals. This marks a stark contrast to early April when these ETFs attracted $484 million despite ongoing outflows from the Grayscale GBTC fund.

Data suggests that Bitcoin bulls might have retreated from leveraging after a period of heightened optimism. In March 2024, there were seven instances where the funding rate exceeded 1.2% per week. This led to days of extreme volatility, resulting in significant 48-hour liquidations: $300 million on March 5, $261 million on March 16, and $225 million on March 19.

This volatility has evidently taken a toll on the morale of the bulls, particularly since Bitcoin’s price rose by 12.3% during March. Despite accurately predicting the price movement, the sharp price fluctuations depleted their margin deposits and triggered forced liquidations.

For a deeper understanding of market sentiment, traders are advised to also observe the Bitcoin options markets, where a growing demand for put (sell) options typically signals a focus on neutral-to-bearish price strategies.

Bitcoin options put-to-call volume ratio at Deribit. Source: Laevitas.ch

Recent data indicate that the demand for call (buy) options has exceeded that for put (sell) options by 35% over the past week. In essence, there is currently no evidence in the Bitcoin futures and options markets to suggest an imminent price correction or deteriorating conditions. If anything, the data confirms that the brief dip below $60,000 on April 17 was insufficient to foster a long-term bearish sentiment.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

Everything you need to know about the AI future that’s hurtling fast towards us.Jump to: Video of the week Atlas Robot, Everybody hates Humanes AI pin, AI makes holocaust victims immortal, Knowledge collapse from mid-curve AIs, Users should beg to pay for AI, Can non-coders create a program with AI? All Killer, No Filler AI News.

Predicting the future with the past

Theres a new prompting technique to get ChatGPT to do what it hates doing the most predict the future.

New research suggests the best way to get accurate predictions from ChatGPT is to prompt it to tell a story set in the future, looking back on events that havent happened yet.

The researchers evaluated 100 different prompts, split between direct predictions (who will win best actor at the 2022 Oscars) versus future narratives, such as asking the chatbot to write a story about a family watching the 2022 Oscars on TV and describe the scene as the presenter reads out the best actor winner.

The story produced more accurate results similarly, the best way to get a good forecast on interest rates was to get the model to produce a story about Fed Chair Jerome Powell looking back on past events. Redditors tried this technique out, and it suggested an interest rate hike in June and a financial crisis in 2030.Theoretically, that should mean if you ask ChatGPT to write a Cointelegraph news story set in 2025, looking back on this years big Bitcoin price moves, it would return a more accurate price forecast than just asking it for a prediction.There are two potential issues with the research, though: the researchers chose the 2022 Oscars as they knew who won, but ChatGPT shouldnt, as its training data ran out in September 2021. However, there are plenty of examples of ChatGPT producing information it shouldnt know from the training data.Another issue is that OpenAI appears to have deliberately borked ChatGPT predictive responses, so this technique might simply be a jailbreak.

Related research found the best way to get LLama2 to solve 50 math problems was to convince it was plotting a course for Star Treks spaceship Enterprise through turbulence to find the source of an anomaly.

But this wasnt always reliable. The researchers found the best result for solving 100 math problems was to tell the AI the presidents adviser would be killed if it failed to come up with the right answers.

Video of the week Atlas Robot

Boston Dynamics has unveiled its latest Atlas robot, pulling off some uncanny moves that make it look like the possessed kid in The Exorcist.

Its going to be capable of a set of motions that people arent, CEO Robert Playter told TechCrunch. There will be very practical uses for that.

The latest version of Atlas is slimmed down and all-electric rather than hydraulic. Hyundai will be testing out Atlas as robot workers in its factories early next year.

Everybody hates Humane’s AI pin

Wearable AI devices are one of those things like DePin that attract a lot of hype but are yet to prove their worth. The Humane AI pin is a small wearable you pin to your chest and interact with using voice commands. It has a tiny projector that can beam text on your hand. 

Tech reviewer Marques Brownlee called it the worst product Ive ever reviewed, highlighting its frequent wrong or nonsensical answers, bad interface and battery life, and slow results compared to Google.  

NEW Video – Humane Pin Review: A Victim of its Future Ambition

Full video: https://t.co/nLf9LCSqjN

This clip is 99% of my experiences with the pin – doing something you could already do on your phone, but slower, more annoying, or less reliable/accurate. Turns out smartphones pic.twitter.com/QPxztCuBls

— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) April 14, 2024

While Brownless copped a lot of criticism for supposedly single-handedly destroying the devices future, nobody else seems to like it either. Wired gave it 4 out of 10, saying its slow, the camera sucks, the projector is impossible to see in daylight and the device overheats. However, it says its good at real-time translation and phone calls.The Verge says the idea has potential, but the actual device is so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways that its not worth buying. 

It’s not clear why it’s called Rabbit, and reviewers aren’t clear on the advantages of it over a phone.

Another AI wearable called The Rabbit r1 (the first reviews are out in a week) comes with a small screen and hopes to replace a plethora of apps on your phone with an AI assistant. But do we need a dedicated device for that?

As TechRadar’s Rabbit preview of the device concludes:

The voice control interface that does away with apps completely is a good starting point, but again, thats something my Pixel 8 could feasibly do in the future.

To earn their keep, AI hardware is going to need to find a specialized niche similar to how reading a book on a Kindle is a better experience than reading on a phone.

One AI wearable with potential is Limitless, a pendant with 100 hours of battery life that records your conversations so you can query the AI about them later: Did the doctor say to take 15 tablets or 50?” Did Barry say to bring anything for dinner on Saturday night?

While it sounds like a privacy nightmare, the pendant wont start recording until youve got the verbal consent of the other speaker. 

So it seems like there are professional use cases for a device that replaces the need to take notes and is easier than using your phone. Its also fairly affordable.

Limitless is an AI wearable that records conversations to query back. AI makes Holocaust victims immortal

The Sydney Jewish Museum has unveiled a new AI-powered interactive exhibition enabling visitors to ask questions of Holocaust survivors and get answers in real time.

Before death camp survivor Eddie Jaku died aged 101 in October 2021, he spent five days answering more than 1,000 questions about his life and experiences in front of a green screen, captured by a 23-camera rig.The system transforms visitors questions to Eddie into search terms, cross-matches them with the appropriate answer, and then plays it back, which enables a conversation-like experience. With antisemitic conspiracy theories on the rise, it seems like a terrific way to use AI to keep the first-hand testimony of Holocaust survivors alive for coming generations. 

SJM Reverberations Exhibition (Katherine-Griffiths) Knowledge collapse from mid-curve AIs

Around 10% of Googles search results now point to AI-generated spam content. For years, spammers have been spinning up websites full of garbage articles and content that are optimized for SEO keywords, but generative AI has made the process a million times easier.Apart from rendering Google search useless, there are concerns that if AI-generated content becomes the majority of content on the web, we could face the potential issue of model collapse,” whereby AIs are trained on garbage AI content, and the quality drops off like a tenth generation photocopy.

Spam content at the touch of a button.

A related issue called knowledge collapse, affecting humans, was described in a recent research paper from Cornell. Author Andrew J. Peterson wrote that AIs gravitate toward mid-curve ideas in responses and ignore less common, niche or eccentric ideas:While large language models are trained on vast amounts of diverse data, they naturally generate output towards the ‘center of the distribution.

The diversity of human thought and understanding could grow narrower over time as ideas get homogenized by LLMs.The paper recommends subsidies to protect the diversity of knowledge, rather in the same way subsidies protect less popular academic and artistic endeavors.

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The paper recommends subsidies to protect the diversity of knowledge, rather in the same way subsidies protect less popular academic and artistic endeavors.Highlighting the paper, Google DeepMinds Seb Krier added it was also a strong argument for having innumerable models available to the public and trusting users with more choice and customization.

AI should reflect the rich diversity and weirdness of human experience, not just weird corporate marketing/HR culture.

Users should beg to pay for AI 

Google has been hawking its Gemini 1.5 model to businesses and has been at pains to point out that the safety guardrails and ideology that famously borked its image generation model do not affect corporate customers.While the controversy over pictures of diverse Nazis saw the consumer version shut down,  it turns out the enterprise version wasnt even affected by the issues and was never suspended. The issue was not with the base model at all. It was in a specific application that was consumer-facing, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.

Gemini wants to make everything more inclusive, even Nazi Germany. (X)

The enterprise model has 19 separate safety controls that companies can set how they like. So if you pay up, you can presumably set the controls anywhere from anti-racist through to alt-right.

This lends weight to Matthew Lynns recent opinion piece in The Telegraph, where he argues that an ad-driven “free” model for AI will be a disaster, just like the ad-driven “free” model for the web has been. Users ended up as the product, spammed with ads at every turn as the services themselves worsened.

There is no point in simply repeating that error all over again. It would be far better if everyone was charged a few pounds every month and the product got steadily better and was not cluttered up with advertising, he wrote.We should be begging Google and the rest of the AI giants to charge us. We will be far better off in the long run.

Can non-coders create a program with AI?

Author and futurist Daniel Jeffries embarked on an experiment to see if an AI could help him code a complex app. While he sucks at coding, he does have a tech industry background and warns that people with zero coding knowledge are unable to use the tech in its current state. Jeffries described the process as mostly drudgery and pain with occasional flashes of holy shit it fucking works. The AI tools created buggy and unwieldy code and demonstrated every single bad programming habit known to man.However, he did eventually produce a fully functioning program that helped him research competitors websites.

Daniel Jeffries recounts trying to create a computer program with terrible coding skills.

He concluded that AI was not going to put coders out of a job.Anyone who tells you different is selling something. If anything, skilled coders who know how to ask for what they want clearly will be in even more demand.

Replit CEO Amjad Masad made a similar point this week, arguing its actually a great time to learn to code, because youll be able to harness AI tools to create magic.

“Eventually coding will almost entirely be natural language, but you will still be programming. You will be paid for your creativity and ability to get things done with computers not for esoteric knowledge of programming languages.

All Killer, No Filler AI News

Token holders have approved the merger of Fetch.ai, SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol. The new Artificial Superintelligence Alliance looks set to be a top 20 project when the merger happens in May.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis will not confirm or deny it is building a $100 billion supercomputer dubbed Stargate but has confirmed it will spend more than $100B on AI in general.

User numbers for Baidus Chinese ChatGPT knockoff Ernie have doubled to 200 million since October.

Researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate asked AI image generators to produce election disinformation, and they complied four out of 10 times. Although theyre pushing for stronger safety guardrails, a better watermarking system seems like a better solution.  

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Instagram is looking for influencers to join a new program where their AI-generated avatars can interact with fans. Well soon look back fondly on the old days when fake influencers were still real.

Guardian columnist Alex Hern has a theory on why ChatGPT uses the word “delve” so much that its become a red flag for AI-generated text. He says delve is commonly used in Nigeria, which is where many of the low-cost workers providing reinforcement learning human feedback come from. OpenAI has released an enhanced version of GPT-4 Turbo, which is available through an API to ChatGPT Plus users. It can solve problems better, is more conversational, and is less of a verbose bullshitter. Its also introduced a 50% discount for batch processing tasks done off peak.

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Mark Scott, a lawyer connected to the OneCoin crypto scheme recently convicted for fraud and money laundering, has been granted bail pending an appeal of his case.

In an April 18 filing in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge Edgardo Ramos approved bail for Scott three months after sentencing the lawyer to prison for 10 years. A portion of the court filing had been redacted regarding Scott’s health issues, which his legal team argued did not make him a flight risk.

“Based on the record before the Court, given Scott’s medical conditions and because he has not been charged with a violent crime, the Court does not find that Scott is likely to flee or pose a danger to the safety of any other person or the community if allowed to remain on bail,” said Judge Ramos.

Source: PACER

According to a notice filed on Feb. 7, there were “substantial questions” of law to consider in a possible appeal. Scott’s legal team suggested Konstantin Ignatov — brother of Ruja “Cryptoqueen” Ignatova and a leader of the OneCoin scheme — had perjured himself, but prosecutors still used his testimony in their case.

“[T]he Court believes it is quite doubtful that Scott will obtain a reversal or new trial on both counts,” said the judge. “But the Court cannot say that the questions are frivolous. And they are sufficiently integral to the merits of Scott’s conviction that a contrary appellate holding could likely require a reversal or new trial on all of the counts for which Scott has been imprisoned.”

Related: OneCoin: A deep dive into crypto’s most notorious Ponzi scheme

In November 2019, a jury convicted Scott of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering related to his role in laundering millions of dollars through OneCoin. The lawyer laundered funds at the direction of OneCoin co-founder Ruja Ignatova, who remained at large at the time of publication.

OneCoin co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood was sentenced to 20 years on fraud and money laundering charges in September 2023 and ordered to pay $300 million in restitution to OneCoin victims. Former OneCoin chief compliance officer Irinia Dilkinska pleaded guilty to two felony counts and was sentenced to four years in prison on April 3.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime