Today's news tips:
US CFTC sues Voyager co-founder for fraud
G20 Joint Communiqué: Adopting the roadmap proposed in the comprehensive document as the G20 crypto asset roadmap
Stars Arena: Will obtain loans from private investors to cover losses
Caroline Ellison: Zhao Changpeng’s tweet “contributed” to the collapse of FTX, and there is no real “internal control and isolation system” between FTX and Alameda
Arbitrum's first round of short-term incentive voting has ended, Jones, GMX and other 29 projects won
Tether's current CTO Paolo Ardoino will become CEO in December
Ethereum validator queues have been significantly reduced, with new validators taking only half an hour to deploy
The total locked amount of DeFi protocols is at its lowest point since February 2021, as the yield is lower than that of traditional financial products
Regulatory News
US CFTC sues Voyager co-founder for fraud
According to The Block, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) accused Voyager Digital co-founder Stephen Ehrlich of fraud. The CFTC said that Ehrlich and his company lied to customers. When Voyager began to collapse, they concealed the true financial situation of the crypto lender. "While they said they would treat customers' digital asset commodities safely and responsibly, they took shocking risks with customer assets behind the scenes, leading to Voyager's bankruptcy and huge customer losses," said Ian McGinley, CFTC enforcement director, in a statement on Thursday.
The CFTC said Ehrlich promised customers high-yield returns, sometimes as high as 12%. In order to pay the high returns, Ehrlich and Voyager transferred "billions of dollars worth of customer digital assets as 'loans' to high-risk third parties."
Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Voyager on Thursday that permanently bars it from handling consumer assets. The commission also accused Ehrlich of lying about whether customer accounts were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Ehrlich did not agree to a settlement with the FTC, so the case against him will continue in federal court.
G20 Joint Communiqué: Adopting the roadmap proposed in the comprehensive document as the G20 crypto asset roadmap
The Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (FMCBG) of the Group of Twenty (G20), of which India holds the rotating presidency, issued a joint communiqué in Marrakech, Morocco on Friday, deciding to adopt the roadmap proposed in the comprehensive document as the G20 crypto asset roadmap, and jointly mobilize more space and concessional financing to enhance the World Bank's ability to support low- and middle-income countries in addressing global challenges. The roadmap aims to enhance global financial stability and ensure that cryptocurrencies are effectively managed within the international economic framework.
The comprehensive report, released last month, stressed the need for clear tax treatment of crypto assets and recommended that countries maintain monetary sovereignty. The decision to ban cryptocurrencies outright is not an "easy option," the report said, while adding that temporary restrictions should not replace strong macroeconomic policies. The statement by finance ministers and central bank governors also asked the International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board to provide regular structured updates on the progress of the G20 crypto asset roadmap.
Microsoft completes acquisition of Activision Blizzard with approval from UK regulators
The UK antitrust regulator (CMA) formally approved Microsoft's acquisition of "Call of Duty" developer Activision Blizzard on Friday, after changes to the deal largely resolved the agency's concerns. Under the new agreement, Microsoft will not purchase the cloud gaming rights held by Activision Blizzard, but will sell them to an independent third party, Ubisoft Entertainment (Ubisoft), before the transaction is completed. The CMA believes that the reorganized transaction has made important changes and largely resolved the concerns raised earlier this year regarding the original transaction.
NFT&AI
The National Information Security Standardization Committee has released basic security requirements for generative AI and is now soliciting public opinions
The National Information Security Standardization Technical Committee has released the "Basic Requirements for Security of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services" (draft for comments) on its official website, and is now soliciting public opinions. The deadline for collecting opinions/suggestions is 24:00 on October 25, 2023. It is reported that this is the first draft of a regulation specifically for the field of generative AI security in China, and it also supports the "Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services" launched by the Cyberspace Administration of China and seven other departments in July.
The draft for comments proposes for the first time the basic security requirements that generative AI service providers must follow, covering aspects such as corpus security, model security, security measures, and security assessments.
1. In terms of corpus security requirements, the draft for comments puts forward requirements from three aspects: source security, content security, and annotation security. Providers should establish a blacklist of corpus sources, and any single-source corpus that contains more than 5% of illegal and negative information should be "blacklisted".
2. In terms of model security requirements, the consultation draft sets out strict requirements in five aspects: basic model use, generated content security, service transparency, content generation accuracy, and content generation reliability. Basic models that have not been registered with the competent authorities should not be used, and information such as the use of third-party basic models should be disclosed to the public in prominent locations such as the homepage of the website.
3. In terms of security measures, the draft for comments puts forward requirements in seven aspects: the applicable population, occasions, and uses of the model, personal information processing, information input by mobile phone users for training, content identification of pictures, videos, etc., acceptance of complaints and reports from the public or users, provision of generated content to users, and model updates and upgrades.
4. In terms of security assessment requirements, the draft for comments provides very specific references from four aspects: assessment methods, corpus security assessment, generated content security assessment, and content refusal assessment. For example, in terms of corpus security assessment, when providers assess the security of corpus, they must use manual sampling, randomly sample no less than 4,000 corpora from all training corpora, and the pass rate should not be less than 96%.
5. In addition, the draft for comments also puts forward some other requirements, involving keyword library, classification model, generated content test question bank, refusal to answer test question bank and other aspects.
Project News
Uniswap launches Android beta wallet
According to official news, Uniswap announced the launch of the Android beta wallet app. The application previously only supported computers and iOS mobile devices. According to the announcement on October 12, the new Android beta wallet allows users to select tokens on different chains without switching networks. It automatically detects the network where the token is located and switches to it. Currently, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base and BNBChain are supported, and more blockchains will be compatible in the future.
Caroline Ellison: Zhao Changpeng’s tweet “contributed” to the collapse of FTX, and there is no real “internal control and isolation system” between FTX and Alameda
According to Cointelegraph, Caroline Ellison, former CEO of Alameda Research, testified in court that SBF created a memo on November 6, 2022, listing investors who might seek assistance. According to the document, SBF said Binance has been "engaged in a PR campaign against us" and that Binance "leaked Alameda's balance sheet and gave it to Coindesk."
Ellison said that a tweet from Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao contributed to the collapse of FTX. In a tweet on November 6, 2022, Zhao Changpeng announced that Binance would liquidate its holdings of FTT, causing retail investors to follow Binance's lead and withdraw funds from FTX. The run caused FTX to stop withdrawals and file for bankruptcy on November 11. Ellison said that while Zhao Changpeng's tweet "contributed" to the collapse of FTX, the main reason was that Alameda borrowed $10 billion from the exchange and "could not repay".
Regarding the commingling of operations between FTX and Alameda, Ellison admitted that the two companies had no real “internal controls and isolation systems” to separate the businesses. From 2019 to November 2022, she considered resigning from Alameda several times.
Ellison also testified that he worked with some accountants between 2021 and 2022, but after those firms reviewed Alameda's books, "they found themselves unable or unwilling to perform an audit." Ryan Salame, former CEO of FTX Digital Markets, testified that he initially prepared Alameda's balance sheet, but at some point, Ellison took over the task.
Platypus: Approximately 50,000 sAVAX and 7,000 AVAX have been successfully recovered
Finance, a stablecoin trading project, tweeted that a security incident occurred between 11:29 and 14:17 Beijing time on October 12, resulting in a loss of approximately $2.2 million in the sAVAX-AVAX pool. The team has suspended the pool at 14:50 and is investigating. With the help of the security platform Supremacy, approximately 50,000 sAVAX and 7,000 AVAX have been successfully recovered from one of the attackers. The team is working closely with security experts to identify and correct vulnerabilities. Platypus will not restart the pool until these issues are fully resolved and security measures are strengthened.
Polkadot parent company Parity Technologies denies layoffs
Earlier this week, there were rumors that the company had laid off about 300 employees. Polkadot's parent company Parity Technologies denied the claim and said it is seeking to transfer some of its existing listing functions to multiple decentralized teams within the Polkadot ecosystem, which will affect the company's staffing in the coming months. And emphasized that any personnel changes related to the decentralized transition to various ecosystem funding entities will occur within a few months.
Stars Arena: Will obtain loans from private investors to cover losses
Stars Arena tweeted that it is using the recovered funds to make up for the losses. The total loss to be made up is 274,333 AVAX, and 239,493 AVAX has been recovered. All expenses incurred so far will be added to the recovered funds, and the team will also obtain loans from private investors to make up the difference.
Terraform Labs claims Citadel Securities has potential links to UST depegging
According to Blockworks, Terraform Labs filed a motion with the court, requiring Citadel Securities to "provide certain data pursuant to a third-party subpoena," and said it was "critical" to its defense in the lawsuit filed by the U.S. SEC. The motion stated that Terraform Labs issued a subpoena to Citadel Securities and Citadel Enterprise Americas for trading data "related to the unpegging in May 2022." Terraform pointed out that public evidence showed that Ken Griffin, the head of the Citadel entity, intended to short UST before and after the unpegging in May 2022. Terraform said that Nansen's data helped them find "seven so-called 'whales' who have the ability and determination to go long or short on an asset or financial instrument." In addition, the data also showed that "a small number of participants discovered vulnerabilities early in the UST unpegging."
Mastercard partners with Cuscal and Mintable to demonstrate CBDC interoperable with public blockchains like Ethereum
Mastercard is participating in the central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot project with the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), exploring potential use cases for CBDC in Australia. And released a new solution developed in collaboration with Cuscal and Mintable that enables CBDC to be tokenized (or "wrapped") onto different blockchains. Mastercard demonstrated in a live environment how the solution enables holders of the pilot CBDC to purchase NFTs listed on the Ethereum public blockchain. The process "locked" the required amount of pilot CBDC on the RBA's pilot CBDC platform and minted an equal amount of wrapped pilot CBDC tokens on Ethereum. A prerequisite for the test transaction was that the buyer's and seller's Ethereum wallets and the NFT marketplace smart contract were "allowed to list" within the platform. As all other transfers of wrapped pilot CBDC were blocked, it successfully demonstrated the platform's ability to enforce controls - even on public blockchains.
The pilot leverages two pillars of Mastercard’s Multi-Token Network, which was launched in June 2023 and is currently in testing.
Modular execution layer Fuel launches native bridge to support cross-chain between Beta-4 and Ethereum Sepolia
Ethereum modular execution layer Fuel announced the opening of a native bridge between the Beta-4 testnet and Ethereum Sepolia. The Fuel native bridge can transfer assets between L1 and L2 and utilizes a message portal to handle token standards such as ERC-20 and ERC-721. On L2, tokens have dedicated contracts for message processing and minting on Fuel. Any assets deposited in Fuel may take up to 6 hours to be withdrawn back to Ethereum. The Fuel native bridge is still in the testing phase and will iterate the appearance and functionality of the bridge over time.
Arbitrum's first round of short-term incentive voting has ended, Jones, GMX and other 29 projects won
The first round of voting for the 50 million ARB short-term incentive program (STIP) initiated by Arbitrum has been completed. Among the 97 proposals submitted, 29 projects will be able to participate in this incentive plan according to Arbitrum rules, including Camelot, Jones, Dopex, GMX, Galxe, LODESTAR, Socket, Timeswap, RADIANT, Pendle, MUX, Frax, Tally, Rysk, Silo, Stella, Good, Gamma, Umami, Abracadabra, KyberSwap, OpenOcean, Angle, Trader, Dolomite, Premia, Vertex, Perennial and Balancer.
Previously, Arbitrum launched the first round of voting for the Short-Term Incentive Program (STIP), which will allocate 50 million ARB to promote network development. If the requested grant exceeds 50 million, it will be allocated according to the following principles: according to the number of votes in favor of the proposal and the time when the proposal is posted to the forum.
Ethereum validator queues have been significantly reduced, with new validators taking only half an hour to deploy
According to CoinDesk, the once crowded queue of new validators on the Ethereum blockchain has almost completely cleared. Blockchain data shows that there are currently only 57 validators waiting to enter the network, down from a peak of more than 96,000 in early June. At the same time, the waiting time for deploying new validators to the Ethereum network has also been reduced from a peak of 45 days in early June to just 28 minutes.
Binance Margin adds NTRN asset and opens NTRN full-margin and single-margin margin trading pairs
Binance Margin has added NTRN as a new asset and opened NTRN full-margin and isolated margin trading pairs: NTRN/USDT.
Flare Network will destroy 2.1 billion FLR to support ecosystem health
According to CoinDesk, the Flare Network development team said they will destroy 2.1 billion FLR tokens, or 2% of the total supply, to support the development and overall health of the ecosystem, prevent the dilution of community token holdings, and increase the motivation for new users to join the network.
Some of the tokens scheduled to be burned have been allocated to early backers of Flare. After Flare reached an agreement with these entities on how the first Flare Improvement Proposal FIP.01 should affect the distribution of tokens to shareholders, these tokens will no longer be distributed. Approximately 198 million FLR will be burned immediately, and an additional 66 million FLR will be burned monthly until January 2026. As of this writing, FLR is trading at $0.0094, and the total value of the tokens burned is approximately $20 million.
THORSwap resumes trading and adds "protective measures" to its terms of service to block users from countries sanctioned by the United States
According to Decrypt, THORSwap has resumed trading of its native token RUNE and updated its “Terms of Service”, adding “some additional safeguards” to prevent illegal capital flows and comply with legal regulations, and blocking users from US-sanctioned countries.
Some users quickly expressed concerns about the new rules, saying they violate the principle of decentralization. In a reply to THORSwap, cryptocurrency researcher Matt Ahlborg said that blanket bans are unethical because they would adversely affect "hundreds of millions of innocent people." And a THORChain supporter replied that users from sanctioned countries can use other applications instead of THORSwap because it was built by a "US team" and "must comply legally."
Last Friday, THORSwap said that it would temporarily switch to maintenance mode in view of the fact that illegal funds were using THORChain. Since THORSwap suspended trading, RUNE has been on a downward trend, with a 7-day drop of 27%, from $2.03 to a low of $1.48. After the above news was announced, THOR also rose by 11.5%.
Big Time: We are fixing the blind box opening system bug and have temporarily frozen some player accounts.
PANews reported on October 13 that Big Time official staff said in the community that the server was overloaded recently, causing a bug in the blind box opening system that allowed repeated openings. In order to avoid problems, the technical staff temporarily froze some players' accounts (accounts that did not view the blind boxes may also be affected). The accounts will be unblocked after the bug is fixed.
Tether's current CTO Paolo Ardoino will become CEO in December
PANews reported on October 13 that according to The Block, Tether's current CTO Paolo Ardoino will be appointed CEO in December. Tether's current CEO Jean-Louis van der Velde will serve as a consultant to the company and retain his position as Bitfinex CEO. Ardoino will continue to serve as Bitfinex CTO and Holepunch Chief Strategy Officer.
Financing News
Singapore wallet provider Account Labs raises $7.7 million, led by Amber Group and others
According to Decrypt, Singapore wallet provider Account Labs announced the completion of US$7.7 million in financing, led by Amber Group, MixMarvel DAO Ventures and Qiming Venture Partners. This strategic investment was launched at the same time as the launch of the consumer-centric application UniPass Wallet, a self-service wallet focusing on peer-to-peer (P2P) stablecoin transfers. The wallet will also use account abstraction to improve the user experience.
Important data
A whale who is long WBTC, ETH, LINK and other assets on Aave starts selling WBTC to repay debts
Lookonchain tweeted that a whale who was long WBTC, ETH, LINK, UNI, and MKR on Aave began to sell WBTC to repay debts. It deposited $11 million in assets on Aave and borrowed $8.45 million in stablecoins. The health rate is 1.08, close to the risk of liquidation.
Data: $640 million worth of BTC and $290 million worth of ETH options contracts will expire today
Greeks.live macro researcher Adam wrote that on October 13, 24,000 BTC options will expire, with a Put Call ratio of 1.23, a maximum pain point of $27,000, and a nominal value of $640 million. In addition, 190,000 ETH options will expire today, with a Put Call ratio of 0.71, a maximum pain point of $1,600, and a nominal value of $290 million. According to his analysis, BTC continues to lead the market, with BTC option holdings increasing by nearly 70% this week, of which BTC put option holdings accounted for 60% of the total, which is relatively rare, while ETH continues to be sluggish.
Merit Circle has destroyed more than 35% of the total supply of MC tokens
The blockchain gaming guild Merit Circle tweeted that Merit Circle DAO has destroyed 368,707,273 MC tokens, accounting for more than 35% of the total supply.
Suspected Upbit wallet currently holds 653 million LOOM, accounting for 50% of the total supply
Lookonchain tweeted that the price of LOOM has soared by about 30% today. The wallet suspected to be Upbit has accumulated 21.42 million LOOM (US$5.83 million) today. The wallet currently holds 653 million LOOM (about US$181 million), accounting for 50% of the total supply.
DWF Labs deposits 50 million ORBS with Bithumb, equivalent to approximately $1.3 million
PANews reported on October 13 that according to Lookonchain monitoring, DWF Labs has just deposited 50 million ORBS, equivalent to approximately US$1.3 million, into Bithumb.
The total locked amount of DeFi protocols is at its lowest point since February 2021, as the yield is lower than that of traditional financial products
According to CoinDesk, on Thursday, the total amount of funds locked in DeFi protocols fell to $36 billion, the lowest point since February 2021, and reached $163.5 billion in April 2022. This is because traders withdraw liquidity to obtain higher returns with lower risks. Currently, Vanguard's money market fund offers customers a yield of 5.28%, while the yield for staking Ethereum on Lido is only 3.3%, which is extremely low risk-return ratio compared with traditional financial products.
“Revenues are definitely falling for all products right now,” said Vyomesh Dua, head of DeFi trading at Folkvang. “But even at this low TVL, we are seeing a lot of activity and opportunities around developing new products. Whenever a new DeFi product gets a lot of attention, the activity in the entire ecosystem around it increases, and there are exciting but short-lived opportunities to make money. But due to the small size of the opportunity, the capital that can be deployed in this space today is limited.”
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