Month: May 2023

Jury convicts former OpenSea manager in NFT-insider trading case

The former OpenSea manager who was accused of insider trading of NFTs has been convicted on May 3 of wire fraud and money laundering in a New York federal court, according to a report from Reuters. According to prosecutors, Nathaniel Chastain, a former Product Manager at OpenSea, was in charge of choosing which NFTs would be featured on the website’s non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. After making these decisions, he frequently purchased these NFTs and then resold them after they had been featured, prosecutors said. He was charged with wire fraud…

Crypto Exchange Coinbase Faces Legal Action Over Biometric Data Collection – Exchanges Bitcoin News

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The Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has been accused of “wrongfully” profiting from its users’ facial and fingerprint scans. “Coinbase collects, stores, possesses, otherwise obtains, uses, and disseminates its users’ biometric data to, amongst other things, further enhance Coinbase and its online ‘app-based’ Platform,” a proposed class action lawsuit details. Coinbase ‘Wrongfully Profits’ From Users’ Facial and Fingerprint Scans A proposed class action lawsuit, filed Monday in the Northern District of California, alleges that the Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (Nasdaq: COIN) illegally collects face templates and fingerprints of its customers in…

U.S. SEC Changes Its Mind on Officially Labeling Digital Assets in Hedge Fund Regulation

“The SEC is a regulator that requires transparency from its registrants, but it is continuing to withhold regulatory clarity by not defining digital assets,” said Anne-Marie Kelley, a partner at Mercury Strategies who was a longtime SEC official. She suggested the commission may have deleted the definition because “any recognition of digital assets uniqueness as a novel product weakens their litigation stance that digital assets are securities and subject to the SEC securities laws.” Source

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says we may have AGI ‘in the next few years’

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Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, recently predicted that artificial intelligence systems would reach human-level cognition somewhere between “the next few years” and “maybe within a decade.”  Hassabis, who got his start in the gaming industry, co-founded Google DeepMind (formerly DeepMind Technologies), the company known for developing the AlphaGo AI system responsible for beating the world’s top human Go players. In a recent interview conducted during The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything festival, Hassabis told interviewer Chris Mims he believes the arrival of machines with human-level cognition is…

State regulators crack down on fraudulent cryptos promoted as ‘Elon Musk AI Tokens’ and ‘TruthGPT Coin’

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The Texas State Securities Board, including several state regulators, have come together to issue cease-and-desist orders against Horatiu Charlie Caragaceanu and his organizations, The Shark of Wall Street and Hedge4.ai, for promoting two cryptocurrencies named TruthGPT Coin and Elon Musk AI Token. The orders seek to clamp down on what they claim is a fraudulent securities scheme attempting to capitalize on the growing buzz around artificial intelligence (AI). The TruthGPT Coin is being marketed as a cryptocurrency that utilizes an AI system called Elon Musk AI. The AI model can…

Robinhood returns to court to defend position in case brought by US state regulator

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Lawyers representing cryptocurrency and stock trading app Robinhood faced off against those for the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts over the legality of a state regulation that could affect how the company markets itself to potential investors. Under Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts William Galvin, the office’s securities division filed a complaint against Robinhood in December 2020 alleging the platform illegally targeted inexperienced investors, claiming the practice was in violation of the state’s fiduciary duty standards. Galvin reportedly said at the time that Robinhood was…