The Office of the Inspector General for the FDIC – an internal watchdog function within U.S. agencies – studied the banking agency’s performance when it came to preparing the industry for crypto’s risks and found it lacking, according to a report issued on Wednesday. Source
“That he vetoed a similar bill last year, and he and the bill’s authors were willing to work with industry to improve it, demonstrates that they do not want to cripple the industry in California,” Klaich said. “It is a reasonable regulatory regime largely on par with other states’ money transmitter licensing, and notably grants conditional licensing to firms that possess New York’s more onerous BitLicense.” Source AbsenceActsCaliforniaCautiouslyCryptoFedsHopefulU.SWorld CryptoX Portal
Senator Elizabeth Warren was the lead author of a letter signed by 28 other senators and 76 members of the House of Representatives about the role of cryptocurrency in financing terrorism. Signers came from both parties and included one independent, although Democrats predominate. The letter, dated Oct. 17, was addressed to Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. The authors cited a news article that claimed Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad raised over $130 million in crypto donations between August…
X, formerly known as Twitter, is testing a signup model wherein new users will have to either pay to become a verified enterprise account, opt into an X premium subscription, or pay a $1 annual fee to prove they’re not a bot. The trial, which began on Oct. 17, is currently only applicable to new users in New Zealand and the Philippines. The experiment, according to a post on X’s Help Center, is called “Not A Bot.” As its name implies, its purpose is reportedly to deter bot activity on…
Observing traders’ decisions about crypto, such as Bitcoin, especially on prominent exchanges like Binance, often holds the key to understanding the underlying currents in the market. Two critical events today, highlighted by renowned crypto analyst Ali Martinez, paint a curious picture of BTC’s current standing. Majority Of Binance Traders Shorting BTC Ali Martinez, a respected figure in the crypto analysis world, revealed some interesting data concerning Bitcoin earlier today. According to Martinez’s X (formerly known as Twitter) post, most traders on Binance with open Bitcoin futures seem to expect a…
PEAK LIDO? As Ethereum transitioned over the past year to a fully functional proof-of-stake blockchain, market observers chronicled the staggering rise of Lido Finance, which effectively allows investors to stake their ether (ETH) – and thus earn rewards, yield – while also getting a token, stETH, that they can trade in the meantime. For many, that combination proved more attractive than the technically cumbersome job of setting up a validator and locking up ETH into the main blockchain. The problem now is that Lido has become too popular – bumping…
Socking the stock market indices is a new leg up in interest rates. The U.S. 30-year Treasury bond yield is higher by nine basis points to 5.02%. Should that level hold, it would be the first close above 5% for the long bond since the summer of 2007. The 10-year Treasury note yield is up seven basis points to 4.905%, also the highest yield since that summer. Original
In what may be a first-of-its-kind study, artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic has developed a large language model (LLM) that’s been fine-tuned for value judgments by its user community. What does it mean for AI development to be more democratic? To find out, we partnered with @collect_intel to use @usepolis to curate an AI constitution based on the opinions of ~1000 Americans. Then we trained a model against it using Constitutional AI. pic.twitter.com/ZKaXw5K9sU — Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) October 17, 2023 Many public-facing LLMs have been developed with guardrails — encoded instructions…
Taproot Assets will give developers “the tools needed to make Bitcoin a multi-asset network, but in a scalable manner,” according to Lightning Labs. Original
The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the United States Department of the Treasury has sanctioned a crypto operator allegedly connected to the terrorist group Hamas. In an Oct. 18 notice, OFAC announced sanctions for Hamas operatives and financial facilitators following the organization’s attack on Israel. The entities added to OFAC’s list of specially designated nationals included a “Gaza-based virtual currency exchange and its operator” with a Bitcoin (BTC) wallet address. According to the Treasury Department, the sanctions were aimed at “root[ing] out Hamas’s sources of revenue” following an…