The ethereum world is in a tizzy over Deepak Chopra. The author and spiritual leader, who is also widely mocked for making pseudo-scientific claims, was promoted on Twitter yesterday as a speaker at a big crypto conference called Ethereal that will be held in New York next month.
As an assistant US Attorney for northern California, Kathryn Haun peered into some of the darkest corners of the cryptocurrency world. Among her greatest hits were the prosecution of a pair of rogue federal agents who were stealing bitcoin while investigating the illicit marketplace Silk Road in 2015, and settling a criminal investigation into Ripple later that same year.
Someone created a sham company in the United Kingdom that bears the name of Telegram’s blockbuster crypto project, the Telegram Open Network, which has raised $1.7 billion in funding for its token sale to date. Telegram is a chat app that has 200 million monthly active users. It’s raising money to develop a number of services, such as file storage, by selling crypto tokens.
The CrypoKitties game took the ethereum world by storm last December, as eager players bought and sold the cutesy virtual creatures for tens of thousands of dollars. The cartoon cats were really just representations of digital tokens on the ethereum blockchain, meaning they could exist independently of their creators, the Canadian studio Axiom Zen.
I’m sitting with Li Wang in a grand room in the Guildhall, the historic center of London’s financial district. Several floors below us are the preserved ruins of an ancient Roman amphitheater, built some time in the first century in the city of Londinium. The venue has been hired out for an annual fintech conference, the Innovate Finance Global Summit.
Last year, when the price of bitcoin rose 1,000%, you might have regretted not buying in. Now that it has fallen almost 40% so this year, perhaps you don’t have as many regrets. The murky trading and wrenching volatility of cryptocurrencies threaten their place as a fundamental plank of the future financial system, as proponents are pushing. Now, a group of famed economists and financial innovators have a plan to address those challenges by creating “the first non-anonymous blockchain-based digital currency,” called Saga (SGA).
For Facebook, how bad can it get? The company lost $50 billion in market value in the first two trading days after it emerged that over 50 million of its users unknowingly had their data harvested in service of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014. One of the men who founded the chat app, Brian Acton, generated headlines by calling for people to #DeleteFacebook following news of the unauthorized use of 50 million users’ personal data by Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that claims credit for Donald Trump’s election victory.
Crypto funds’ susceptibility to hacking and theft is a major concern in the industry. Over $8 billion in bitcoin have been stolen from exchanges since 2011, Reuters has found.
A proposal to speed up bitcoin’s transactions has received a boost from Jack Dorsey. The Twitter and Square founder is among the new investors in Lightning Labs, a startup that today announced it raised $2.5 million and released a beta version of its technology.
The Egyptian government, or entities linked to it, has hijacked local internet users’ connections to secretly mine cryptocurrency “en masse,” according to a new report by security researchers at the University of Toronto. Evidence of this type of intrusion by a nation-state is “the stuff of legends,” the researchers say, because the techniques involved are especially difficult to detect.
It started innocuously enough. I noticed that Kyle Torpey, a prominent writer on cryptocurrency topics, had followed me on Twitter. That was odd, because I thought we already followed one another. I clicked on his profile and saw that his follower count had dropped to zero, quite a fall compared to the 38,000 or so he normally had.
A firm called Helios Towers is the latest owner of telecoms towers in sub-Saharan Africa planning to go public. Helios is looking to raise over $2 billion on the London and Johannesburg stock exchanges for the 6,500-plus towers that it operates in four African markets. It joins fellow tower firms Eaton and IHS in tapping the public markets this year.
“The market is getting a bit bored now of the black rectangles.”
The enthusiasts who populate “crypto Twitter,” an endless stream of gossip, memes, and financial speculation, have a new hero: top American commodities regulator J. Christopher Giancarlo.
Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain
More than 100,000 telecom execs, equipment vendors, and smartphone enthusiasts will descend on Barcelona for Mobile World Congress next week. Much like the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, tech companies use the four-day event, which starts on Feb. 26, as a backdrop to launch their latest products and discuss their visions for the future. The focus in Barcelona this year is 5G, 5G, and more 5G.
Telegram’s “secretive” next phase of its initial coin offering (ICO) will raise $1.15 billion for the chat platform, according to offering documents seen by Quartz. If the funding round is successful, Telegram would have raised $2 billion from accredited investors—institutions and wealthy individuals—before its tokens are even offered to the public. The funding exercise would also be the largest of its kind, dwarfing the $1.3 billion raised by a blockchain platform called EOS.
The world of initial coin offerings (ICOs) is attracting so much interest that some investors are able to double their money—on paper—before an offering has even begun. This is the case with the chat app Telegram, which is targeting a blockbuster $1.2 billion ICO.
Amir Taaki is notorious in the bitcoin world for his radical political beliefs and technical skills—which is saying something in a culture that has spawned a cast of infamous characters, like the cryptocurrency magnate “Bitcoin Jesus” or the rapper CoinDaddy.
South Korean officials say they won’t ban cryptocurrency trading, but they have been cracking down hard on the country’s freewheeling market. Among the biggest victims are shadowy groups that profited handsomely from the unique opportunity to arbitrage cryptocurrency in Korea. Regulators recently said that they identified $600 million worth of “illegal foreign exchange trading using cryptocurrency,” but offered no details about what they were doing about it.
At a hearing today on cryptocurrency regulation, it was up to J. Christopher Giancarlo, head of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to explain the meaning of the bitcoiner rallying cry “hodl” to the members of the US Senate Banking Committee.
