Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s Founder and former chief executive, has been hit with additional criminal charges such.
United States authorities have filed further charges in addition to the eight looming ones the disgraced exec is set to face in October. Along with bank fraud, he will face charges for conspiracy to make unlawful political contributions.
According to the filing, Bankman-Fried and several other executives “falsely represented to a financial institution that the account would be used for trading and market making” to open a bank account. They would later use the account to receive and transfer customer funds for its business operations.
Bankman-Fried also opened North Dimension to defraud banks that had previously failed to authorise an account.
The filing added the charged also “agreed to and did make corporate contributions to candidates and committees in the Southern District of New York that were reported in the name of another person.”
According to the document, the former chief executive aimed to contribute roughly $1 million USD to a political action committee for the LGBTQ community but could not find a person “trusted at FTX [who was] bi/gay” at his firm.
The named executive urged Nishad Singh to donate funds and a further exec donated to causes linked to the Republican Party, the document added.
Singh contributed $1.1 million USD to the LGBTQ Victory Fund Federal Political Action Committee (PAC), records from the Federal Election Commission show.
The massive donation funded unofficial campaign contributions, namely advertising for Rep Becca Balint (D-VT).
It added: “an internal Alameda spreadsheet noted over $100 million in political contributions, even though FEC records reflect no political contributions by Alameda for the 2022 midterm elections to candidates or PACs.”
Concluding, it stated: “Bankman-Fried’s use of straw donors allowed him to evade contribution limits on individual donations to candidates to whom he had already donated.”
Disgraced cryptocurrency trading platform FTX has seen thousands of users at its Japanese sister company withdraw funds since Tuesday.
The subsidiary firm announced on Wednesday that its crypto holders and investors at Liquid Global withdrew nearly 6.6 billion Japanese Yen, or $50 million USD.
Reclaiming both fiat and crypto tokens, 7,026 accounts transferred funds from FTX Japan to Liquid Global. 1,947 users withdrew fiat currencies and 5,697 withdrew cryptocurrencies, it stated.
People withdrawing their funds from FTX Japan are required to confirm account balances to transfer their assets to Liquid accounts.
The news comes after the collapsed US crypto firm filed bankruptcy proceedings in mid-November. FTX Japan later froze millions in assets to over 9 million holders, totalling around $138 million USD after halting withdrawals, a NHK report revealed.
Japan currently plans to ease regulations on cryptocurrency tax regimes to boost the nation’s position as a global fintech hub. As people on the FTX platform pull out their funds from the bankrupt exchange, future investors may look to a more mature domestic market to invest their crypto assets.
Swedish music streaming giant Spotify is set to test a series of token-backed playlists across several critical listening markets around the world.
The three-month pilot involves Web3 gaming platform Overlord, which tweeted the partnership on Wednesday. This will allow communities to build song playlists on the Overlord platform and access them on Web3 wallets.
People with Creepz non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can access the Web3-backed playlists on Spotify’s streaming platform. The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany can access the playlists.
Additional communities such as Moonbirds, the Fluf, and Kingship will also join the initiative, requiring users to own a Kingship Key Card NFT to participate.
The news comes after Spotify rolled out an NFT gallery programme for select musicians. At the time, users could preview artist NFTs and later purchase the items on OpenSea.
According to DeFi Planet, some of the best music streaming platforms are Audius, Royal, Sound, Emanate, Catalog, and Glass.xyz.
Web3 music aims to tackle the ongoing music industry crisis of low artist royalties, loss of ownership rights, and unequal distribution of revenues.
Artists fail to receive sufficient compensation due to the issues. Decentralised Web3 music platforms use the blockchain to link fans to artist NFTs and additional benefits for exclusive releases, artworks, and other incentivised programmes.
Network explorer Polygonscan reportedly stopped updating with correct values, confusing investors on the health of the Polygon blockchain.
This triggered rumours that the Polygon’s layer-2 scaling faced outages after data ceased to generate on PolygonScan for roughly 1.5 hours.
Despite the false warning, Polygon continued to create blocks, OKLINK verified on Wednesday.
Teams operating at Polygon have updated investors, stating “a few nodes” failing to synchronise caused the issue. They added the blockchain had not stopped producing blocks.
The news comes after rumours of an outage surface on Wednesday after block production allegedly ceased on Polyscan data. It showed at the time that its last block processed at roughly 20:35 UTC.
Additionally, Polygon Labs announced on Tuesday it had slashed up to 20 percent of its employees, totalling 100 workers.
The crypto firm will provide three months of severance pay to employees, it said in a blog post.
It explained: “Earlier this year, we consolidated multiple business units under Polygon Labs. As part of this process, we’re sharing the difficult news that we’ve reduced our team by 20% impacting multiple teams and about 100 positions. This was a painfully hard decision, but a necessary step in our journey.”
San Francisco, USA, 25th February, 2023, Chainwire
Telept Inc., a Web 3.0 startup, has announced today the launch of a ground-breaking first-mover Web PC platform Telept City, which empowers participants to create one-of-a-kind AI generated Non-Fungible Token (NFT) called X-Native.
With its cutting-edge AI Generated Content (AIGC) image generation model that has undergone rigorous fine-tuning utilizing a vast database of images, and coupled with an intuitive game-like user interface, provides a novel and accessible AI Web 3.0 experience for participants of all levels. Creating NFTs is a breeze with Telept City, and it can be done with minimal effort and costs.
What is Telept City?
Imagine the users are capable of generating an NFT through a AI powered platform similar to playing a text adventure game. Telept City’s multiple-choice options are presented in a way that is both engaging and easy to navigate. Upon logging onto Telept City via Metamask wallet, users are greeted with an interface that’s reminiscent of a trivia game. The questions were designed to tap into users’ thinking about their own self-image through a gamified approach and to help them create their desired NFT. The AI interprets the answers and generates a user-defined image, which can be finally encrypted as an NFT of X-Native Collection.
Telept City – PC webpage, style of sci-fi universe. Telept City
What is X-Native Collection?
The set of NFTs produced by Telept’s AI exclusively for Telept City users is known as X-Native (Official Name on OpenSea ‘Telept City: X-Native’). The concept of X-Native project is based on benchmarking the visual version of Ethereum Name Service. The X-native collection is an ever-expanding library of NFTs created using the Telept AI. In addition to owning a piece of historic NFT art and an asset worth ETH, the primary advantage of owning X-Native is its social significance and exclusive privilege, as outlined in the X-Native roadmap which will be released on March, 23rd. It contains AI NFTs and X-Native Mystery boxes with exclusive IP on the Ethereum. 
The beta version of X-Native’s NFT
The beta version of X-Native Mystery Boxes
As the CEO of Telept, Lika Lee believes that the value of an NFT will go beyond just its financial worth and has the potential to produce significant social value. “Decentralizing NFT production is the trend. With the growing adoption of NFTs, we are committed to making it easier for everyone to create them, whether the user is experienced with Web 3.0 or just getting started. We will take the first step of using AI and NFT technology to shape a new way of forming identity and personality representation, while also providing an unprecedented way for people to experience industry changes.” Lika Lee says. Telept expects to see even more application scenarios for NFTs once the labor required to create them has been reduced.
Telept City – PC webpage, text adventure style NFT generation process Telept City
Telept City : A New Era of Empowered Digital Asset Creation
The NFT market has been experiencing tremendous growth in recent years, and the AI is poised to take this trend to new heights. In today’s digital landscape, these interactions are often expensive, intimidating and high entry barriers. Telept City is a platform that leverages AI to automate the NFT creation process, making it accessible for anyone to create unique NFTs. The platform uses a semi-customized set of text inputs, in the form of selected words or phrases, to generate an image with a wide range of styles. In the upcoming version, users will be able to actively participate in the creation of their own NFTs by giving simple text. The goal of Telept City is to democratize the process of creating NFTs and empower individuals to express themselves creatively through the use of AI technology, representing a significant stride towards a more decentralized and equitable digital future for the industry.
Further Thinking of the Telept City
Telept represents a revolutionary approach to NFTs, combining both blockchain and AI technologies to enable new forms of digital ownership and social interaction. The team will continue working towards its goal of empowering individuals, organizations, and communities by providing them with greater control over their data, on-chain identity, and social potential.
Can’t wait to unlock a world of limitless possibilities with AIGC NFT? Make an AI NFT to become a member of X-Native. For more information, visit Telept City’s Website.
About Telept
Telept is an all-in-one Socialfi Mobile DApp under the umbrella brand of a Stealth Startup. The company houses a number of products that span various categories that empowered with groundbreaking technologies. Telept makes building and launching Web3 projects easy from news feeds, groups, projects and more.
Socials: Twitter | Discord | LinkedIn
Contact
CMO
Renee B.
Telept Inc.
[email protected]
The New York State Attorney General has launched a further lawsuit this month as cryptocurrency exchange CoinEx has come under fire from the regulator.
NYSAG authorities have accused the exchange of operating as an unregistered securities broker as well as commodity broker-dealer.
Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement: “Our laws are designed to protect New Yorkers, and when companies ignore them, they put residents, investors, and businesses at risk. The days of crypto companies like CoinEx acting like the rules do not apply to them are over. My office will continue to protect New York investors and ensure our state’s laws are followed.”
The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) alleges it could buy and sell cryptocurrencies on CoinEx despite the company not being registered in the New York, citing an affidavit.
It adds the availability of unregistered companies violated New York’s Martin Act, allowing the NYAG to enforce actions to block the exchange from operating in New York. The filing continues that stablecoins such as LUNA, LBC, AMP, and RLY were securities and commodities.
The NYAG filing explained further,
“The Tokens each fall within the Martin Act’s definition of commodities, which includes any foreign currency and any other good, article, or material. CoinEx is engaged in the business of selling and offering to sell commodities through accounts, agreements, or contracts to accounts in New York primarily for investment purposes. The Tokens are also securities under the Martin Act because they represent investments of money in common enterprises with profits to be derived primarily from the efforts of others.”
Heavy Measures on CoinEx
It continued, stating CoinEx refused to comply after the NYAG suboenad the firm. The agency will respond by attempting to block the cryptocurrency firm from accessing local IP addresses and providing “full monetary restitution” along with paying fees.
The news comes as New York authorities aim to step up the agency’s efforts to access tools needed to monitor cryptocurrency activities across the US state.
Additional restrictions came after Paxos stablecoin rival Circle blew the whistle on the former’s cryptocurrency offering to the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) last year.
The agency claims that Binance failed to show sufficient reserves for its Binance USD (BUSD) tokens minted and issued from Paxos.
Decentralised finance (DeFi) protocol Frax Finance voted on Wednesday to collatoralise its native token Frax (FRX).
According to its FIP-188 proposal last week, the governance forum ruled to target its collateral ration to 100 percent via its earnings, allowing the protocol to boost its stablecoin reserves.
This has led to a major shift for the world’s fifth-largest stable coin as it aims to remove its stabilising algorithm, reports said.
The stablecoin is pegged to the US dollar and backed by collateralised digital assets. It uses an algorithm to stabilise it value by minting and burning its FXS governance token owned by Frax Finance.
Frax Finance’s decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) votes and rules with direct democratic control of its community via proposals.
The current proposal will keep protocol earnings while purchasing up to $3 million USD in its liquid Ether staking derivative, frxETH.
This will replace creating FXS tokens to raise collateral ratios and avoid boosting its tokens supply.
According to a Telegram group chat from Sam Kazemian, Frax Finance’s co-founder, he supported boosting collateral as the “safest design, while also being the most capital efficient.” Voters unanimously backed the proposal by 98 percent.
Depegged Stablecoins Face Glitches
The news comes after numerous stablecoins were depegged and fell significantly in value. This sparked the collapse of major cryptocurrencies such as TerraUSD in May last year, leading authorities to investigate Terraform Labs and Do Kwon on charges of defrauding investors.
Nearly $600 million USD in redemptions took place last year following the FTX bankruptcy, causing Tether (USDT) to decrease to $0.97. TrueUSD (TUSD), BInanceUSD (BUSD) and others were also affected last year following the crisis.
Immersve, a Web3 payment protocol, has teamed up with payment system behemoth Mastercard to facilitate cryptocurrency payments.
The companies announced the partnership, using decentralised protocols to facilitate crypto transactions. Locations and businesses that accept Mastercard payments, online and in-person, can support users of the new payment platform.
Immersve and Mastercard’s crypto payment system uses USDC stablecoins and allows users to integrate their Web3 wallets for direct payments.
Immersive also plans to partner with third-party settlement providers to sanction USDC purchases for card holders. This swaps USDC to fiat currencies while leveraging Mastercard’s payment network.
Additionally, card holders can integrate Web3 wallets and DeFi protocols on Immersve applications programme interfaces (APIs).
The news comes after Mastercard furthered ties to the Web3 industry with a cutting-edge accelerator programme. The company’s Start Path programme created a cohort of fintech startups to test new Web3 technologies.
Mastercard and affiliated experts trained, deployed, and facilitated cryptocurrency, payment, and blockchain technologies for the seven selected companies.
The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) has upgraded its illegal activity detection capabilities.
Its enhancements come amid major efforts to monitor and regulate activities in the cryptocurrency industry.
According to a statement from the organisation, it said that it had upgraded its “new insider trading and market manipulation risk monitoring tools.”
NYDFS superintendent Adrienne Harris explained further,
“This is a significant step in our supervision of the virtual currency industry as it continues to quickly transform and mature. These tools will help us combat financial crime and fraud, hold regulated entities accountable, and further strengthen our national leadership in virtual currency supervision.”
She added the tools would help the regulator “combat financial crime and fraud, hold regulated entities accountable, and further strengthen our national leadership invirtual currency supervision.”
The news comes after the agency stated it had “expedited procurement of additional blockchain analytics technology” to enforce Russian sanctions.
The NYDFS also enforced measures on Paxos Trust, forcing the cryptocurrency firm to stop minting Binance USD stablecoins following investigations.
The developments come after the NYDFS slapped a $100 million USD settlement on Coinbase after it accused the crypto firm of backlogging 100,000 alerts detailing suspicious transactions.
Currently, the organisation is investigating crypto platform Gemini’s Earn lending programme, which it suspected of selling securities.
Coinbase Global posted losses in its fourth quarter (Q4) reports due to mounting pressure from an industry downturn triggered by cryptocurrency platform collapses, it reported on Tuesday.
Coinbase shares nosedived around 86 percent in value last year, and slumped a further 2 percent following the report.
The news comes as numerous cryptocurrency platforms, including FTX, Three Arrows Capital, and Voyager filed for bankruptcy in 2022, sparking a wave of negative investor sentiment on digital assets.
Further issues surrounding cryptocurrencies led to the fall of crypto lending exchange Genesis in January. This continued a mixed trend of market sentiment and a further tightening of cryptocurrency restrictions.
Sam Bankman Fried, the disgraced former chief executive and founder of FTX, currently faces eight counts of financial malfeasance. Charges include wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and many others.
In a letter to shareholders, Coinbase wrote: “As macroeconomic indicators like inflation remained high and interest rates rose throughout the year, crypto market cap declined along with broader equity markets.”
It explained further:
“These weakening market conditions became exacerbated by two idiosyncratic events. The first was the depegging of $LUNA in Q2’22 which contributed to a ~60% crypto market cap decline in that quarter and exposed poor risk management practices in crypto, which ultimately helped drive the credit related bankruptcies of Three Arrows Capital, Voyager, and Celsius.”
It also cited the collapse of FTX in Q4 2022, resulting from fraud, which “helped drive additional credit related bankruptcies.”