Cryptocurrency

The Agilex M-Series FPGA is the only solution to offer support for HBM2e, DDR5 and Optane memory, with a up to 32 GB DRAM capacity and 820 GBps maximum bandwidth. Intel claims it also offers 60% improved performance over the previous gen and twice the fabric performance over Xilinx's solutions.

President Biden will be signing a wide-reaching cryptocurrency control executive order that will aim to coordinate the regulation efforts of the various government agencies currently involved in monitoring the crypto market. The development and viability of a digital dollar may also be addressed.

Non-fungible tokens may have to be treated like stocks with all the regulatory compliance resulting from that fact, claims a Securities and Exchange Commission probe. Meanwhile, a Treasury Department study says NFTs may need more regulation to avoid money laundering activities pertinent to "high-value art."

The South American hacker collective allegedly put the confidential data that was stolen in a recent cyber attack to good use and has developed a bypass tool for Nvidia's cryptomining hashrate limiter that is integrated in most GeForce RTX GPUs.

The major digital asset exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, or Kraken, aren't going to institute blanket bans on Russian crypto accounts despite Ukraine's plea to freeze any and all transactions. Such a move would fly in the face of crypto's libertarian virtue, they argue, yet add that if they are forced to comply with government mandates they might have to go along.

After a sharp drop that took it down to US$34,338.56, Bitcoin is now back above US$35,000. This dive of the world's most popular cryptocurrency comes as a direct consequence of Russia's military actions in Ukraine and, unfortunately, is also accompanied by a noticeable decline of the global stock market.

One Timothy McKimmy has filed a lawsuit against the OpenSea NFT exchange platform claiming that they had their pricey Bored Ape Yacht Club series NFT stolen without any repercussions. The Bored Ape #3475 NFT, they argue, is rarer than Justin Bieber's US$1.3 million Bored Ape, while demanding compensation.

(Update: Malware warning) A public beta of the nifty little piece of software for cryptominers will be released in the coming few days, and it could possibly impact the prices of all Nvidia's RTX GPUs with the infamous hashrate limiter.

A phishing attack on users of OpenSea has resulted in the theft of NFTs worth millions of dollars. The source of the attack remains unclear, with 17 affected users identified.

China set digital yuan machines for athletes, Olympics officials or visitors to exchange their dollars or rubles to the local e-CNY digital currency as a way to popularize it. The digital renminbi ATMs took many foreign currencies and issued a hardware wallet with the corresponding amount in Chinese crypto in the form of a plastic debit card that could then be used for payment in shops and restaurants.

Yesterday, Ukraine legislators voted in favor of legalizing cryptocurrencies. The goal of this move is to reduce corruption risks and to prevent fraud. This is the second attempt in five months, as the early October bill that had a similar goal was vetoed by President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Steam has now removed suspicious mods of the popular game Cities: Skylines after users complained of performance regressions upon installing a redesigned Harmony mod. Turns out that the redesigned mod was created by a notorious developer named Chaos, who put users' computers at serious risk of getting infected by trojans, keyloggers, and Bitcoin miners.

Prompted by the cryptocurrency wallet forfeiture possibility opened by the Canadian government's Emergencies Act against the so-called Freedom Convoy financing, a U.S. congressman is introducing a new "Keep Your Coins" bill. It aims to prevent digital asset forfeitures by the government without a court order and stop unsanctioned crypto transactions monitoring.

The popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase ran one of the most memorable Super Bowl ads in recent memory - a mystery bouncing QR code with allusions to The Office TV series and 8-bit gaming. The Coinbase Super Bowl commercial was so successful that it crashed the exchange's critical trading app, forcing a reaction by none other than Edward Snowden.

Before Bloomberg recently ranked the richest people in crypto, everyone assumed that this was Satoshi Nakamoto, the mystery Bitcoin protocol creator who allegedly owns 1.1 million of the earliest bitcoins mined. It turned out that the CEO of the largest crypto exchange Binance owns that title now, and he just invested US$200 million in Forbes to help educate the globe about crypto.

Intel's new energy-efficient accelerators for cryptomining are intended to prepare the company for the era of the metaverse and Web 3.0, while gamers probably hope that these new chipsets could potentially ease the continuous GPU shortage.

Apple has announced that a new feature by which merchants will be able to take in-person payments using nothing more than their iPhone, using these devices' NFC modules. Although it is not to become available until later in 2022, its launch has led to speculation that it will also unlock the ability to buy using cryptocurrencies via the new system. Either way, the new ability will only be available in the US on its release.

Less than a week after over 94,000 bitcoins linked to the 2016 Bitfinex hack were noticed in a suspicious transfer, the United States Department of Justice has announced the seizure of those bitcoins and the arrest of two individuals linked to the hack. The DOJ seized the bitcoins, currently valued at roughly US$3.6 billion, and will work with Bitfinex to return the crypto to victims of the 2016 hack.

The top thousand of Ethereum "whale wallets" have made Shiba Inu the most widely traded token there, which, together with the announced coin burns, could explain the skyrocketing of the $SHIB price in just the past 24 hours. Shiba Inu replaced the Curve DAO Token (CRV) as the most popular coin trade in the whale Ethereum wallets each of which holds US$145 million on average.

Tesla lost US$101 million on its crypto investments in 2021, reveals its latest SEC filing, as Elon Musk's buoyant $US1.5 billion Bitcoin purchase saw some writedowns throughout the year and towards the crypto price crash at its end. Tesla previously profited from a March sale of some of its Bitcoin holdings, and now holds US$1.99 billion worth of bitcoins.

To no will of their own, the identities of the co-creators of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection have been revealed. The doxxed Florida men are behind one of the most coveted and celebrity-endorsed NFT kits in recent memory, with Justin Bieber spending nearly US$1.8 million on two Bored Ape NFTs in the span of a week.

A report published by Chainalysis has detailed the prolific wash trading going on in the NFT marketplace. The 262 sellers that were selling their NFT collections to themselves engaged in the practice a minimum of 25 times. After artificially increasing the value of the collections, the sellers profited more than US$8 million by later selling the NFTs to unsuspecting buyers.

The original "meme coin" is now reincarnated in the form of an NFT collection by its co-founder called 'Dreaming Doge' and available over at the OpenSea platform. The Dreaming Doge set consists of eight digital art pieces with 88 editions each that go for the equivalent of about $254 each in Ethereum.

Security researcher warns that the Mars Stealer malware is now affecting Chrome-based browser crypto wallet extensions like MetaMask, Coinbase wallet and Binance chain wallet, plus it also compromises 2FA authenticators like Microsoft's Authenticator and Authy. Extensions for Firefox and Opera are not affected, but Mars Stealer may still hijack site credentials on these two browsers.

Mark Webber and a group of scientists from the University of Sussex calculated that it would take a quantum processor with 1.9 billion qubits to effectively crack the Bitcoin encryption, and this is most likely not going to happen in the next 10 years, giving Bitcoin core developers enough time to make the code quantum-resistant.

A huge number of stolen bitcoins have been spotted on the move. A total of 94,643.29 bitcoins that were taken from the 2016 Bitfinex hack have been transferred to an unknown wallet, with the current street value at the time of writing being over US$3.54 billion. The original heist involved the unauthorized transfer of 119,755 bitcoins.

India has swung from an intention to ban all digital assets transactions in the country to a proposal to tax crypto with a 30% government cut on profits and issuing a digital rupee. According to analysts this arguably means that Indian officials are exploring the possibility of crypto becoming legal tender.

In an apparent crypto fraud, a popular game streamer known from Twitch and YouTube has allegedly scammed his fans out of half a million dollars by creating his own cryptocurrency and employing a simple pump and dump scheme. Instead of returning the money, he decided to buy himself an expensive new Tesla.

An investigation into Nvidia’s Lite Hash Rate (LHR) solution to prevent GeForce RTX 30 series boards from being bought up en masse by crypto miners has revealed that many involved in the crypto craze were not discouraged by Team Green’s limiter. Third-party software is available to bypass the LHR mining lock and raise the rate.

Authorities in the Spanish town of Santiponce busted upon a cryptocurrency mining operation and seized €50,000 worth of equipment. It was initially suspected to be a marijuana farm due to its high energy consumption. The miners were found to be stealing €2,000 worth of power every month via an illegal electricity connection.

Payment card company VISA's crypto wallet-linked cards witnessed a bonanza of transactions in its first quarter of the fiscal 2022 year. VISA's payment cards linked to Bitcoin and other digital currencies scored 70% more in transactions for a single quarter than for the whole of fiscal 2021.

Lamborghini has announced its first NFT in tandem with Swedish artist, Fabian Oefner. The NFT features a space-themed design with a Lamborghini car that is disintegrating into the atmosphere. The company intends to attract young people in the NFT community and capitalise on the current NFT trend.

Ubisoft VP Nicolas Pouard is arguing that gamers currently focus too much on the downsides brought upon by NFTs instead of focusing on the direct benefits. Nevertheless, Ubisoft's NFT implementation appears to rely on the cash shop item model instead of the play to earn one.

Inspired by the mayor of New York City, Belgian official Christophe De Beukelaer has decided to receive his paychecks in Bitcoin. Since he is the first European official to do so and the legal framework is not yet in place, his monthly paycheck of 5,500 Euros will be converted to cryptocurrency (no details available yet).

According to recent rumours, Diem, the stablecoin project backed by Meta, is looking to sell off assets such as its intellectual property. The company has faced many setbacks, including warnings from the U.S. Federal Reserve last year.

With all their controversial issues, NFTs still seem appealing for the YouTube platform, especially when it comes to solidifying the communities created around content creators. A roadmap for YouTube's NFT integration could be presented in the coming months.

The International Monetary Fund has advised that El Salvador's government renege on its decision to make Bitcoin a legal tender in the country, citing "large risks associated with the use of Bitcoin on financial stability..." The success of a US$1.3 billion loan negotiation with El Salvador may hinge on following the IMF's advice.

Adding to the worries of cryptocurrency investors, the credit rating agency Fitch has issued a statement defining Bitcoin mining as a potential threat to the stability of the American power supply system. Not only is crypto mining energy-intensive, Fitch says, but the plunge in Bitcoin prices could force farms to renege on their long-term electricity supply contracts.

An orthopedic surgeon at the Teaching Georges-Pompidou European Hospital has tried to sell an X-ray of one of his patients as NFT. He listed the X-ray of a woman who survived the Bataclan terror attack in Paris with a Kalashnikov bullet lodged in her arm on the OpenSea NFT platform at a US$2776 price.

The average retail prices for units in the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series and the AMD Radeon RX 6000 range have dropped slightly in the last three weeks. The fall in prices for the Ampere and RDNA 2-based cards appears to coincide with the weakening Ethereum price and improved stock availability. However, average retail prices are still close to double list prices.

The recently elected mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, has received his first paycheck in cryptocurrency earlier this week via Coinbase's Direct Deposit. Thanks to the Bitcoin & Ethereum combination that was transferred to his wallet, he became the first mayor of the Big Apple to be paid using crypto.

Another sudden selloff and crashing prices have turned into a major concern for crypto investors. The world's most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has meanwhile lost almost half of its value since early November, painting a dire picture of the struggling crypto market.

Twitter is rolling out a way to connect your crypto wallet to your account and pick any NFT image in the JPEG or PNG format there as your profile picture. The NFT avatars will appear in a hexagonal shape instead of a circle, and for now can only be set via the Twitter for iOS app.

The Russian Central Bank has come up with its own set of proposals to add to the Parliament's working group on crypto regulation that was formed back in December. The head of Bank of Russia's Financial Stability Department presented a report that essentially suggests a full ban on crypto payments, mining, and transactions in the country.

Opera has launched a dedicated surfing tool in its Crypto Browser Project that has been built with Web3 in mind from the ground up. Besides an integrated Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchains wallet, the browser features a Crypto Corner for news and quick exchange access, as well as a plethora of privacy and security features.

Although no Tesla cars can be purchased using DOGE yet, the official Tesla online store is currently selling the Cyberquad for Kids (none in stock right now, apparently) and accepts this meme coin as (the only?) payment method. Other products available for DOGE are the Cyberwhistle and the Giga Texas Belt Buckle.

After an initial jump of over 15 percent that came after the new rumors regarding a listing on Robinhood, Shiba Inu is now down nearly 7 percent compared to yesterday. Although the meme coin will probably hit Robinhood sooner or later, it looks like it will take some time until it even gets near to the ATH value.

Gap has released NFTs, which were designed using hoodie art, as part of a digital experience to engage customers in line with modern culture. This customer experience consists of multiple tiers, with the Epic tier created via a partnership with Brandon Sines. The digital art was developed using Tezos blockchain, which Gap endorsed for its environmental friendliness.

A prototype of the EV with cryptomining capabilities has been driven on public streets in Canada during a first test drive, and this milestone for the Daymak Spiritus has of course been captured in a recently released video.

Answering the question who is currently the richest person in crypto, the net worth of the Binance exchange founder and CEO has been estimated for the first time. Bloomberg's Billionaire Index immediately shot him before the alleged inventor of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto's riches. While Satoshi is supposedly the owner of 1.1 million bitcoins sloshing around with dubious access privileges, the Binance CEO net worth is tangible and now pegged at US$96 billion, making him the richest man in crypto.