• Aug 01, 2024

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust BTC Holdings Dropped 55% in First Half of 2024

Grayscale Investments disclosed Friday that its flagship Bitcoin fund has shed more than 348,000 Bitcoin in its past two quarters as investors bail for other funds. That's a sum valued at around $22.4 billion based on today’s prices. Not long before the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) converted into a spot Bitcoin ETF in January, the fund held close to 620,000 Bitcoin. In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Grayscale stated that figure has since fallen below 276...

• Aug 01, 2024

‘Hamster Kombat’ Telegram Game Airdrop: Everything You Need to Know

Hamster Kombat picked up the baton from Notcoin, leading the next generation of Telegram crypto games while apparently amassing huge droves of players—more than 300 million, the developers said in late July, just weeks after Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov claimed that the game had topped 239 million players earlier in the month. What’s driving players to the game, which pairs simple tapping gameplay with lightly strategic moves as you take the role of a hamster CEO of a crypto exchange? An...

• Aug 01, 2024

Man Pleads Guilty to Theft After Crypto.com Refunded His Partner $6 Million Instead of $65

Centralized exchange Crypto.com accidentally refunded a woman $6.8 million (approximately $10.47 million Australian dollars) instead of $65. She and her partner then withdrew and spent the money. Now, three years later, he pled guilty alongside his partner for theft of $4.42 million, as reported by NewsWire. Jatinder Singh tried to deposit $65 into his Crypto.com account back in May 2021 using his partner’s bank account. Due to the name discrepancy between the exchange and bank account, Crypto.c...

• Aug 01, 2024

Solana DEX Raydium Sees RAY Drop 5% After Twitter Meme Coin Misfire

Solana decentralized exchange (DEX) Raydium has seen its RAY token slump overnight following yesterday's abortive attempt to launch a meme coin using a Twitter token launchpad. Per data from CoinGecko, Raydium is currently priced at $2.06, down 5.1% on the day and 12.9% on the week, after dropping to a local low of under $2. The token remains up over 11% on the month, however. Yesterday, Raydium attempted to launch a meme token, CTO, using makenow.meme, a Twitter account that automatically spins...

• Aug 01, 2024

Terra Founder Do Kwon Will Be Extradited to South Korea—Court Says It's Final

The Montenegro Appellate Court upheld its decision to extradite Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs, to South Korea. The August 1 ruling marks the conclusion of a protracted legal saga involving multiple appeals and judicial reversals. The Appellate Court confirmed the June 28 decision of the Higher Court in Podgorica, which granted the extradition request from South Korea while rejecting a concurrent request from the United States. The court’s ruling is based on the provisions of Montenegro'...

• Aug 01, 2024

Bybit to Exit From France’s Market as EU’s Crypto Regulation Takes Hold

Bybit said Thursday it will withdraw from the French market, citing “regulatory developments” as Europe’s long-awaited crypto legislation reshapes how companies and individuals should treat the asset class. From August 13, French users will be unable to transact on the exchange other than to withdraw any funds they already have in their account, Bybit said in a statement. Accounts are restricted to a “close-only” mode, meaning that users will not be able to add any new positions or purchase any...

• Aug 01, 2024

Crypto Market Will Continue to Expand Over Next Two Years: Gemini

The crypto market is expected to continue its expansion over the next two years as several tailwinds continue to stack up for the asset class, crypto exchange Gemini said in its latest Institutional Insights report on Thursday. A combination of favorable monetary policy, regulatory shifts, and infrastructure development will drive growth, even in the face of recent market volatility, the exchange said. Over the past three months, the prices of major cryptos Bitcoin and Ethereum, have traded with...

• Aug 01, 2024

Marathon Digital Posts $200 Million Quarterly Loss Amid Bitcoin Mining Sector Woes

Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings reported a significant loss for the second quarter of this year, citing the impact of Bitcoin’s halving event on its operations as rivals posted similar results. The Fort Lauderdale, Florida, firm faced a substantial net loss and decreased Bitcoin production amid rising operational challenges, according to its latest quarterly figures. The Bitcoin halving event in April, which typically occurs approximately every four years, effectively slashed the reward...

• Aug 01, 2024

Meet Flux: New Open-Source AI Image Generator Beats Midjourney, SD3 and Auraflow

Black Forest Labs—the team that helped develop the original Stable Diffusion—has launched Flux, the largest open-source text-to-image model to date. With a staggering 12 billion parameters, Flux can delivery visuals that rival those of Midjourney, and possibly beat any other model currently available—be it open or closed source. Flux comes in three variations: Flux Dev, which is open source with a non-commercial license for community development; Flux Schnell, which is a faster, distilled versio...

• Aug 01, 2024

Google Ramps Up Fight Against AI Deepfakes in Search Results

In its latest bid to curb unauthorized AI-generated deepfakes, Google is taking new steps to remove and demote websites in searches that have been reported to contain illicit images, the technology and search giant said on Wednesday. An AI deepfake is media created using generative AI to produce videos, pictures, or audio clips that appear real. Many of these fake images depict celebrities like actress Scarlett Johansson, politicians like U.S. President Joe Biden, and, more insidiously, children...