Everything was transparent and I was amazed when I dug deeper, superb technology, exceptional development team!
Crypto lobby spending in the US reaching new heights? Better buckle up, folks!
Anthropic, an AI innovation company that FTX invested during the leadership of SBF, has confirmed that it has received a US$2 billion financing commitment from Google. Can this investment revive FTX?
Lens Protocol is a blockchain-based social media protocol that aims to reshape the fundamentals of social media to give users more of what they have. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, Lens Protocol utilises the features of blockchain technology to provide users with a more open, free and secure social media experience, which will become an influential social media protocol and replace traditional social media platforms through the following strategies and advantages:
Decentralisation and User Ownership: Through its decentralised architecture and blockchain technology, Lens Protocol ensures that users have ownership and control over their data, and that users can better protect their privacy and decide how they want to use, share and benefit from their data.
NFT and Feature Identity Allowance: Users assign NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and associated identity features to create unique social media experiences.
Openness and third-party developer support: Support for third-party developers to build social media ecosystems by sharing user and subscriber data, increasing openness and innovation.
Transparent and tamper-proof: The tamper-proof nature of blockchain ensures authenticity and transparency of information on social media. Users can verify that the content posted is authentic and trustworthy, thus reducing the possibility of disinformation and information manipulation.
Community Autonomy and Governance: encouraging community participation and decision-making, through a decentralised governance mechanism, users are able to participate in the platform's rule-making and decision-making process. This community autonomy enhances the fairness and transparency of the platform.
Rewards and incentives: Users can be provided with incentives through a token economy system to encourage active participation and contributing behaviour. Users can be rewarded for creating valuable content, promoting the development of the platform, and participating in community activities.
Cross-chain interoperability: It can be integrated and collaborated with other decentralised applications (DApps) to expand its functionality and user base. Through cross-chain interoperability, users can deeply integrate their social media experience with other Web 3.0 applications.
MicroStrategy has acquired an additional 5,445 BTC for ~$147.3 million at an average price of $27,053 per bitcoin. As of 9/24/23 MicroStrategy hodls 158,245 BTC acquired for ~$4.68 billion at an average price of $29,582 per bitcoin.
The strength of your hand, is determined during a dip.
Bitcoin Gets Its Own Take on Social App Friend.tech
After a 48-hour coding sprint, a Friend.tech look-alike dubbed Alpha launched on top of Bitcoin this weekend, bringing a social token experience to users of the venerated blockchain.
Like Friend.tech—which is built on Ethereum scaling network Base and saw a flurry of activity last month (and a recent revival)—Alpha is a decentralized social network protocol that lets users tokenize and monetize their online presence and content via tokens.
In other words, people can buy tokens tied to individual creators that rise or fall in price, and can be used to gate access to exclusive content. It’s another incarnation of the “social token” concept, and social finance projects like these are often billed as being a way to bring new users into the crypto space.
After the recent Friend.tech surge, pseudonymous Alpha founder Punk3700 described his Bitcoin-based platform to Decrypt as “the next big leap in the world of social finance.” Despite building it in a weekend, he said the project “aims to bring a luxurious and exclusive experience to social interactions.”
At the time of writing, new users are joining the network every few minutes, many of which amass tens or even hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers.
Punk3700 is also one of the core members behind New Bitcoin City, an ecosystem that is dabbling in art, on-chain gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi), and AI as a way to “explore Bitcoin beyond just a currency.”
Alpha is the collective's latest development—but its unique tech stack isn’t entirely focused on Bitcoin. According to its founder, Alpha “runs a rollup that rolls up to another rollup that rolls up to Bitcoin.”
What does that even mean? In short, it’s a way of using multiple blockchain networks to create an experience that can be responsive and scalable. In this case, the project leverages a hybrid blockchain architecture with several components: Bitcoin, Ethereum scaling network Polygon, and the project’s own Bitcoin scaling network called Trustless Computer.
According to New Bitcoin City’s website, a Trustless Computer is a low-cost and speedy layer-2 blockchain built on top of Bitcoin that can support things like a decentralized exchange (DEX), tokenized communities called decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and NFT marketplaces.
It is a no-code tool that allows for developers to choose whether they want to implement Optimistic rollups or zero-knowledge rollups (zkRollups) to facilitate apps built on top of Bitcoin.
Alpha’s hybrid design uses Optimistic rollups as a scaling solution by moving computation and data storage off-chain from Bitcoin. It currently taps into Polygon, the Ethereum scaling network, using it for data storage—although Punk3700 says data availability can eventually live 100% on Bitcoin “if need be.”
This is one of the differences Alpha has with Friend.tech. Built on Base, Friend.tech leverages rollups directly on Ethereum, inheriting the network’s security. Alpha has to look elsewhere for solutions.
“Rollups on Bitcoin right now aren't true rollups because Bitcoin can't verify proofs,” explained Bob Bodily, CEO of Bioniq, an Ordinals marketplace that runs on a Bitcoin sidechain. Lack of verification on Bitcoin’s part means a certain degree of centralization will exist.
That said, he told Decrypt that “people don’t usually wait around for full decentralization,” pointing to the billions locked in layer-2 networks on Ethereum. “People are keen to experiment with new tech.”
Even so, Bodily isn’t sold on the answers Alpha’s team provided in response to some of the concerns expressed over the project. He said he still doesn't know who owns the smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) rollups, whether they’re upgradeable or immutable, and more.
Tokenomics also raise some enormous red flags, which the team has yet to address. According to the Trustless Computer website, the token supply is approximately $100 million TC, with 99.8% of it sitting in one address.
“I've been digging in the explorer, but it's very hard to figure it all out,” Bodily said.
Even amid such concerns, Alpha’s launch has sent a ripple of excitement throughout the Bitcoin space, much as the NFT-like Ordinals protocol and its BRC-20 token standard did earlier this year.
Jake Gallen, strategy lead at Emblem Vault, has been at the forefront of the launch. Emblem Vault is a tool that lets users store tokens across blockchains without need for a bridge. “There is a more authentic feel to it,” Gallen told Decrypt, citing a friendlier user experience, along with the fact that “there is no point in airdrop farming.”
“If you're building a brand, the goal is to distribute awareness across platforms," he concluded. “Just as most people have multiple social media accounts across multiple apps, crypto users will use SocialFi on whichever blockchain they prefer.”
Scammers Used ChatGPT to Unleash a Crypto Botnet on X
OpenAI had not responded to a request for comment about the botnet by time of posting. The usage policy for its AI models prohibits using them for scams or disinformation.
ChatGPT, and other cutting-edge chatbots, use what are known as large language models to generate text in response to a prompt. With enough training data (much of it scraped from various sources on the web), enough computer power, and feedback from human testers, bots like ChatGPT can respond in surprisingly sophisticated ways to a wide range of inputs. At the same time, they can also blurt out hateful messages, exhibit social biases, and make things up.
A correctly configured ChatGPT-based botnet would be difficult to spot, more capable of duping users, and more effective at gaming the algorithms used to prioritize content on social media.
“It tricks both the platform and the users,” Menczer says of the ChatGPT-powered botnet. And, if a social media algorithm spots that a post has a lot of engagement—even if that engagement is from other bot accounts—it will show the post to more people. “That's exactly why these bots are behaving the way they do,” Menczer says. And governments looking to wage disinformation campaigns are most likely already developing or deploying such tools, he adds.
Researchers have long worried that the technology behind ChatGPT could pose a disinformation risk, and OpenAI even delayed the release of a predecessor to the system over such fears. But, to date, there are few concrete examples of large language models being misused at scale. Some political campaigns are already using AI though, with prominent politicians sharing deepfake videos designed to disparage their opponents.
William Wang, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says it is exciting to be able to study real criminal usage of ChatGPT. “Their findings are pretty cool,” he says of the Fox8 work.
Wang believes that many spam webpages are now generated automatically, and he says it is becoming more difficult for humans to spot this material. And, with AI improving all the time, it will only get harder. “The situation is pretty bad,” he says.
This May, Wang’s lab developed a technique for automatically distinguishing ChatGPT-generated text from real human writing, but he says it is expensive to deploy because it uses OpenAI’s API, and he notes that the underlying AI is constantly improving. “It’s a kind of cat-and-mouse problem,” Wang says.
X could be a fertile testing ground for such tools. Menczer says that malicious bots appear to have become far more common since Elon Musk took over what was then known as Twitter, despite the tech mogul’s promise to eradicate them. And it has become more difficult for researchers to study the problem because of the steep price hike imposed on usage of the API.
Someone at X apparently took down the Fox8 botnet after Menczer and Yang published their paper in July. Menczer’s group used to alert Twitter of new findings on the platform, but they no longer do that with X. “They are not really responsive,” Menczer says. “They don’t really have the staff.”
Layer 2 Metis Take Back Control Of Their Official X (Twitter) Account
In today’s announcement, Metis said it has regained control of its X account and has taken appropriate security measures. This is a Sim Swap attack targeting key industry members.
We’re relieved to inform the community that we’ve regained control of the Metis X account, and have taken the appropriate security measures.
In order to confirm the reliability of this information, please verify the announcement made by @MetisDAOfdn, as well as those made in our…
— Metis (@MetisDAO) August 16, 2023
Unfortunately, one of the team members fell victim to this coordinated operation, which resulted in the bad guy being able to take over the account in about 30 hours.
Yesterday, Metis used the company’s prominent X (formerly Twitter) account as the launchpad for a phishing campaign. However, soon the situation came to light when one of the key executives, Elena Sinelnikova, revealed that the platform’s security had been breached.
This resulted in the dissemination of phishing links to over 150,000 followers. However, no damage has been reported yet. Sinelnikova expressed urgency, asserting that X needs to suspend the compromised account until the team restores control quickly.
Metis is a Layer 2 that allows users to participate in Defi with low cost and extensive functionality. The protocol provides full support for use cases such as farming yield, DEX trading and powers the Gig economy through dApps that offer fast and cheap micropayments.
DISCLAIMER: The information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your research before investing.
Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms trims Q2 loss to $27.7M
Colorado-based Bitcoin mining firm Riot Platforms narrowed its second quarter net loss to $27.7 million as it ramped up its Bitcoin production and reached record hash rate capacity.
The crypto miner posted total revenue of $76.7 million — up 5.2% from Q2 2022 — which was primarily driven by a 27% year-on-year increase in Bitcoin production, offset by a decline in Bitcoin prices, according to the firm’s Aug. 9 results filing.
The firm’s mining revenue of $49.7 million made up 64.7% of the firm’s total revenue over the quarter. An additional $13.5 million was made through the firm’s power curtailment credits.
Meanwhile, its Q2 net loss was a massive reduction from the prior year period, which was $353.5 million. It was also around half the net loss posted in the first quarter of 2023.
The firm produced 1,775 Bitcoin in the quarter, while its average cost to mine a Bitcoin (BTC) was $8,389 in Q2, beating beat Q1’s average price.
The mining firm also reached an all-time high hash rate capacity of 10.7 exahashes per second and anticipates this figure will reach 20.1 EH/s by the second quarter of 2024, before reaching 35.4 EH/s in 2025.
The estimates come following its purchase of 33,280 mining rigs in late June, with the 35.4 EH/s figure assuming that Riot will exercise its right to purchase an additional 66,560 miners at the same price and terms at some time in the near future.
Despite Riot’s share price falling 4.42% earlier in the day, its share price fell another 0.86% in after hours, shortly after the firm’s results were released.