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AI Eye chatted with Framework Venture’s Vance Spencer recently and he raved about the possibilities offered by an upcoming game his fund invested in called AI Arena in which players train AI models how to battle each other in an arena.

Framework Ventures was an early investor in Chainlink and Synthetix and three years ahead of NBA Top Shots with a similar NFL platform, so when they get excited about the future prospects, it’s worth looking into.

Also backed by Paradigm, AI Arena is like a cross between Super Smash Brothers and Axie Infinity. The AI models are tokenized as NFTs, meaning players can train them up and flip them for profit or rent them to noobs. While this is a gamified version, there are endless possibilities involved with crowdsourcing user-trained models for specific purposes and then selling them as tokens in a blockchain-based marketplace.

“Probably some of the most valuable assets on-chain will be tokenized AI models; that’s my theory at least,” Spencer predicts.

AI Arena chief operating officer Wei Xi explains that his cofounders, Brandon Da Silva and Dylan Pereira, had been toying with creating games for years, and when NFTs and later AI came out, Da Silva had the brainwave to put all three elements together. 

Janice McAfee, the widow of tech impresario John McAfee, is still in the midst of grief. She is doing “odd jobs to feed herself,” has run out of funds, and still doesn’t know what really happened to her husband.

Since the death of crypto guru and antivirus pioneer husband John McAfee in a Barcelona prison more than two years ago, she has remained in Spain in an undisclosed location and has only been saved from homelessness by the kindness of friends.

She can’t move on because she still doesn’t know what happened to her husband in spite of a September ruling this year from a Catalan court that John McAfee died by suicide and the case was effectively closed.

In an exclusive Zoom interview with Magazine, she explained her current situation.

“For more than two years, I’ve not only had to deal with the tragedy of John’s death, but it’s so hard to move on because the authorities refuse to release the autopsy of his death. I have tried and tried, but they will not let me see it.

Irene Zhao, the Simp-Queen mastermind behind the SO-COL platform and a Crypto Twitter influencer, explains that having a celebrity in your corner can turbocharge your NFT collection.

Zhao’s first Simp DAO and NFT collection, IreneDAO, started with a floor price that was basically pocket change in ETH.

“I think it was about zero-point-something ETH,” Zhao recalls.

However, the game changed for Zhao when controversial YouTube star Logan Paul threw in around a quarter of a million dollars in January 2022.

“The next day, I woke up, the floor price went up five times when Logan Paul bought about 20 pieces or something. I was really shocked,” she explains. 

Lugui Tillier is the sales manager for Lumx Studios, one of the top cryptocurrency firms in Rio de Janeiro — a city with a burgeoning crypto industry.

But for Tillier — who holds dual citizenship between Belgium and Brazil — cryptocurrency is more than a job. It was a passion sparked by a friend, and it evolved into his first full-time crypto job with Lumx in 2021.

I was very fortunate because the father of one of my closest friends was the one who founded the first crypto firm here in Brazil in 2016 — BLP Crypto. Before that, he was always talking to me about crypto and blockchain, telling me it was the future and that I should learn more about it. So around 2019, I finally listened to him and started studying Bitcoin. I started working for Lumx in 2021.

We are a blockchain abstraction solution for big enterprises. We help anyone who wants to integrate blockchain into their business, or companies that want to deploy projects or experiment on blockchain. We do things like payment solutions and decentralized identity (DID) solutions.

Big companies can mostly focus only on their own applications — not on hiring blockchain engineers or learning about blockchain technology and infrastructure, which is still complex. So we enable those big companies to work and test safely. I’m the manager of sales for Lumx, so I’m the one responsible for building and maintaining relationships with blockchains and protocols.

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of all seven charges by a jury in his criminal trial in New York after about four hours of deliberation. He was convicted of two counts of wire fraud, two counts of wire fraud conspiracy, one count of securities fraud, one count of commodities fraud conspiracy and one count of money laundering conspiracy. He will return to court for sentencing by New York District Judge Lewis Kaplan on March 28, 2024. Government prosecutors will recommend a sentence, but Judge Kaplan will have the final say. Bankman-Fried’s crimes each carry a maximum sentence of between five and 20 years in prison with the wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy carrying a maximum 20-year sentence. His lawyers, however, say the fight isn’t over yet.

Payment giant PayPal has received a subpoena from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding its U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin. The subpoena requested that PayPal produce certain documents, the firm said. “We are cooperating with the SEC regarding this request,” PayPal noted in a financial report. The SEC has sued several of the largest local companies in the crypto industry, including its ongoing lawsuit against Coinbase. In October 2023, the regulator moved to dismiss its lawsuit against Ripple, the company behind the XRP token, one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.

The ticker for Invesco and Galaxy’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) — BTCO — has appeared on the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation’s (DTCC) website, marking a step forward in the application process for the two asset managers. A ticker added to the list of “ETF Products” on the DTCC’s site is not a guarantee of future approval for that product. However, according to a DTCC spokesperson, it is standard practice to add securities to the NSCC security eligibility file “in preparation for the launch of a new ETF to the market.” Recently, BlackRock and 21Shares’ application for a similar product were added to the DTCC website as well.

Switzerland’s St.Galler Kantonalbank (SGKB), one of the largest banks in the country, is moving into cryptocurrency by introducing Bitcoin and Ether trading to its customers. The bank has partnered with the SEBA Bank to offer its clients digital asset custody and brokerage services. SGKB plans to expand its offerings to additional cryptocurrencies based on client demand. Founded back in 1868, St.Galler Kantonalbank is reportedly the fifth largest bank in Switzerland, having had a total of 53.6 billion Swiss francs ($58.9 billion) in assets under management at the end of 2022.

Jack Dorsey-led Block published its third-quarter earnings report on Nov. 2, revealing a profitable quarter and surpassing analyst expectations. The firm had $5.62 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2023, boosted by solid revenue growth in Cash App and Square, with $44 million in profit on its Bitcoin holdings thanks to a price surge in recent months. Block generated a gross profit of $1.90 billion, up 21% year-over-year.

Hong Kong is one step closer to a central bank digital currency (CBDC) with the release of its successful e-HKD phase 1 results in collaboration with Visa, HSBC, and Hang Seng Bank.

According to the November 1 announcement, Visa said that it achieved “near real-time” finality with transfers involving tokenized deposits of the digital Hong Kong dollar (e-HKD).

“Tokenized deposits were burned on the sending bank’s ledger, minted on the receiving bank’s ledger, and simultaneously settled interbank via the simulated wholesale CBDC layer,” the payments firm wrote.

“This would provide for settlement in an atomic manner with better streamlining of any operational dependencies imposed by financial institutions and other intermediaries, thus improving liquidity management.”

The payment processor also stated that its e-HKD test pilot was functional 24/7, surpassing the uptime of traditional financial systems, which typically don’t function after hours or on weekends. In addition, the firm wrote that “tokenized deposits can be fully transacted while remaining encrypted, without revealing information about identity, balances, or transaction amounts to non-bank users.”

Read Part 1 here: Slumdog billionaire: Incredible rags-to-riches tale of Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal

Growing up in poverty in a Delhi ghetto with an alcoholic father and an illiterate mother, Sandeep Nailwal has always had a fire in his belly to achieve something better.

He wants to go big or go home — middling success is not an option.

“I am not doing something small,” he tells Magazine. “Okay, we build some network, and it has a token. It does well for one cycle and then fades into the dawn, and I make a few million dollars for myself and retire or whatever — this was not the plan.”

“We were very clear that we will build this, we will grow the community, and we’ll make it one of the biggest projects in the space.”

Patrick Amadon combines a passion for art and activism, and is articulate about how he intends for his work to have impact.

Self-described as a “digital disobedient,” the Los Angeles-based glitch artist has been no stranger to controversy, having made international headlines for his “No Rioters” digital billboard displayed at the Hong Kong Art Week in March that was eventually taken down for its political undertones.

He also made headlines when he pulled out of Sotheby’s first glitch show, taking a stance against a lineup of artists that featured no women or non-binary people.

(For the uninitiated, glitch art purposefully includes digital or analog errors.)

Like many other artists, Beeple’s historic $69 million NFT sale in March 2021 caught Amadon’s attention. He had been making digital art for over a decade prior but had no way to attribute value to it. 

From his childhood living in a ghetto on the east bank of the Yamuna river in Dehli to launching the $6-billion Polygon blockchain, Sandeep Nailwal has an incredible rags-to-riches tale.

Now happily ensconced in the futuristic, air-conditioned cityscape of Dubai, he tells Magazine he was born in a farming village in 1987 with no electricity called Ramnagar in the foothills of the Himalayas.

His parents married as teenagers and then packed up home when Nailwal was just four to try their luck in Dehli. They wound up in the poor settlements on the east banks of the river, often dismissively referred to as Jamna-Paar.

“Imagine the Bronx in New York,” Nailwal says. “It was like a tier-three area. Even now, when you go there is a very kind of ghetto-ish area.”

He remembers lots of cows roaming the roads and illegal guns, though he says knives were the weapon of choice. “When stuff needs to be done, then knife is the best tool,” he says of the attitude.

Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried testified this week in his ongoing criminal trial in the Southern District of New York, denying any wrongdoing between FTX and Alameda Research while acknowledging making “big mistakes” during the companies’ explosive growth. Highlights of his testimony include denying directing his inner circle to make significant political donations in 2021, as well as claims that FTX’s terms of use covered transactions between Alameda and the crypto exchange. Additionally, Bankman-Fried testified that he requested additional hedging strategies for Alameda in 2021 and 2022, but they were never implemented. The trial is expected to conclude within the next few days.

Google searches for “buy Bitcoin” have surged worldwide amid a major crypto rally, with searches in the United Kingdom growing by more than 800% in the last week. According to research from Cryptogambling.tv, the search term “buy Bitcoin” spiked a staggering 826% in the U.K. over the course of seven days. In the United States, data from Google Trends shows that searches for “should I buy Bitcoin now?” increased by more than 250%, while more niche searches, including “can I buy Bitcoin on Fidelity?” increased by over 3,100% in the last week. Zooming out further, the search term “is it a good time to buy Bitcoin?” saw a 110% gain worldwide over the last week.

The United States Court of Appeals has issued a mandate following a decision requiring Grayscale Investments’ application for a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) to be reviewed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In an Oct. 23 filing, the “formal mandate” of the court took effect, paving the way for the SEC to review its decision on Grayscale’s spot Bitcoin ETF. The mandate followed the court’s initial ruling on Aug. 29 and the SEC’s failure to present an appeal by Oct. 13. To date, the SEC has yet to approve a single spot crypto ETF for listing on U.S. exchanges but has given the green light to investment vehicles linked to Bitcoin and Ether futures.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission overstepped its authority when it classified Coinbase-listed cryptocurrencies as securities, the exchange has argued in its final bid to dismiss a lawsuit by the securities regulator. In an Oct. 24 filing in a New York District Court, Coinbase chastised the SEC, claiming its definition for what qualifies as a security was too wide, and contested that the cryptocurrencies the exchange lists are not under the regulator’s purview. The SEC sued Coinbase on June 6, claiming the exchange violated U.S. securities laws by listing several tokens it considers securities and not registering with the regulator.

Cryptocurrency exchange Gemini filed a lawsuit against bankrupt crypto lender Genesis on Oct. 27. At issue is the fate of 62,086,586 shares of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. They were used as collateral to secure loans made by 232,000 Gemini users to Genesis through the Gemini Earn Program. That collateral is currently worth close to $1.6 billion. According to the suit, Gemini has received $284.3 million from foreclosing on the collateral for the benefit of Earn users, but Genesis has disputed the action, preventing Gemini from distributing the proceeds. Genesis filed for bankruptcy in January. It had suspended withdrawals in November 2022, which impacted the Gemini Earn program.

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.

Changjiang Currency Exchange, a money transmitter business based in Australia, has beenbustedin a 230 million Aussie dollar ($145 million) money laundering scandal.

On Oct. 26, a 300-strong police operation spanning Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth arrested seven individuals — four Chinese citizens and three Australian nationals — after a 14-month investigation.

Operating under the front of a legitimate currency exchange business, police say that Changjiang Currency Exchange helped launder dirty funds and tainted cryptocurrency from investment scams and unregistered crypto exchanges.

In one single incident, a 37-year-old Chinese national was accused of using Changjiang’s services to launder AU$100 million ($63 million) worth of funds received from a multinational Ponzi scheme.

Web3 gaming ecosystem Immutable is helping Random Games join the blockchain gaming world. The studio was founded by veteran developers and storytellers from famous franchises including Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Fortnite, Batman, Star Trek, The Walking Dead, Star Wars and South Park. The collaboration centers around Unioverse, a Web3 sci-fi franchise spanning multiple mediums.

Random Games plans to create a platform offering high-quality assets for game creation without royalty fees. The Unioverse community will be encouraged to produce their own stories, games and content using official assets.

Unioverse hopes to foster a continuous stream of professional and user-generated content, given its royalty-free nature. Users can monetize their creations by selling merchandise such as comic books, T-shirts and lunchboxes and retain all the profits.

Immutable’s vice president of global business development, Andrew Sorokovsky says Immutable will provide the blockchain platform, tools and services, including its zkEVM for scaling and Immutable passport for digital IDs:

This will allow the team to focus on shipping a great game without having to become blockchain experts in the process — letting us take care of the heavy lifting,”

This “Crypto City” guide looks at Finland’s crypto culture: The most notable projects and people, its financial infrastructure, which retailers accept crypto, and where you can find blockchain education courses.

City: Helsinki
Country: Finland
Population: 1.55 million 
Established: 1550
Languages: Finnish and Swedish, with English widely spoken

Jump to: Crypto Culture, Where to spend crypto in Helsinki, Crypto projects and companies, Local crypto controversies, Crypto education and community, Notable crypto figures from Helsinki

Situated on the Gulf of Finland, Helsinki is the capital of Finland and is arguably the world’s most northern metropolis, with 1.5 million people — 30% of the country’s population — calling the metro area home. Its inhabitants spend winter in a cold, still darkness but enjoy 11 pm sunsets in summertime.

Major population centers are nearby, with both Tampere and Turku reachable in two hours via road or rail. There are regular ferry services across the Baltic — including to Estonia’s capital of Tallinn, which can be reached in two hours by sea, and there are also plans to link the cities via an undersea tunnel. The nearby Helsinki-Vantaa airport is the country’s main international gateway and serves as a transfer hub for Asia.

Adelle Nazarian is the top staffer at the American Blockchain PAC, where she serves as its CEO. But she has a long story to tell about her life prior to her time in the crypto industry — from her Persian roots to her career in journalism.

Nazarian, who worked as a freelance journalist after serving in positions with mainstream outlets that included Fox News and CNN, said her work contributed to her disillusionment with the media. “Working in journalism was really eye-opening for me because I witnessed how divisive and activist-oriented it’s become,” she said in an interview with Cointelegraph.

She said her desire to work in a role that contributed to people’s betterment was one of the driving factors that led her to the American Blockchain PAC in 2021, saying, “I saw Bitcoin as being one way of providing an opportunity to people everywhere in the world to pull themselves up in life.”

My parents were both born in Tehran, Iran and emigrated to the United States when they were young. My father was 15 and my mother was 12. I was raised speaking Farsi and English. (I also speak Mandarin Chinese and French.) It is one of my dreams to visit Iran someday in the future. I’d love to visit so many parts of the country and especially to visit Isfahan, which is where my maternal grandparents were born and raised. I am proud to come from such a rich, diverse and beautiful cultural background. 

My mom is a homemaker and also had a caviar business for several years and my father is an entrepreneur.

Major cryptocurrency investment firm Grayscale Investments has filed a new application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a new spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). The new filing aligns with Grayscale’s ongoing effort to convert its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into a spot Bitcoin ETF, according to a statement from the firm. The news comes weeks after Grayscale won an SEC lawsuit for its spot Bitcoin ETF review, with a court of appeals ordering the SEC to explain why it rejected Grayscale’s application in June 2023. The company also filed with the SEC to list an Ether futures ETF in September.

New York Attorney General sues Gemini, Genesis, DGC for allegedly defrauding investors

New York’s attorney general has filed a lawsuit against cryptocurrency firms Gemini, Genesis and Digital Currency Group (DCG) for allegedly defrauding more than 23,000 investors through the Gemini Earn investment program. The suit claims that Gemini assured investors that the program was a low-risk investment, while investigations carried out by the office of New York State Attorney General Letitia James found that Genesis’ financials “were risky.” The lawsuit also charges Genesis’ former CEO, Soichiro Moro, and its parent company’s CEO, Barry Silbert, with defrauding investors by attempting to conceal more than $1.1 billion in losses. In addition, the court case looks to ban Gemini, Genesis and DCG from operating in the financial investment industry in New York.

Nishad Singh, the former engineering director at now-defunct crypto exchange FTX, faces up to 75 years in prison for charges related to defrauding users of the crypto exchange. He pleaded guilty to fraud charges as part of his cooperation agreement with the U.S. prosecutors. During his testimony this week, Singh said that when liquidity issues at FTX began in November 2022, he felt “suicidal for some days” while dealing with alleged inconsistencies between the exchange’s public statements and its activities behind the scenes. Singh also claimed that Bankman-Fried had the habit of deciding on purchases through Alameda Research by himself.

Binance Visa debit card services will close down in the European Economic Area in December, marking the latest setback for Binance. The termination of the card services was announced a day after the exchange restored euro deposits and withdrawals, which had been unavailable for a month after payments processor Paysafe dropped the exchange. Binance is still not onboarding new users in the United Kingdom due to the loss of a third-party service provider.

Elon Musk, Mark Cuban and others have collaboratively submitted a shared amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States to raise concerns about the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) approach to conducting internal proceedings without the inclusion of juries. The context of this legal challenge centers around the SEC vs. Jarkesy case. George Jarkesy argues that the SEC’s internal adjudication process, which lacks a jury and is overseen by an administrative law judge appointed by the commission, contradicts his Seventh Amendment rights. Effectively resulting in a single entity fulfilling the roles of judge, jury and enforcer.

A self-proclaimed jack of all trades and master of none, OSF has become a prolific figure in the nonfungible token world in just over two years, trading his former life at Barclay’s to focus full-time on Web3, his digital art pursuits, his PFP project Rekt Guy and living the life of a degen collector. 

The self-deprecating 34-year-old Englishman has a Swiss army knife of skills suited for a modern world of creating digital objects — being a self-taught coder, understanding internet culture, with an ability to capture attention and not take himself too seriously. 

While he wears many hats, OSF, the artist, has been featured at Sotheby’s and has sold multiple pieces for six figures. He describes himself most as an artist and project founder.

“I find it really tough to classify myself as one thing or another, but it’s certainly a question I get asked quite a bit. I do have periods where I’m more focused on certain things like trading but overall, an artist and project founder is the way I would describe myself,” OSF tells NFT Creator. 

“I hate the idea of constraining myself to one thing. I think it’s just probably a problem I have in life. My attention gets easily captured by anything really and as you probably can guess, I have ADD and all that kind of stuff. I do feel that I just enjoy lots of different aspects of the [Web3] space, and I kind of want to be a part of it all.”

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.

Bitcoin application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining manufacturer Bitmain has allegedly fired three of its employees for speaking to the media regarding the withholding of salary payments by their employer. 

According to local news reports on Oct. 17, citing an alleged internal Bitmain memo, the company accused three staff members of breaching various clauses in their employment contracts for sharing their remuneration on social media platforms. The note reads: 

“The EMT [Executive Management Team] has decided: (1) Employee Li of product operations and circuit development, is to be fired immediately and blacklisted. (2) Employee Xie of product operations and circuit development, is to be fired immediately and blacklisted. (3) Employee Ding, administrative intern at strategic development PMT, is to be fired immediately and blacklisted. The intern’s post-secondary institution shall also be informed of the incident.”

“In addition, the company reserves the right to pursue legal action against the individuals above,” Bitmain allegedly wrote. “Without authorization by the company, nothing can be said, nothing can be given [to outsiders!]”

From privacy coins to shiny iris-scanning orbs, zero-knowledge proofs have become synonymous with crypto, scalability and privacy.

In 2022, investors gave over $700 million in funding to companies pushing the envelope with zero-knowledge proofs. This year, ZK-proofs has arguably become one of the biggest blockchain trends, with several major Ethereum scaling protocols hitting mainnet.

ZK-proofs are a cryptographic protocol that allows one party to prove the truth of a statement to another party without sharing any of the statement’s contents. 

An often-cited example is proving to a bartender that you’re old enough to drink without showing your ID or even telling them your birthdate.

Well, it seems that Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, once found the technology pretty interesting.

Ethereum restaking — proposed by middleware protocol EigenLayer — is a controversial innovation over the past year that has some of the brightest minds worried about the potential ramifications.

Restaking involves reusing staked or locked-up Ether tokens to earn fees and rewards. The restaked tokens can then help secure and validate other protocols. 

Proponents believe restaking can squeeze additional security and rewards from already staked ETH and grow the crypto ecosystem in a healthier way based on Ethereum’s existing trust mechanisms. Restaking could serve as a security primitive for exporting Ethereum’s trust generated by its validators to other projects.

Yet Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and a number of key devs worry that restaking is a house of cards that will inevitably tumble. Some of those Ethereum devs have even proposed a fork to head off restaking platform EigenLayer. 

Why the project’s founders promote “trust as a service” from Ethereum without the Ethereum founder and others’ willingness to participate is still to play out. Will the whole concept result in an Ethereum fork to protect the network from catastrophic failure? 

Caroline Ellison, former CEO of Alameda Research, testified for over 10 hours this week at Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial, offering deeper details on the events that anticipated the FTX debacle in November 2022. From Ellison’s testimony, jurors learned that she planned to leave Alameda months before its collapse, but feared a bank run on FTX amidst the crypto market downturn. The week also featured a recording presented as evidence in the case showing the exact moment Ellison told employees about Alameda’s use of FTX customer deposits. Among the key moments of Bankman-Fried’s trial were revelations of fabricated balance sheets in order to deceive crypto lenders, as well as BlockFi CEO Zac Prince’s testimony. Check out this week’s highlights from Cointelegraph’s team on the ground.

Months before the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was “freaking out” about buying shares in Snapchat, raising capital from Saudi royalty and getting regulators to crack down on rival crypto exchange Binance, according to evidence presented in court this week as a part of the ongoing criminal trial. Bankman-Fried believed Binance leaked an Alameda balance sheet to the media in 2022. According to a document from Nov. 6, 2022, Bankman-Fried wrote that Binance had been “engaging in a PR campaign against us.” It continued, saying that Binance “leaked a balance sheet; blogged about it; fed it to Coindesk; then announced very publicly that they were selling $500m of FTT in response to it while telling customers to be wary of FTX.”

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly has no plans to appeal the recent court decision that favored Grayscale Investments. The ruling requires the SEC to review the firm’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) application. The SEC’s supposed decision not to appeal doesn’t necessarily mean Grayscale’s application is set to be approved. If the reports are true, the SEC will need to follow the court’s August order and review Grayscale’s application to change its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into a spot Bitcoin ETF.

Terraform Labs has again pointed the finger at market maker Citadel Securities for its role in an alleged “concerted, intentional effort” to cause the depeg of its TerraUSD stablecoin in 2022. On Oct. 10, Terraform Labs filed a motion in the United States to compel Citadel Securities to produce documents relating to its trading activity in May 2022, when TerraUSD Classic depegged. In its motion, Terraform argued that the documents are crucial for its defense in the lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in February, which alleged Terraform Labs and its founder, Do Kwon, had a hand in “orchestrating a multi-billion dollar crypto asset securities fraud.” Citadel Securities has, however, previously denied trading the TerraUSD stablecoin in May 2022.

Mastercard has completed a trial involving wrapping central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on different blockchains, similar to wrapped Bitcoin and wrapped Ether. The trial was conducted with the Reserve Bank of Australia and the country’s Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre CBDC. Mastercard said the solution allowed a CBDC owner to purchase a nonfungible token (NFT) listed on Ethereum. “The process ‘locked’ the required amount of a pilot CBDC on the RBA’s pilot CBDC platform and minted an equivalent amount of wrapped pilot CBDC tokens on Ethereum,” the payment processor wrote.