Decentral Block Post

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

In the fourth hack affecting the HTX (formerly Huobi Global) ecosystem in just two months, the exchange lost $30 million via a hot wallet hack that occurred on Nov. 22. The amount was updated from original reports of $13.6M. 

In its Nov. 23 announcement, the exchange promised to “fully compensate for the losses caused by this attack and 100% guarantee the safety of user funds,” as well as restore services within 24 hours of the attack. The day prior, the HTX Eco Chain (HECO) bridge was exploited for $86.6 million. An investigation is ongoing. 

In September, the HTX exchange was hacked for $7.9 million; this was followed by a $100 million hack against the Poloniex exchange, a related entity, in November. Justin Sun, the Chinese blockchain personality and de-facto owner of HTX (not to mention an “adviser” to, but possibly owner of, Poloniex, founder of Tron and CEO of BitTorrent etc),stated after the attack that “HTX Will Fully Compensate for HTX’s hot wallet Losses. Deposits and Withdrawals Temporarily Suspended. All Funds in HTX Are Secure.” Sun previously also madeassurancesthat “all user assets are #SAFU” in the aftermath of the September hack against HTX.

Huobirebranded to HTXduring this year’s Singapore2049 event in September. Although its executives have repeatedly reassured that the exchange is doing well, the exchange ran into a number ofserious incidentsthis year, including analleged employee revolt.

As the year winds down, every gaming company and its dog are dropping year-in-review reports.

A recent report from blockchain gaming accelerator Game7 suggests that many game developers had an enforced nap instead of pumping out new games.

This year, just 223 Web3 games were launched which is a 65% drop from the 640 games launched in 2022, and even more distant from the 811 games launched in 2021.

So what’s the deal with the sudden nosedive in output?

Well, the optimistic answer is Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Although documented statistics about cryptocurrency trading and substance abuse are hard to come by, addiction experts are treating an increasing number of crypto traders.

Abdullah Boulard, founder and CEO at The Balance Luxury Rehab, tells Magazine that a number of crypto traders struggle with substance abuse. “Our client base is diverse, but this is a unique demographic that we’ve seen an increase in over the recent years,” Boulard says. 

According to Boulard, the high intensity of cryptocurrency trading combined with 24/7 accessibility encourages some to use stimulants to keep up the pace. “Substances like amphetamines, cocaine and even excessive caffeine use are common among these individuals,” says Boulard. 

Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, tweeted about the use of stimulants in April 2021.

New York Magazine subsequently reported that a successful trader who met with Ellison commented about her use of stimulants and their overall effects on members of the community. “Crypto really fucked with a lot of people’s perceptions of money. A lot of stuff doesn’t feel real. And if you add speed …”

Prior to that, in September 2019, the former CEO of disgraced cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, tweeted about his use of stimulants and sleeping pills.

Dominic Frisby recalls meeting MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor for the first time at a crypto event. What started off as an awe-struck moment became confusing after things took an unexpected turn.

“I saw Michael Saylor there. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s him!’” he tells Magazine. But it was Saylor who quickly came over and introduced himself before Frisby had a chance:

“He just came up to me and said, ‘I’ve seen some of your videos, and I really like your work and what you’re doing. Would you like to come over to dinner?’”

Frisby explains he was thrilled to be hanging with the OG Bitcoin maxi in Saylor’s house, which is “much nicer” than his own.

“Every time I watch a Michael Saylor video, I get orange pilled. The guy is so clever,” he declares.

Umami Labs CEO Alex O’Donnell grew up on the outskirts of Philadelphia before attending Temple University to study literature and economics. That path led him to devote seven years of his life as a financial journalist at Reuters, where he specialized in M&As IPOs.

He said his academic focus created a “pretty natural synthesis” when it came ot financial journalism. However, he said he became “disenchanted” with his industry while he was cooped up at home during the Covid-19 pandemic. “There really was a three-way alliance between journalists, government officials and technology companies trying to control the flow of information,” O’Donnell said in an interview with Cointelegraph.

He began tinkering with cryptocurrency, which led to his introduction with Umami DAO — and ultimately his creation of Umami Labs.

O’Donnell and his wife, Sanjana, are preparing for a “third, smaller person” to join their family next year. In the meantime, he said he’s also gearing up for another crypto-related venture. The details aren’t fully public yet, but he said he plans to release more information the months ahead.

I’d been a journalist for the better part of a decade primarily covering mergers and acquisitions. I always had an interest in finance and tech. But I started becoming a bit disenchanted with the mainstream media around the time of the pandemic. That was the first time I started becoming a bit more cynical about my own industry’s role in the information economy. So I started paying more attention to issues like privacy, censorship and other things I had not taken as much interest in before.

ChatGPT developer OpenAI removed founder Sam Altman from his CEO position on Nov. 17. Chief technology officer Mira Murati is now serving as interim CEO. According to a blog post, the board of directors engaged in a “deliberative review process,” which resulted in the conclusion that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Shortly after, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman revealed his exit from the organization.

The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, officially filed for a spot Ether exchange-traded fund (ETF) with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Nov. 15. The ETF, dubbed the iShares Ethereum Trust, aims to “reflect generally the performance of the price of Ether,” according to the S-1 filed with the SEC. The iShares brand is associated with BlackRock’s ETF products. The move by BlackRock comes nearly a week after it registered the iShares Ethereum Trust with Delaware’s Division of Corporations and almost six months after it filed its spot Bitcoin ETF application. Following BlackRock’s filing, asset manager Fidelity also sought a green light for its own Ether ETF.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has issued guidance on capital gains tax (CGT) treatment with regard to decentralized finance and wrapping crypto tokens for individuals, confirming that Australians are liable for capital gains taxes when wrapping and unwrapping tokens. The transfer of crypto assets to an address that the sender does not control or that already holds a balance will be regarded as a taxable CGT event, the ATO said in its statement. The CGT event will trigger depending on whether the individual recorded a capital gain or loss. A similar approach has been considered for taxing liquidity pool users, providers and DeFi interest and rewards. In addition, wrapping and unwrapping tokens will also be subject to triggering a CGT event.

An employee of FTX’s charity wing recruited by Sam Bankman-Fried is trying to get paid $275,000, the remainder of his claimed 2022 salary bonus. Ross Rheingans-Yoo’s lawyers argued in a court filing that only $375,000 of his $650,000 bonus was paid by FTX. They claim the remaining funds were owed when the crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy in November 2022. The fate of Rheingans-Yoo’s bonus will be determined by a Delaware bankruptcy judge who is overseeing FTX’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

WisdomTree filed an amended Form S-1 spot Bitcoin ETF prospectus with the U.S. SEC on Nov. 16. The update comes a few months after WisdomTree refiled its spot Bitcoin ETF application in June 2023, proposing a rule change to list and trade shares of the WisdomTree Bitcoin Trust. The amended prospectus mentions that the WisdomTree Bitcoin Trust ETF will trade under ticker symbol BTCW, with Coinbase Custody Trust serving as the custodian holding all of the trust’s Bitcoin on its behalf.

Mark Wilson — the artist known as diewiththemostlikes — has a truly unique style to his art and a presence that could be described as grotesque, performative, thought-provoking and hilarious all in one packet of rolled-up ground beef.

In a digital art market where supply can be infinite, the Indiana-based artist really stands out from the crowd with his ability to garner attention by often ridiculing the NFT space and eliciting both humor and sadness within his work.

An author of five books, diewiththemostlikes has a passion for not only visual art but also scribing his streams of consciousness. He originally minted his first NFT on March 26, 2021, on Foundation after a random account on X reached out because Wilson had made a joke campaign poster for comedian Eric Andre that went viral.

“This dude reached out and just said, ‘Hey, I have a Foundation invite. Would you want to mint a piece on there?’ I said I don’t know what minting is. I don’t know what Foundation is. I have no clue what any of this shit is,” Diewiththemostlikes explains.

“He said, ‘It could be a good avenue for your digital art,’ so I said, ‘Well, fuck it, man. It’s not like I’m not doing anything with it now. It’s getting two likes on Instagram from fucking porn bots. So, whatever, I’ll mint something, and maybe I can sell something finally as an artist — that would be nice.’” 

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

Hashkey Exchange — one of the first regulated crypto exchanges in Hong Kong — has announced insurance coverage for clients assets stored in its hot and cold wallets. accounts. The policy will cover 50% of Hashkey’s digital assets in cold wallets and 100% of digital assets in hot wallets and pay out anywhere between $50 million to $400 million in the event of a claim.

Hashkey’s partnership with fintech OneDegree will also see the pair co-develop novel crypto security solutions for the exchange to manage server downtime, data back-up, and load control. “Getting insurance cover from OneInfinity by OneDegree not only fulfills the Securities and Futures Commission requirements, we believe the collaboration can also enhance our financial, technical, and service infrastructure to provide our customers with comprehensive protection,” said Livio Wang, COO of Hashkey Group.

Disembarking the Liberty houseboat moored off the frontier of the European Union, we’re met by a pair of Serbian police officers, their lit squad car nearly blinding us in the dark forest.

“How many people are staying on the boat?” one asks, holding a large dog at bay. “I really don’t recall,” says my colleague from Reuters. Fortunately, they let us go.

We must run, using phone lights to navigate the muddy path to the rally point a bit further in Croatia, in hopes that the departing presidential convoy has not left us behind.

We are meters from the border of Liberland, an unrecognized micronation of crypto fans claiming a piece of land between Croatia and Serbia on the Danube river. At just seven square kilometers — 2.7 square miles — the piece of land is roughly the size of Gibraltar.

Liberland “president” Vít Jedlička explains it had not officially been claimed by either neighboring country, making it terra nullius — nobody’s land — when he planted a flag there on April 13, 2015.

I just spent an entire week working in virtual reality using the new Meta Quest 3. While the experience still mostly sucked, I came away with some renewed optimism for VR in the workplace.

As I took Ron’s outstretched, virtual hand for a handshake, my actual hand — in the real world — clumsily whacked into the side of my desk.

Ron started laughing, his avatar’s animated facial expressions mimicking his real face thanks to his device’s eye and facial tracking technology.

A project manager at Microsoft, Ron tells me it’s something I’ll get used to. He’s been working in the metaverse for over a year.

Days later, I meet Heather, a mother who’s been working in virtual reality for a couple of months. She likes to jump into the metaverse to work when her kids are at school and the house is quiet.

Bitcoin’s futures market is showing an interesting shift as global derivatives marketplace the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has surpassed Binance in terms of Bitcoin futures open interest. This change occurred after Bitcoin exceeded the $37,000 mark for the first time in over 18 months.

However, James Seyffart, a research analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence specializing in exchange-traded funds, questioned whether the increasing open interest in Bitcoin futures on CME would address historical concerns of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the depth of Bitcoin markets and the potential for market manipulation.

“Okay this is interesting… Does this constitute a ‘market of significant size’ now?” Seyffart stated in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

The former head of legal and compliance at OneCoin is looking at a potential 10-year prison term for her involvement in the $4 billion cryptocurrency trading scheme. In Manhattan federal court, the ex-compliance chief of OneCoin, Irinia Dilkinska, pleaded guilty to charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

According to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos accepted Dilkinska’s guilty plea. She admitted to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. 

Hong Kong Web3 gaming giant Animoca Brands (The Sandbox, Revv, Phantom Galaxies), has acquired blockchain-powered streaming platform Azarus for an undisclosed sum.

Built around the slogan “streams are not TV,” Azarus allows users to livestream their gameplay while using tokens for incentives and rewards. Animoca Brands says it wants to change gaming culture with Azarus’ tech, by enabling streamers to generate new sources of income, engage their audience and reward their followers while allowing viewers to support their preferred creators. 

In a surprise move, the Chinese government has guaranteed legal protection for NFTs.

In response to a series of often conflicting judicial opinions on the state of cryptocurrency in the country, the Chinese government has officially issued a legal commentary on dealing with cases of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) theft and their status as virtual property protected by law. 

According to a November 9 publication by China’s state-controlled Southwest University of Political Science & Law (SUPL), digital collectibles such as NFTs — unlike ordinary online images — conform to the characteristics of online virtual property due to their non-tamperable features, unique codes, and detailed transaction information.

“This highlights the scarcity of digital collections, which have both use value and exchange value,” jurists write. “According to Article 127 of the Civil Code, it can be seen that from the perspective of civil law, online virtual property is regarded as an object of rights that ‘is different from property rights, creditor’s rights, intellectual property rights, etc. and is protected by civil law’.”

In addition, jurists state that the theft of NFTs therefore carries applicable criminal penalties, which can be evaluated in conjunction with related offenses committed during the course of the theft, such as hacking into computer systems or data theft.

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.”