Over 40 years after the death of John Lennon, Paul McCartney this week announced that a 'final' song by The Beatles would be released this year, thanks to advances in AI technology. Of course, by the time McCartney dies, AI will likely have advanced so much that it could write and record an entire new Beatles discography in less time than it will take me to review the weeks crypto news.
First off, China, where Tencent came up with a cool new plan to gather even more of the citizens' biometric data for the Chinese government. The company also this week announced its '1+1+1' model, an ambitious project which seems to rely on the rest of the world happily giving the CCP its personal information too. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, Bank of China issued 200 million yuan worth of digital banknotes on the Ethereum blockchain.
Hacking next, as the Sturdy Finance DeFi lending platform lost over three-quarters of a million dollars of user assets to a loan security hack exploiting a vulnerability in fellow DeFi project, Balancer. Better news on the Mt Gox hack, as two Russian citizens were charged with stealing and laundering around 647,000 BTC between 2011 and 2014 when the exchange collapsed. Well, it would be better news if the defendants weren't still at large.
Binance just can't seem to get a break this month, as the company's recent troubles in the U.S. have been swiftly followed by an accusation of "aggravated money laundering" by French authorities.
Following the collapse of the FTX exchange last year, Brazil rushed in a new crypto assets law but forgot to name the new sheriff in town, which has now been rectified. And in Thailand, key bank staff are trialling the digital Baht at merchants located near their head offices.
Lastly, we look to the crypto community, who were about fifty/fifty on supporting the Reddit blackout protesting API usage fees for third-party apps. Meanwhile Worldcoin is looking to implement a number of worthy projects to benefit the global community, and the Ethereum developer community agreed to implement proto-danksharding in the next major upgrade, which sounds a bit like something you might do to a BRC-20 meme-coin that had just made you very very very rich (or poor).
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