Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of Coinbase, believes Apple's App Store rules have hampered the company's product roadmap, accusing the iPhone-maker of banning features from their app and generally not being friendly with the cryptocurrency industry. From a report: "Apple so far has not really played nice with crypto, they've actually banned a bunch of features that we would like to have in the app, but they just won't allow it -- so there's potential antitrust issues there," Armstrong said.

Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht will see his $183 million debt wiped out following the seizure of $3 billion in bitcoin connected to an unnamed Silk Road hacker, according to a court filing. From a report: In 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He was also ordered to pay $183 million in restitution, a figure calculated from the total illegal sales on Silk Road using an exchange rate at the time of each transaction. Court documents in 2020 reveal that the Justice Department seized 69,370 bitcoins from a hacker who moved the trove to a private wallet in April 2013. Ulbricht has been given a surprising reprieve, with the Justice Department making a deal with him in February 2021 that forfeits any claim Ulbricht may have had to the stolen bitcoin in exchange for the restitution to be repaid once the bitcoin is sold.

During a 92-minute presentation Wednesday on the state of the free software movement, Richard Stallman spoke at length on a wide variety of topics, including the need for freedom-respecting package systems.

But Stallman also shared his deepest thoughts on a topic dear to the hearts of Slashdot readers: privacy and currency: I won't order from online stores, because I can't pay them . For one thing, the payment services require running non-free JavaScript... [And] to pay remotely you've got to do it by credit card, and that's tracking people, and I want to resist tracking too.... This is a really serious problem for society, that you can't order things remotely anonymously.

But GNU Taler is part of the path to fixing that. You'll be able to get a Taler token from your bank, or a whole bunch of Taler tokens, and then you'll be able to use those to pay anonymously.

Then if the store can send the thing you bought to a delivery box in your neighborhood, the store doesn't ever have to know who you are.
But there's another issue Stallman touched on earlier in his talk: There is a proposed U.S. law called KOSA which would require mandatory age-verification of users -- which means mandatory identification of users, which is likely to mean via face recognition. And it would be in every commercial software application or electronic service that connects to the internet.... [It's] supposedly for protecting children. That's one of the favorite excuses for surveillance and repression: to protect the children. Whether it would actually protect anyone is dubious, but they hope that won't actually be checked.... You can always propose a completely useless method that will repress everyone....
So instead, Stallman suggests that age verification could be handled by.... GNU Taler: Suppose there's some sort of service which charges money, or even a tiny amount of money, and is only for people over 16, or people over 18 or whatever it is. Well, you could get from your bank a Taler token that says the person using this token is over 16. This bank has verified that.... So then the site only needs to insist on a 16-or-over Taler token, and your age is verified, but the site has no idea who you are.

Unfortunately that won't help if user-identifying age-tracking systems are legislated now. The code of Taler works, but it's still being integrated with a bank so that people could actually start to use it with real businesses.
Read on for Slashdot's report on Stallman's remarks on cryptocurrencies and encryption, or jump ahead to...

• Can GNU Taler accounts be frozen?
• Why cryptocurrency shouldn't replace banking
• The problem with VPN apps - and how interoperable encryption could protect your freedom

"Cryptocurrency has changed the game of cybercrime," argues Vice's Christian Devolu, in a new episode of their video series CRYPTOLAND. "Hackers and cybergangs have been locking down the data of large corporations, police departments, and even hospitals, and demanding ransom — and guess what they're asking for? Cryptocurrency!"

In short, argues an article accompanying the episode, cryptocurrency "gave birth to the ransomware epidemic."

Slashdot reader em1ly shares one highlight from the video: The team visits a school district in Missouri ["just one of around 1,000 U.S. schools hacked last year with ransomware"] that was the victim of a ransomware attack. ["Luckily, the school's backups were not impacted...."]
Another interesting observation from the article: When ransom payments do happen, companies like Chainalysis can track the Bitcoin through the blockchain, identifying the hackers' wallets and collaborating with law enforcement in an attempt to recover the funds or identify the hackers themselves.

Virgil Griffith, a US cryptocurrency expert, was sentenced on Tuesday to 63 months in prison after pleading guilty to assisting the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) with technical info on how to evade sanctions. BleepingComputer reports: The sanctions imposed by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and Executive Order 13466 forbid the export of any goods, services, or technology to the DPRK without a Department of the Treasury license issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Griffith, who worked as a special projects developer and research scientist for the Ethereum Foundation, was arrested in November 2019 by the FBI following a presentation in North Korea on how the country could use cryptocurrency and blockchain tech (i.e., smart contracts) to launder money and evade sanctions.

Despite being denied permission by the US Department of State, Griffith went to the North Korean conference knowing that doing so without a license from the OFAC would violate US sanctions against the DPRK. According to court documents, the cryptocurrency expert asked to receive his travel visa on a separate paper and not on his US passport, likely to avoid creating physical evidence of his travel to North Korea.

At the DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference, "Griffith and his co-conspirators also answered specific questions about blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies for the DPRK audience, including individuals whom Griffith understood worked for the North Korean government." DOJ said today. He also tried recruiting "other US citizens to travel to North Korea and provide similar services to DPRK persons and attempted to broker introductions for the DPRK to other cryptocurrency and blockchain service providers." During the DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference, he also talked about how North Korea could use cryptocurrency to gain financial independence from the global banking system.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: A non-fungible token (NFT) of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first ever tweet could sell for just under $280. The current owner of the NFT listed it for $48 million last week. Iranian-born crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi purchased the NFT for $2.9 million in March 2021. Last Thursday, he announced on Twitter that he wished to sell the NFT, and pledged 50% of its proceeds (which he thought would exceed $25 million) to charity. The auction closed Wednesday, with just seven total offers ranging from 0.09 ETH ($277 at current prices) to 0.0019 ETH (almost $6). "The deadline I set was over, but if I get a good offer, I might accept it, I might never sell it," Estavi told CoinDesk via a WhatsApp message on Wednesday. Estavi has two days to accept the bid, or it will expire.

waspleg writes: More than 200 long-time Wikipedia editors have requested that the Wikimedia Foundation stop accepting cryptocurrency donations. The foundation received crypto donations worth about $130,000 in the most recent fiscal year -- less than 0.1 percent of the foundation's revenue, which topped $150 million last year. In her proposal for the Wikimedia Foundation, GorillaWarfare added that 'Bitcoin and Ethereum are the two most highly used cryptocurrencies, and are both proof-of-work, using an enormous amount of energy.' According to one widely cited estimate, the bitcoin network consumes around 200 TWh of energy per year. That's about as much energy as is consumed by 70 million people in Thailand. And it works out to around 2,000 kWh per bitcoin transaction.

Bitcoin defenders countered that bitcoin's energy usage is driven by its mining process, which consumes about the same amount of energy regardless of the number of transactions. So accepting any given bitcoin donation won't necessarily lead to more carbon emissions. But cryptocurrency critics argued that Wikimedia's de facto endorsement of cryptocurrencies may help to push up their price. And the more expensive bitcoin is, the more energy miners will devote to creating new ones. If the foundation complies with the community's request, it wouldn't be the first organization to stop using cryptocurrencies due to environmental concerns. Earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation announced it would stop accepting cryptocurrencies that use the energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus process. These include bitcoin and ether -- though the latter is expected to convert to a proof-of-stake model in the future.

Celsius will stop offering its crypto interest accounts to US users at the end of this week. From a report: Per an April 11 announcement, the crypto lender will transition new deposits from US users to custody accounts. Critically, those accounts will not pay interest, unless their owners are accredited investors. Existing deposits will, however, continue to pay normal interest. As of today, those interest rates on offer go as high as 18%, with stablecoins paying over 7% returns. The move happens as Celsius, as well as competitors like BlockFi and Nexo, have faced increasing scrutiny from US securities regulators. The New York Attorney General sent letters to firms offering crypto interest accounts in October. Nexo, which is not based in the United States, cut off new US accounts from earning interest back in February.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last year, T-Mobile confirmed it was breached after hackers offered to sell the personal data of 30 million of its customers for 6 bitcoin worth around $270,000 at the time. According to court documents unsealed today and reviewed by Motherboard, a third-party hired by T-Mobile tried to pay the hackers for exclusive access to that data and limit it from leaking more widely. The plan ultimately failed, and the criminals continued to sell the data despite the third-party giving them a total of $200,000. But the news unearths some of the controversial tactics that might be used by companies as they respond to data breaches, either to mitigate the leak of stolen information or in an attempt to identify who has breached their networks.

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Diogo Santos Coelho, who it alleges is the administrator of a popular hacking site called RaidForums. Law enforcement also uploaded a banner to the RaidForums site announcing they had taken over its domain. Coelho was arrested in the United Kingdom in March. Included in the affidavit in support of request for his extradition to the United States is a section describing a particular set of data that was advertised on RaidForums in August. [...] The document does not name the victim company, instead referring to it as Company 3, but says another post confirmed that the data belonging to "a major telecommunications company and wireless network operator that provides services in the United States.

The document goes on to say that this company "hired a third-party to purchase exclusive access to the database to prevent it being sold to criminals." An employee of this third-party posed as a potential buyer and used the RaidForums' administrator's middleman service to buy a sample of the data for $50,000 in Bitcoin, the document reads. That employee then purchased the entire database for around $150,000, with the caveat that SubVirt would delete their copy of the data, it adds. The purpose of the deletion would be that this undercover customer would be the only one with a copy of the stolen information, greatly limiting the chance of it leaking out further. That's not what happened. The document says that "it appears the co-conspirators continued to attempt to sell the databases after the third-party's purchase." Company 3, the unnamed telecommunications firm that hired this third-party, was T-Mobile, according to Motherboard's review of the timeline and information included in the court records. The third-party that paid cybercriminals $200,000 may have been Mandiant, though the security company has yet to confirm with Motherboard. In March, Mandiant announced it was being acquired by Google.

The long decline in the price of Axie Infinity's Smooth Love Potion (SLP) token illustrates the challenge of play-to-earn (P2E) gaming: players need more than a way to earn some random token, the token needs mechanics that enable it to hold value. From a report: P2E worked great, particularly with one game, Axie Infinity (whose treasury clocked $1.3 billion in revenue last year), until profits took a dive in early December that it has never recovered from, as Token Terminal shows. The "Smooth Love Potion" (SLP) token is the fuel that Axie Infinity runs on.

To access the game, players need once valuable NFTs called Axies. Axie owners can breed more Axies with their Axies, but they need to spend SLP to do so. Users spend SLP in the game and it gets destroyed, decreasing the supply. That's supposed to help maintain the price, but there's been too much earning and not enough burning. The token has been in a long fall since the peak of its strength last July, because too few players are using SLP to make more Axies, analytics firm Naavik contends.

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, has accused a "finance gerontocracy" including Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon of hindering bitcoin's progress. From a report: The outspoken libertarian tech investor described multibillionaire Buffett, the world's richest investor, as the "sociopathic grandpa from Omaha" in a keynote address at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami on Thursday. Thiel's address began with an analysis of the investment merits of cryptocurrencies but soon escalated into a tirade against the financial establishment, including "bankrupt" central banks and the "hate factory" of ESG -- which stands for environmental, social and corporate governance and is a cornerstone of responsible investing principles.

"It's a movement, and it's a political question, whether this movement is going to succeed, or whether the enemies of a movement are going to succeed in stopping us," he said, shortly before naming Buffett as "enemy number one." In a speech that also cited JP Morgan's chief executive Dimon and Larry Fink, the chair of investment group BlackRock, he said institutions run by a "finance gerontocracy" were hindering the cryptocurrency. Thiel said choosing not to invest in bitcoin was a "deeply political choice" and the financial establishment should be told "you have to get onboard on this." Thiel added that the $830bn bitcoin market could rival the global equities market, worth more than $100tn.

As Washington attempts to get its arms around the rapidly growing cryptocurrency industry, policy makers in the Biden administration and on Capitol Hill have identified stablecoins as an initial target for tighter regulation. From a report: Often billed as one-to-one representations of a currency like the dollar, stablecoins have recently exploded in popularity as investors use them for trading other cryptocurrencies. There are dozens of stablecoins, though a handful pegged to the dollar account for most of the market value, which grew roughly 500% in the 12 months ending in October, according to a report from the Biden administration.

Both Democrats and Republicans want to create new safeguards to help ensure that one stablecoin is quickly redeemable for one dollar, while at the same time warding off broader risk to financial markets. But despite bipartisan agreement about the need for new federal action on stablecoins, policy makers remain at odds about how and when to take it. The Biden administration is asking lawmakers to pass legislation that would treat stablecoin issuers like banks, a step that Republicans and some Democrats oppose in favor of a lighter statutory touch. Other Democrats are skeptical of compromising with Republicans on the issue at all, instead pushing the Biden administration to take more aggressive steps itself. How -- and if -- Congress resolves the debate over the roughly $185 billion stablecoin market is an early test of whether Washington will ultimately write new laws or wield existing frameworks to regulate the broader $2 trillion cryptocurrency industry.

Fast Company reviews the Bitcoin 2022 conference held in Miami this week — arguing that it was actually Ethereum that sparked 2021's boom in cryptocurrenies. (And that with NFTs and DAOs, Ethereum still remains the flashier, main driver of popular crypto culture.)

Their conclusion? There's "a real sense of desperation for some kind of star power that can elevate Bitcoin from digital gold for the techno-libertarian set to the true mainstream cultural movement it needs to be in order to actually catch on." In fact, the issue of what influencers or celebrities can do for the Bitcoin community came up directly on Thursday morning, during a panel featuring Odell Beckham Jr., Serena Williams, Aaron Rodgers, and Cash App's crypto product lead, Miles Suter. Beckham and Rodgers have both made headlines recently for taking their salaries in Bitcoin; Williams is heavily involved in the Bitcoin startup world.... It was pretty far away from the high energy radiating from the world of NFTs, and it was clear that the event's bigger names aren't sure what else to do other than just tell the audience to buy Bitcoin over and over again. A lot of people make fun of NFTs, but they're an easier cultural product to point to and talk about than trying to have a fun conversation about lightning networks....

Bitcoin's attempts at going mainstream feel like a real two-steps-forward-one-step-back situation. Its most vocal supporters see it as a war-ending miracle technology. Alex Gladstein, the Human Rights Foundation's chief strategy officer led a panel on Thursday that argued it could lead to peace on Earth. It's not uncommon to hear presenters at Bitcoin 2022 argue that Bitcoin could end all wars forever. But that flies in the face of the conference's wilder, bawdier attractions — the big robot bull statue, the wild after-parties, the endless panels about cancel culture and Twitter drama.

And these competing attitudes within the world of Bitcoin came to a head on Thursday afternoon, when chaos briefly erupted in the conference's main stage when it was announced that Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy had dropped out of his much talked-about panel, titled "Bitcoin Is Fuck You Money". Portnoy has not issued any explanation for why he dropped out, but he did spend the rest of the afternoon live tweeting the PGA Masters Tournament. For someone who claims to be all in on the technology, the so-called "baron of Bitcoin" didn't even stay for his panel.

"Fuck you, Dave," the emcee gleefully told the crowd as they cheered and booed in response.
The article reports that other speakers at the conference included:

• Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang
• Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary
• Paypal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel

But the article ultimately argues that the conference "feels like a low-level comic convention that's being held in the same event space as an economic forum."

Chainalysis is a software for tracing cryptocurrency, "to turn the digital underworld's preferred means of exchange into its Achilles' heel," writes Wired.

This week they describe what happened when that company's co-founder discovered that for two yeras, hundreds of users of a child pornography-trading site — and its administrators — "had done almost nothing to obscure their cryptocurrency trails..." and "seemed to be wholly unprepared for the modern state of financial forensics on the blockchain." Over the previous few years, [Internal Revenue Service criminal investigator Chris] Janczewski, his partner Tigran Gambaryan, and a small group of investigators at a growing roster of three-letter American agencies had used this newfound technique, tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable, to crack one criminal case after another on an unprecedented, epic scale. But those methods had never led them to a case quite like this one, in which the fate of so many people, victims and perpetrators alike, seemed to hang on the findings of this novel form of forensics.... Janczewski thought again of the investigative method that had brought them there like a digital divining rod, revealing a hidden layer of illicit connections underlying the visible world....

When Bitcoin first appeared in 2008, one fundamental promise of the cryptocurrency was that it revealed only which coins reside at which Bitcoin addresses — long, unique strings of letters and numbers — without any identifying information about those coins' owners. This layer of obfuscation created the impression among many early adherents that Bitcoin might be the fully anonymous internet cash long awaited by libertarian cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists: a new financial netherworld where digital briefcases full of unmarked bills could change hands across the globe in an instant. Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, had gone so far as to write that "participants can be anonymous" in an early email describing the cryptocurrency. And thousands of users of dark-web black markets like Silk Road had embraced Bitcoin as their central payment mechanism.

But the counterintuitive truth about Bitcoin, the one upon which Chainalysis had built its business, was this: Every Bitcoin payment is captured in its blockchain, a permanent, unchangeable, and entirely public record of every transaction in the Bitcoin network. The blockchain ensures that coins can't be forged or spent more than once. But it does so by making everyone in the Bitcoin economy a witness to every transaction. Every criminal payment is, in some sense, a smoking gun in broad daylight. Within a few years of Bitcoin's arrival, academic security researchers — and then companies like Chainalysis — began to tear gaping holes in the masks separating Bitcoin users' addresses and their real-world identities.
The article describes some investigative techniques — like pressuring exchanges for identities, tying a transaction to a known identity, or even performing an undercover transaction themselves. "Thanks to tricks like these, Bitcoin had turned out to be practically the opposite of untraceable: a kind of honeypot for crypto criminals that had, for years, dutifully and unerasably recorded evidence of their dirty deals.

"By 2017, agencies like the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the IRS's Criminal Investigation division had traced Bitcoin transactions to carry out one investigative coup after another, very often with the help of Chainalysis.

"The cases had started small and then gained a furious momentum...."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for sharing the article.

The International Monetary Fund "has indicated it will not give El Salvador a much-needed loan unless it drops bitcoin" as one of the country's legal tenders, reports the Los Angeles Times. And meanwhile the "bitcoin bond" proposed by El Salvador has been "delayed indefinitely."

But the government has taken other actions:
After a dramatic spike in killings here over a single weekend last month, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's reaction was swift — and extreme. He sent soldiers into poor neighborhoods to round up thousands of people who he claimed were gang members, then paraded them in front of news cameras in their underwear and handcuffs.

He tweeted pictures of detainees who had been bruised and bloodied by security forces, suggesting they "maybe fell" or "were eating fries with ketchup." And he started feeding the nation's prisoners two meals a day instead of three, warning that if violence continued, "I swear to God that they won't eat a single grain of rice."

It is a distinct look for Bukele, who has been focused in recent months on presenting himself to the world as a modern tech innovator on a quest to turn El Salvador into a cryptocurrency paradise. Not only is Bukele now embracing the mano duro techniques of past Latin American leaders, he is going much further, using the homicide spree — which left 87 people dead in three days — as a pretext for suspending civil liberties and attacking the press.

In recent days, Bukele and his loyalists in the Legislative Assembly ordered a state of emergency that restricts freedom of association, suspends the norm that detainees be informed of their rights at the moment of arrest and denies prisoners access to lawyers....

That Bukele would use the spate of homicides as a pretext to further consolidate power is no surprise to many of his critics, who believe he may be preparing to stay in office past 2024, when he is supposed to step down, even though El Salvador's constitution bans consecutive presidential terms.

But they also say that there may be another motive for his new tough-on-crime stance: diverting attention from the deepening failure of his cryptocurrency experiment.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) firm Truflation is building a new gauge to track inflation independent from the government and in real-time. CoinDesk reports: Think of it as a competitor to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and one where officials can't move the goalposts. "The framework that [the government] is using is a hundred years old ... and they have continuously tried to evolve that versus taking a fresh approach in an age where we've got everything computerized," Truflation founder Stefan Rust told CoinDesk in an interview. The team started building Truflation after former Coinbase (COIN) Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan challenged Web 3 developers to build a censorship-resistant inflation feed, claiming that "the centralized state isn't going to provide reliable inflation stats," and promising an investment of $100,000. On Friday it was announced that Truflation won the challenge.

The key difference between the CPI and the Truflation index is that while the government uses survey data to measure inflation, Truflation looks at price data. The CPI is measured in the form of a survey that collects about 94,000 prices per month for commodities and services and 8,000 rental housing units for the housing component. While the Truflation index is based on the same calculation model as the widely used CPI, it is different because it measures and reports inflation changes daily by using current real-market price data from sources like Zillow, Penn State and Nielsen, among others. About 40% of the data that is being looked at is the same goods basket that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses. The remaining 60% is being substituted with data from other sources. Truflation, which runs on Chainlink and is therefore accessible and visible for everyone, currently measures a 13.2% inflation rate, as opposed to 7.9% measured by the CPI in March.

Blockstream and Jack Dorsey's Block, formerly Square, are breaking ground on a solar- and battery-powered bitcoin mine in Texas that uses solar and storage technology from Tesla. Tesla's 3.8 megawatt solar PV array and 12 megawatt-hour Megapack will power the facility. From a report: Blockstream co-founder and CEO Adam Back, a British cryptographer and a member of the "cypherpunk" crew, told CNBC on the sidelines of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami that the mining facility is designed to be a proof of concept for 100% renewable energy bitcoin mining at scale.

[...] Miners provide demand to these semi-stranded assets and make renewables in Texas economically viable, according to Castle Island Venture's Nic Carter. The constraint is that West Texas has roughly 34 gigawatts of power, five gigawatts of demand, and only 12 gigawatts of transmission. You can think of bitcoin miners as temporary buyers who keep the energy assets operational until the grid is able to fully absorb them. Back said the off-grid mine, expected to be completed later this year, highlights another key tenet of the bitcoin network: Miners are location agnostic and can "do it from anywhere without local infrastructure."

Robinhood Markets (HOOD) said Thursday it has activated its crypto wallet for 2 million "eligible" customers, making digital asset transfers broadly possible in the long-firewalled investments app. CoinDesk reports: Chief Product Officer Aparna Chennapragada made the announcement on stage at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami. Only a handful of wallet beta testers could move bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), dogecoin (DOGE) and a handful of other traded coins in and out of Robinhood's walled garden before. Now, all waitlisted customers outside of regulatory no-go zones Nevada, New York and Hawaii can do so. Additionally, she said Robinhood will add support for bitcoin transactions on the Lightning Network, the speedy, low-cost settlement layer for Bitcoin. "For the larger community this is a fantastic way" to access bitcoin cheaply and in a green way, she said, adding that BTC is the top recurring buy on the app.

Still, Robinhood's multi-asset wallet falls short of true functionality. It cannot plug into Ethereum-based services as MetaMask does. It cannot accept ERC-20 tokens, non-fungible tokens (NFT) or any asset outside of Robinhood's trading list. Tokens generated by airdrops and forks won't work either. "Any NFTs sent to a Robinhood Ethereum address may be lost and unrecoverable," the FAQ page said. Staking also appears to be off-limits for now. Tenev has previously acknowledged customers' desire for the yield-earning feature and said during last quarter's earnings call that Robinhood was investing in the necessary tech. A staking service would have to be "compliant," he said.

Users won't be charged for moving their Robinhood-based crypto into wallets that have such abilities. The company said it will apply estimated gas fees but not withdrawal fees to requested outbound transfers. There's a $5,000 daily cap on outbound transfers and newly acquired crypto stays put until the transaction settles, the web page said. Further, users must undergo an identity check and enable two-factor authentication to access the wallet.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Thursday crypto asset regulations should support responsible innovation while managing risks, sticking to the contours of a recent White House executive order that was well-received by the crypto market. From a report: In a speech on digital assets policy released by the Treasury, Yellen said that in many cases regulators already have authorities that can manage crypto risks and provide appropriate oversight of new types of intermediaries such as digital asset exchanges. "Our regulatory frameworks should be designed to support responsible innovation while managing risks -- especially those that could disrupt the financial system and economy," Yellen said in the excerpts of her speech to be delivered at American University in Washington. "As banks and other traditional financial firms become more involved in digital asset markets, regulatory frameworks will need to appropriately reflect the risks of these new activities," she said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The NFT marketplace OpenSea is now facing at least three lawsuits over stolen cartoon apes after lawyers for a New York man filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court claiming that his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT was taken from him due to what he characterized as "security vulnerabilities" of the OpenSea platform. Lawyers unaffiliated with the cases told Motherboard that, whatever the merits of the individual suits, the situation has the potential to cause trouble for the $13 billion Web3 startup, often referred to as the "eBay of NFTs," as it could potentially reveal its inner workings and invite a torrent of other suits that the company will be forced to defend against. "I think they're sitting on a ticking bomb," said Max Dilendorf, a lawyer specializing in digital assets, cryptocurrency, and asset tokenization who is not involved in any of the Bored Ape lawsuits.

The newest $1 million lawsuit, filed on behalf of Michael Vasile, is similar to another lawsuit filed in February by the same lawyers on behalf of an aggrieved Texas man. In both cases, the men say they lost their apes because of alleged bugs in OpenSea's code that the company knew about but did not take appropriate steps to fix. A third ape-related lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada and also naming the NFT marketplace LooksRare and Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, claimed OpenSea did not "implement common sense and reasonable security measures'' against fraud and instead put "all the onus" on users. Altogether, the cases against OpenSea and other platforms could prove to be an arena where the courts figure out if the platform or the individual should be to blame when people lose thousands of dollars in a matter of seconds to illicit and irreversible blockchain scams.

Regardless of the suits' merits, the unaffiliated lawyers said the OpenSea suits could place the popular NFT marketplace in a difficult position, as anything less than an all-out victory could invite a spate of similar lawsuits. Dilendorf added that OpenSea had reason to consider settling the case in order to avoid offering up the company's internal emails and documents during the discovery process. "I would not want to open up a Pandora's Box," Dilendorf said. "Because looking at how OpenSea operates the platform from a 10,000-foot view, it's very, very questionable."