As Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced founder of crypto exchange FTX, sits in a jail cell in Brooklyn’s notorious Metropolitan Detention Center awaiting the start of his trial on Tuesday for seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, funds that were stolen from FTX in a hack hours after the firm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last November have moved for the first time in more than 9 months. Not only was the FTX collapse already one of the most stunning debacles in the long history of financial disasters, the siphoning of $600 million in funds from the company’s crypto wallets added insult to injury and led to speculation that company insiders were absconding…
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Crypto & AI: Competition, Convergence or Both?
Part two: Smart Contracts, Fraud Detection & Portfolio Management
Blockchain is increasingly presenting new opportunities for applications in combination with AI. In fact, Future Market Insights estimates that the global market for blockchain AI will skyrocket to $3.5 billion by 2032, with a 23% CAGR from 2023 to 2033 driven in part by small and medium enterprises adopting AI-based blockchain platforms to enhance smart contracts, payment systems and more. “Reaching consensus on reality” Paul Brody, Global Blockchain Leader at consulting powerhouse Ernst & Young (which has also become a blockchain powerhouse owing in large part to Paul’s thought leadership the last 7 years—including his early advocacy of Ethereum as the platform of choice for enterprise), has a characteristically nuanced…
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Multi-year effort to improve Bitcoin-to-DeFi bridging crosses Threshold
Network announces redemptions for tBTC
Threshold Network announced this week that it has completed a multi-year effort to upgrade its Bitcoin-to-DeFi bridge tBTC from its original structure and security model launched in 2020. Specifically, the protocol added redemption capability – that is, the ability for customers to not only put their bitcoin in escrow and mint tBTC (an ERC-20 token) but also reverse the process and “unmint” back to BTC. This is the latest in a string of Threshold announcements beginning in January with tBTC minting, an integration with interoperability protocol Wormhole in May and four subsequent partner launch announcements, three involving Ethereum “Layer 2” (L2) scaling juggernauts Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism. The reason given…
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Multi-Signature Ethereum Wallets Explained
Benefits include enhanced security, control and flexibility
Security is essential in the brave new world of cryptocurrency. It is crucial to safeguard digital assets from possible dangers and weaknesses, as along with the myriad benefits crypto offers, each owner takes on a large, and often quite challenging, responsibility in the absence of a company or entity to turn to for support. Not to mention that there is generally zero opportunity for restitution in the case of user error or malfeasance. The phrase “not your keys, not your coins” has long meant both that if you allow an entity to hold your crypto-assets they have ultimate control over them, as well as that the assets are truly in…
