A hacker has published the source code, including .exe, .txt, .bat, and .reg files, for the software used within El Salvador’s government-maintained Chivo bitcoin ATMs. President Nayib Bukele’s administration paid third-party contractors from various countries to build and maintain its infrastructure. Chivo has ties to Athena Bitcoin Global, a pink sheet stock that trades on the US OTC stock market. Athena rallied from $0.20 to $46.50 during Bukele’s Chivo announcements in 2011, however, today it trades for less than $0.10. Other third-party contractors include ROI Developers (a.k.a. Accruvia ..read more

Ontario’s superior court has green-lit a class action lawsuit against Binance that accuses the crypto exchange of selling unregistered crypto derivative products and violating securities law.  The lawsuit, brought by Christopher Lochan and Jeremy Leeder, claims that Binance sold crypto-derivative products to thousands of retail traders while failing to register with the Ontario Securities Commission, as required by law.  As reported by Advisor.ca, the lawsuit received a certification of motion on April 19 allowing it to proceed as a ‘class action’ lawsuit and represent a wide basis ..read more

This week was supposed to be the moment that fungible tokens on Bitcoin rocketed to prominence. Although some fungible tokens like the billion-dollar ORDI have gained modest popularity using standards like BRC-20 and STAMPS’ SRC-20, a brand new protocol was supposed to supersede these expensive, slow, and data-intensive standards. On April 20, the day of the Bitcoin halving, Ordinals founder Casey Rodarmor launched his next-generation fungible token protocol, Runes. Hundreds of thousands of wallets minted new Runes, paying all-time high Bitcoin transaction fees. Runes promised to be a more pr ..read more

The New York Stock Exchange is reportedly polling traders to see if they want to open trading up 24 hours a day, seven days a week, similar to cryptocurrency and forex markets. Leading the charge on the proposed change is infamous hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, who is attempting to open up his own exchange called 24 Exchange, which currently has tradeable markets out of Bermuda. Last year, 24 Exchange discontinued trading in crypto products and gave up on a bid to open up trading of US equities but it’s restarting the process now. The current move wouldn’t be the first time that the NYSE has ..read more

This morning, Crypto Twitter widely shared an official-looking document that supposedly detailed a request by Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren to impose a 1% wealth tax on personal crypto holdings exceeding $500,000. Just one problem: The letter was fake. Although Senator Warren is famously antagonistic toward crypto — even spawning a derogatory meme coin making fun of her staunch opposition — she didn’t sign a letter seeking “the imposition of a 1% wealth tax on cryptocurrency holdings exceeding $500,000 for individuals, trusts, and entities.” In fact, nobody signed that letter. The hoaxe ..read more

Binance recently announced that it was converting its ‘Secure Asset Fund for Users’ (SAFU) fund to the USDC token. This SAFU fund was a pseudo-insurance fund in which Binance stored funds to hopefully reimburse users if something were to go wrong with the platform. Before the conversion, the fund was held in several coins, including BTC, USDT, BNB and TUSD. These changes to the fund have brought to mind Binance’s earlier ‘Industry Recovery Fund’ and the lack of updates about the project. What was the Industry Recovery Fund? While FTX was collapsing into bankruptcy, financial criminal Cha ..read more

Following a month-long ‘bridge-to-earn’ program, crypto gambling platform ZKasino launched its own network on Saturday. However, the announcement included a nasty surprise. In what ZKasino referred to as a ‘seamless transition,’ users were informed that “All bridged Ethereum has been converted to our native gas token, ZKAS… as a favor to our users.” Not only was the 10,505 ETH, (worth $33 million at the time of writing) converted to the project’s own token without forewarning, but the tokens themselves would not be available to users right away. “Keep in mind that the majority of ZKAS is vest ..read more

On Bitcoin Halving day, Bitcoin Core contributor Bryan Bishop volunteered to replace Luke Dashjr as the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) editor. And while it may have started as a joke, the movement to displace Dashjr is gaining momentum. Dashjr is a staunch member of the Bitcoin old guard. Bishop, however, is more open to exotic financial products, having worked at futures and options exchange LedgerX and Avanti Bank which tried to launch its own stablecoin, AVIT. The part-real, part-meme of Bishop’s desire to work as Bitcoin’s BIP editor (a volunteer position that doesn’t actually exist e ..read more

Almost two years after its spectacular blow-up, Three Arrows Capital (3AC) co-founder Zhu Su has helpfully offered advice to Ethena on how to manage risk. Su’s fund blew up spectacularly in 2022 after aggressively pursuing his ‘supercycle’ thesis. 3AC ghosted creditors and was uncooperative with liquidators, leading to Su’s imprisonment in September after attempting to flee Singapore. Su’s partner in crime Kyle Davies remains unrepentant and intends to avoid jail. Boldly presuming Ethena’s risk managers would want his advice in the first place, Su suggests leveraging up the long side of the t ..read more

Solana’s meme coin season hit its peak a month ago, but the trend seemingly refuses to die elsewhere. The launch of a new ‘FOMO’ meme coin on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer 2, Base, shows many are still willing to blindly throw money at dubious projects. The project, Father Of Meme Origin (FOMO), is styled on the likeness of Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, in which the term ‘meme’ was coined. The FOMO team has been accused of bad faith around the launch and botching the distribution of tokens. Despite raising over $15 million via ‘presale,’ the team allegedly supplied less than 10% of ..read more