Bored Ape co-founder Wylie Aronow — also known as Gordon Goner online — struggled through a decade afflicted by an autoimmune disease before recovering to launch the world’s hottest NFT project three years ago this week. After hitting stratospheric heights of money and success, with BAYC being feted by major celebrities like Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg, Aronow came crashing back to earth after being diagnosed with a heart failure condition in January 2023. Being in your mid-30s and being told you have a condition that 50% of people pass away from within five years is hard to comprehend. Aronow ..read more

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments. Chinese national accused of $5.94 billion scam in court Yadi Zhang, a Chinese national alleged to have scammed over 130,000 Mainland China investors out of 43 billion Chinese Yuan ($5.94 billion) and then laundered the proceeds using Bitcoin, has been apprehended by UK authorities.  During her appearance at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on April 20, Zhang indicated through a translator that she intended to plead not guilty to two charges of criminal possession of cryptocurrency. She was rem ..read more

After the last bull run and the raft of lawsuits that came out of the initial coin offering mania of 2017 and 2018, it was generally believed that ICOs were dead in the water. A combination of regulatory scrutiny, especially in the U.S., spectacular pump-and-dump schemes and an overall flakiness not witnessed since the back-of-the-beermat ideas of the Dot.com boom appeared to have sealed the fate of ICOs. Which was a shame. Because, despite the scams and hype, tokens are an innovative way to raise money. Stylianos Kampakis, CEO of The Tesseract Academy, says fundraising for new projects was ne ..read more

Chainlink guru Zach Rynes only doxed himself as the man behind the six-year-old pseudonymous account “ChainLinkGod” a month ago. But he can’t stress enough the perks of starting out in crypto anonymously.  “You should probably be anon first unless you have a good reason to be doxed because you can always go doxed from being anon, but you can’t go the other way around,” he tells Hall of Flame. Beginning incognito also offers you the flexibility to step back without embarrassment if your account is a flop within the community. When Rynes started posting on X, he was just a kid. “I joined ..read more

More than 70% of the crypto lost to North Korea-linked hacks since 2020 was stolen via private key exploits, according to Magazine’s analysis of data from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and DeFiLlama. The combined figures suggest North Korea was responsible for about $2.4 billion of crypto heists since 2020, of which $1.69 billion was stolen due to compromised private keys. These cybercrimes are often attributed to the Lazarus Group — a notorious hacking syndicate allegedly backed by the North Korean state — and allegedly support the hermit kingdom’s weapons of mass destruction pro ..read more

Top Stories This Week Grayscale spot Bitcoin ETF ‘halves’ before BTC halving Major Bitcoin investor Grayscale Investments saw its spot BTC exchange-traded fund (ETF) holdings drop 50% ahead of the anticipated Bitcoin halving event. On April 16, Bitcoin holdings in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF (GBTC) shrunk by one-half from 619,220 BTC on the first day of trading on Jan. 11. The spot Bitcoin ETF held 309,871 BTC on its 66th day of trading, down 50% of the amount since the trading debut, according to GBTC data. The GBTC “halving” came just two days before the much-anticipated Bitcoin halving ..read more

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments. Hong Kong’s new Bitcoin and Ether ETFs Hong Kong’s Securities & Futures Commission has approved spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs. But will they unlock a river of gold from Asian investors, or will they simply be a blip on the radar of the finance world? Social media pricked up its ears at the news that Hong Kong offshoots of Chinese asset managers Harvest Fund Management, Bosera Asset Management, and China Asset Management (ChinaAMC) are among the first to kickstart their crypto asset ETFs.  Boser ..read more

Everything you need to know about the AI future that’s hurtling fast towards us. Jump to: Video of the week — Atlas Robot, Everybody hates Humane’s AI pin, AI makes holocaust victims immortal, Knowledge collapse from mid-curve AIs, Users should beg to pay for AI, Can non-coders create a program with AI? All Killer, No Filler AI News. Predicting the future with the past There’s a new prompting technique to get ChatGPT to do what it hates doing the most — predict the future. New research suggests the best way to get accurate predictions from ChatGPT is to prompt it to tell a story set in the fut ..read more

Bitcoin halving twice as good for Web3 Games this time around Joonmo Kwon, founder and CEO of Web3 gaming platform Delabs Games, predicts that this week’s Bitcoin halving will see funds pouring into the Web3 gaming industry. “The heightened market enthusiasm and increased capital inflows into the cryptocurrency space resulting from the halving event could translate into more significant funding and advancement for Web3 gaming initiatives,” Kwon tells Web3 Gamer. “As altcoin market dominance and market capitalization climb, there is typically an increased interest and influx of capital into gam ..read more

You may have heard of Joseph Lubin, the Ethereum co-founder presently serving as the CEO of Consensys. But don’t confuse him for Kieren James-Lubin — the entrepreneur’s highly successful son who co-founded his own company, BlockApps, in 2015. James-Lubin now serves as the chief executive of BlockApps from its offices in Miami Beach — where he moved from New York City after a stint at the University of California-Berkeley, where he had been working on a PhD in theoretical physics. We took a few minutes to speak with him about his thoughts on the future of the cryptocurrency industry. Here’s wha ..read more