The Dubai leg of ‘premier’ global crypto conference series TOKEN2049 is facing massive disruption after it was hit by a heavy storm that reportedly flooded the event and the wider city. TOKEN2049, which is scheduled to run until April 21, bills itself as one of the most esteemed crypto conferences out there and boasts speakers including Peter McCormack, Vitalik Buterin, and Dovey Wan.  However, conference goers face being left underwater after severe storms battered the UAE, grounding flights and prompting authorities to warn residents to stay in their homes. According to the National Ce ..read more

As geopolitical tensions sent crypto markets into a tailspin last weekend, the Curve Finance community was again forced to consider the risks posed by founder Michael Egorov. Egorov came close to liquidation on his highly leveraged CRV positions, which total over $150 million, with CRV dipping below $0.38 on Saturday, according to data from CoinMarketCap. On-chain analyst EmberCN identifies five addresses that have current open positions of $93 million worth of stablecoins borrowed against 372 million CRV (worth $162 million at time of writing). It was also noted that the 20 million CRV posit ..read more

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has sent more than $300,000 to coin mixer Railgun which has also been used by North Korea’s Lazarus Group. Buterin has been using the service for months, — albeit with smaller sums of money — and today he took a definitive stand in support of it and other coin anonymizing services. In addition to sending 100 ETH through Railgun, he posted a defense of his actions, claiming “Privacy Is Normal” — a phrase borrowed from Zcash. Buterin defended Railgun in particular, claiming that its novel use of zero-knowledge proofs allows users to demonstrate the lawful origin ..read more

Recently, the SushiSwap community voted on a proposal that signaled support for transferring nearly the entirety of the treasury from the DAO to a ‘Labs’ entity. Sushigov.eth, the operational multisig for SushiSwap, voted for the first time in a governance proposal, voting ‘Yay’ with 5.5 million SUSHIPOWER, the largest individual voter, and approximately 30% of the votes in favor.  Recently, sushigov.eth received significant quantities of Sushi, including approximately 1.9 million on April 4, from 0x4bb4c1B0745ef7B4642fEECcd0740deC417ca0a0, an address that resolves to *.eth. It also rece ..read more

With momentum carried over from the relatively smooth hard fork upgrades Shapella (Shanghai+Capella) and Dencun (Deneb+Cancun), Ethereum’s next hard fork was supposed to be a breeze. Nevertheless, several analysts are waving red flags about one of its code changes, EIP-3074. Through EIP-3074, Pectra will introduce codes that permit users to delegate all of their Ethereum assets to so-called Invokers — externally owned accounts (EOA) that users must trust to not steal their money. Following the naming convention of ‘star + city portmanteau,’ the upcoming hard fork Pectra (Electra+Prague) will ..read more

European authorities arrested nine suspects and seized €1.5 million ($1.6 million) in crypto on Friday during an investigation into a $687 million cannabis Ponzi scheme dubbed ‘JuicyFields.’ The suspects are accused of using social media to promote a number of websites that offered promising investment opportunities in the cultivation, harvesting, and distribution of medicinal cannabis. Specifically, investors were told they could use crypto and fiat to crowdfund the growing of cannabis plants that would be sold on, sometimes for 100% annual returns. According to Europol, JuicyFields had an e ..read more

A senior employee at one of the world’s biggest bitcoin mining firms says he’s “fascinated” that there’s no futures market based around rare and incredibly valuable satoshis, and has speculated that ultra-rare sats could be worth “millions” to collectors. Adam Swick, chief growth officer at Marathon Digital Holdings was speaking to CoinDesk about the race to mine the first satoshi after bitcoin’s next halving, due to happen later this month. Following the launch of Bitcoin Ordinals early last year, individual satoshis, far from being unremarkable and largely anonymous slivers of bitcoin, can ..read more

Yuga Labs, the firm behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and other popular NFT collections, has been directing ‘royalties’ to a deposit address associated with FTX US, according to Blockchain Intelligence firm Arkham Intelligence.  Arkham highlights the fact that Yuga Labs has sent over $250,000 worth of value over the last two months to 0xAAe7aC476b117bcCAfE2f05F582906be44bc8FF1, an address that Arkham, as well as blockchain intelligence firm Breadcrumbs, associated with FTX US. FTX US was plunged into bankruptcy in November 2022 due to its role in the crimes of Sam Bankman-Fried and ..read more

Pac Finance, a crypto lending platform on the Ethereum L2 Blast, made a costly error while updating its ezETH market parameters yesterday. The resulting $26 million of liquidations, spotted by Parsec founder Will Sheehan, affected at least a dozen addresses, though the worst hit user lost the lion’s share, at $24 million. Responding to Sheehan, the Pac Finance team explained that the bloodbath had been caused by human error; instead of adjusting the loan-to-value ratio (LTV) as planned, the liquidation threshold was changed ‘unexpectedly’ and ‘without prior notification to our team.’ Thank ..read more

Australian prosecutors have dropped mining billionaire Andrew Forrest’s criminal case against Meta in which he was seeking reparations over a series of crypto scam advertisements that used his face. According to a spokesperson for the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP), there was insufficient evidence to continue Forrest’s prosecution against the tech giant. The CDPP, representing Forrest’s case, reportedly made a submission to the chief judge to discontinue the case after receiving the brief.  In response to the case’s termination, Forrest said it was “a tragedy for inn ..read more