Regulation

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has announced the sentencing for an individual who pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges connected to “unlawfully obtained” Bitcoin from the Silk Road marketplace in 2012. In an April 14 announcement, the U.S. Justice Department said James Zhong was sentenced to one year

In October 2022, the European Union finalized the text of its regulatory framework called Markets in Crypto-Assets or MiCA. The final vote on the new regulation is scheduled for April 19, 2023, meaning the days of an unregulated crypto market in the EU may soon be over. The MiCA regulations introduce clear guidelines for handling

Hong Kong-based digital asset firm HashKey Group has launched a new wealth management platform geared toward professional and institutional investors. In an April 14 announcement, HashKey cited “significant demand from investors to access virtual assets” as the reason for its move into the wealth management space. Deng Chao, the CEO of the group’s venture capital

Katie Hobbs, the governor of the state of Arizona, has vetoed legislation that would have largely stopped local authorities from imposing taxes on individuals and businesses running blockchain nodes.  In an April 12 decision, Governor Hobbs issued a veto to Arizona Bill 1236, first introduced in January. The legislation aimed to revise sections of statutes

Blockchain gaming guilds are the continuation of an ancient tradition. Guilds have existed since the beginning of capitalism in the fourteenth century. The most popular European artisan guilds were seven major guilds of Florence known as Arti Maggiori, which helped refine and improve crafts and trades from medicine to banking and weaving. Can blockchain gaming

Cryptocurrency regulation tests aiming to help shape crypto laws in Zambia that simulate the real-world use of crypto are on track to finish by June. In an April 12 Reuters interview, Zambia’s innovation, science and technology minister, Felix Mutati, said the purpose of conducting the tests was to help the government “see what would happen

Texas lawmakers in the state’s Senate have approved a bill aimed at largely removing incentives for crypto miners operating under the seemingly friendly regulatory environment. In a 30-1 vote on the floor of the Texas State Senate on April 12, lawmakers in the 88th legislative session passed Senate Bill 1751, legislation that would amend sections

From childhood dreams of becoming a rapper to serving in the United States Marines, to now being “the pro-XRP lawyer” on Crypto Twitter, John Deaton has had an eventful life. While his dream of becoming a rapper didn’t work out, John Deaton’s 260,000 Twitter following would make many up-and-coming rappers envious. “That was about 10

The Australian government is being pushed to ban the payment of cyber ransoms, usually demanded in cryptocurrency, following a local business suffering a mass data breach and subsequent ransom demand. Australian financial institution Latitude Financial first announced on March 16 that it was hit by a cyber attack and provided an update on April 11

The Banque de France has contributed to the discussion of European crypto asset regulation with a close examination of decentralized finance (DeFi) and potential approaches to its regulation. The discussion is timely, given the growing use of tokenization in finance and the introduction of blockchain technology in many economic sectors, the authors said.   The

Regulators in the United States have been piling on the pressure on the crypto space over the last year, even more so in light of the FTX demise and collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). Now, according to a job posting on the official government website, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking to

Presidential hopefuls Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) and Ron DeSantis are rallying against the Federal Reserve’s FedNow payments system claiming it would pave the way for a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). In an April 11 Twitter thread, Democrat RFK Jr. — the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy Jr. — once again

New York Times’s latest report on Bitcoin (BTC) mining, titled “The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin,” has irked many BTC proponents. A number of Bitcoin proponents took to Twitter to call out certain aspects of the report calling it “cheery picking data.” The NYT article calls Bitcoin mining a “voracious” appetite and claims

Japan has shown support for OpenAI amid a sea of bans by different countries and uncertainties for the artificial intelligence (AI) company. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno stated on Monday, April 10, that Japan would contemplate incorporating AI technology into government systems, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, provided privacy and cybersecurity issues are addressed. Following

FTX was run by three inexperienced people “not long out of college,” who relied on “a hodgepodge” of online shared documents and communications across a series of different apps to manage the multi-billion dollar empire according to FTX CEO John Ray III. In an April 9 court filing in a Delaware Bankruptcy Court, John J

A widely shared video of European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde admitting that a Digital Euro will be used in a “limited” way to control the payments people can make was taken from the three week old prank video. The video was highlighted by breaking news account Watcher Guru on April 6 and generated