The wide-ranging bill, introduced in July, would – among other things – extend anti-money-laundering requirements from the Bank Secrecy Act to providers of digital assets wallets, crypto miners, validators and other network participants. One of its original co-sponsors was Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who has often occupied a middle ground between the parties on important legislative issues, and two Republicans also supported it from the start: Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Media gatekeepers are weaker than ever, leaving the public, which is already distrustful of large corporations and institutions, vulnerable to rumor and disinformation. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many Americans relied heavily on traditional media sources. Today, more Americans get their news from their favored social media app, which likely prioritizes content that engages (sensationalizes) rather than educates. And when constituents are whipped up by trending topics and viral posts, lawmakers have less political freedom to craft middle-of-the-road policies. Just as crypto market participants have suffered from the public’s focus on a small number of bad actors, the AI industry will be held politically liable when machine learning produces sub-optimal outcomes, even if machine learning outcomes are more often statistically superior than processes managed by humans.

Other celebrities who have been sued for promoting FTX include the likes of Shaquille O’Neal, Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, and Steph Curry. Lawyers leading the case against the celebrities said in the filing that they are engaged in confidential discussions, and there is a “likelihood that other FTX settlements will be reached,” according to court filings.

“Bitcoin is an adversarial network, but on the flip side it’s also a cooperative network,” Lopp wrote on X. “Miners are humans too, and they realize that people make mistakes. While retaining egregious transaction fees makes for a nice short-term profit, returning those funds is the humane decision.”

“There are still several avenues available for crypto exchanges to achieve compliance with U.K. regulators in the future, and we are actively exploring all options for this market,” Zhou said. “We are engaged in partnerships and consultations with local businesses, assessing potential collaborations with entities in the U.K., which will enable us to continue our operations in full compliance.”

Coinbase’s layer 2 blockchain, Base, which launched in early August, has seen its daily transactions hit an all-time high, according to data from IntoTheBlock. Base saw 1.88 million transactions on Thursday, higher than layer 2 rivals Arbitrum and Optimism combined, which saw 780,000 and 370,000, respectively. “Interestingly, it is not decentralized finance (DeFi) applications nor non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces driving the surge in Base’s activity. Instead, a significant portion of usage can be attributed to a new social application, FriendTech,” said Lucas Outumuro, head of research at IntoTheBlock. Decentralized social network platform Friend.tech is built on Base and calls itself “the marketplace for your friends.” The platform saw increased usage over the last week, with its daily transactions also reaching an all-time high. Friend.tech’s transactions reached 529,000.

The payments world is blanketed by financial intermediaries, each extracting a toll for their services. Creating a stablecoin involves PayPal buying a basket of currencies and holding these yen, euros, rupees, won and so on in banks across the world. Once PayPal tokenizes the currency backed by those bank deposits, it has a private, multicurrency money supply that exists outside the global banking system and is free of any third-party toll collectors, Quigley explained.