The famous author of the best-selling book Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki, says the world economy is on the verge of collapse. He warned investors about the risks of bank runs, frozen savings, and bail-ins that may come next.

Robert Kiyosaki on Collapsing World Economy

The author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki, is back with more gloomy warnings about the world economy. Rich Dad Poor Dad is a 1997 book co-authored by Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter. It has been on the New York Times Best Seller List for over six years. More than 32 million copies of the book have been sold in over 51 languages across more than 109 countries.

Kiyosaki said on Tuesday that the world economy is on the verge of collapse, warning of several risks that could hurt investors. He tweeted:

World economy on verge of collapse. Runs on banks next? Savings frozen? Bail-ins next?

He then urged investors to buy silver. “You can buy a real silver coin for about $25,” he noted, adding that he doesn’t make any money when people follow his advice and buy silver coins. The renowned author emphasized:

I simply want you prepared for what is coming.

In times of financial crisis, depositors may panic and withdraw their money all at once, which can cause a bank run and lead to frozen savings accounts. In addition, if a bank faces the issue of insolvency, it may impose a bail-in, where the bank uses depositors’ funds to keep itself afloat. All of this could hurt investors financially.

Kiyosaki often said he does not trust the Biden administration, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and Wall Street. He previously warned that the Fed’s action could destroy the U.S. economy and the dollar.

The Rich Dad Poor Dad author has also raised concerns many times about upcoming market crashes. He recently warned against investing in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), noting that bitcoin, gold, and silver are the best investments for unstable times. He called gold and silver God’s money while bitcoin is “people’s money.”

Kiyosaki predicted that by 2025, bitcoin’s price will be $500,000 while gold will rise to $5,000 and silver will soar to $500. This year, he expects the price of gold to reach $3,800 and silver to hit $75. He said the holders of gold, silver, and BTC will get richer when the Fed pivots and prints trillions of dollars. In January, he said that we are in a global recession, warning of soaring bankruptcies, unemployment, and homelessness.

What do you think about Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki’s warnings? Let us know in the comments section below.

Kevin Helms

A student of Austrian Economics, Kevin found Bitcoin in 2011 and has been an evangelist ever since. His interests lie in Bitcoin security, open-source systems, network effects, and the intersection between economics and cryptography.




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Solana’s co-founder said last week’s 1.14 network update has raised concerns about maintaining stability during major updates.

By Shaurya Malwa

AccessTimeIconMar 1, 2023, at 1:17 p.m.

Updated Mar 1, 2023, at 9:00 p.m.

Solana is rising higher in the last 24 hours after sluggish transaction processing spiraled into a near-complete shutdown of activity on the protocol. The Solana Foundation says the root cause is “still unknown” and an investigation is underway. CoinDesk Managing Editor for Data and Tokens Danny Nelson discusses the latest developments.

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Solana Labs will make improvements to its software upgrade process to ensure network reliability and uptime, co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said on Tuesday.

“Delivering a fast, reliable, and scalable network in order to move toward a better, decentralized web remains a top priority,” Yakovenko said in a blog post. “The issues around last week’s 1.14 network update – which focused on improvements for speed and scale – made it clear how maintaining stability during these major updates remains a challenge.”

Yakovenko said last week’s 1.14 network update had raised concerns about maintaining stability during major updates.


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Prior to the 1.14 release, core engineers were working on fixing problems that were impacting the network’s speed and usability, such as invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions, and lack of fee markets, among other more technical issues. These issues were prioritized to improve user experience.

But following the latest release, core engineers plan to bring in additional external developers and auditors to test and find exploits. They will also form an adversarial team comprising almost a third of the Solana Labs core engineering team.

The core engineers will continue supporting external core engineers, including Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team, which is building a second validator client.

Additionally, core engineers plan to improve the restart process by making nodes automatically discover the latest confirmed slot and share the ledger with each other if it is missing. Solana Labs and third-party core engineering teams have been working to improve the network over the past year, with a focus on stability.

“For example, Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team is building a second validator client to increase the network’s throughput, efficiency, and resiliency. Mango DAO developers are focused on the tooling needed to build on Solana,” Yakovenko said.

The comments came following a lengthy weekend outage for the Solana blockchain. The problems that started as sluggish transaction processing spiraled into a near-complete shutdown of activity on Solana. Developers said Monday the reason for a network-wide outage over the weekend was still unclear but investigations are ongoing.


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Many market observers expected a surge in the use of decentralized exchanges following the collapse of FTX, but analysts said many DEXs offer a less user-friendly experience than centralized ones.

By Jocelyn Yang

AccessTimeIconFeb 28, 2023 at 1:46 a.m.

Updated Feb 28, 2023 at 4:20 a.m.

The chart shows Coinbase’s trading volume has surpassed Uniswap’s this year. (Kaiko)
(Kaiko)

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Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase’s trading volume has surpassed the popular decentralized exchange platform Uniswap’s this year, according to a report from crypto data firm Kaiko.

As of Friday, trading volumes for Coinbase had reached more than $185 billion, nearly double the $93 billion on Uniswap, Kaiko said. At one point in 2022, the exchanges’ respective volumes were nearly equal.

Following last year’s collapse of the FTX exchange and other centralized entities in the crypto ecosystem, market watchers anticipated seeing more traders pivot to decentralized exchanges (DEX), and at one point in 2022 that shift seemed to be occurring. But DEXs have presented challenges for users.


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Data from analytics platform DefiLlama showed that November trading volumes on decentralized platforms surged to $113 billion, their highest monthly level since May, but they now seem unlikely to surpass $100 million this month, based on daily volumes.

Conor Ryder, research analyst at Kaiko, said the calls for a transition to DEXs look “a bit premature” as centralized exchanges (CEX) still serve a critical role in onboarding the average investor.

“Presumably the average investor has still been put off by the worse user experience on some of these DEXs, compared to the more straightforward experience on CEXs,” Ryder told CoinDesk in a direct message on Twitter. “I think CEXs will always be an essential part of the exchange landscape, whether we like it or not.”

Lucas Outumuro, head of research at blockchain analytics firm IntoTheBlock, said the initial spike in demand for noncustodial trading and decentralized finance (DeFi) at large after the meltdown of FTX has “waned out.” Outumuro highlighted that the daily number of new Ethereum addresses along with trading volume remained small on DeFi exchanges.

According to data from IntoTheBlock, the daily number of newly created Ethereum addresses reached some 228,000 on Nov. 24, their highest level since May 2021, but has retreated to less than 90,000 daily.

CoinDesk - Unknown
The chart shows the daily number of newly created Ethereum addresses retreated to less than 90,000 daily. (IntoTheBlock)

“Getting onboard into Coinbase is much more similar to what people are used to with other tech or finance platforms, whereas getting into Uniswap is a completely different flow,” Outumuro told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. “This makes adoption take a little longer as new users may feel intimidated.”

JPMorgan strategists wrote in a note in November that slower transaction speeds, pooling of assets, and order-traceability features are likely to limit institutional participation. The analysts noted the absence of a limit order/stop loss feature on DEXs, their dependency on price oracles that source data from centralized exchanges, vulnerability to hacks, and exploits, the need for over-collateralization and systemic risks from the cascade of automated liquidations as hindrances to widespread adoption.

“While there has been some increase in the share of DEX in overall crypto trading activity in recent weeks, this is more likely to reflect the collapse in crypto prices and the deleveraging/automatic liquidations that followed the FTX collapse,” the authors wrote.


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Axelar describes its new VM as Kubernetes for Web3.

By Sam Kessler

AccessTimeIconFeb 28, 2023 at 1:22 a.m.

Updated Feb 28, 2023, at 5:47 a.m.

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(Aleksandr Barsukov/Unsplash)

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Axelar, the blockchain network that helps developers build cross-chain crypto apps, is expanding its product suite with the introduction of Axelar Virtual Machine (VM) – a generalized environment for building interconnected blockchains.

“Axelar Virtual Machine will allow developers to build their dApps (decentralized apps) once – whether on EVM, Cairo VM, Cosmos or another ecosystem – and run them on all chains,” Axelar said in a statement.

Most blockchains today are walled gardens; apps built on one chain typically lack access to data or services on another. Different blockchains can use different programming languages, and operating across chains generally means using headache-inducing infrastructure like bridges and oracles.


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Axelar describes itself as “Stripe for Web3” – just as Stripe provides a one-stop-shop for Web2 developers to bake virtually any banking institution into their apps, Axelar aims to help Web3 developers integrate seamlessly across different chains.

Axelar’s main product offering is a network that was purpose-built to communicate with a growing set of different blockchains. The Axelar network and its accompanying application programming interface (API) help developers build crypto apps that work with assets on all of these chains.

But building cross-chain crypto apps remains complex – each time a developer deploys on a new chain they need to run through a lengthy set-up process and re-tool their code for chain-specific quirks. By Axelar CEO Sergey Gorbunov’s estimate, cross-chain developers spend “70% of their time” prepping their code to deploy on new chains “versus actually coding the application logic.”

“We kind of took a step back and said, ‘OK, how can we simplify all of these issues for the ecosystem?’” Gorbunov told CoinDesk. “This is where the idea of creating an excellent virtual machine – an interoperability layer – came about.”

The Axelar Virtual Machine

A virtual machine is like a software version of a physical computer – it is a place to build applications that read and write data in a shared space. (The Ethereum Virtual Machine, for instance, hosts programs – called smart contracts – that can alter the state of the Ethereum ledger.)

Axelar says its new VM will extend upon the protocol’s cross-chain mission by providing a framework for building blockchains that – like the Axelar network – can natively swap assets and messages between one another. Blockchains connected to Axelar’s new VM will be able to talk to one another, and app builders that develop VM-compatible apps will be able to deploy their software onto VM-compatible chains.

Taking the Stripe analogy a step further, Gorbunov describes the new Axelar VM as a Web3 version of Google’s Kubernetes – a popular toolkit that provides building blocks for developers to spin up and scale web apps.

“Kubernetes allows you to program how you want to deploy your application in the Web2 world. Like what are the regions where it needs to be deployed? What are the application servers? What are the databases behind it?” Gorbunov explained. “Similarly, using the [Axelar] virtual machine, we can let [Web3] developers specify their deployment configurations and then upload their code. And then with one transaction, that code will get pushed to all the chains interconnected through the Axelar protocol.”

Over the next six months as Axelar begins to roll out its VM, Gorbunov says his team will be “working with app developers and protocol developers to build templates” that will allow developers to roll out their apps with certain deployment conditions pre-configured.

Axelar’s most recent fundraising round valued the company at over $1 billion. According to Axelarscan, a tool that tracks Axelar network activity, the protocol is currently connected to 32 different chains – including Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, and Arbitrum – and has processed $86 million in asset transfers over the past 30 days.

UPDATE (Feb 28, 00:17 UTC): Changes language in the ninth paragraph to more accurately reflect that blockchains “connect” to the VM (Axelar’s VM is not a toolkit for building brand new blockchains).


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Sam is CoinDesk’s deputy managing editor for tech and protocols. He reports on decentralized technology, infrastructure, and governance. He owns ETH and BTC.

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The global financial crime watchdog’s plenary, made up of 206 members including observer organizations like the UN, also agreed to take stock of what jurisdictions have been doing so far.

By Sandali HandagamaCamomile Shumba

AccessTimeIconFeb 24, 2023 at 7:03 p.m.

Updated Feb 25, 2023, at 12:19 a.m.

The Financial Action Task Force has agreed on an action plan to drive the “timely implementation” of its global standards for crypto, a report from its recent plenary meeting shows. “The Hash” panel discusses the potential outcomes for crypto regulation across the world.

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The Financial Action Task Force has agreed on an action plan to drive the “timely implementation” of its global standards for crypto, a report from its recent plenary meeting shows.

The plenary for the global money-laundering and financial crimes watchdog is made up of 206 members, including observer organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, United Nations, and Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units.

In Friday’s document, the watchdog noted that many countries have failed to implement its norms, including its controversial “travel rule,” which requires services providers to collect and share information on crypto transactions.


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“The plenary thus agreed on a road map to strengthen implementation of FATF standards on virtual assets and virtual asset service providers, which will include a stocktake of current levels of implementation across the global network,” the FATF said, adding that a report on its findings is due in the first half of 2024.

FATF published its updated standards for crypto in 2019, but last June, it said only 11 of 98 surveyed jurisdictions were enforcing the travel rule and urged them to act faster.

The report also noted that strong crypto regulation is key to disrupting financial flows from ransomware exploits, adding that “criminals responsible are getting away undetected with large amounts of money, predominantly using virtual assets.”

In its country-specific recommendations – mostly addressing sanctions compliance – the FATF said Jordan “should continue to work on implementing its action plan to address its strategic deficiencies” for assessing money-laundering risks involving crypto.

Read more: Few Crypto Firms Even Trying to Comply With FATF’s ‘Travel Rule’


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Software engineers and members of the development lab Ripplex want to create a cross-chain bridge for the XRPL network to bolster cross-chain transfers between different blockchain networks. According to a recent GitHub draft, the proposal outlines how the cross-chain bridge could function and suggests ways to prevent transaction replay.

Ripplex Dev Proposes XRPL Cross-Chain Bridge Technology

According to a recent draft submitted to Github, developers want to create a cross-chain bridge for the XRP Ledger (XRPL). The technology would allow cross-chain transfers and provide blockchain interoperability between XRPL and various networks. “In this proposal, a cross-chain transfer is not a single transaction,” the GitHub draft details. “It occurs on two chains, requires multiple transactions, and involves an additional server type called a ‘witness.’”

If a cross-chain bridge is implemented for XRPL, the blockchain will join numerous networks that leverage this technology, including Ethereum, Avalanche, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, and others. The proposed design by XRPL developers includes a new server type, three new ledger objects, and eight new transactions. The summary also describes a method to “prevent the same assets from being wrapped multiple times (prevent transaction replay).” Mayukha Vadari, a software engineer and Ripplex developer, shared the proposal on social media.

“We just published an official XRPL Standards spec for cross-chain bridges,” Vadari said. “Check it out and let me know if you have any thoughts.”

The cross-chain idea follows the push to create an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) sidechain in October that is compatible with the XRP Ledger and Ripple transaction protocol (RTXP). Currently, XRP, XRPL’s native cryptocurrency, is the sixth-largest digital currency by market capitalization. However, over the last seven days, it has lost 7.7% against the U.S. dollar.

Ripple Labs is also dealing with a legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and some suspect a settlement between the two parties is possible. XRP, a token issued in 2012, has been accused of being unregistered security by the SEC. The U.S. regulator charged Ripple Labs in 2020, accusing the firm and executives of selling unregistered security without permission from the SEC.

What are your thoughts on the potential impact of a cross-chain bridge for the XRPL network and the wider blockchain ecosystem? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Jamie Redman

Jamie Redman is the News Lead at Bitcoin.com News and a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open-source code, and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 6,000 articles for cryptoflings.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.




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The company is moving into the hosting business and says it already has a “waiting list” of clients.

By Eliza Gkritsi

AccessTimeIconFeb 23, 2023 at 6:30 p.m.

Updated Feb 23, 2023 at 7:34 p.m.

Bitcoin mining
A Sabre56 bitcoin mining facility. (Sabre56)

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Sabre56, a company that consults miners on the development and operations of facilities, has raised $35 million to build its own hosting sites, aiming to have 150 megawatts (MW) of energy capacity ready by the end of the year. Hosting is a service that data centers provide to crypto miners that want to run their mining rigs without having to build the infrastructure themselves.

The first four sites will total 115 MW and be located in Wyoming and Texas, where construction has already begun, according to a press release. The capacity will be built in 7MW-15 MW of monthly increments, with the first batch coming online in mid-March, company CEO Phil Harvey said. The $35 million investment is coming primarily from private individuals, he added.

Hosting space for mining rigs has been in short supply over the past few months as few new sites were coming online and capital for development ran dry. The bankruptcies of major hosting firms like Compute North and Core Scientific (CORZ) heightened the supply issue.


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Sabre56 will offer competitive pricing between $0.068-$0.072 per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity consumed, depending on the duration of the contract and the type of machines, Harvey said. For comparison, Core Scientific increased its hosting price to just under 10 cents in October as soaring natural gas prices increased its electricity costs.

Harvey declined to specify the price of the fixed-rate electricity contracts that Sabre56 has signed.

Sabre56 already has a “waiting list” of clients, said the press release. Harvey specified that it is comprised mostly of companies and individuals already close to the company, and the contracts are in the 10 MW-50 MW range. In addition to its projections to have 150 MW online by the end of 2023, the company plans to keep adding 150 MW of capacity annually for the next four years. The profits made from the initial investments will be enough to continue this further development, Harvey said.

“I’m not interested in taking over, some s***show that people are trying to sell because they’re going bankrupt and can’t run their operations,” said Harvey, responding to a question from CoinDesk about why his company has chosen not to purchase an existing development from a distressed miner.

The report says officials from China’s Liaison Office have been spotted at crypto events in the city.

By Sam Reynolds

AccessTimeIconFeb 21, 2023 at 9:53 a.m.

Updated Feb 21, 2023, at 9:52 p.m.

CDCROP: The Hong Kong skyline (Bady Abbas/Unsplash)
Hong Kong(Bady Abbas/Unsplash)

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As Hong Kong prepares for a consultation process that might eventually legalize a form of retail crypto trading in the territory, Bloomberg reports the mainland government in Beijing might be subtly endorsing the idea.

Read more: Hong Kong Proposes Rules for Crypto Trading Platforms

According to Bloomberg, officials from China’s Liaison Office have been frequent guests at crypto gatherings in Hong Kong. The tone of their visits and follow-up calls with certain projects has been friendly.

Some stakeholders think that this can be seen as an endorsement of Hong Kong’s push to become a crypto hub, with the Special Administrative Region of China using its separate legal system and markets to be a testing ground – much in the same way as Hong Kong was China’s first test of open markets in the 20th century.

“As long as one doesn’t violate the bottom line, to not threaten financial stability in China, Hong Kong is free to explore its own pursuit under ‘One Country, Two Systems,’” Bloomberg quotes Nick Chan, a National People’s Congress member, and a crypto lawyer, as saying.

On Monday, Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) made its first push to open the door to retail crypto trading, beginning a consultation process for Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) seeking a license to provide trading services for retail.

Some of the requirements the SFC proposes to involve a due diligence process on tokens prior to listing, which would see only pre-approved tokens available to traders, as well as setting up a risk profile for clients to ensure their exposure is “reasonable.”

The SFC has just concluded a multi-year consultation process that will see exchanges being allowed to serve professional investors (defined as those with a net worth of over $1 million) on June 1.

It’s not known when the SFC will finish its consultation process on allowing retail investors access.


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Revenue from cryptocurrency scams dropped 46% in 2022, according to blockchain data analytics firm Chainalysis. “We attribute most of this decline to market conditions, as scam performance tends to worsen when cryptocurrency prices are in decline,” the firm explained.

‘Crypto Scam Revenue Fell Significantly in 2022’

Blockchain data analytics firm Chainalysis published its 2023 Crypto Crime Report last week with a section on crypto scams. “Crypto scam revenue dropped 46% in 2022,” the 109-page report reads, elaborating:

Crypto scam revenue fell significantly in 2022, from $10.9 billion the year prior to just $5.9 billion.

Chainalysis tracks several types of crypto scams, including giveaway scams, impersonation scams, investment scams, non-fungible token (NFT) scams, and romance scams.

Noting its numbers are “a lower-bound estimate,” the blockchain analytics firm explained that “estimates of the true amount lost to fraudsters will grow as we identify more addresses associated with scams.” The firm specifically mentioned “pig butchering” scams which have become alarmingly popular. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned about this type of crypto scam many times. Last November, U.S. authorities seized seven domains used by pig butchering scammers.

Yearly crypto scam revenue from 2017 to 2022. Source: Chainalysis.

Regarding the decline in crypto scam revenue, Chainalysis detailed:

We attribute most of this decline to market conditions, as scam performance tends to worsen when cryptocurrency prices are in decline.

“Cryptocurrency scam revenue began the year trending upwards but plummeted in early May — the same time the bear market set in following the collapse of Terra Luna — and then declined steadily throughout the rest of the year,” Chainalysis described.

While noting that “some types of scams see revenue changes increase as crypto asset prices decrease,” the blockchain analytics firm pointed out: “Scam revenue throughout the year tracks almost perfectly with bitcoin’s price, consistently maintaining a three-week lag between price moves and changes in revenue.”

What do you think about cryptocurrency scam revenue dropping 46% last year? Let us know in the comments section below.

Kevin Helms

A student of Austrian Economics, Kevin found Bitcoin in 2011 and has been an evangelist ever since. His interests lie in Bitcoin security, open-source systems, network effects, and the intersection between economics and cryptography.




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ftx

FTX bankruptcy proceedings have taken another twist after the company’s insiders were all hit with fresh subpoenas.

The bankruptcy court has ordered Sam Bankman-Fried, former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, former FTX CTO Gary Wang, and former co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets Nishad Singh to produce a range of documents related to the exchange’s activities.

Bankman-Fried’s father Joseph Bankman and mother Barbara Fried are among those subpoenaed too, according to court documents filed Tuesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.

FTX’s legal team asked for permission to serve subpoenas to the group on January 25, saying that “key questions remain… concerning numerous aspects of the Debtors’ finances and transactions.”

The subpoenas demand a considerable amount of information regarding the now-defunct crypto exchange and its affiliated companies, including “any payments, digital assets, real estate, fiat currency, or other assets received from any of the entities in the FTX Group,” or from any executive or employee of any entity in the FTX Group.

All but Bankman-Fried must supply the requested information by February 16. The disgraced crypto founder has until February 17 to provide the relevant documents.

FTX suspicious activity information demanded

Both Bankman-Fried and Ellison have been specifically asked to provide information about all communications sent or received from personal email accounts or instant messaging platforms concerning the FTX Group or assets of the FTX Group or Alameda.

They are also asked to produce information about Binance’s move to acquire FTX last November, which eventually fell through after CEO Changpeng Zhao stated that FTX’s liquidity problems were “beyond our control or ability to help.”

FTX’s legal team also wants to see documents related to “any payments or other transfers of value to any political campaigns, politicians, political action committees, political parties,” and other affiliated individuals.

The court has asked SBF’s father to produce information about “contemplated, potential, or actual purchases of real estate,” including any real estate in the Bahamas.

FTX Digital Markets’ Singh has been specifically asked to produce documents related to FTX Group’s risk management and automated liquidation systems, processes, and policies, including all documents that would shed light on how those applied or did not apply to Alameda.

SBF, who faces eight criminal charges, including wire fraud, money laundering, and misappropriation of customer funds, last month pleaded not guilty to the alleged crimes.

Former Alameda CEO Ellison and FTX co-founder Wang, on the other hand, have both admitted to fraud and are cooperating with federal prosecutors.