Hong Kong’s ambition of becoming a cryptocurrency hub is reportedly seeing subtle support from the Chinese government, in what could be seen as a contrast to the mainland’s hard-line anti-crypto stance. In October last year, the government of Hong Kong floated the idea of introducing its own bill to regulate crypto and allow retail investors to “directly invest into virtual assets” that could possibly be in contrast to China’s widespread crypto ban. According to people familiar with the matter, Beijing officials have not been brazenly opposed to the idea. According to a Feb. 20 Bloomberg report, it is understood that …

Institutional investors may have gotten the jitters on crypto in the wake of the regulatory crackdown in the United States, with digital asset investment products seeing the largest weekly outflow of 2023. On Feb. 20, institutional crypto fund manager CoinShares reported that digital asset investment products saw outflows totaling $32 million last week, the largest outflow of the year. This week in Fund Flows, by our Head of Research @jbutterfill : Digital assets see US$32m in outflows, but rising prices push AuM to highest since August 2022. Read the full report - https://t.co/EIXblrOBcL Get a comprehensive view of last week’s …

A small monetary bounty and an aptitude for coding were all it took to fork the Ordinals protocol to the world’s second-ever cryptocurrency network, Litecoin (LTC) earlier this week, its creator told Cointelegraph. On Feb. 18, an Australian software engineer by the name of Anthony Guerrera posted a repository to GitHub that forked the Bitcoin (BTC) Ordinals protocol to Litecoin. This allowed for nonfungible token (NFT)-like assets on the Litecoin network in much the same way it had made it to Bitcoin earlier in the year. In an interview with Cointelegraph, Guerrera said he was spurred to make a Litecoin …

Real Vision CEO and co-founder Raoul Pal believes nonfungible tokens (NFTs) will act similar to “high-end property” in the traditional economy, outperforming Ether (ETH) during crypto market boom cycles. In an hour-long YouTube video published on Feb. 20, the former JPMorgan executive offered a run-down of what he felt most bullish about when it came to NFTs, including key use cases for the asset class, its underlying tech, and its potential performance relative to Ether. Boom! Here you go... My deep dive thesis and understanding on NFT's, what they mean, where they are going and why they are important and …

Bitcoin fixes broken democracies and fights government corruption by limiting its power to control its people, argues Bitcoin advocate and chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, Alex Gladstein. In a Feb. 20 interview, Gladstein argued that the decentralized nature of Bitcoin (BTC) can act as a barrier against corruption and tyranny. "Where the democracies have broken down, I do think it's very clearly related to fiat currency, and I do think that Bitcoin fixes this in a way," he said. “#Bitcoin fixes democracy…#Bitcoin is…free speech, property rights & open capital markets…tyrants need…the opposite: they need censorship…confiscation & closed …

Shark Tank investor and venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary has urged crypto exchanges to “get on board with regulation” if they want to “stay out of the way” of Gary Gensler and the United States Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). In a Feb. 20 interview with TraderTV Live, O’Leary said that U.S. lawmakers are “fatigued” over crypto collapses and that they’re only going to get more ruthless if companies continue to not comply: “You got to get on board with regulation, you got to stay out of the way of Gensler at the SEC and other regulators. Those hombres [men] in Washington …

The CEO of Composable Finance has vigorously refuted allegations of legal improprieties at his decentralized finance (DeFi) infrastructure platform, which was being aired by the firm's former CTO Karel Kubat. In a Feb. 20 Twitter post, Composable Finance's now-former CTO Karel Kubat announced he had stepped down from the firm. He also leveled a number of accusations aimed at his former company and its CEO. In Kubat’s post, the CTO said that he is resigning because the firm has not provided financial statements to him or the community and because he has no overview of the company’s financial health. He …

Cryptocurrency exchange Huobi Global is seeking a license in Hong Kong, as the Chinese special administrative region considers new licensing and regulatory moves that would allow them to serve retail customers. The new framework, which requires crypto exchanges to register with the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), would allow the exchange to expand its services to the city. Huobi also plans to open a new exchange named Huobi Hong Kong that would concentrate on institutional and high-net-worth individuals, according to a tweet thread by Justin Sun. The SFC has recently opened the new Hong Kong licensing proposals for …

The public blockchain sector grew from less than a few million dollars in the last decade to a $1 trillion industry. However, one thing that the space has yet to solve is a decentralized and secure interoperable solution. Let's take Ethereum (ETH) to Bitcoin (BTC), the largest blockchain network, for example. Till today, centralized exchanges are the only viable solution for shifting from one chain to another. A centralized solution provider, BitGo, provides the largest pool of liquidity for Ethereum users to gain BTC exposure via Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC). The BitGo IOU accounts for over 93.6% of the Bitcoin bridged …

A report from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) suggested that trading activity on major exchanges increased in the days following the collapse of crypto firms FTX and Terraform Labs. According to a Feb. 20 bulletin on “crypto shocks and retail losses,” the BIS reported that while the price of Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and other tokens dropped in 2022, the number of daily active users at some exchanges including Coinbase and Binance “increased markedly” following news of the collapse of Terra and FTX. The bank suggested that “users tried to weather the storm” by moving their investments into stablecoins …

New week, a new element of the crypto ecosystem is under attack. This time, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ordered Paxos Trust to stop issuing Binance USD (BUSD) — a dollar-pegged stablecoin. Paxos received a cease order from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). With no other choice, Paxos announced that from Feb. 21, it would end its relationship with Binance for the branded U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin BUSD. All existing BUSD tokens will remain fully backed and redeemable through Paxos Trust Company until “at least February 2024.” Customers can redeem their funds in U.S. dollars …

As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly works its complex magic on one sector of the economy after another, there is an increasingly pressing need for compute resources to power all this machine intelligence. Training a model like ChatGPT costs more than $5 million, and running the early ChatGPT demo, even before usage increased to its current level, costs OpenAI around $100,000 per day. And AI is more than just text generation; applying AI to practical problems across multiple industries requires similar large neural models trained on a diversity of data types — medical, financial, customer information, geospatial and so forth. Moving …