FTX EU, the European arm of FTX, has launched a website to allow European customers to submit withdrawal requests, nearly five months after the global trading platform collapsed and went bankrupt in early November. Meanwhile, in the United States, former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have entered a not-guilty plea for five additional charges, including accusations of bribery in China. Bankman-Fried is now prohibited from using any smartphone with internet access as part of a new court agreement. Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak were signatories on an open letter signed by more than 2,600 tech industry leaders and researchers calling for a temporary halt on any further artificial intelligence (AI) development. The petition shared concerns that AI with human-competitive intelligence can pose serious hazards to society and urged all AI firms to “immediately cease” developing AI systems that are more potent than GPT-4 for at least six months.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has filed a lawsuit against crypto exchange Binance and its CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao for allegedly failing to register with regulators, non-compliant trading, obscuring the location of its executive offices, and performing transactions for persons in the United States since 2019, despite a policy of blocking or restricting customers in the country. Binance’s CEO has rejected the allegations, arguing that the crypto exchange “does not trade for profit or ‘manipulate’ the market under any circumstances”. Authorities from both the United States and South Korea have made efforts to have Terra co-founder Do Kwon extradited following his arrest in Montenegro. During his custody in Montenegro, Kwon may face harsh conditions in the country’s penal system since jail conditions haven’t changed from those described in a 2020 human rights report by the US State Department.
Ethereum core developers have revealed more details on the highly anticipated Shapella hard fork, which will allow validators to withdraw staked Ether from Beacon Chain. Shapella will take effect at epoch 194,048, which is scheduled for 10:27 pm UTC on April 12. Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4895 will enable withdrawals by “pushing” staked Ether from the Beacon Chain to the execution layer. There are 17.81 million Ether staked on the Beacon Chain, with several mechanisms set to ensure a flood of Ether doesn’t disrupt the market.
Bitcoin recovered recent losses following encouraging macroeconomic data from the United States, with the February Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Index modestly beating expectations in some areas — a sign of progress against inflation. Moving to higher timeframes, optimism was no less in evidence among traders. Caleb Franzen, senior market analyst at Cubic Analytics, wrote on Twitter: “Bitcoin’s 24-month Williams%R Oscillator is set to close above the ‘oversold’ threshold for March, which has marked an end to prior bear markets. Bullish long-term probabilities are improving, so long as we stay above the lower-bound.” Italy’s watchdog in charge of protecting data has announced it is temporarily blocking AI chatbot ChatGPT and is opening an investigation over suspected breaches of data privacy rules, including a recent data breach that the AI platform suffered on March 20.
Blockchain investigator PeckShield has said that SafeMoon, a project that was previously endorsed by celebrities and social influencers, such as Jake Paul and Soulja Boy, announced its liquidity pool had been compromised. The suspected flaw was a recent public burn function introduced in the latest upgrade that allegedly allows users to burn tokens from other addresses. The attacker used the vulnerability to remove SafeMoon tokens, causing an artificial spike in the token’s price.
