Blocking Daily | OpenAI releases iOS version of ChatGPT app; Hashkey Group plans to raise $100 million to $200 million in funding with a valuation of over $1 billion

OpenAI releases iOS version of ChatGPT app; Hashkey Group plans to raise $100-200M in funding with a valuation of over $1B.

Today’s news summary:

1. US CFTC Chairman: BTC and ETH are commodities, strongly opposed to SEC enforcement regulation

2. OpenAI has released an iOS version of the ChatGPT app

3. OpenAI CEO’s cryptocurrency project Worldcoin launches new measures to combat the black market

• Why did hardware wallet Ledger launch the Ledger Recover service, which has sparked criticism from the Web3 community?
• 3 Counterintuitive Experiences in Cryptocurrency Investment
• EigenLayer, which raised $64.5 million in financing: A new narrative in the collateralized track

4. Warning: Apple users who use someone else’s Apple ID should pay attention to the security of their encrypted wallets. A criminal gang has stolen more than $10 million

5. Paisheild: Arbitrum ecosystem Swaprum project suffers Rug Pull, losing nearly $3 million

6. Web3 social graph protocol CyberConnect completes $5.4 million financing through token public sale

7. Bloomberg: Hashkey Group plans to raise $100 million to $200 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion

8. Data: A certain whale address transferred 10,000 BTC to Coinbase early this morning, worth approximately $267 million

Regulatory news

US CFTC Chairman: BTC and ETH are commodities, strongly opposed to SEC enforcement regulation

According to Bloomberg, Rostin Behnam, chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), said in an interview that there are clear differences in the methods of regulating cryptocurrencies between the CFTC and the SEC led by Gary Gensler.

Behnam said that the CFTC is responsible for protecting American investors in the commodity financial asset market, and many of these encrypted tokens are commodities. BTC and ETH are commodities, and the listing of BTC and ETH futures on exchanges is “market-driven” and based on legal analysis. He pointed out that the lack of a central coordinating person or common enterprise is the reason why cryptocurrencies and other commodities are not securities.

In addition, Behnam criticized the SEC’s cryptocurrency regulatory approach: “I strongly oppose enforcement regulation. I have done my best to maintain transparency and contact market participants in the DeFi field.” He also called financial innovation in line with national interests and compared cryptographic innovation to other “milestone moments in market structure,” such as “20 years ago shifting from floor trading to electronic trading.”

US lawmakers propose “Securities Clarity Act” to clarify digital asset regulatory classification

Majority House Democrat Tom Emmer tweeted: “Today, I introduced the Securities Clarity Act with Congressman Darren Soto, which clarifies regulatory classification of digital assets, provides market certainty for innovators, and clear jurisdictional boundaries for regulators.”

Emmer said that if asset and securities contracts are not distinguished, token projects that raise funds for development cannot get out of the securities framework once the project is decentralized, which hinders the project’s utility and ultimately harms token holders. The “Investment Contract Assets” was inserted into existing securities laws by the Securities Clarity Act to allow cryptocurrency projects to fully realize their potential in a compliant manner and enable the United States to compete globally in the next iteration of the internet.

NFT

BlockingraSBlockingce’s Chief Business Officer Jay Yao tweeted that “earlier today, I resigned from my position at BlockingraSBlockingce along with other team members. While we are still working hard to complete our solution, I wanted to take a moment to apologize to the community as our internal affairs have affected our users–this was never intended to be a public issue and it should have been resolved internally. I am sorry that it was not. I sincerely hope Yubo and BlockingraSBlockingce move forward.”

Yesterday, BlockingraSBlockingce founder Yubo said that Thomas Schmidt and Jay Yao have agreed to hand over multisignature and Twitter account permissions and have successfully deployed the protocol on the Arbitrum network.

Lido introduces NFT as a withdrawal voucher for ETH withdrawals

According to blockchain analysis company Nansen, when a user sends an ETH withdrawal request on Lido Finance, they will receive an NFT. Once the withdrawal request is accepted, the NFT image will be updated and the withdrawal applicant will be notified, and the user can use the NFT as a withdrawal voucher (receipt).

According to information disclosed by Lido Finance, the ETH withdrawal NFT launched by Lido Finance is transferable, which means that users can send it to any ETH wallet they want to receive unpledged ETH.

Metaverse

Baidu Vice President Ma Jie resigned, and the metaverse business “Xilang” is in crisis.

According to Interface News, Ma Jie, Vice President of Baidu and head of Baidu’s “Xilang” business, has recently resigned. Although the Xilang team has not been dissolved, its future is currently unclear, and some personnel have been transferred or resigned.

Internal sources said that the short-term commercial viability of the metaverse business is poor, and Baidu’s shift towards AIGC-related businesses and reluctance to invest more resources in the metaverse business are the main reasons why Sherpa has been marginalized. As of press time, Baidu has not responded to the news.

Meta will start a new round of large-scale layoffs next week

According to VOX, Meta executives announced in a Q&A session with employees on Thursday that a new round of large-scale layoffs will begin next week. This round of layoffs will affect Meta’s business departments and may involve thousands of employees. Although company executives have not confirmed the specific scale of the layoffs, Zuckerberg said in March that the company plans to lay off 10,000 people by the end of May, and last month Meta laid off 4,000 people.

Project Updates

OpenAI CEO’s crypto project Worldcoin launches new measures to combat the black market

According to The Block, BlockBeats recently tweeted that some crypto users in certain regions could not register for shares when the Worldcoin token was launched, but a new way has emerged, where “scalpers” collect iris scans from local villagers in Southeast Asia and sell them to individual crypto users for $30 or less to help complete app registration. A Worldcoin spokesperson acknowledged the phenomenon, but emphasized that the problem was limited to “a few hundred instances.” The spokesperson said, “Through ongoing threat and awareness monitoring, the Worldcoin team has identified suspicious and potentially fraudulent activity that drives individuals to register a verified World ID and then send it to a third-party World App rather than their own.”

The spokesperson said that Worldcoin has taken several steps to try to control the problem, including “adjusting the initial personal registration process and implementing dynamic and static QR codes”; in addition, if a user’s account is stolen, the user can regain their World ID by scanning their iris a second time to their verified account, which will help prevent the illegal sale of identity certificates. The spokesperson added, “While these preventative measures are in place, it’s important to acknowledge that they can’t fully prevent collusion or other attempts to circumvent our one-person-one-ID principle. Innovative ideas for mechanism design and social relationship attribution will be necessary to address these challenges.”

OpenAI has released an iOS version of ChatGPT

OpenAI announced early this morning that it has released an iOS version of the ChatGPT app. The app is free to use and supports cross-device syncing of chat history. It also integrates the Whisper open source speech recognition system, supporting voice input. ChatGPT Plus subscribers can use the GPT-4 feature on iOS. The product will be launched first in the United States and will expand to other countries in the coming weeks. In addition, OpenAI said it will soon release an Android version of the ChatGPT app.

MicroStrategy is researching the Ordinals protocol and evaluating its potential for app development, according to Decrypt. Michael Saylor, co-founder and chairman of MicroStrategy, said in an interview at Bitcoin 2023 in Miami that the company is not only familiar with the Ordinals protocol but is also interested in how the much-discussed protocol could lead to software innovation, and is currently studying Ordinals and evaluating its potential in application development. Saylor said that developing applications based on Bitcoin functionality could also promote overall adoption of Bitcoin among individuals, companies, and governments. Saylor did not specify which use cases MicroStrategy may be researching, but he noted that the ability to submit data to the Bitcoin blockchain is not only related to transactions but also has many potential applications.

Warning: Apple users who use someone else’s Apple ID need to pay attention to the security of their encrypted wallets, as a criminal group has stolen more than $10 million, according to the security community Dilation Effect. It tweeted: “Recently, some people reported that their wallets were inexplicably stolen (their coins and NFTs were emptied), and they all used an iPhone and did not click on any links or save their mnemonic phrases in their photo albums or cloud services, only copying them on paper. These users were puzzled. After a lot of research and analysis, we found a rare attack scenario that was successfully reproduced on some wallet apps. There are national or regional restrictions on downloading apps from the App Store, such as Chinese mainland accounts not being able to download some apps. Many users buy (on Taobao) or use shared American Apple IDs. Because the iPhone’s backup mechanism backs up the phone’s app data to the cloud, attackers can restore your wallet app data on their phone using the same Apple ID as you. In addition, the local access password for the wallet is not set to be very complex, so attackers can easily crack it and transfer your assets away. After tracking the stolen funds on the chain, we found that there is a mature criminal group behind it, and the total amount of stolen funds for the victims has exceeded $10 million.”

Dilation Effect warns that 1) users who use an iPhone and have installed a wallet app, if you have purchased or used another person’s provided Apple ID, please stop using it immediately and transfer your wallet assets. 2) This attack scenario has been successfully reproduced on some popular wallet apps on the market, calling on wallet manufacturers to pay attention to and investigate this issue, actively optimize it, and issue reminders to users.

The Chief Information Security Officer of SlowMist stated: “The core issue of this problem is that the ‘application is not bound to the device password,’ which is a problem that exists in 99% of wallets, trading apps, and other applications. I mentioned this a long time ago, but perhaps it was not considered when the application was designed, and applications on the target market have not been fixed.”

PadShield: Arbitrum ecology Swaprum project suffered Rug Pull, losing nearly $3 million

According to PadShield’s early warning monitoring, the Swaprum project in the Arbitrum ecology suffered a Rug Pull, and the SAPR price plummeted 100%. Swaprum has deleted its social media accounts. The scammers bridged 1,628 ETH (approximately $2.94 million) to Ethereum and transferred 1,620 ETH to Tornado Cash.

Mantle Network and BitDAO merge, BIP-21 proposal passes

The BitDAO community, a decentralized autonomous organization, has approved a governance proposal called BIP-21, which proposes to rebrand the governance token of BitDAO from BIT to a new identity, Mantle. BitDAO will merge with Mantle Network. With this integration, Mantle Network developers will inherit nearly $300 million in stablecoins and more than 270,000 ETH (approximately $485 million) in reserves from BitDAO. In addition, Mantle Network will enter the second phase of its testnet, code-named “Ringwood,” in May.

BNB Greenfield testnet will be reset on May 25 and upgraded to Mekong testnet

The BNB Greenfield testnet, a decentralized storage infrastructure developed by the BNB Chain development team, will be reset and upgraded to version 2.0, named Mekong Testnet, from 14:00 to 18:00 on May 25. The new version fixes several bugs and introduces some new features, including a stop-service target, cleaning up stale permissions, SP GC service, support for listing objects by prefix and delimiter fields, and upgrade to cosmos-sdk v0.47.2.

Funding news

Web3 social graph protocol CyberConnect raises $5.4 million through token sale

According to the official Twitter account, Web3 social graph protocol CyberConnect announced that its CoinList token sale has ended, with each CYBER token priced at $1.8, raising a total of $5.4 million. 532,000 users from 112 countries participated in the sale, with 11,540 participants purchasing the available 3 million CYBER for sale.

It is reported that CyberConnect is a multi-chain decentralized social graph protocol that has been deployed on Ethereum mainnet, Polygon, and BNB Chain. With CyberConnect, users can have their own social graph, content, tokenized channels, and social data, and enable them to seamlessly cross multiple dApps without having to recreate a new social network on each new platform.

Previously, CyberConnect completed a $10 million seed round of funding led by Multicoin Capital and Sky9 Capital in November 2021 and a $15 million Series A round of funding led by Animoca Brands and Sky9 Capital in May 2022.

Bloomberg: Hashkey Group Plans to Raise $100M to $200M at a Valuation of Over $1 Billion

According to Bloomberg, cryptocurrency investment firm Hashkey Group is planning to raise $100M to $200M at a valuation of over $1 billion, using Hong Kong’s digital asset momentum to attract potential investors. Hashkey is currently operating one of only two licensed cryptocurrency exchanges in Hong Kong.

Sources say Hashkey is in early talks for the fundraising, and the deal is progressing, but the terms, including size and valuation, may change as they have not yet been finalized.

Mining News

Bit Digital Places New Mining Machines in Iceland to Counter Potential U.S. Tax Risks

According to The Wall Street Journal, New York-based bitcoin mining company Bit Digital is expanding its operations to Iceland to hedge against regulatory risks in proposed cryptocurrency mining taxes by the Biden administration.

Bit Digital CEO Samir Tabar said the company bought 2,500 new bitcoin mining machines for $5 million last week and placed them in Iceland, the first time in two years the company has moved new machines outside of the United States. Iceland and Canada will host one-fifth of Bit Digital’s machines once the Iceland machines come online, with the rest in the U.S. Iceland operations will use hydroelectric and geothermal energy.

Important Data

Data: Whale Address Transfers 10,000 BTC Worth $267 Million to Coinbase Early Morning

Chainalysis analyst Wu Jin tweeted that a whale address transferred 10,000 BTC (worth $267 million) to Coinbase six hours ago.

On the morning of May 12, the whale address previously transferred 10,000 BTC to Coinbase when the BTC price was $27,620. The day after the BTC entered the exchange on May 12, BTC fell to $25,811, a drop of 6%.

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