Snippings

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A recent report from the Brevan Howard hedge fund found that 49% of weekly active wallets using stablecoins resided on Tron at 2.41 million, followed by BNB Chain with 1.37 million users or a 28% dominance. Ethereum came in third with just 379,769 or a 7.7% market share.
Data from DeFi Llama also suggests Tether (USDT) on Tron boasts a 70% dominance with $104 billion of the on-chain stablecoin sector’s $148 billion market cap.

From: Worldcoin Addresses Privacy Concerns With New Personal Custody Feature – The Defiant.

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Tornado Cash involvement
Adding another layer of complexity, the address associated with BlackRock’s BUIDL fund was ‘tainted’ with ETH originating from Tornado Cash, a crypto mixer sanctioned by the US Treasury. This development underscores the challenges posed by regulatory compliance within the crypto ecosystem, as traditional financial institutions navigate interactions with decentralized protocols subject to regulatory scrutiny.

From: Crypto community mocks BlackRock’s $100M fund amid Tornado Cash transaction.

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Commercial Bank of Ethiopia has lost more than £31 million after a technical glitch let customers withdraw and transfer money that was not in their accounts.

From: Ethiopian bank glitch lets customers withdraw millions.

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One sector in particular that is leaning in to AI’s capabilities is fintech, and according to research conducted by Mordor Intelligence, the global AI in fintech market is projected to reach $26.67 billion by 2026, expanding at a CAGR of 23.37% from 2021 to 2026.

From: How AI is changing fintech jobs.

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Americans passed a discomfiting benchmark last year: For the first time, they lost a collective $10 billion to fraud, according to data that the Federal Trade Commission released last month. Taking advantage of social isolation and unmet needs, scammers are using ever more sophisticated methods to tailor their grifts and blanket Americans with requests for money, gift cards, cryptocurrency, and personal information.

From: How America got scammed – The Atlantic.

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What in practical terms can be done?

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Jian Wen, 42, was said to have been the “front person” recruited to help fugitive Yadi Zhang launder the profits of a £5bn fraud.

From: How Chinese takeaway worker led police to Bitcoin worth £3bn in Britain’s biggest ever cryptocurrency seizure | UK News | Sky News.

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Newly released Federal Trade Commission data show that consumers reported losing more than $10 billion to fraud in 2023, marking the first time that fraud losses have reached that benchmark. This marks a 14% increase over reported losses in 2022.

From: As Nationwide Fraud Losses Top $10 Billion in 2023, FTC Steps Up Efforts to Protect the Public | Federal Trade Commission.

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Another first is the method scammers reportedly used to reach consumers most commonly in 2023: email. Email displaced text messages, which held the top spot in 2022 after decades of phone calls being the most common. Phone calls are the second most commonly reported contact method for fraud in 2023, followed by text messages.

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Invesco is preparing to roll out generative artificial intelligence technology to cut rising compliance costs, but would not employ it to pick stocks anytime soon, says its chief executive.

From: Invesco wants to use generative AI to cut costs but not yet pick stocks.

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Several executives, product managers and salespeople at the major cloud providers, such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google, also privately said most of their customers are being cautious or “deliberate” about increasing spending on new AI services, given the high price of running the software, its shortcomings in terms of accuracy and the difficulty of determining how much value they’ll get out of it.

From: Amazon, Google Quietly Tamp Down Generative AI Expectations — The Information.

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Four months after Altman announced the GPT Store, however, some developers who offer chatbots through it say they have been disappointed by the lack of customers for their products. They say they’ve gotten little support from OpenAI in terms of analytics about their users. OpenAI also limits access to the store to paying customers of ChatGPT and hasn’t allowed the developers to charge money for their apps yet.

From: OpenAI’s Chatbot App Store Is Off to a Slow Start — The Information.

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