Snippings

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Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet powered by ChatGPT operating on X—the social network formerly known as Twitter—in May of this year.

The botnet, which the researchers dub Fox8 because of its connection to cryptocurrency websites bearing some variation of the same name, consisted of 1,140 accounts. Many of them seemed to use ChatGPT to craft social media posts and to reply to each other’s posts. The auto-generated content was apparently designed to lure unsuspecting humans into clicking links through to the crypto-hyping sites.

From: Scammers Used ChatGPT to Unleash a Crypto Botnet on X | WIRED.

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Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, BASE, has experienced a significant surge in network activity. The latest rise in activity numbers could be attributed to the rising popularity of Friend.tech. The application tokenizes X (previously Twitter) accounts on-chain. The platform allows users to buy and sell “shares” of internet social media personalities.

From: BASE Absorbs Friend.tech Hype, But For How Long?.

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The Hollywood Stock Exchange game uses virtual specialist technology invented by Hollywood Stock Exchange co-founders and creators Max Keiser and Michael R. Burns. The exchange has been in operation since 1996 and is owned by brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which launched a real-world exchange similar to HSX, called the Cantor Exchange, in 2010.

Previous incarnations of the game included a music market (for purchasing musical artists), prizes for top gainers, and briefly, a “buyout” program in which the Hollywood Stock Exchange would reward top players by purchasing their portfolios at a price of $1 per $1 million of exchange currency if the player listed the portfolio for sale on eBay. These features have been discontinued. The now-discontinued practice of selling portfolios on eBay was inaugurated by Curtis Edmonds, a former Texas lawyer.

From: Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) Definition.

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The general idea of tokenizing artists to share in their success is not that crazy.

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Rex Woodbury makes a very important point in his brilliant piece on Masmej in The Atlantic. Talking about the shift in the generational perspectives on finance he says that if we expand “everyone is an investor” to “everyone is an owner” then we see what he calls “ripple effects” in the record-breaking 4.4 million businesses started in 2020, or in the 68 million Americans who freelance. As he says, what if Taylor Swift had issued a token of herself before “Kanye interrupted her onstage at the VMAs”.

From: Art For Money’s Sake.

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White House efforts seem to be largely focused on a narrower effort to address identity theft in government benefits programs, rather than the more holistic, multi-sector approach outlined in the strategy. 
To be clear, it’s not just the White House that has sidestepped this issue. The last three Congresses have considered the Improving Digital Identity Act, which would launch a coordinated effort to address critical deficiencies in digital identity infrastructure and set a high bar for privacy, security and inclusion. Despite key committees of jurisdiction signing off on the bill, others have blocked its passage. 
Whether intentionally or through ambivalence, decisions have been made in the legislative and executive branches to do nothing when it comes to a comprehensive initiative to address challenges around digital identity.

From: Why is our government taking a back seat on digital identity issues? | The Hill.

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Financial exclusion is bad for people, bad for society and bad for the economy. Saving in the form of cash stuffed under mattresses is dangerous: cash savings are notoriously targets for thieves, and are vulnerable to natural disaster and vermin. Furthermore, they don’t earn any returns, their value is eroded by inflation, and they aren’t deployed productively to benefit wider society and improve prosperity for all.

From: Banking the unbanked: focusing on commercial banks misses an opportunity.

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Lex Sokolin, the founder of Generative Ventures, is the fomer Global Fintech Co-Head at ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company.

It should not be about VR headsets or fashionable internet culture — these things have been around and do not require blockchains. Rather, the most differentiated frontier is in the economic architecture and financial networks built through Web3.

From: The Machine Economy and the Convergence of Web3, AI and Fintech.

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Crypto assets give us digital scarcity and financial abstraction; just like the hyperlinks of Web2 pointed to information and tokens point us to value. Decentralized finance has built a banking industry for Web3, the global tribe of techno-utopians, hyper-capitalist arbitrageurs, and idealistic DAO artists. The digital property rights system works, and its financial infrastructure has been shown to perform better than the traditional, centralized counterpart. And yet, we are lost in hyper-financialization and self-referential ponzi games. I spent several years at Consensys focused on tokenomics and governance, with the conclusion that our industry still has a lot of work to do.

From: The Machine Economy and the Convergence of Web3, AI and Fintech.

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the Digital Product Passport (DPP).

The DPP is a tool to create transparency and unlock circularity proposed by the European Commission (EC) that will share product information across the entire value chain, including data on raw material extraction, production, recycling, etc.

From: The EU Digital Product Passport – World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

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Privacy-enhancing computation and advanced technologies such as homomorphic encryption are becoming much faster and more scalable but still lack any sort of widespread adoption.

From: How AI Is Increasing Fraud Risks Across The Fintech Industry.

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Another potential area of concern is the use of AI to automate the entire process of synthetic identity creation and fraud, from generating fake data to executing fraudulent transactions. This could make identity fraud more scalable and challenging to detect, as fraudsters could quickly create and use hundreds or even thousands of deep-fake personas simultaneously.

From: The Rise of the Digital Catfish: How ChatGPT and Deep-Fake Personas are Changing Financial Fraud.

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By harnessing AI technologies and collaborating with industry partners, organizations can effectively combat synthetic fraud and protect themselves from professional fraudsters.

From: Harnessing AI To Defend Against Synthetic Scams.

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New York City is banning TikTok from city-owned devices and requiring agencies to remove the app within the next 30 days.

From: NYC bans TikTok on city-owned devices – The Verge.

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Singapore police have seized about S$1bn ($735m; £578m) – including luxury homes, cars and watches – in one of its biggest anti-money laundering probes.

From: Cash, cars and homes seized in $735m Singapore anti-money laundering raids – BBC News.

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