Snippings

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What if we treated a set of core digital systems—such as digital IDs, payments, data exchange platforms, credentials, and other shared services that drive core functions across government and the economy—the same way we treat roads or power grids? As essential, long-term, shared systems designed for repeated use.

From: Digital Infrastructure.

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The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City approved a limited-purpose master account for Kraken Financial, granting the cryptocurrency exchange direct access to the central bank’s payment network.

The milestone makes Kraken “the first digital asset bank in U.S. history to gain direct access to the Federal Reserve’s payment infrastructure,” according to a Wednesday press release from the company.

From: Kraken first crypto bank to get Fed master account | American Banker.

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Getting chatbot shopping to work on a large scale has been tough for OpenAI and other AI firms. Merchants’ product information, like pricing and in-stock availability, needs to be standardized and constantly updated for chatbots to access accurate information, while commerce and payment firms need safeguards against AI initiating fraudulent or erroneous transactions.

From: OpenAI Scales Back Shopping Plans for ChatGPT — The Information.

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IF YOU PICKED Seattle to win Super Bowl LX, there were multiple means to turn your hunch into cash. You could place a wager on a betting site like FanDuel or DraftKings. Or you might risk the same amount of money by taking a position in the prediction market known as Kalshi. In both cases you would have been rewarded.

But according to Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s cofounder and CEO, those two acts are completely different. Kalshi is not a gambling site, Mansour says. It’s a marketplace, one regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It’s also a startup, and securing that regulatory approval might be its most impressive innovation. Kalshi is allowed to operate in all 50 states, 20 more than allow online sports betting, and it offers markets not only on sports and election results (its most popular categories) but also on a dog’s breakfast of events including tomorrow’s temperature in Philadelphia, Taylor Swift’s wedding date, and whether Elon Musk will start a Bluesky account before 2027. One might note that some of those categories are, well, prone to manipulation by inside players.

From: How Is Kalshi Not Gambling? | WIRED.

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AI models from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic lost money betting on football matches over a Premier League season, in a new study suggesting even the most advanced systems struggle to analyse the real world over long periods of time. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 fared best, with an average loss of 11 per cent and nearly breaking even on one attempt.

From: AI models lose their shirts on Premier League bets.

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Thus far, the story of prediction markets in America has mainly been about betting on sports, particularly in states where sports gambling is illegal. In California and Texas, you can’t legally bet on an NFL or NBA game on DraftKings or FanDuel — but thanks to a contested regulatory quirk, you can on Kalshi, for now.

From: Prediction Market Bubble: Super Bowl Proves Polymarket, Kalshi Boom – Business Insider.

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Feng is among a small cohort of savvy early adopters turning China’s OpenClaw craze into cash. As users with little technical background want in, a cottage industry of people offering installation services and preconfigured hardware has sprung up to meet them. The sudden rise of these tinkerers and impromptu consultants shows just how eager the general public in China is to adopt cutting-edge AI—even when there are huge security risks.

From: Hustlers are cashing in on China’s OpenClaw AI craze | MIT Technology Review.

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Kraken Financial, a Wyoming-chartered bank owned by crypto platform Kraken, has been granted the first Federal Reserve master account awarded to a digital asset bank.

This will enable it to hold reserves at the US central bank and connect directly to core US payment rails without relying on intermediary banks.

From: (15) Kraken, the Fed and the new payments landscape.

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International payments are arguably the least efficient part of most financial systems and are thus ripe for disruption. Before 2025 central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) appeared to be the most likely vehicle for such disruption, given monetary systems are best built on the settlement finality of central bank money. This changed in 2025 with the support of the Trump Administration for stablecoins. There is now a contest between stablecoins, CBDCs and tokenized bank deposits to underpin international payments in the future. This article analyses the three different architectures and argues that tokenized deposits are the most likely to prevail longer term.

From: The Contest Between Central Bank Digital Currencies, Stablecoins and Tokenised Deposits: Which Will Likely Win, and Why?  by Ross P. Buckley :: SSRN.

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Last year, a record number of scams were reported to the national fraud database, fuelled by AI, which allows for large-scale deception on “industrialised” levels, according to Cifas, the fraud prevention organisation.

Its report showed 444,000 cases of fraud were reported by its members last year – a 6% increase on 2024. The tactics of criminals are shifting towards account takeovers, where they take control using stolen data and make unauthorised transactions.

From: ‘Convincing’ AI scams drove UK fraud cases to record 444,000 last year | Scams | The Guardian.

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At the beginning of this month, hackers published what appears to be the full remaining cache of stolen customer data from Dutch telecom provider Odido, following the telco’s decision not to pay ransom demand. The cache  contains information on more than 6.5 million individuals and about 600,000 companies, includeing more than five million unique identification documents (eg, driver’s licenses and passports). The files also contain dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses. Bank account numbers and internal customer service notes were withheld by the hackers, not said that such data would be kept “for their own use”.

And how did the hackers get in to this Aladdin’s Cave full of fantastically valuable data? Deep cover spies recuited years ago who are now in management positions? Sophisticated bugging equipement that bounces lasers off of windows to eavesdrop on snstivie conversations? No, of course not. They called Steve from Account while pretending to be from IT staff and tricked him into approving fraudulent logins, thus bypassing multi-factor authentication.

 

xxxAmericans lost billions of dollars to scams in 2025. Meanwhile, banks lost hundreds of billions to fraud. Criminals laundered more than $1.1 trillion in illicit funds through the U.S. financial system in 2025, including from the proceeds of organized crime, drug trafficking and human trafficking.

From: AI and cartels push global financial crime to $4.4 trillion | American Banker.

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