Snippings

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Moreover, open digital societies are more exposed to outside manipulation than those that shelter behind an internet firewall. Is Big Brother better suited to exploiting the era of Big Data, AI and social media?

From: SpyGPT will shake James Bond’s world.

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DraftKings, one of the two largest online sportsbooks in the U.S., launched its own prediction market yesterday, with rival FanDuel pledging to do the same this month. Crypto exchange Coinbase launched a prediction market on Wednesday, joining its peers Robinhood and Crypto.com, which introduced their own prediction markets in late 2024.

Not everyone is thrilled about the explosion of prediction markets. Operators of traditional casinos believe the markets are undercutting their business and skirting state and tribal regulations. And some sports leagues are spooked by the looser federal oversight of prediction markets compared to other forms of betting, which could increase the risk of point shaving by players or other potential scandals.

From: Sports Betting Everywhere: Prediction Markets Explode — The Information.

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They broke into the couple’s home wearing balaclavas during the night of December 17-18. In Dompierre-sur-Mer, a town near La Rochelle ( Charente-Maritime ), three assailants forced a cryptocurrency investor and his partner to transfer approximately 8 million euros in cryptocurrencies to them, according to the Rennes prosecutor’s office on Friday.

More specifically, according to our information and that of the specialized media outlet The Big Whale , the assailants broke into the home around 5:00 a.m. There, they tied up the woman and her partner, beating the latter for nearly two hours. The group then achieved their goal: the couple finally agreed, under threat, to transfer cryptocurrency, an amount estimated at 8 million euros by the prosecutor’s office.

Once the attackers had left, the two occupants, “very shaken,” finally managed to free themselves and alert emergency services, according to a statement released by the Rennes prosecutor’s office on Friday. The man was hospitalized, but his condition was not life-threatening. His potential inability to work has not yet been assessed.

The facts suggest that this is “a structured criminal team,” according to the prosecutor’s office. The investigation, which includes charges of “organized extortion” and “kidnapping,” has therefore been entrusted to the Specialized Interregional Jurisdiction (JIRS) of Rennes, responsible for combating organized crime in western France.

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The man worked in the cryptocurrency sector, a police source indicated. An electronic wallet containing cryptocurrency was also stolen, according to the same source.

From: Eight million euros in cryptocurrency stolen: what we know about the kidnapping of a couple near La Rochelle – Le Parisien.

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China is enthusiastic about stablecoins and keen to exploit the advantages of token technology, such as programmability, transparency and efficiency, but only within closed and permissioned systems. It wants stablecoins, but only stablecoins that it can control. The result, as Dr. Monique Taylor (a Lecturer in World Politics at the University of Helsinki) notes in her article in the East Asia Forum is a sophisticated digital finance infrastructure that is “advanced in design but constrained in reach”.

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Discussing the final volume of his masterpiece The City of London, which deals with the period 1945-2000, David Kynaston has observed that the City people in that book are more boring than in earlier volumes because all they do with their lives is work in finance.

From: John Lanchester · For Every Winner a Loser: What is finance for?.

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On Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) approved five national trust charter applications:

First National Digital Currency Bank – a subsidiary of Circle, issuer of USDC
Ripple National Trust Bank – issuer of RLUSD
BitGo Bank & Trust – offers white-label stablecoin issuance
Fidelity Digital Assets – back in March, the Financial Times reported that Fidelity was “in the advanced stages” of testing its own stablecoin
Paxos Trust Company – issuer of USDP as well as PayPal’s PYUSD and the Global Dollar USDG; offers white-label stablecoin issuance.
The last three are conversions from state charters.

From: New charters and banking upheaval – by Noelle Acheson.

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Translation: lots of companies will issue stablecoins. Most won’t matter.

What matters is the infrastructure that makes those stablecoins useful. The custody layer. The conversion layer. The compliance layer. The API layer. The settlement layer that connects to existing banking infrastructure. The prefunding layer that eliminates capital inefficiency.

From: Stablecoins’ Infrastructure Moment.

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One shared conclusion: issuing stablecoins creates less strategic value than building the infrastructure that makes any stablecoin useful.

From: Stablecoins’ Infrastructure Moment.

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This procedure also helps address lengthy remittance times and reduces exchange rate risks in China-Africa trade. Remitting funds from China to some African countries can take three to four days, while certain jurisdictions on the continent maintain requirements on foreign exchange settlement. Using US dollar-backed stablecoins can speed up transactions and help prevent losses.

From: Explainer | How some Chinese exporters benefit from US dollar-backed stablecoins | South China Morning Post.

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Together, these forces generate an impossibility result: transparent and decentralized trading cannot coexist in equilibrium. All robust equilibria are centralized, while decentralized allocations require knife-edge conditions or fail to exist. Transparency—intended to eliminate intermediaries—systematically recreates and entrenches them.

From: On the Impossibility of Transparent and Decentralized DeFi Trading  by Hanna Halaburda :: SSRN.

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