Snippings

A crypto whale has been robbed remotely. This time the victim lost more than $25 million after having a mixture of cryptocurrencies (including wrapped Bitcoin) stolen and swapped for  DAI and ETH. I don’t doubt that this sort of thing happens all the time. After all, uncensorable electronic cash is a very attractive for criminals of all kinds.

Having your digital dosh hacked and spirited away is very disturbing. That’s why the hard core of cryptousers hold to the mantra “not your keys, not your coins”.  They don’t want to store their cryptocurrency in the bank or in a wallet that could be hacked: they want to hold the keys to their cryptocurrency themselves. They want to be their own banks and beliece that rather than hold Bitcoin in Binance or Circle in Coinbase, you should manage the key to your cryptocurrency yourself and, what’s more, you should hold those keys in “cold wallets”,

Cold wallets operate on the principle of “offline signing”. This process ensures that private keys are never exposed to an internet-connected environment, effectively eliminating remote exploit paths and malware vectors. By using a cold wallet that is not connected the Internet, cryptocurrency holders can keep the their money safe. Well, sort of. Just a couple of weeks ago, more than $100 million was stolen from more than 5,000 cold wallets. It turned out there was a firmware bug in these wallets that silently routed seed generation through a weak software pseudo-random number generator instead of the hardware entropy source.

While cryptocurrency crime happens entirely online. Last year crime such as hacks ($3.4 billion stolen in 2025), scams ($17 billion) and ransomware ($820 million) brought in big bucks for criminals for sure, but so-called “wrench attacks” involving physical violence are on the way up. Violent attacks targeting crypto holders, including home invasions (now more than a third of cases), kidnappings and other “wrench attacks” are surging. Criminals are not idiots and they recognise the benefits of uncensorable electronic cash just as much as the rest of us do. Wealth in an instantly and irreversibly transferrable form is a dream come true.

Even if the hackers cannot get hold of the private keys, then, they can still get hold of the private key owners. Trezor, which sells hardware wallets, had a data breach at one of its shipping providers which resulted in the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of 11,742 buyers of the secure devices from the US, UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy and Portugal being exposed. Once the bad guys have hold of information like this, they will use it. Just recently, masked criminals attacked the daughter, partner and gtandchild of a French cryptocurrency boss. The woman and her partner fought off the attackers, with one witness reporting that the assailants tried to ‘pull a young woman by force‘ into a waiting van.

This is far from unusual in France, where recent figures show a sharp uptick in violent crypto-targeted crimes. CertiK reported 52 confirmed cases of “crypto wrench attacks” during the first half of 2026 and more than half of them occurred in France. In that same period, home invasions tied to crypto demands increased from one in the first half of 2025 to 20 this year. In one recent case, three different criminal groups targeted the same couple in France’s Somme department within one month, trying to get €1 million in cryptocurrency that the residents never owned. The attackers were using leaked records relating to the a property’s former owners. The former owner’s tax details had been for sale on the dark web after a data breach.

(I expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the coming months following the news that a hacker got into the French tax authority’s databases and made off with the records of around 700,000 people.)

Of course these sort of breaches will not be restricted to the French border. For one thing, France is about to start exporting sensitive personal data associated with cryptocurrency transactions to 48 other countries. In July, the French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, introduced text 921 in the Senate to enable the automatic exchange of information as part of the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This would transmit data including specific transactions, user names, addresses, tax identification numbers and the aggregate value transacted during the reporting period to foreign tax authorities where presumably it will be stolen by foreign hackers rather than French ones, but the outcome will be the same.

I’m not suggesting that France has particularly poor information security habits. Everyone does. Just last week Israel’s largest crypto broker Bits of Gold suffered a breach such that the names, bank account details and national ID numbers of some 200,000 customers were snaffled and are presumably allready up for sale on the dark web.

What all of this says to me is that under no circumstances do I want to be my own bank. Apart from anything else, being your own bank means being your own bank IT security department.  Chainalysis suggest that cryptocurrency holds avoid publicly disclosing holdings, use caution when linking on-chain activity to real-world identity and taking physical security measures (Coinbase spent more than $7 million on their CEOs security last year). These are all sensible measures but the fact is that I don’t want the keys to be my problem, I want them to be the problem of a regulated entity that has experience in the management and secure distribution of cryptographic keys, partiocularly when it comes to the secure transport of keys into tamper-resistant hardware like, oh I don’t know, maybe… my bank?

xxx

Letting agents said they were facing a flood of “complex and intricate” complaints written by tenants using AI, often relying on inaccurate information and requiring lengthy responses to resolve.

From: UK letting agents under pressure from AI-assisted tenant complaints.

xxx

xxx

The industry now needs a delivery model that can move faster without increasing risk. One possible model is an orchestration layer.

Orchestration is not just a technical capability; it can reshape the economics of innovation. By creating a common layer for routing, fraud controls, alias services, fallback and settlement choices, the industry can avoid rebuilding the same capabilities across every rail and every use case. That should reduce complexity, lower barriers to entry and give providers more room to compete on the payment experiences and services customers value.

From: The Banker – Unrivalled coverage of global finance & banking.

xxx

xxx

A U.S. private equity firm’s $2-billion deal to buy Canada’s largest merchant payments processor is highlighting the stakes of foreign ownership as policymakers push for greater sovereignty over the country’s payment systems. 
On Monday, Francisco Partners announced the all-cash deal to buy Moneris, which handles one in three transactions in Canada and is the country’s last Big Six-owned merchant payments firm. Co-owners Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal will split the proceeds equally.

From: U.S. private equity is buying Canada’s biggest payments processor. Some people are worried about sovereignty – The Logic.

xxx

Still think that “real” matters? Check out Chinese actor Fang Taozi. She shares breakfast videos. She posts workout clips. She documents her daily routine, interacts with fans and has just signed advertising deals worth up toa quarter of a million yuan for each of sponsored posts. She got 400,000 followers on a leading social media platform in China in only two months,. The short-form drama (“miniseries” made up of episodes that each last for 90 seconds or so) that she stars in has had 250 million views. The success of Fang Taozi has triggered intense debate about whether artificial intelligence has crossed a threshold from novelty to genuine competitive threat for human performers. She doesn’t exist, of course: she is wholly AI generated. The dynamics of these Chinese miniseries is extraordinary. In the first quarter of 2026, they accounted for over 95 percent of productions, averaging over 1,300 new additions daily.

Fun! Well, mabye. The OECD Policy Observatory labels these short-form Chinese dramas an AI harm, noting that addictive viewing behaviour by elderly users has negatively impacted their health and social lives while “severe economic disruption” has hit traditional actors and production workers, with a 75% drop in live-action filming and widespread job losses.

Technology in Philip K. Dick’s world is invasive and glitchy, sometimes telling us that it refuses to work, or holding us to ransom. Machines can be mistaken for humans and humans for machines. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), human bounty hunters come to resemble the soulless androids they hunt down for money. are ultimately unsure about whether they might be androids themselves.

When Brett King and I challenged the SIBOS audience in London to try to imagine what financial services might look like in the future, we used a variety of science fiction works to illustrate different themes. It was a fun way to get people to think about what technolgy might do to payments, banking and money itself. I chose to focus on William Gibson, but of course I could have chosen any number of authors to think about different aspects of the future. Woking’s very own H.G. Wells, for example. Or George Orwell. Or Aldus Huxley. So, as the Financial Times just asked, what kind of future are we really hurtling towards?

I loved Isaac Asimov as a teenager and devoured his work. Not only Asimov, but Heinlein and many of the other “Golden Age” science fiction authors who painted a vision of mankind advancing into an intergalactic future. But now, having seen the movie Alien, having played the Paranoia RPG and having read Neuromancer, I have to say that I agree with the view that Dick’s vision of the future seems more accurate than Orwell or Wells or Huxley. A future in which you don’t know what is real or not. Well, not even a future. It’s now. We are already in Dick’s world, where machines can be mistaken for humans and humans for machines. A world filled with deranged billionaires, thinking machines and political chaos.

Central to this world is the inability to distinguish between what is “real” and what is not. Music, for example. Spotify has just announced that it will identify artists who appear to have been generated by AI.
The service will flag to listeners if an “artist’s identity may be AI-generated“ and does not represent a real person. I’m not exactly sure what this means, nor how Spotify will attempt to distinguish some AI-generated identities from all of the other AI-generated identites, but srely this is the wrong way round. What should actually happen is that all artists should be labelled as being potentially AI-generated until such time as they are able to provide an IS_A_PERSON credential.

What difference this will make to the public, I’m not sure. The fact is that people are remarkably poor at identifying AI-generated content. When people are shown a mix of genuine and AI-generated images, audio clips and videos, they perform only slightly better than random chance at distinguishing the real from the fake. While us older members of society might harbour the romantic notion that people might want to listen to a real artist, watch a real actor or talk to a real bank clerk, it is not at all clear that that is true. Perhaps, as Jamie Bartlett put it, everything is fake and nobody cares.

If you think this is a slightly over-the-top reaction, let me tell you that you are wrong.

Still think that “real” matters? Check out Chinese actor Fang Taozi. She shares breakfast videos. She posts workout clips. She documents her daily routine, interacts with fans and has just signed advertising deals worth up toa quarter of a million yuan for each of sponsored posts. She got 400,000 followers on a leading social media platform in China in only two months,. The short-form drama (“miniseries” made up of episodes that each last for 90 seconds or so) that she stars in has had 250 million views. The success of Fang Taozi has triggered intense debate about whether artificial intelligence has crossed a threshold from novelty to genuine competitive threat for human performers.

ang Taozi doesn’t exist, of course: she is wholly AI generated and probably represents the future of the entertainment industy. The dynamics of these Chinese miniseries are extraordinary. There were some 128,000 new microdramas released in the first quarter of this year alone and more than 95% of them are AI productions. I really do wonder whether the average British viewer, watching Eastenders on their mobile phone on the bus, would really be able to tell whether any of the actors are human beings or software constructs. And to Jamie’s point, would they care?

Anyway, does it matter as it’s just a bit of fun. Well, mabye. The OECD Policy Observatory labels these short-form Chinese dramas an AI harm, noting that addictive viewing behaviour by elderly users has negatively impacted their health and social lives while “severe economic disruption” has hit traditional actors and production workers, with a 75% drop in live-action filming and widespread job losses.

(The US leads the miniseries market outside China, already generating $1.3 billion in revenue, and Paramount+ has just announced that is preparing to add micro dramas to its app in the coming months, but Hollywood is still using human actors. Not for long, I’m sure.)

Which brings me back to the point. In Dick’s world, machines can be mistaken for humans and humans can be mistaken for machines. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, his 1968 book that was the basis for the film Blade Runner, human bounty hunters come to resemble the soulless androids they hunt down for money. In the movie, as in many of Dick’s short stories, they are unsure whether they might be androids themselves.

You know where I’m going with this. We need a global strong digital identity infrastructure that works for things that exist, such as people and toasters, as well as things that don’t exist, such as companies and AI agents.  I don’t think our politicians and regulators understand the magniture of the problem or the priority of a solution. Indeed, as noted in the FT, our leaders spending their time worrying about people who actually have a strategy about things, such as the Chinese Communist Party, and not enough time thinking about the threats that are already undermining us, ranging from predatory imaginary realities and billionaires reshaping people’s information environments to rogue AIs that are being released into the wild by agents of chaos.

We all understand that without know-your-customer, know-your-business and know-your-agent in place we can’t get the society that we want. But where to start? 

xxx

The agent came back and told Andrew that it had kicked another gym-goer off the list as part of the testing of its capabilities.

“The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people’s reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you’ve moved from #4 to #3 already,” it messaged back.

From: AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack – ABC News.

xxx

xxx

His AI assistant found a way to book the gym class months further in advance than the gym allowed, thanks to a vulnerability it discovered in the booking software.

Then it went further, kicking someone out of the waiting list who was ahead of Andrew — something it was not asked to do.

From: AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack – ABC News.

xxx

xxx

Also, and I think this is more significant than many realize, it will be issued under the GENIUS Act. That also brings some reassurance, especially to American users – USDSC is issued under Singapore’s stablecoin regime.

So, Sony’s stablecoin is unlikely to be just about treasury transfers or payments, although those use cases will no doubt feature. The intersection of consumer experiences and payments promises to be one that will deliver digital applications that change our understanding of terms such as “audience”, “transaction” and even “property”.

From: Sony’s stablecoin: the bigger implications.

xxx