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A Florida woman, Maria Vaca, has sued Google in a California state court, alleging that a cryptocurrency wallet app she downloaded from the Google Play Store was malicious and resulted in the theft of $5 million in cryptocurrency. Vaca claims the app, Yobit Pro, exploited Google’s marketing that portrayed the Play Store as a secure […]
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Category: Crypto Freedom News
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Google Faces Lawsuit After $5M in Crypto Stolen via Play Store App
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Protocol Village: Quai Releases Mainnet-Compatible Devnet, Crunch Lab Raises $3.5M
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The latest in blockchain tech upgrades, funding announcements and deals. For the period of Aug. 15-21, 2024.
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World’s 3rd largest public pension fund buys $34M MicroStrategy shares
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The third-largest public pension fund in the world has just bought nearly $34 million worth of shares in MicroStrategy, a Bitcoin-buying business intelligence firm.
South Korea’s National Pension Service (NPS) purchased 24,500 MicroStrategy shares for a price of $33.75 million, an Aug. 13 filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission shows.
The National Pension Service is South Korea’s public pension and the country’s largest investor, with over $777 billion (1 trillion won) in total assets at the end of February.
The filing, which details its investments for the quarter ended June 30, shows it still holds an over $51 million stake in Coinbase, holding 229,807 shares of the crypto exchange.
It also has $31.5 million invested into Roblox and $61.5 million worth of Jack Dorsey’s Block, Inc.
Thinking Ahead Institute’s annual Global Pension Assets Study shows that Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund is the world’s largest pension fund, with nearly $1.5 trillion in total assets as of 2023. Next is the Government Pension Fund of Norway, with just over $1.3 trillion.
Related: 4 years in, MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin gamble beats Warren Buffett’s warning
Meanwhile, MicroStrategy (MSTR) has seen a 92.5% gain so far this year and has climbed above $150 for the first time in over 24 years, according to Google Finance.
MicroStrategy’s stock price has nearly doubled so far this year. Source: Google Finance The company has been buying Bitcoin (BTC) since August 2020, and its earnings report earlier this month shows it purchased an additional 12,222 Bitcoin for $805 million in the second quarter of 2024.
MicroStrategy’s latest Bitcoin buy brought its total holdings to 226,500 BTC, which is worth around $13.19 billion at Bitcoin’s current price.
It makes MicroStrategy the public company with the largest Bitcoin holdings, with around 13 times more Bitcoin than the world’s largest Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital, according to CoinGecko.
Others, too, think MicroStrategy is a good bet, with exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuer Defiance ETFs launching a United States-based fund that targets a 175% long daily exposure to MicroStrategy.
Asia Express: Low users, sex predators kill Korean metaverses, 3AC sues Terra
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China-Russia International Trade Payments Situation Worsens: Crypto and Barter Rise as Alternatives
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Chinese regional banks, which were once used as bridges to process payments from Russia to China, have begun rejecting these payments for fear of secondary sanctions. To facilitate these transactions, cryptocurrency and even barter schemes have emerged as options to continue trading outside the dollar-dominated financial system. Crypto Considered for Settling Trade Transactions Between China […]
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Crypto Industry Committing $12M to Dethrone U.S. Sen. Brown in Ohio, PAC Says
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Crypto interests are planning to go after Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) in their biggest-ever single campaign, setting aside $12 million to support the Republican candidate seeking to snatch the Senate seat from the current chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who has been highly critical of the digital assets sector and reluctant to embrace crypto legislation.
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Investors flock to ETH products over BTC as markets recover: CoinShares
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Ethereum exchange-traded products were the top choice for institutional investors as money returned to crypto funds following the Aug. 5 market slump.
In its weekly Digital Asset Fund Flows report published on Aug. 12, asset manager CoinShares revealed that crypto asset investment products saw inflows totaling $176 million for the week ending Aug. 11.
It found that Ether (ETH) funds benefited the most from the market correction, attracting $155 million in inflows last week, or around 88% of the total. Ether funds also led on monthly performance with $150 million in inflows so far this month.
It also brings the year-to-date inflows for ETH funds to $862 million, the highest since 2021. It has been “largely driven by the recent launch of US spot-based ETFs,” stated CoinShares.
On Aug. 12, Cointelegraph reported that US-based spot Ether ETFs saw their first week of inflows since they launched in late July. The nine newly launched products had positive overall net inflows of around $105 million for the week beginning Aug. 5.
Weekly crypto asset fund flows. Source: CoinShares Comparatively, Bitcoin ETPs only managed $13 million in inflows for the week and have outflows of $366 million month-to-date, according to CoinShares.
Interestingly, short Bitcoin ETPs saw their largest outflows since May 2023, totaling $16 million. This has reduced the assets under management (AUM) for short positions to its lowest level since the start of the year, “indicating a substantial investor exit.”
Multi-asset or altcoin funds also outperformed Bitcoin ETPs with an inflow of $18.3 million for the period.
Related: Ether ETF weekly flows turn positive for first time since launch
Crypto markets have recovered by around 20% since the major correction on Aug. 5, with total capitalization returning to $2.2 trillion by Aug. 13.
The total AUM of institutional investment products had also recovered to $85 billion after more than $20 billion was wiped out in the market rout.
Meanwhile, ETH prices have recovered 23% since dropping below $2,200 on Aug. 5 to top $2,700. Comparatively, the price of BTC has recovered around 19% back since its slump below $50,000.
Magazine: Ethereum price will lag for ‘months’ as Bitcoin surges: X Hall of Flame, Roman
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Ripple Legal Chief Discusses Potential SEC Appeal After Final Ruling in XRP Case
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Ripple’s chief legal officer has addressed the possibility of an appeal by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) following the $125 million final judgment in the XRP case. He suggested that if the Biden-Harris administration is committed to resetting its stance on crypto, the securities regulator should not seek to appeal. He noted that […]
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IRS Shares New Crypto Tax Form, Invites Industry Input
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The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has released an updated draft version of the tax form crypto brokers and investors will use to report proceeds from certain transactions, the 1099-DA.
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AI offerings are a bad joke, and investors aren’t laughing
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The timely bursting of the AI bubble is seeing investors finally wake up and smell the coffee. That was briefly reflected by the stock performance of players in the AI arms race during the Aug. 5 market crash, when stock prices for Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Meta plummeted — even if they did undeservedly recover the next day.
Some of the companies are making massive investments in AI. Meta has indicated through recent earnings reports that it expects to spend up to $40 billion on AI R&D in 2024. Microsoft has spent $56 billion, and the number is rising. Google is projecting an expenditure of $12 billion per quarter.
These are enormous numbers — even for Google — and investors have so far seen nothing for it. According to both Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the risk of underinvestment in AI can’t be understated. They argue that building out data stores to train AI models takes time and resources, and being unprepared for the future isn’t a position they want to be in.
Related: Regulators are misguided in efforts to restrict open-source AI
This is a sentiment that appeals strongly to investors who were caught out during the first tech boom — those who either lost a lot of money in 2001 when the early internet bubble popped or cronies who didn’t get in until the big money had been made (Warren Buffett himself, for instance). However this FOMO is dangerous and, frankly, this is starting to look like an arms race for a non-existent war.
Let’s take OpenAI — perhaps the most overhyped company in the market since Tesla and the creator of ChatGPT. This is the absolute darling of the sector — really its best hope — and according to some reports, it is eking out an annual revenue run rate of just $3.4 billion. As we can see from the capital being hemorrhaged by Microsoft — which owns 49% of OpenAI — that is absolutely nothing.
What is more, the majority of this is coming from subscriptions to what can only be described as silly jokes. ChatGPT is all but useless for any company wanting to market its products and services as it generates patent garbage that can be spotted a mile away. Meanwhile, kids can have fun morphing works of art into each other on DALL-E, while elsewhere AI is helping to generate deep-fake porn videos of Taylor Swift — great.
Related: Only Congress and DARPA can rein in the dangers of AI
The lawsuits this trash is rightly clocking up is a testament to its shelf-life, along with the growing concerns — again, rightly so — of regulators and governments across the globe regarding the enormous damage this technology can potentially do. Add to this to the lawsuit that Elon Musk is throwing at Sam Altman for “tricking” him into seeding OpenAI, and we have to wonder how long this joke will run.
In a lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, Elon Musk says his case against them “is a textbook tale of altruism versus greed.” Source: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California There are some promising spots in this otherwise desolate landscape, such as AI-linked chip maker Nvidia, whose earnings remain strong. Infrastructure plays like this are always considered a safer bet, not least because AI is not Nvidia’s only revenue source. It has, though, faced recent shipment challenges and has attracted criticism from hedge funds like Elliot Management in London, which has warned that AI technology is nowhere near ready for “prime time,” alleging that Nvidia is in a bubble.
Indeed, Microsoft has been at least transparent on timelines, claiming it expects to see a return on its investments within the next 15 years, while Meta has said it expects to see returns from generative AI “over a longer period of time.” Well, 15 years (or “a longer period of time”) are not acceptable timeframes for publicly traded companies — they are barely even tolerated in venture capital.
Right now, we can safely say the AI bubble has burst and Warren Buffett — who offloaded a $90 billion chunk of his Apple stock in the second quarter of 2024 — may be right this time around to be skeptical about the fate of the Magnificent Seven. Betting their fortunes on AI may well be their undoing. If AI does prove to be useful, it won’t be anytime soon.
Michael Brescia is a guest columnist for Cointelegraph and the CEO and co-founder of Cerus Markets, a platform for trading cryptocurrencies and traditional assets together using derivative. Brescia began his career as a stock broker at Lehman Brothers in New York before moving to forex firm FXCM, where he helped to shape their pioneering contract for differences (CFD) desk. He became an entrepreneur as the co-founder of Praxis Digital Trading, an institutional offering that matches professional trading houses with bespoke digital asset opportunities.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
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Democrats Launch ‘Crypto for Harris’ — White House Officials Address Industry Concerns
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Senior White House officials have reportedly engaged with cryptocurrency leaders to discuss industry concerns, facilitated by Representative Ro Khanna. This initiative continues the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to engage with the crypto sector. Additionally, the Democrats have launched a “Crypto for Harris” initiative to help Vice President Kamala Harris gain support from the cryptocurrency community. Biden-Harris […]
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