Crypto

• UK minister Lucy Powell's X account was hacked, promoting a fake cryptocurrency called '$HCC' through phishing tactics, highlighting the continuing rise of 'pump and dump' scams and cybersecurity concerns for political figures.

• Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison and banking executive Dina Powell McCormick join Meta's board, effective April 15, supporting business navigation amid ongoing challenges while Stripe continues its evolution in crypto payment solutions.

• Ripple Labs Inc. acquired Hidden Road for $1.25 billion, expanding institutional crypto services and integrating their Ripple USD stablecoin for cross-margining with traditional markets.

• The FBI covertly operated a significant money laundering ring to apprehend drug traffickers and hackers while analyzing the effects of tariffs on various products.

• Albert Saniger, CEO of Nate, faces fraud charges for misleading investors by claiming his app was fully AI-automated while actually relying on human contractors in the Philippines.

• Elon Musk's DOGE program aims to automate government tasks using blockchain technology, potentially acquiring extensive American data including medical records and credit information, raising significant privacy and data security concerns.

Canadian math prodigy allegedly stole $65M in crypto (theglobeandmail.com, 2025-04-14). Andean Medjedovic, a Canadian math prodigy, allegedly exploited decentralized finance platforms to steal US$65 million in crypto, using flash loans and market manipulation before going into hiding from U.S. authorities

If it's crypto it's not money laundering (moneyness.ca, 2025-04-11). The U.S. Department of Justice has shifted its stance on cryptocurrencies, effectively exempting crypto platforms from money laundering liability, which could worsen illicit activities like fentanyl trading by increasing anonymity for bad actors

Protocol Engineering Roadmap: Q2 2025 (electriccoin.co, 2025-04-12). ECC's Q2 2025 protocol roadmap focuses on Zcash Shielded Assets deployment, Zcashd deprecation, Zallet wallet development, integration with Zebra, and aims for scalable payments while addressing quantum resilience and transitioning to Proof-of-Stake

Taking stablecoins seriously, with Haseeb Qureshi (complexsystemspodcast.com, 2025-04-10). Haseeb Qureshi discusses the rapid adoption of stablecoins, economic models, decentralized systems like MakerDAO and Athena, regulatory challenges, and their roles in international payments and black markets

Bitcoin Mining Centralization in 2025 (b10c.me, 2025-04-15). Bitcoin mining centralization has escalated by 2025, with just six pools controlling over 95% of blocks. The Mining Centralization Index illustrates this trend, revealing proxy mining through AntPool and others exacerbating future risks

Trade War Erases $1 Trillion in Crypto: Bitcoin Behaves Like a Risk Asset (cosmicmeta.io, 2025-04-11). The crypto market lost over $1 trillion amid U.S.-China trade tensions, with Bitcoin behaving more like a high-risk asset than 'digital gold,' raising questions about its stability and role as a hedge during geopolitical crises

Taiko x Commit-Boost x Fabric: A Partnership for Ethereum-Wide Preconfirmations (taiko.mirror.xyz, 2025-04-14). Taiko partners with Commit-Boost and Fabric to enhance Ethereum-wide preconfirmations, utilizing tools like Commit-Boost for validators and Fabric for standardized rollup infrastructure, aiming for L1 preconfirmation implementations by 2025

Crypto in Pakistan: Between Promise, Politics, and Pragmatism (everymansci.com, 2025-04-14). Pakistan's struggling economy sees crypto as a financial lifeline. Key issues include legal ambiguity, no taxation framework, and brain drain, while potential solutions include establishing a regulatory sandbox and a blockchain research lab

Reflections on my Cardano-Haskell Experience (lambdabytes.io, 2025-04-11). A contractor's experience developing Axo, a decentralized trading protocol on Cardano, utilizing Haskell and Rust, addressing software engineering challenges, mental load, and the advantages and drawbacks of Haskell in industry

Blockchain and data protection (GDPR) (blog.lukaszolejnik.com, 2025-04-14). Blockchain's inherent traits, like immutability and decentralisation, complicate GDPR compliance regarding data protection principles such as storage limitation and right to erasure, as warned by the EDPB

Devcoins (blog.vrypan.net, 2025-04-13). Devcoins are personal tokens for developers, enabling direct support for their work. Platforms like clanker.world facilitate token creation, allowing developers to build ecosystems around their projects, such as $lemon3 used in pingem.xzy

Build a Crypto Bot Using OpenAI Function Calling (blog.adnansiddiqi.me, 2025-04-14). Learn to build a crypto assistant that analyzes RSI signals from Binance's OHLC data using OpenAI's function calling, implemented via Python to perform trades and check prices effectively

How Can We Bring the Future of Finance to the Bitcoin Network? (alchemistaccelerator.com, 2025-04-10). Bitcoin is evolving into a decentralized financial platform through BitcoinFi, utilizing stablecoins, tokenization of assets, and decentralized lending mechanisms to unlock idle liquidity and facilitate global financial access

Open vs. Closed Metaverses: Decentraland & Horizon Worlds as a featured examples (medium.com/@shymaa.arafat, 2025-04-09). Comparison of open metaverse Decentraland, utilizing Ethereum Blockchain and NFTs, against closed metaverse Horizon Worlds by Facebook, highlighting user freedom, content creation, and immersive experience features

Better Funds Flows (benmilne.com, 2025-04-13). Ben Milne discusses streamlining funds flows with the Commons Stablecoin Format, using tools like Modern Treasury and Mermaid for efficient representation and clarity in stablecoin financial transactions

Conthereum: Concurrent Ethereum Optimized Transaction Scheduling for Multi-Core Execution (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-09). Conthereum presents a concurrent blockchain solution utilizing a deterministic scheduling scheme for multi-core transaction processing, reformulating smart contract execution into a Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem variant to optimize time and energy efficiency

Copy-and-Paste? Identifying EVM-Inequivalent Code Smells in Multi-chain Reuse Contracts (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-10). A study reveals EVM-Inequivalent Code Smells in reused Solidity contracts across blockchains, identifies six types, and introduces EquivGuard, a tool using static taint analysis and symbolic execution to detect these issues in contracts

Evaluating DAO Sustainability and Longevity Through On-Chain Governance Metrics (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-15). This study evaluates Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) using a framework of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to address governance efficiency, financial robustness, decentralisation, and community engagement through on-chain data analysis

ECDSA Cracking Methods (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-04-09). This paper discusses vulnerabilities in ECDSA signatures, focusing on nonce-related issues such as revealed nonces, weak nonce choice, nonce reuse, two keys and shared nonces, as well as fault attacks

Publicly Verifiable Generalized Secret Sharing Schemes and Their Applications (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-04-12). Introducing publicly verifiable generalized secret sharing (PVGSS) schemes that enable fine-grained access control and honest verification in decentralized systems, utilizing non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and illustrated through a decentralized exchange protocol

MProve-Nova: A Privacy-Preserving Proof of Reserves Protocol for Monero (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-04-12). MProve-Nova introduces a privacy-preserving proof of reserves protocol for Monero, using Nova recursive SNARKs to ensure constant proof sizes and verification times, revealing only the number of outputs owned by an exchange

Vector Commitment Design, Analysis, and Applications: A Survey (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-04-13). This survey systematizes vector commitment designs, their properties, and applications, comparing schemes based on security, proof/update sizes, and effectiveness in decentralized and privacy-preserving contexts

More Efficient Stealth Address Protocol (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-09). A novel hybrid Stealth Address Protocol combining the Curvy protocol and Module-LWE technique achieves significant speed improvements in Ethereum-compatible transactions while addressing quantum vulnerability and optimizing ephemeral public key registry scanning

PoGO: A Scalable Proof of Useful Work via Quantized Gradient Descent and Merkle Proofs (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-10). PoGO utilizes quantized gradients and Merkle proofs for scalable blockchain consensus, verifying machine-learning model training with reduced resource needs while allowing efficient progress checks and attestation handling