Presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy came down hard on SEC chair Gary Gensler and other “three letter agencies” during the recent Republican presidential debate, claiming that regulators had failed to keep up with crypto.

During the 4th Republican presidential debate of the 2024 cycle on Dec. 7, Ramaswamy said it was “nothing short of embarrassing” that Gensler couldn’t admit before Congress that Ethereum’s native currency Ether (ETH), should be viewed as a commodity.

@VivekGRamaswamy and @RonDeSantis talk crypto in the GOP primary debate pic.twitter.com/mQEPAmhfT5

— Taylor Barr (@taylorjbarr) December 7, 2023

The question directed at Ramaswamy mentioned the recent guilty…

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Crypto industry short sellers have lost at least $6 billion trying to bet against publicly-traded crypto firms this year, due largely to Bitcoin’s (BTC) outsized rally since Jan. 1.

According to a Dec. 5 report from research firm S3 partners, traders who bet against publicly traded crypto firms such as Coinbase, MicroStrategy, and Marathon Digital are now nursing $6.05 billion in on-paper losses.

The bulk of the losses for short sellers have been concentrated in the last three months. After Bitcoin fell to a quarterly low of $25,133 on Sept. 11, short sellers increased their exposure to what they thought was an overbought sector.

Unbeknownst to the traders loading up on shorts, Bitcoin…

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JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is being hauled over the hot coals on crypto X (Twitter) after claiming Bitcoin (BTC) and cryptocurrency’s “only true use case” is to facilitate crime.

“The only true use case for it is criminals, drug traffickers, money laundering, tax avoidance,” Dimon said in a hearing before the United States Banking Committee on Dec. 5. “If I were the government, I’d close it down.”

But crypto pundits quickly pointed out the seeming hypocrisy in Dimon’s statements, highlighting that JPMorgan is the second largest penalized bank, having paid $39.3 billion in fines across 272 violations since 2000, according to Good Jobs First’s violation tracker.

About $38 billion…

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Tech giant Google has officially rolled out Gemini, its latest artificial intelligence model that it claims has surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-4.

On Dec. 6, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis announced the launch of Gemini in a company blog post

The AI model has been optimized for different sizes and use cases (Ultra, Pro, Nano) and built to be multimodal to understand and combine different types of information.

The model is also advanced in math and specialized coding, as compared to OpenAI’s GPT-4, which cannot perform math.

Meanwhile, Google claims its Ultra version achieves “state-of-the-art performance” across 30 out of 32 academic benchmarks…

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A United States House Committee has unanimously passed a pro-blockchain bill, which would task the U.S. commerce secretary to promote blockchain deployment and thus potentially increase the country’s use of blockchain technology.

On Dec. 5, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce voted 46-0 to pass H.R. 6572, the Deploying American Blockchains Act of 2023, in a session aiming to clear 44 pieces of legislation.

The 13-page blockchain bill would direct Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo to “take actions necessary and appropriate to promote the competitiveness of the United States related to the deployment, use, application, and competitiveness of blockchain technology or other…

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Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon has launched his final attempt to appeal a Montenegrin court’s decision that could see him extradited from the country. 

In a Dec. 6 report, local state media stated that lawyers for Kwon had officially appealed the Nov. 24 decision from the High Court of Podgorica, which approved that Kwon could be extradited to either the United States or South Korea pending a final decision by the Montenegrin Ministry of Justice.

The Ministry of Justice will now consider the appeal and reexamine the initial extradition order and is currently slated to make a final decision on the matter by Dec. 15.

According to a Nov. 24 statement from the High Court of Podogrica,…

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An Abu Dhabi government-affiliated research center has announced the launch of a new blockchain-powered carbon tracking and trading platform, amid efforts from the United Arab Emirates government to lower emissions toward net zero.

The new blockchain was unveiled at the latest the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) on Dec. 5, which will enable the international trade of carbon tokens linked to investments in green projects, such as forestation and carbon capture.

The platform was built by Technology Innovation Institute’s (TII) Cryptographic Research Center, according to a Dec. 5 statement by the TII. The blockchain can track carbon emissions by registering the emissions…

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Despite the risks and the failures associated with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), global policymakers are pushing forward to make them a reality. 

In November alone, officials from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Bretton Woods Committee, and Bank for International Settlements (BIS) issued rallying calls for governments to push forward on CBDCs with courage and determination. But rather than double down on a bad idea and waste further resources in this pursuit, policymakers should let this idea go and focus on more fundamental reforms that would create a freer financial system.

The November CBDC campaign began when IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva told…

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A federal judge accepted Binance founder Changpang “CZ” Zhao’s guilty plea to money laundering, but hasn’t decided if he can leave the United States before his February sentencing date.

In a Dec. 6 filing to a Seattle District Court, Judge Richard Jones said he accepted Zhao’s guilty plea to one count of Bank Secrecy Act violations, which he submitted over two weeks ago on Nov. 21 alongside his exchange’s $4.3 billion settlement with the U.S.

As part of the settlement deal, Zhao agreed to step down as CEO of Binance and paid $150 million to regulators.

Zhao is set to be sentenced on Feb. 23 next year and faces up to 18 months in prison. He’s currently released on a $175 million…

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Anatoly Legkodymov, founder of the dark web-tied crypto exchange Bitzlato, has pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business in a New York court. 

The Department of Justice originally filed charges against the Hong Kong-based exchange’s majority owner last January. 

Bitzlato “sold itself to criminals as a no-questions-asked cryptocurrency exchange, and reaped hundreds of millions of dollars worth of deposits as a result,” US attorney Breon Peace said in a statement at the time.

According to the DOJ, Legkodymov will dissolve Bitzlato and “release any claim over approximately $23 million in seized assets of Bitzlato” as part of the plea agreement. A…

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