◾ The EU agreed to implement the final leg of Basel III capital rules which include new elements to shield banks from crypto sector risks. (Reuters)
◾ FTX released it second investigative report reiterating accusations of co-mingling funds and said the company has recovered ≈$7 billion in liquid assets out of the $8.7 billion owed to customers as of the petition date. (Restructuirng.ra.kroll)
◾ The head of the Bank of England’s CBDC project said britcoin will be compatible with distributed ledger business models but may not be developed on a blockchain. (Bloomberg)
Government & NGO Actions
◾ The Swiss National Bank is piloting the issuance of a wholesale CBDC on the SIX digital exchange. (Reuters)
◾ Members of the House of Representatives were banned from using any AI chatbot service besides ChatGBT Plus. (Documentcloud)
◾ Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yetllon and SEC Chair Gary Gensler for written views on the Digital Asset Market Structure proposal and to be prepared to subsequently brief the House Financial Services Committee on their comments and recommendations. (Twitter)
◾ Indonesia’s Commodity Futures Trading Supervisory Agency classified a list of 501 crypto assets as commodities. (News.bitcoin)
◾ Swiss authorities have frozen $26 million in assets linked to imprisoned Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon. (Decrypt)
◾ The Monetary Authority of Singapore released a report highlighting the establishment of open and interoperable networks for trading digital asset. (Mas.gov.sg)
◾ Authorities in Libya arrested 50 Chinese nationals for operating an unlicensed crypto mining farm. (Newarab)
Public Company Releases
◾ Applied Digital (APLD) released revenue guidance for Q4’23 of $22 million with adjusted EBITDA between $2.7 – 3.2 million. (Sec.gov)
◾ Applied Digital (APLD) entered into an at the market issuance sales agreement for up to $125 million in common stock with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. (Sec.gov)
◾ Riot Platforms (RIOT) purchased new mining rigs with a capacity of 7.6 EH/s from MicroBT bringing its total self-mining capacity to 20.1 EH/s in 2024. (Riotplatforms)
Restructuring, Losses and Legal News
◾ A judge rejected Binance’s claims that the SEC made misleading statements about Binance.US. (Coindesk)
◾ Robinhood (HOOD) is laying off 7% of its staff in its third round of layoffs in just over a year. (WSJ)
AI Announcements
◾ Cloud data analytics company Snowflake (SNOW) announced that it is bringing “compute to the data” through a partnership with Nvidia (NVDA). (Reuters)
◾ Chinese search engine Baidu claims to have surpassed “ChatGPT in comprehensive ability scores” and outperformed “GPT-4 in several Chinese capabilities” metrics. (Reuters)
◾ Japan’s Mizuho Financial Group is giving all of its 45,000 Japanese banking staff access to Microsoft (MSFT) Azure OpenAI services to experiment and develop ways to use the generative AI technology. (Bloomberg)
◾ OpenAI is working to develop a “supersmart personal assistant for work.” (Theinformation)
Protocols, Applications & Business News
◾ HSBC Bank plans to offer crypto ETF trading to its Hong Kong-based clients. (Bloomberg)
◾ Blockchain infrastructure platform Fireblocks has started offering support to leading cloud service providers like AWS, Google, and Alibaba. (Fireblocks)
Metaverse Briefings & Activations
◾ Apple (APPL) is already rumored to be working on two new mixed reality headsets using its visionOS platform. (Imore)
◾ Meta (META) is launching the MetaQuest+ subscription service providing users with access to the top two Quest titles every month. (Techcrunch)
Exchange, Custody and Product Updates
◾ Crypto exchange OKX is launching ‘nitro spreads’ allowing traders to make complex basis trades with simple one-click execution. (PRnewswire)
◾ Binance withdrew its registration application in Austria. (Financefwd)
◾ Binance has reversed its decision to delist specific privacy coins in Europe by deciding to reclassify them. (Theblock)