Amazon

FTX miniseries gets go ahead, covering the ‘most brazen frauds ever committed’

The Russo’s are reported to have said that FTX “is one of the most brazen frauds ever committed” in their reasoning for wanting to create the show.

An eight-episode limited series exploring the unraveling and scandals behind sunken crypto exchange FTX and its leadership is slated to begin production soon.

The series has been purchased by technology conglomerate Amazon and will likely air on Amazon’s video streaming service Prime.

It’s understood to be based on “insider reporting” from journalists covering FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, according to a Nov. 23 report from the entertainment magazine Variety.

Brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, famed for directing Avengers: Endgame and multiple other Marvel-owned movies, are reported to have sold the idea to Amazon and are slated to direct the mini-series.

Details are sparse with what direction the series will take, the source material it will draw from, and what time period and people it will focus on, with all of it still kept under wraps for the time being.

In their reason for pursuing a series on the FTX story, the Russos brothers told Variety what happened with the exchange “is one of the most brazen frauds ever committed,” and opined on Bankman-Fried:

“At the center of it all sits an extremely mysterious figure with complex and potentially dangerous motivations. We want to understand why.”

Amazon is slated to start producing the show as early as March 2023, and while the characters and the actors who will play them are unknown, it’s reported the Russos are in discussions with prior Marvel actors they’ve worked with to fill the main roles.

The idea for FTX-inspired movies akin to The Big Short and the Wolf of Wall Street has already been joked around on Twitter over a week ago, with some members of the community already taking the initiative to cast who would play Sam Bankman-Fried, Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao and other related players, such as Terra’s Do Kwon.

One Twitter user pitched the idea of FTX THE MOVIE on Nov. 12, selecting Wolf of Wall Street’s Jonah Hill to play Bankman-Fried, while comedian Jimmy O. Yang could play Changpeng Zhao.

#FTX THE MOVIE @SBF_FTX @cz_binance pic.twitter.com/DWorL6G7An

— EvilEyes (@SolanaEyes) November 11, 2022

Another user created a promotional poster with their take on the film’s title: The Wolf of Effective Altruism, spoofing The Wolf of Wall Street and poking fun at Bankman-Fried’s philosophical stance of wanting to help others.

pic.twitter.com/o76cejBB4y

— Hanal Capital (@chillhanachill) November 13, 2022

It appears Hollywood is eager to snap up the rights to stories centered on the collapse of the world’s top crypto exchanges.

Author and financial journalist Michael Lewis, known for his book The Big Short on the 2008 financial crisis, is reportedly looking to sell book rights on an FTX story after spending six months with Bankman-Fried in the months leading up to FTX’s implosion.

Big Tech player Apple is reportedly the front-runner for the rights beating out competitors Amazon and Netflix, with intentions to create a film for its video-streaming service Apple TV Plus.

Crypto is breaking the Google-Amazon-Apple monopoly on user data

Blockchain is undermining Big Tech companies and cloud providers, particularly when it comes to the Internet of Things.

For decades, banks and insurance firms employed the same mostly static but highly profitable and centralized business models. Also for decades, Big Tech firms such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google have monopolized user data for their profit. However, blockchain projects could significantly challenge Big Tech’s grip on user data.

In 2015, the future of money was at the forefront of financial experts’ minds at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There, they started to seriously focus on the challenges presented by the rise of Bitcoin (BTC), digital assets and fintech. The world of finance began to realize that new technologies were upending everything in the sector, from savings to trading to making payments and cross-border and peer-to-peer transactions.

Then in the summer of 2020 came the decentralized finance (DeFi) renaissance. After a couple of years of seeing an extraordinary rise in this new concept, the machine economy started to take center stage and concern over who should own the world’s new greatest commodity, data.

Thanks to blockchain, we have DeFi, SocialFi, GameFi and a new emerging asset category: machine financialization (MachineFi), or the decentralized machine economy. It enables the owners of the billions of internet-connected devices worldwide to monetize them and developers to build decentralized applications (DApps) that draw device data for monetization.

One obvious question is: Why? Why do devices need financialization or decentralized markets? The answer is quite apparent.

Big Tech has built trillion-dollar empires selling user data. Blockchain can change that by democratizing the data and machine economy.

Historically, machine economies have failed to garner traction due to the infrastructure and capital requirements needed to operationalize them. Blockchain changes that by providing users, businesses and developers with an end-to-end solution to distribute, orchestrate and monetize large numbers of smart devices as part of a unified machine network.

There are currently more than 50 blockchain projects related to the Internet of Things (IoT). There are also several traditional tech companies — such as IBM, Azure, Samsung, Apple, Google and Amazon — that are combining IoT and blockchain to power the burgeoning machine economy.

Single version of the truth

So, as we look back at 2021, we see it as the year blockchains became smart. Oracles introduced a new data source that provided facts about the real world to make them more secure and trustworthy. Agreement on the price of Bitcoin and other crypto assets soon followed, creating a “single version of the truth” that led to the growth of a whole new financial system. DeFi was the foundation for new concepts like peer-to-peer lending and borrowing, and yield farming, which opened new opportunities for investors to earn passive income. Verifiable real-world data became the proof needed for the DeFi revolution.

Everyone in the crypto space knows about proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, evidence provided to the blockchain to receive a reward or permission. If a Bitcoin miner proves they have solved a computationally intensive problem, they become eligible to be the next block producer. For Ethereum, if someone stakes a certain amount of Ether (ETH), they qualify to become an Ethereum validator.

Similarly, a “single version of the truth” from unbiased, secure machines will be proof-of-work done in the real world, creating limitless opportunities for new business models.

Proof-of-anything

What if “proof” could also be generated from regular activities people perform in their daily lives? IoT devices and machines — like those in a smart home, wearables, cameras and autonomous vehicles — have the potential to become “proof providers” that can use blockchain to capture the utility and value that people generate from everyday activities.

Proof-of-presence could be determined from an asset tracker on a vehicle that feeds real-time GPS location information to a crowdsourced map. In the insurance space, proof-of-health can be provided by wellness data from a wearable, or proof-of-safety can be obtained from driving patterns. Proof-of-humanity helps verify people’s identity with biometric information.

Smart devices and machines on the blockchain will provide an opportunity to return data ownership to the people, enabling them to do what they wish with their property — including monetizing it. Blockchain-based IoT projects offer greater trust, security, interoperability and scalability than their predecessors, and they generate new efficiencies and business value by drawing on the data supplied by IoT devices and sensors.

Smart devices: The new machine economy

By 2030, estimates suggest IoT projects will represent more than $12 trillion in value globally. But who will own this value? Will large corporations continue to manage devices on centralized cloud platforms and be the gatekeepers of the new machine economy? We are at a pivotal moment in history. The decisions about how the machine economy evolves will reap consequences — or benefits — for decades.

A decentralized backbone, purpose-built to enable billions of machines on the blockchain, is what we need to democratize the machine economy/IoT industry and remove it from the domain of Big Tech. The IoT machine economy would require a combination of blockchain, secure hardware and confidential computing to empower user-owned devices, apps and services:

Secure hardware captures and signs real-world data that anyone can verify and trust.
Real-world data oracles then bring this verifiable data to the blockchain in a trusted manner.
Decentralized identity enables humans and machines to own their data as digital assets they can earn and trade using DApps.

By pairing the integrity of secure hardware with the immutability of blockchain, we can create a new paradigm for end-to-end trust to help ensure that the machine economy grows in a way that creates more opportunities for users and curbs the influence of the few large companies that would seek its control.

Raullen Chai is the co-founder and CEO of IoTeX. He previously worked for companies including Google, Uber and Oracle. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo, where his research focused on designing and analyzing lightweight ciphers and IoT authentication protocols. At Google, he led many important security initiatives for its technical infrastructure, including mitigation of SSL attacks, privacy-preserving SSL offloading and enabling certificate transparency for all Google services. He was also the founding engineer of Google Cloud Load Balancer, which now serves thousands of cloud services, with 1 million-plus queries per second.

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.

Bitcoin weak hands ‘mostly gone’ as BTC ignores Amazon, Meta stock dip

Huge tech stock losses, mostly occurring after the Wall Street close, fail to show up in Bitcoin price weakness.

Bitcoin (BTC) is decoupling from big tech as disappointing earnings fail to spark any major BTC price losses.

Economic data for Q3, 2022, saw heavy losses for some tech stocks, but BTC/USD avoided a chain reaction.

Bitcoin hodlers shrug off Q3 tech results

The largest cryptocurrency shed around $800 over Oct. 27, or 3.8%, after hitting its highest levels in six weeks.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was still around $20,200, offering more consolidatory trading behavior than a major correction.

The same was not true of tech stocks — these were led by a dramatic 20% rout in Amazon during out-of-hours trading thanks to missed earnings targets. Amazon’s market cap sealed the biggest such post-close drop in history, at over $230 billion.

“There is obviously a lot happening in the macroeconomic environment, and we’ll balance our investments to be more streamlined without compromising our key long-term, strategic bets,” CEO Andy Jassy commented in the firm’s Q3 earnings report.

While evidence of the problematic state of flux experienced by tech giants worldwide this year, Amazon’s comedown notably failed to spark copycat moves on crypto markets.

The same is true with similarly painful results from Meta, the stock price of which fell below $100 to return to 2015-levels this week.

This is a sea change from the end of 2021 , economist, trader and entrepreneur Alex Krueger believes, that time marked by heavy price declines, which came in step with poor performance at Netflix.

“Last January Netflix’s earnings and its ensuing 20% crash sent $BTC down 20%, $ETH down 30%. Today Amazon’s earnings and its ensuing 20% crash sent $BTC down 2%, $ETH down 3%,” he tweeted on Oct. 28:

“Weak hands are mostly gone.”

With that, Netflix is down 50% year-to-date with its current stock price around $300. BTC/USD is down around 6% more, data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows.

*BTC/USD vs. Netflix stock 1-week chart. Source: TradingView*

Correlation has not gone away

The observation feeds into a growing narrative over Bitcoin’s correlation to traditional markets.

The past week has not seen the clear-cut lockstep moves between BTC and equities, with the former playing catch-up as stocks cooled. As Cointelegraph previously reported, Bitcoin’s growing correlation to gold is now gaining attention once again.

Overall, however, a long-term trend change in correlation with the S&P 500, for example, is still far from being confirmed.

*BTC/USD vs. S&P 500 correlation chart. Source: TradingView*

“While it’s too early to say if this trend continues, it’s worth watching,” Mario Nawfal, founder of Blockchain consultancy firm IBC Group, summarized.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

European Central Bank chooses Amazon and 4 other firms to prototype digital euro app

The five fintech, payments and e-commerce firms will create front-end prototypes for the digital euro, which will not be used in later phases of the CBDC project.

The European Central Bank, or ECB, has announced it will be collaborating with five companies for the development of potential digital euro user interfaces.

In a Friday announcement, the ECB said it had chosen “Big Four” tech company Amazon, fintech firm Nexi, Spanish digital bank CaixaBank, French payments platform Worldline and the European Payments Initiative, or EPI, to each focus on developing a prototype based on specific use cases of the digital euro. According to the central bank, the firms will create front-end prototypes, which will not be used in later phases of the digital currency project.

The ECB chose the five companies based on their fulfilling “specific capabilities” when compared to 50 other front-end developers that responded to the central bank’s call in April. Officials planned the project to be completed in the first quarter of 2023 as part of a two-year investigation phase into the digital euro, expected to end in October 2023.

As interest in central bank digital currencies seems to be growing globally, ECB officials have been exploring the potential impact of a digital euro on Europe while being vague about if or when the bank could release a CBDC. The central bank commissioned a series of focus groups on digital payment methods in September 2021, which suggested that using digital currency at online and physical stores could be a key feature of a digital euro. An earlier public consultation also suggested that privacy was considered “the most important feature of a digital euro by both citizens and professionals.”

Amazon.eth ENS domain owner disregards 1M USDC buyout offer on OpenSea

Before it expired, the offer stood at approximately 10x the amount of the domain’s last sale.

On Tuesday, the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, domain Amazon.eth received an offer for 1 million USD Coin (USDC), a stablecoin pegged to the United States dollar, from an anonymous wallet address on OpenSea. The offer to buy the ENS domain went unanswered, however, and no transaction took place. This is despite the last sale of the domain name being five months ago for 33 Ether (ETH), worth around $100,000 at the of writing.

The expired million-dollar offer for Amazon.eth on OpenSea | Source: OpenSea

It is unclear at the time of publication whether the owner simply was not informed of the offer, did not consider it to be near fair value or if the bidding and domain owner accounts were linked in an attempt to boost the price of the asset (in what is known as a wash trade). According to data from OpenSea, other bid offers for the ENS domain stand at just around $6,200 in USDC. The domain name is verified as official by ENS and is owned by anonymous OpenSea user 4761BF.

The expired million-dollar offer for Amazon.eth on OpenSea | Source: OpenSea

ENS is a blockchain naming protocol that allows users to store avatars and profile images for use across devices and send or receive crypto and nonfungible tokens (NFTs). To sell a .eth domain on OpenSea, users would first need to connect their wallet and register an address at manager.ens.domains then list it on their OpenSea account.

While many crypto enthusiasts took up interesting or creative names for the ENS service, others have embarked on the practice of domain-flipping. That is, registering ENS domains containing names of prominent entities beforehand and then later demanding a high price for the domain should the said entity wishes to enter the Web3 space later on.

Since its inception in 2017, there have been over 1.67 million .eth domain registrations across approximately 482,000 owners. More than 154,100 registrations were made recently between July 5 to Monday, partly due to lower gas fees and continued interest from entities seeking to enter the Web3 space. To date, the ENS collection on OpenSea has witnessed approximately 46,200 ETH, or $71.5 million, in cumulative transaction volume.