The whole world is clearly going to hell in a handbasket, and at this stage there is precious little that you or we can do to stop it. However, we don't like to dwell on negative news in the Sunday Review, so after some deep digging, we discovered the bombshell revelation that in two of the world's major economies, investing (and even savings accounts) are considered 'sexy' by young people.
Yes, as unbelievable as that may seem, today's 'yoot' (in the U.S. and Japan, at least) appears to have shunned previous generations' morbid obsession with such frivolities as "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" in favor of five-year plans, investment portfolios and regular savings. Well, whatever floats your boat.
The findings make no specific mention of whether these 'young people' similarly find crypto 'sexy', but we will certainly be slipping on our Pudgy Penguins t-shirt to test the water, next time we venture out to a discotheque or dance-hall in either of those two countries.
We started this week still thinking about last weekend's Super Bowl. Crypto companies were notable for their absence during the event's much-vaunted ad breaks, but who was calling the shots on that? But when Joe Biden posted his 'Dark Brandon' meme during the game (with BTC coincidentally pumping at the same time), crypto conspiracists had a field day convincing themselves that the U.S. President had orchestrated the whole thing.
Bitcoin continued to perform well through the rest of the week, closing above $52k after some impressive inflows to spot bitcoin ETFs. Also ending the week on a high was Worldcoin, which saw token gains of over 70% after founder Sam Altman's OpenAI announced a new AI video model, Sora.
On to security, and we discovered that PlayDapp had offered their hacker a white hat bounty to return the stolen funds... before the hacker did return, to steal even more funds. White hat hacker Samczsun has created a legal framework to facilitate faster invention into 'live' attacks, along with a 24-hour hotline for those affected. And, Chainlink has partnered with Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica to create an API enabling smart contracts to detect potential SIM swap attacks.
Continuing on a theme of creation: Morpheus AI has locked in $120 million of funding for the creation of a personal smart agent platform serving the Web3 space. Alleged flaws in the hybrid ERC-404 token standard led to the creation of the DN-404 standard in order to address the issues and improve the fledging format, much to the chagrin of the ERC-404 developers, it should be said. And, the Spanish city of Torrevieja claimed it had created Europe's first crypto-friendly city, sadly forgetting about the already crypto-friendly city of Lugano in Switzerland.
Ripple bought itself a digital assets custody and settlement platform with a New York BitLicense, expanding its licensed presence in the U.S. market. And our Banking and CBDC Round Up covered wholesale CBDC promises from the Philippines, American Bankers badgering the SEC to change the rules so that they can take a piece of the sweet bitcoin ETF custody pie, and Taurus offering Ethereum staking services to customers of Swiss banks.
Solana-based cross-chain messaging protocol Wormhole had a good week, celebrating its billionth message and unveiling its tokenomics ahead of an upcoming airdrop. Newly launched Backpack Exchange was also celebrating... itself. You couldn't keep co-founder Armani Ferrante off social media, posting some admittedly impressive 24-hour volumes as the platform enters 'preseason' rewards.
Fundraising platform GoFundMe has canceled the campaign to crowdfund the legal defense of the Tornado Cash co-founders. The trial is crucial to the coding community, as it is trying to blame developers for the illicit misuse of their tools.
And finally [checks notes]... hmm, all I have written is "Craig S Wright is not Satoshi". Wonder what that could be about?
