OpenSea Pro is a rebranded and expanded version of Gem V2, the upgraded version of the NFT marketplace aggregator that it acquired in April 2022. At the time, co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer framed the move as one towards acquiring “more experienced, ‘pro’ users.” Under the new name, OpenSea Pro is still billed as a separate product from the standard marketplace, albeit now under the same brand umbrella. According to an announcement post, OpenSea Pro aggregates listings from more than 170+ NFT marketplaces large and small, including notable platforms like Blur, LooksRare, and X2Y2. It also gives users more flexibility when searching for NFT listings and managing their inventory of digital assets, as well as aggregation of open NFT collection offers across marketplaces.

OpenSea’s main marketplace recently cut its typical 2.5% platform fee amid the rise of rival Blur, which overtook OpenSea in terms of NFT trading volume in February. The firm announced today that OpenSea will reinstate its standard fee amid the launch of OpenSea Pro while the Pro platform will instead offer a temporary 0% fee for traders. In terms of creator royalties, OpenSea Pro will maintain OpenSea’s current model, which is to require only a 0.5% minimum royalty on projects that do not use an on-chain enforcement method. Sellers may choose to pay more than 0.5% if they wish. A royalty is a fee paid to the original NFT creator and is typically set at 5-10% of the secondary sale price.

Blur’s rise to the top of the NFT space is fueled in large part by BLUR token rewards paid out to traders, to the tune of over $200 million worth of tokens when the initial airdrop took place in February. OpenSea does not have a token, and does not appear to be going that route—but it will offer another type of reward to OpenSea Pro traders.

On a recent panel at the Citi Digital Money Symposium in London, which touched on crypto regulations in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, Barclays head of digital policy Nicole Sandler argued that the apparent late arrival from policymakers was actually intentional.

"I think one thing certain policymakers have said is that they left this market to do what it wanted to do because they thought it would essentially die," she said. "And it hasn't died, it's grown, it's grown, it's grown."

Drawing from her experience in 2016, when she discussed a legal framework around digital assets with the European Commission, Sandler argued that the space may have been nascent then, but it certainly isn't now—and again repeated that its nascence wasn't why regulators stayed away until recently.

"It wasn't that it was nascent and they couldn't regulate it, it was a choice to see where the market went," she said. "And now they know that they have to regulate it. But the problem is regulation takes a long time from start to finish."

The regulatory crackdown has been especially fierce in the United States.

Following the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX empire in November, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has taken swift and decisive action. After charging Bankman-Fried, the SEC also charged the crypto exchange's co-lead engineer Nishad Singh with defrauding investors.

Still, insisted Sandler, the FTX collapse had "nothing to do with the technology."

And though regulations would've certainly helped, the exchange's downfall revolved primarily around a "bad actor," she said, adding that the firm's terms and conditions "didn't say you can take your client funds and use it for something other than what they've said."

The Commission has also gone after other crypto firms for different reasons. On March 22, the SEC issued Coinbase with a Wells Notice, informing the California-based exchange that it would be pursuing enforcement action against the company. The notice alleged that Coinbase's staking products constituted unregistered securities.

“The FTC has a clear responsibility to investigate and prohibit unfair and deceptive trade practices,” the center’s founder and president, Marc Rotenberg, said in a statement. “We believe that the FTC should look closely at OpenAI and GPT-4.” Not coincidentally, the FTC updated the act last month to include language directed at developers of artificial intelligence programs like OpenAI. The agency advised developers to avoid exaggerating their capabilities, making deceptive performance claims, or promising superiority over non-AI products without adequate proof.

The Center for AI and Digital Policy was established in 2020 under the Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation—founded by the former Massachusetts governor and failed Democratic U.S. presidential candidate—and is now a Washington, DC-based non-profit. The FTC also warned developers to explore potential risks and impacts before launch.

“You need to know about the reasonably foreseeable risks and impact of your AI product before putting it on the market,” the agency wrote. “If something goes wrong—maybe it fails or yields biased results—you can’t just blame a third-party developer of the technology. And you can’t say you’re not responsible because that technology is a ‘black box’ you can’t understand or didn’t know how to test.”

Since 2017, the FTC has sounded the alarm about unethical uses of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain, as the two have become more popular and mainstream.

The almost overnight popularity of GPT-4, the latest iteration of ChatGPT, has many questioning OpenAI’s rapid dominance of the industry. The Center for AI and Digital Policy is asking the FTC to investigate OpenAI to determine if the company has complied with the FTC’s rules.

The Center’s filing with the FTC comes days after several high-profile tech industry members—including Telsa and Twitter CEO Elon Musk—co-signed an open letter demanding a pause on developing AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4 platform.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Japan’s largest bank, has started development to make a domestic stablecoin interoperable. Local media outlets report that the bank is working with Datachain and Solamitsu “to realize a smooth mutual transfer and exchange between a wide variety of table coins to be issued domestically.”

Stablecoin Interoperability To Streamline Remittances The stablecoin in question is called the Progmat Coin and uses the Hyperledger Iroha. The parties state that the interoperability of this stablecoin with domestic financial institutions will improve exchange. Businesses intend to use Hyperledger Iroha, a permissioned blockchain network. The report reads,

“This will result in a wide variety of stablecoins and smooth mutual transfers and exchanges between regional digital currencies that will be issued by various banks and other countries, and will be able to streamline interbank, business-to-business and personal remittances.”

In the future, development efforts will shift towards cross-border remittances and reducing fees and will involve foreign central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Japan expects to implement a bill on stablecoins in 2023, which would allow banks to issue stablecoins.

Progmat Coin Could Have Extensive Use Cases The Progmat Coin was first announced in 2022 to streamline settlement processes. However, Progmat is more than just a settlement solution, as it may also feature on other networks. The fact that it will allow cross-border remittances and exchanges with other CBDCs adds to its use cases.

Progmat is also a platform, with a utility token reportedly in the works. Development may also eventually focus on NFTs and other crypto assets. Considering Japan is attracting web3 talent, the stablecoin may see much more expansive use cases in the future.

Mitsubishi and Others Move Deeper Into Crypto The Mitsubishi bank has been ramping up its efforts with respect to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. For instance, the country could soon allow 13 registered trust banks, including this one, to offer crypto custody services. While lawmakers are keen to ensure investor protection during these developments, especially after the downfall of UST.

According to an investigation conducted by CNBC, some employees at the exchange have been helping Chinese customers to bypass the Know-Your-Customer (KYC) verification process despite the region’s ban on the crypto market.

Employees Allegedly Help Bypass Verification Process

CNBC’s report alleged that Binance’s billion-dollar worth of security protocol is being manipulated by some users in China with the help of some workers in the exchange. These acts were reportedly seen taking place in the Binance official Chinese language chat rooms which contain above 220,000 users.

The reports highlighted that the techniques that can be used to evade the exchange’s KYC residency and verification systems were shared in the group chats. These shared techniques and chats came from accounts identified as Binance employees or Binance-trained volunteers known as “Angels.”

Some of the techniques shared included forging bank documents or offering false addresses while others contained basic manipulation tips of the crypto exchange’s systems.

Additionally, the employees, volunteers, and customers also reportedly shared video guides and documents on how to falsify their country of residence in order to obtain Binance’s debit card.

Binance’s Response To The Alleged Act

As a response to the act, reported by CNBC, a Binance spokesperson noted, “We have taken action against employees who may have violated our internal policies, including wrongly soliciting or making recommendations that are not allowed or in line with our standards.”

The spokesperson further added that “Binance employees are explicitly forbidden from suggesting or supporting users in circumventing their local laws and regulatory policies, and would be immediately dismissed or audited if found to have violated those policies.”

Binance CEO Changepeng Zhao “CZ” who is usually most active on Twitter to address almost every situation concerning his exchange hasn’t made any comments about the CNBC investigation.

The SEC simultaneously charged the following eight celebrities for illegally touting TRX and/or BTT without disclosing that they were compensated for doing so and the amount of their compensation.

•             Lindsay Lohan

•             Jake Paul

•             DeAndre Cortez Way (Soulja Boy)

•             Austin Mahone

•             Michele Mason (Kendra Lust)

•             Miles Parks McCollum (Lil Yachty)

•             Shaffer Smith (Ne-Yo)

•             Aliaune Thiam (Akon)

The SEC’s complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that Sun and his companies offered and sold TRX and BTT as investments through multiple unregistered “bounty programs,” which directed interested parties to promote the tokens on social media, join and recruit others to Tron-affiliated Telegram and Discord channels, and create BitTorrent accounts in exchange for TRX and BTT distributions. The complaint further alleges that Sun, BitTorrent Foundation, and Rainberry offered and sold BTT in unregistered monthly airdrops to investors, including in the United States, who purchased and held TRX in Tron wallets or on participating crypto asset trading platforms. According to the complaint, each of these unregistered offers and sales violated Section 5 of the Securities Act.

The Commission also alleges that Sun violated the antifraud and market manipulation provisions of the federal securities laws by orchestrating a scheme to artificially inflate the apparent trading volume of TRX in the secondary market. From at least April 2018 through February 2019, Sun allegedly directed his employees to engage in more than 600,000 wash trades of TRX between two crypto asset trading platform accounts he controlled, with between 4.5 million and 7.4 million TRX wash traded daily. This scheme required a significant supply of TRX, which Sun allegedly provided. As alleged, Sun also sold TRX into the secondary market, generating proceeds of $31 million from illegal, unregistered offers and sales of the token.

“This case demonstrates again the high risk investors face when crypto asset securities are offered and sold without proper disclosure,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler. “As alleged, Sun and his companies not only targeted U.S. investors in their unregistered offers and sales, generating millions in illegal proceeds at the expense of investors, but they also coordinated wash trading on an unregistered trading platform to create the misleading appearance of active trading in TRX. Sun further induced investors to purchase TRX and BTT by orchestrating a promotional campaign in which he and his celebrity promoters hid the fact that the celebrities were paid for their tweets.”

“While we’re neutral about the technologies at issue, we’re anything but neutral when it comes to investor protection,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. “As alleged in the complaint, Sun and others used an age-old playbook to mislead and harm investors by first offering securities without complying with registration and disclosure requirements and then manipulating the market for those very securities. At the same time, Sun paid celebrities with millions of social media followers to tout the unregistered offerings, while specifically directing that they not disclose their compensation. This is the very conduct that the federal securities laws were designed to protect against regardless of the labels Sun and others used.”

With the exception of Cortez Way and Mahone, the celebrities charged today agreed to pay a total of more than $400,000 in disgorgement, interest, and penalties to settle the charges, without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings.

The SEC’s investigation was conducted by Adam B. Gottlieb, Ann Rosenfield, John Lucas, and John Marino. It was supervised by Paul Kim, Michael Brennan, Jorge G. Tenreiro, and David Hirsch. The SEC’s litigation will be led by Timothy Halloran and Mr. Gottlieb, under the supervision of Melissa Armstrong.

Today, as the conflict enters its second year, over $212 million worth of crypto has been donated to pro-Ukrainian war efforts, according to Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm. This includes roughly $80 million worth of crypto going directly to the Ukrainian government.

Crypto funds have been used to support a variety of war efforts, according to Ukrainian officials and government fundraising sites. Purchases range from bulletproof vests and helmets to demining equipment and drones. Other crypto donations have been spent on support materials like medical supplies and radios