Crypto markets are becoming increasingly financialized, and hashrate-backed contracts are not new. What’s unique about Blockstream’s note is its duration. Most contracts lock in the hashprice for up to 12 months, James Macedonio, Blockstream’s SVP global head of mining sales and business development, said. BMN2, an EU-compliant security token, gives exposure to the bitcoin hashrate over a 48-month period.

Crypto regulation in most of Africa is inevitable, as governments accept that trying to stop activity is futile. Note that Nigeria became the world’s second most “crypto” economy, according to the Chainalysis global adoption rankings, even after a blanket ban on crypto firms accessing fiat. For many of Africa’s youth, crypto trading is one of the very few available sources of income. And, for savers terrified of losing value amid painful inflation and freefall devaluation, holding crypto assets can be not just a lifeline, but also a way to access scarce dollars.

“During the Relevant Period, the digital assets traded on the Protocol through the Interface included a limited number of leveraged tokens, which provided users approximately 2:1 leveraged exposure to digital assets such as ether (ETH) and bitcoin (BTC), both commodities in interstate commerce,” a CFTC filing said.

Though the Trump family appears to have been heavily involved in the promotion and inception of the project, the white paper takes pains to distance the project from any political affiliation, stating: “World Liberty Financial is not owned, managed, operated, or sold by Donald J. Trump, the Trump Organization, or any of their respective family members, affiliates, or principals. However, they may own $WLFI and receive compensation from World Liberty Financial and its developers. World Liberty Financial and $WLFI are not political and have no affiliation with any political campaign.”

“When it comes to cryptocurrencies, Zürcher Kantonalbank takes on the critical function of securely storing the private keys. Customers and third-party banks therefore do not need their own wallet and therefore do not have to worry about storing their own private keys. Zürcher Kantonalbank takes care of both,” said Alexandra Scriba, head of institutional clients and Multinationals at Zürcher Kantonalbank, in a statement.

“And then the second one is a means for, effectively, validators to receive emissions,” Boiron added. “Effectively, if you think of these new chains that pop up, what’s going to happen is that with time, they’re going to want to decentralize. And so instead of just having a centralized sequencer, they’re going to need to incentivize people to actually run a decentralized group or a decentralized prover. And if they don’t have a token, or if they don’t want to launch a token yet, how do they do that? Well, effectively, what this does is that a portion of that POL emissions can actually be used to decentralize their network, and then POL holders will then receive fees from that network.”

The alleged exploiter drained roughly $27 million of crypto assets including various types of staked ether (ETH), Ethena’s sUSDE and wrapped USDC stablecoin from the protocol, blockchain data shows. Later, it converted the proceeds to ETH using predominantly Li.fi and forwarded to asset to a new address, according to Etherscan data.