CRYPTO

Update: 

The Financial Times report turned out to be correct. 

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) announced just moments ago a $2.5 billion private placement offering to fund the creation of one of the largest Bitcoin treasuries by a public company.

The raise includes $1.5 billion in common stock and $1 billion in 0.00% convertible senior secured notes, with commitments from around 50 institutional investors.

The offering is expected to close by Thursday, pending (more…)

Authored by Amin Haqshanas via CoinTelegraph.com,

The crypto industry is no stranger to controversy, yet few projects have drawn more scrutiny than Sam Altman’s World, formerly known as Worldcoin.

Promising to verify human uniqueness through iris scans and distribute its WLD token globally, World positions itself as a tool for financial inclusion. However, critics argue the project’s biometric methods are invasive, overly centralized, and at odds with the ethos of decentralization and digital privacy.

At the heart of the critique is the claim that biometric identity systems cannot be truly decentralized when they rely on proprietary hardware, closed authentication methods, and centralized control over data pipelines.

El Damaty argued that despite using tools like multiparty computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, World’s reliance on custom hardware — the Orb — and centralized code deployment undermines the decentralization it claims to champion.

“This is by design to achieve their goals of uniquely identifying individual humans. This concentration of power risks creating a single point of failure and control, undermining the very promise of decentralization,” he said.

When reached out for comment, a spokesperson for World pushed back against these claims. “World does not use centralized biometric infrastructure,” they said, adding that the World App is non-custodial, meaning users remain in control of their digital assets and World IDs.

The project said once the Orb generates an iris code, the “iris photo will be sent as an end-to-end encrypted data bundle to your phone and will be immediately deleted from the Orb.” The iris code, they claimed, is processed with anonymizing multiparty computation so “no personal data is stored.”

World’s disclosure regarding personal custody. Source: World

Evin McMullen, co–founder of Privado ID and Billions.Network, said that World’s biometric model is not “inherently incompatible” with decentralization but faces some challenges in implementation around (more…)

Authored by Helen Partz via CoinTelegraph.com,

X Money, the payment and banking app tipped by Elon Musk in 2022 after he acquired Twitter, has started beta testing, Musk confirmed in an X post on May 25.

Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, a fan X account focused on Elon Musk and Tesla, took to X on May 25 to report that Musk has confirmed that X is “launching X Money soon.”

Source: Elon Musk

The billionaire businessman subsequently jumped on the X thread to confirm (more…)