Korea’s “cage pumping” crypto market manipulation, Chinese exchange grooming scandal, 67K scammed in Indian pig butchering con. Asia Express. Major cryptocurrency exchanges are under fire over allegations that they gave leveraged platform-locked funds to university students in China to encourage speculative trading. The controversy has drawn comparisons to the countrys campus lending scandal nearly a decade ago, when students burdened with debt were offered exploitative naked loans in exchange for nude pictures as collateral. Bruce Xu, co-founder of ETHPanda, claimed that centralized exchanges were giving students non-withdrawable trial funds for futures trading. Profits could be kept, and students who posted high-return screenshots on WeChat were reportedly offered additional rewards. Xu called the model a way of grooming the next generation of gambling degens. Crypto media outlet BlockBeats called on all exchanges to halt any trial fund promotions targeting students, describing the campaigns as exploitative...
Former X Factor star Violetta Zironi, sold a song for 1 BTC and generated 340 ETH in sales but says OnlyFans performers get more respect. Violetta Zironi, a 30-year-old Italian singer-songwriter, might just be the poster child for Web3 music. Her path as a musician shot out of the gates at the age of 18, when she finished third on the popular reality TV show, X-Factor Italy in 2013. Since her TV stardom, Zironi ditched a music label deal with Sony Records that she felt took advantage of her and now mints her songs on the blockchain. In a little over three years, Zironi has built and cultivated a community of fans who see value in owning her music as NFTs. Now based in Nashville, Tennessee, she recently sold a 1 of 1 song titled “n0 0rdinary kind” for 1 Bitcoin ($60,000 at the time) as an Ordinal, and has amassed over $2.5 million in revenue through her music NFTs, including her debut collection “Moonshot” on Ethereum where the artwork was done by her father, a renowned Disney visual artist. Read more
AI replicas trained on your digital footprint can take meetings, answer questions from clients and comfort loved ones after you die. If artificial intelligence could stand in for you, take your meetings, answer your emails, and even comfort your loved ones long after youre gone, would you let it? Thats no longer a hypothetical question. Around the world, a new class of startups is building digital twins AI replicas of real people that act, speak and remember just like their human counterparts. These arent just souped-up chatbots or gimmicky holograms; theyre serious attempts to capture human essence in machine form, with real-world use cases and profound cultural implications. The idea might sound like science fiction. In some cases, it already looks like an episode of Black Mirror. The Re;Memory project in South Korea helped pioneer the concept by allowing bereaved families speak to a hyper-realistic AI version of their deceased loved ones, complete with recorded memories and facial expressions. DeepBrain AI...
Risk-to-earn game Cambria is so good pro-gamer Inhuman forgot to shower for two days. Plus, Pixels token goes “multi-game”: Web3 Gamer. Season 2 of Cambria the risk-to-earn game thats like if Hunger Games and crypto had a baby just launched and is capturing the attention of the crypto gaming community like no other game has in 2025. Inspired by classics like Runescape and Ultima, the game is based on Ronin and Abstract. Its set in a brutal medieval fantasy world and players stake crypto, NFTs and other in-game assets but if they lose a battle, they can lose everything theyve put on the line. This ones not for the faint-hearted. Popular gaming streamer Yellow Panther admitted he is addicted to the game. Gaming commentator Karina said the game has her hooked. Read more
Shaquille O’Neal cleared to settle Astrals NFT lawsuit, Bitcoin $100K target still in play, and more: Hodler’s Digest Former NBA star Shaquille ONeal has been granted final court approval to settle a class-action lawsuit for $11 million with Astrals non-fungible token (NFT) buyers. Florida federal court judge Federico Moreno granted approval of the settlement between ONeal and the class group led by Daniel Harper in an April 1 order made available on April 8. The deal created a fund of up to $11 million for eligible class members and awarded $2.9 million in attorney fees and costs. All those who purchased Astrals NFTs from May 2022 to Jan. 15 and those who purchased the projects native GLXY tokens up until mid-January are eligible. Read more
South Korean police bust illegal gaming arcade LARPing as a legit Bitcoin mine, fake soldiers rob women of crypto in China. Asia Express. In a scam that combined a fake relationship, fake crypto and real doorbells, a woman in Xuzhou, a city in eastern Chinas Jiangsu Province, lost over $55,000 to a man who pitched USDT investments and sent a cash collector to her home. Five suspects have been arrested and the investigation is ongoing. According to a notice published via the official WeChat account of the local police, the victim was first contacted by a man claiming to be an active-duty soldier. He gained her trust by invoking military rules that supposedly prohibited the use of WeChat, and directed her to download a separate app for private communication. As their conversations grew more frequent and familiar, the man shared a fabricated story about a friend who had joined the state-run Tobacco bureau after retiring from the military and had access to internal data. He claimed they had already earned substan...
Secret UK government “Murder Prediction’ AI system revealed, deepfake lawyer struck off, Kawasaki’s bizarre rideable robot horse: AI Eye. Pressure group Statewatch has revealed the UKs Ministry of Justice has been working on a dystopian AI Murder Prediction program that uses algorithms to analyze large data sets and predict who is most likely to become a killer. Thats basically the plot of Minority Report. Documents outlining the scheme were uncovered in Freedom of Information requests. In them, the MoJ says the program aims to review offender characteristics that increase the risk of committing homicide and explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide. Statewatch says data from ordinary citizens is being used as part of the project, although officials claim the data is only those with a criminal record. Researcher Sofia Lyall called the project chilling and dystopian and said it would likely end up targeting minority communities. Building an automated tool to prof...
What if you could harness the power of memecoin degeneracy to solve the biggest problems humanity has ever faced: aging and death? Memecoins generate a lot of financial activity without creating much real-world impact. But what if you could harness the power of memecoin degeneracy to solve the biggest problems humanity has ever faced: aging and death? Thats the essential idea behind a raft of anti-aging crypto projects, including VitaDAO, CryoDAO, BiohackerDAO and others. But its Pump.science that takes the idea to its logical extreme. The fledgling platform has just started taking orders for its first-ever anti-aging or longevity supplement called Urolithin A. The compound is believed to increase mitophagy, which is the bodys clean-up and replacement system for the mitochondria that power your cells. Whats unusual is that research into its effects on longevity was funded by crypto degens buying up a related token. The platforms community decides what compounds to research and funds the experiments by buying ...