Coindesk

As Utah became the first state to get a bill through a legislative chamber that would allow the investment of public money into crypto assets, lawmakers in two other states joined the hunt this week: Kentucky and Maryland.Though broadly identified with the Republican-led charge toward a so-called "bitcoin strategic reserve" at the federal level, the states have moved their own measures, widely varied as to how each might invest state money into digital assets.Utah's bill to allow the state treasurer to put money into digital assets survived a tight vote in the Utah House of Representatives — advancing with just a three-vote margin — to head on Friday to the state senate. If it clears both chambers and is signed...

Crypto investment magnate Barry Silbert is betting big on decentralized AI, calling it "the next big era of crypto" that could be bigger than even bitcoin.In a letter to shareholders of his crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group, Silbert went long on deAI: the crypto industry's effort to fuse AI innovations with blockchain tech. He believes the tech mashup may pay better dividends for humanity than the closed-off systems being developed by OpenAI and other giants."We’re moving from the digital ownership of assets to the decentralized ownership of intelligence and the availability of vast decentralized compute resources," Siblert wrote in the Q4 letter reviewed by CoinDesk.The setup reminded Silbert of bitcoin, the best-known and by far biggest cryptocurrency, and the one...

We are entering a new epoch where the ability to use and to work with artificial and synthetic intelligence is a human right.Access to intelligence – the prerogative to innovate, work with, and benefit from higher levels of synthetic intelligence – belongs to the people.Building on increasingly inexpensive compute, abundant data, and low-cost, open-source models, we are about to witness a synthetic intelligence cornucopia.We have to build infrastructure that supports pluralistic development of AI. That’s why we’re starting The Thames Network, based at Oxford: a decentralized intelligent network to run at the edge, enabling private, censorship-resistant, depoliticized, and decentralized AI through built-in economic incentives and cryptographic proofs. “I have concerns about the concentration of power and loss of privacy that...

What if I told you that the experts are wrong? Over the years several prestigious consulting firms and financial institutions have put out forecasts about the growth of tokenization by the end of the decade. It’s interesting how between all that “expertise,” their ranges vary between $2 trillion (McKinsey) and $16 trillion (BCG). Fourteen trillion dollars is a heck of a lot of spread!Since 2017, there have been trials to tokenize assets all around the world. Along the way we’ve seen almost every asset class brought on-chain. Today there are more than $50 billion in tokenized stocks, bonds and real estate, with some of the world’s biggest financial institutions, like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Apollo starting to invest serious resources...

It was a busy week in crypto featuring important product launches, fevered debate around Ethereum, movement on stablecoin legislation, and high-profile Congressional hearings on “debanking.”David Sacks, the Crypto and AI Czar, held a high-profile press conference with Senate leadership, as Senator Hagerty, of Tennessee, introduced a new stablecoin bill. The proposal, which outlines an oversight regime for stablecoin issuance, builds on a bill that passed the House last year but fell in the Senate. It’s more likely to pass this year, now that Republicans are in control. CoinDesk’s Jesse Hamilton had the news.The Senate also held hearings on the co-ordinated policy of institutions like the FDIC to deny financial services to crypto companies during the Biden years (aka debanking). Nathan...