Or where is Jan Marsalek, part two … As the headlines rolled out last week, I heard a name: Jan Marsalek, the former COO of disgraced fintech star Wirecard. It turns out that he was also the central figure in a GRU, Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie (Russian military intelligence unit), operation created to spy across the…
As Donald Trump orders creation of a strategic cryptocurrency reserve for the USA, North Korea is working hard to hack it. This is demonstrated by the biggest theft of all time – $1.5 billion – by the North Korean Lazarus Group from Bybit. How could this happen? Well, Chainalysis breaks it down nicely into a step-by-step…
It is a wild ride with cryptocurrencies. Rising rapidly with Trump’s presidential campaign – after all, he is the crypto President! – things have gone south badly in the last week. It’s kind of that crescendo from zero to hero to zero again. The rises and falls in cryptocurrency values are a real rollercoaster. For…
We just had the annual Oscar jamboree and congratulations to Anora for its five Oscars, and particular respect to Sean Baker who picked up four personally, something that’s never been achieved before. But Hollywood has an issue. No one knows where the money goes. I’ve just joined some friends to fix that. It came around…
Microsoft just unveiled a new chip called Majorana1 that it says will enable the creation of quantum computers able to solve “meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades”. Two months ago Google unveiled Willow, a chip that “can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits” and can process a computation “in under five minutes…
America innovates, China replicates and Europe regulates I often find the maze of European regulations hard to follow and track. It’s ok if you’re tracking one – like the Payment Service Directives and Regulations – but when you’re trying to track many, it’s an ever changing cauldron. Right now, I’m trying to work out with…
I made this headline immediately challenging for anyone not in my space, as it incorporates all the TLAs (three letter arconyms) to confuse and abuse you. A fascinating release from Europe’s Central Bank announced that they aim to move soon to distributed ledger technology (DLT) settlements for payments last week. What did the announcement say?…
Every day there appears to be another update about how AI will change our world. The latest one in my inbox is a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), who warn that AI is likely to have a “seismic impact” on the economy and society, particularly in roles reliant on computer-based tasks. That’s almost all of…
