According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) press release, an Iranian national and member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been charged with a plot to commit murder for hire involving cryptocurrency payments.
Shahram Poursafi, aka Mehdi Rezayi, 45, has been charged with attempting to arrange the murder of former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Pursafi reportedly tried to reach out to sources and open cryptocurrency accounts to facilitate payment for his work.
Meanwhile, NFTs that are part of the collection will have to apply new cryptographic rules from the European Union’s Markets in Crypto Act (MiCA), Coindesk’s report said.
There have been claims that tokens are exempt from the MiCA law.
The current draft may exempt NFTs unless they constitute another type of crypto asset.
In practice, however, this may not be very reassuring as EU legislators have a narrow view of what NFTs are. So if the token is part of a collection or series, it is not considered an NFT and should be subject to MiCA rules.
Publishers of NFT collections must disclose the protocol details of their NFTs and cannot make “outlandish promises” about future value that could mislead people.
Elsewhere, Ansible Labs, which builds a payment platform for blockchain accounts, has raised $7 million in a seed funding round, Coindesk reported Wednesday.
The company said the funding will go towards hiring, liquidity and operating expenses as it plans to debut its first project.
Daniel Mottice, co-founder and CEO of Ansible Labs, said the company sees offramp as the “missing piece” that could enhance mainstream Web3 adoption and usage. Mottice was a key player in Visa Crypto and Visa Direct Payouts before starting Ansible.
The round was led by Archetype, a cryptocurrency venture capital firm.
In other news, cryptocurrency trading platform Hotbit has suspended trading, withdrawal, deposit, and funding capabilities for the foreseeable future, the company’s blog post said.
That’s because the former employee, who retired in April, was involved in a project that may have violated criminal law.
Since the end of July, many Hotbit senior executives have been summoned by law enforcement agencies, and the law enforcement agencies have frozen some of the company’s funds, making Hotbit unable to operate normally.
According to the company, the project “violated Hotbit’s internal principles and was unknown to Hotbit.”
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New PYMNTS Survey Finds 3 in 4 Consumers Have Strong Demand for Super Apps
about: A new PYMNTS study, “The Super App Shift: How Consumers Want To Save, Shop And Spend In The Connected Economy,” in collaboration with PayPal, collected responses from 9,904 consumers across Australia, Germany, the UK and the US. Analyzed. It also showed a strong demand for a single multifunctional super app instead of having dozens of separate apps.