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A message from Fidelity Careers |
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Hacked cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has declared a “war against Lazarus” and launched a new website tracking the group’s wallet addresses, hoping to crowdsource the investigative efforts. In return for submissions that lead to frozen funds, the exchange is offering 5% of what gets frozen.
The declaration of “war” came from Bybit’s CEO, Ben Zhou, in a social media post in which he noted the firm was launching the first “first bounty site that shows aggregated full transparency on the sanctioned Lazarus money laundering activities.” Zhou wrote that users can connect their wallets to the newly launched website to help trace the stolen funds, adding that when a submission leads to funds getting frozen, a “bounty is paid upfront” as soon as assets are frozen. “We have assigned a team to dedicate to maintain and update this website, we will not stop until Lazarus or bad actors in the industry is eliminated. In the future we will open it up to other victims of Lazarus as well,” Zhou added.
Currently, 6,338 addresses tied to the Lazarus group are being tracked on the website, and around $42.3 million have already been frozen, corresponding to just over 3% of the stolen assets.
On Friday, the nearly $1.5 billion hack of crypto exchange Bybit rocked the crypto market and saw most digital asset prices tumbling. It was later reported that North Korea's Lazarus Group was behind the attack, which was deemed "the largest crypto theft of all time, by some margin." |
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The Industry’s Brightest Minds. One Unmissable Event.
Dealmaking. Networking. Big moves. Consensus 2025 is where the industry’s top players connect, innovate, and build what’s next. Don’t miss out. Save 15% with code NODE15. |
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Michael Novogratz's Galaxy Digital (GLXY) has hired Zac Prince as a managing director, according to an internal memo seen by CoinDesk.
Prince will be working closely with Galaxy's President, Chris Ferraro, to expand the company's digital assets offering. Galaxy believes that crypto is entering a "pivotal era of transformation," and has hired Prince to help deliver the firm's strategic vision, the company said in the memo.
He joins from real estate advisory firm RE Cost Seg, where he was employed as CEO for the last year. Prince is well known in the industry. He is the former CEO and co-founder of bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi.
Galaxy hired former Point72 chief financial officer Anthony Paquette to serve in the same role at the crypto financial services firm, it said in December. |
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Ethereum Foundation Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi shared Tuesday that she would be leaving her position and would soon be transitioning to her new role as president at the organization. The news comes as the nonprofit goes through a leadership shake-up and as Ethereum has become less popular for new builders in recent months, with some even blaming Miyaguchi’s leadership as for why the blockchain’s token price is lagging behind other cryptocurrencies. “This new opportunity will allow me to continue supporting EF’s institutional relationships, and to expand the reach of our vision and culture more broadly,” Miyaguchi wrote in a blog post. The Ethereum Foundation is a nonprofit that supports the development of the Ethereum blockchain. Founded in 2014, Miyaguchi joined in 2018 and has been the executive sirector ever since. CoinDesk reached out to a spokesperson at the EF to find out who would fill the executive director position, but did not hear back in time for publication. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote in a post on X that “every success of the EF - the steady execution of Ethereum hard forks, client interop workshops, Devcon, Ethereum's culture and steadfast commitment to its mission and values, and more - is in part a result of Aya's stewardship.” |
Bitwise Bolsters Balance Sheet |
Cryptocurrency-focused asset manager Bitwise has completed a $70 million equity raise led by crypto venture firm Electric Capital.
The raise also included participation from MassMutual, Highland Capital, MIT Investment Management Company, Haun Ventures and ParaFi Capital, Bitwise announced on Tuesday. The firm plans to use proceeds from the raise to bolster its balance sheet, expand its investment capabilities and services and grow its headcount across its offices in San Francisco, New York and London.
Bitwise is the issuer of one of the 12 spot BTC exchange-traded funds listed in the U.S., which opened the door to previously unseen institutional investment in bitcoin.
It has since listed a spot ether ETF and last month set the wheels in motion to list a product offering weighted exposure to both BTC and ETH. |
The Takeaway: New Trends in Gen-AI |
By Jesus Rodriguez
"Build for where the industry is going, not for where it is." This mantra has fueled disruptive innovations for decades — Microsoft capitalized on microprocessors, Salesforce leveraged the cloud and Uber thrived in the mobile revolution.
The same principle applies to AI — Generative AI is evolving so rapidly that building for today’s capabilities risks obsolescence. Historically, Web3 has played little role in this AI evolution. But can it adapt to the latest trends reshaping the industry? 2024 was a pivotal year for generative AI, with groundbreaking research and engineering advancements. It was also the year that the Web3-AI narrative transitioned from speculative hype to glimpses of real utility. While the first wave of AI revolved around mega-models, long training cycles, vast compute clusters and deep enterprise pockets — making them largely inaccessible to Web3 — newer trends in 2024 are opening doors for meaningful Web3 integration. On the Web3-AI front, 2024 was dominated by speculative projects such as meme-driven agentic platforms that reflected bullish market sentiment but offered little real-world utility. As that hype fades, a window of opportunity is emerging to refocus on tangible use cases. The generative AI landscape of 2025 will be vastly different, with transformative shifts in research and technology. Many of these changes could catalyze Web3 adoption, but only if the industry builds for the future.
Let’s examine five key trends shaping AI and the potential they present for Web3.
1. The reasoning race Reasoning has become the next frontier for large language models (LLMs). Recent models like GPT-01, DeepSeek R1, and Gemini Flash place reasoning capabilities at the core of their advancements. Functionally, reasoning allows AI to break down complex inference tasks into structured, multi-step processes, often leveraging Chain of Thought (CoT) techniques. Just as instruction-following became a standard for LLMs, reasoning will soon be a baseline capability for all major models.
The Web3-AI opportunity Reasoning involves intricate workflows that require traceability and transparency — an area where Web3 shines. Imagine an AI-generated article where every reasoning step is verifiable on-chain, providing an immutable record of its logical sequence. In a world where AI-generated content dominates digital interactions, this level of provenance could become a fundamental need. Web3 can provide a decentralized, trustless layer to verify AI reasoning pathways, bridging a critical gap in today’s AI ecosystem.
Read the full op-ed here. |
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