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Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried says he ‘made a lot of mistakes’

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Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of cryptocurrency giant FTX, defended his actions on Wednesday in his first public appearance since his exchange collapsed earlier this month.

“Clearly, I made a lot of mistakes. There are things I would give anything to be able to do over again. I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone,” said Bankman-Fried.

The 30-year-old was speaking at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit via video link from the Bahamas in his first public speech after the collapse of FTX and its sister trading firm Alameda Research.

On Nov. 11, FTX filed for bankruptcy protection in the US, and Bankman-Fried also stepped down as CEO.

“I was excited about the prospects of FTX a month ago. I saw it as a thriving, growing business. I was shocked by what happened this month. And you know, reconstructing it…there are things that I wish I had done differently,” he said.

The former crypto billionaire also distanced himself from Alameda, which he said became larger over the course of 2022.

“I wasn’t running Alameda. I didn’t know exactly what was going on. I didn’t know the size of their position,” said Bankman-Fried, adding “that’s a pretty big oversight that I wasn’t more aware.”

He also said that FTX could have margin call positions and could have “closed them down in time such that it would cover all of those, all those shorts, all those liabilities,” but it did not do so.

“And that’s a massive failure of oversight of risk management,” he added.

FTX, which was the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume, filed for bankruptcy earlier this month due to liquidity problems.

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While Bankman-Fried later apologized to investors in a series of tweets, cryptocurrencies went into freefall due to the financial turmoil and perceived risks of investors.

The exchange once boasted a $32 billion valuation.

Bankman-Fried, a Democrat donor, told ABC News this week that he currently has just one ATM card and $100,000 in his bank account. He once had an estimated fortune of more than $20 billion.

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Elon Musk unveils new name, logo for Twitter

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Popular microblogging app, Twitter has unveiled its new logo.

The new logo was made public by Twitter owner Elon Musk and its new CEO.

The social media app on Sunday hinted that it would ditch its bird logo, be rebranded with the name X and move quickly into payments, banking and commerce, according to AFP.

Founded in 2006, Twitter takes its name from the sound of birds chattering, and it has used avian branding since its early days, when the company bought a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15, according to the design website Creative Bloq.

Tweeting a picture of the company’s new logo – a white X on a black background – late Sunday night, Twitter chief executive Linda Yaccarino said “X is here! Let’s do this.”

Also late Sunday night, Musk changed his profile picture to the company’s new logo, which he described as “minimalist art deco,” and changed his Twitter bio to “X.com,” which now redirects to twitter.com.

Musk had earlier tweeted that “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make (it) go live worldwide tomorrow.”

Musk also tweeted that under the site’s new identity, a post would be called “an X.”

The changes were not visible on the website as of 0630 GMT Monday.

Musk had already named Twitter’s parent company the X Corporation, and previously said his takeover of the social media giant was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app” — a reference to the X.com company he founded in 1999, a later version of which went on to become payments giant PayPal.

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Such an app could still function as a social media platform, and also include messaging and mobile payments.

“Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” Yaccarino tweeted earlier on Sunday.

Yaccarino, an advertising sales executive at NBCUniversal who Musk poached last month to become Twitter’s CEO, said the social media platform was on the cusp of broadening its scope.

“X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” Yaccarino tweeted.

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Binance CEO declares ‘Binance Nigeria Limited scam entity’

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The Chief Executive Officer of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, has declared Nigeris’s subsidiary of the global cryptocurrency exchange platform as a scam.

Zhao made this known via his Twitter handle on Sunday, saying, “Binance Nigeria Limited a scam entity.”

“Binance has issued cease & desist notice to the scammer entity “Binance Nigeria Limited”. Don’t believe everything you read in the news,” he wrote.

The Securities and Exchange Commission of Nigeria had declared that Binance Nigeria was operating illegally in the country as it is not registered or regulated by the SEC.

Details later…

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Jack Dorsey launches Twitter alternative ‘Bluesky’ on Android

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Co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Twitter, Jack Dorsey has launched a new application called ‘Bluesky’ on Android, a few hours after losing his verification badge on the microblogging platform.

According to the app’s website, the “social internet” of the future will give users more options and creators “independence from platforms”.

However, the app is still under development and may only be accessed with an invite code.

“We’re building the AT Protocol, a new foundation for social networking which gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience,” the website stated.

Using financing from Twitter, Mr Dorsey started developing Bluesky as a side project in 2019. In late February, it was first rolled out to iOS users.

As per TechCrunch, the basic features for monitoring likes or bookmarks, modifying tweets, quote-tweeting, direct messages and using hashtags, which are available on Twitter are not present in Bluesky at launch. This will make the app a more streamlined version of Twitter than what it initially appeared to be.

Additionally, it’s incorporating decentralisation into its own protocol, the AT Protocol, rather than adding to the work already done on ActivityPub, the protocol powering Mastodon, an open-source Twitter alternative and a variety of other decentralised apps in the larger “Fediverse”, the term for these connected servers hosting free, open-source web publishing software, as per the outlet.

The demand for the application has been growing and has 20,000 active users currently.

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