“I want to make a big announcement,” said Faryar Shirzad, the chief policy officer of Coinbase, to a nearly empty room. His words echoed across the massive hall at the Bitcoin Conference, deep in the caverns of The Venetian Expo in Las Vegas, and it wasn’t apparent how many people were watching on the livestream. Then again, somebody out there may have been interested in the panelists he was interviewing, one of whom was unusual by Bitcoin Conference standards: Chris LaCivita, the political consultant who’d co-chaired Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. “I am super proud to say it on this stage,” Shirzad continued, addressing the dozens of people scattered across 5,000 chairs. “We have just become a major sponsor of the America250 effort.” My jaw dropped. Coinbase, the world’s largest crypto exchange, the owner of 12 percent of the world’s Bitcoin supply, and listed on the S&P 500, was paying for Trump to hold a military parade.No wonder they made the announcement in an empty room. Today was “Code and Country”: an entire day of MAGA-themed panels on the Nakamoto Main Stage, full of Republican legislators, White House officials, and political operatives, all of whom praised Trump as the savior of the crypto world. But Code and Country was part of Industry Day, which was VIP only and closed to General Admission holders — the people with the $199 tickets, who flocked to the conference seeking wisdom from brilliant technologists and fabulously wealthy crypto moguls, who believed that decentralized currency on a blockchain could not be controlled by government authoritarians. They’d have drowned Shirzad in boos if they saw him give money to Donald Trump’s campaign manager, and they would have stormed the Nakamoto stage if they knew the purpose of America250. America250 is a nonprofit established by Congress during Barack Obama’s presidency with a mundane mission: to plan the nationwide festivities for July 4th, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “Who remembers the Bicentennial in 1976?” the co-chair, former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios, asked the crowd. “I remember it like it was yesterday, and this one is going to be bigger and better.” But then Trump got re-elected, appointed LaCivita as co-chair, and suddenly, the party was starting earlier. The week before the conference, America250 announced that it would host a “Grand Military Parade” on June 14th to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, releasing tickets for prime seats along the parade route and near the Washington Monument on their website, hosting other festivities on the National Mall, and credentialing the press covering the event. (Their celebrations and events are a different operation from the U.S. Army, which had never planned for a parade to celebrate its 250th birthday, much less a military parade, but is now spending up to $45 million in taxpayer dollars to make the parade happen.) According to the most recent statements from Army officials, the parade will include hundreds of cannons, dozens of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters, fighter jets, bombers, and 150 military vehicles, including Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Stryker Fighting Vehicles, Humvees, and if the logistics work out, 25 (or more) M1 Abrams tanks. Trump had spent years trying to get the government to throw a military parade — primarily because he’d attended a Bastille Day parade in France and became jealous — and now that he was back in office, he’d finally eliminated everyone in the government who previously told him that the budget didn’t exist for such a parade, that the tank treads would ruin the streets and collapse the bridges, that the optics of tanks, guns and soldiers marching down Constitution Avenue were too authoritarian and fascist. June 14th also happens to be Donald Trump’s birthday.And Coinbase, whose CEO once told his employees to stop bringing politics into the workplace, was now footing the bill — if not for this military parade watch party, then for the one inevitably happening next year, when America actually turns 250, or any other festivities between now and then that may or may not fall on Trump’s birthday. (This wasn’t the first party they helped fund, though. Earlier this year, Coinbase wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s inauguration committee. One month later, the SEC announced that it was dropping an investigation into Coinbase.) I had to keep reminding myself that I was at the Bitcoin Conference. I’d been desperately looking for the goofy, degenerate party vibes that my coworkers who’d covered previous crypto conferences told me about: inflated swans with QR codes. Multimillionaires strolling around the Nakamoto Stage in shiba inu pajamas. Folks who communicated in memes and acronyms. Celebrity athletes who were actual celebrities. “Bitcoin yoga,” whatever that was. Afterparties with drugs, lots of drugs, and probably the mind-bending designer kind. And hey, Las Vegas was the global capital of goofy, degenerate partying. But no, I was stuck in a prolonged flashback to every single Republican event I’ve covered over the past ten years – Trump rallies, conservative conferences, GOP conventions, and MAGA fundraisers, with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” playing on an endless loop. There was an emcee endlessly praising Trump, encouraging the audience to clap for Trump, and reminding everyone about how great it was that Trump spoke at the Conference last year, which all sounds even stranger when said in an Australian accent. In addition to LaCivita, there were four GOP Congressmen, four GOP Senators, one Trump-appointed SEC Commissioner, one Treasury Official, two senior White House officials (including David Sacks, the White House crypto and A.I. czar), and two of Trump’s sons. All of them, too, spent time praising Trump as the first “crypto president.” (Vice President J.D. Vance would be speaking the next day to the general admission crowd, but he was probably going to praise Trump, too.) The titles of the panels seemed to be run through some sort of MAGA generative AI system: The Next Golden Age of America. The American Super Grid. Making America the Global Bitcoin Superpower. The New Declaration of Independence: Bitcoin and the Path Out of the U.S. National Debt Crisis. (Speaker: Vivek Ramaswamy.) Uncancleable: Bitcoin, Rumble & Free Speech Technology. (Speaker: Donald Trump Jr.) The only difference was that this MAGA conference was funded by crypto. And if crypto was paying for a MAGA conference, and they had to play “God Bless the USA,” they were bringing in a string quartet.Annoyed that I had not yet seen a single Shiba Inu — no, Jim Justice’s celebrity bulldog was not the same thing — I left Nakamoto and went back to the press area. It hadn’t turned into Fox News yet, but I could see MAGA’s presence seeping into the world of podcasters and vloggers. A Newsmax reporter (great blowout, jewel-toned sheath dress, heels to the heavens, very camera-ready) was interviewing White House official Bo Hines (clean-cut, former Yale football player and GOP congressional candidate, nice suit), right before he was hustled onstage for a panel with a member of the U.S. Treasury. Soon, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) was doing an interview gauntlet while his senior aides stood by, one wearing a pink plaid blazer that could have easily been Brooks Brothers. Over on the Genesis Stage, the CEO of PragerU, a right wing media company that attacks higher education, was interviewing the CEO of the 1792 Exchange, a right-wing nonprofit that attacks companies for engaging in “woke business practices” such as diversity initiatives. (Leveraging Bitcoin’s Values to Shift the Culture in America.) I walked into the main expo center, past a crypto podcaster in a sequined bomber jacket talking to a Wall Street Journal reporter. For some reason, his presence was a relief. Even though he was clearly a Trump supporter — his jacket said TRUMP: THE GOLDEN AGE on the back — there was something more janky and homegrown, less corporate, about him. But the moment I looked up and saw a massive sign that said STEAKTOSHI, the unease returned. A ghoulish-looking group of executives from Steak ‘n Shake, the fast food company with over 450 locations across the globe, had gathered under the sign in a replica of the restaurant. They were selling jars of beef tallow, with a choice of grass-fed or Wagyu, and giving out a MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN hat with every purchase an overt embrace of the right-wing conspiracy that cooking with regular seed oils would lower one’s testosterone. (Relevant to the conference: they were also advertising that their restaurants now accepted Bitcoin.)Andrew Gordon, the head of Main Street Crypto PAC, had been to five previous Bitcoin Conferences and worked on crypto tax policy since 2014. He’d seen Trump speak at the last conference in Nashville during the election, and the audience – not typically unquestioning MAGA superfans – had melted into adoring goo in Trump’s presence. But now that Trump was using his presidential powers to establish a Bitcoin reserve, roll back federal investigations into crypto companies, and order massive changes to financial regulatory policies — in short, changing the entire market on crypto’s behalf with the stroke of a pen — Gordon clocked a notable vibe shift this year. “There are people wearing suits at a Bitcoin conference,” he told me wryly back in the press lounge. (He, too, was wearing a suit). The change wasn’t due to a new breed of Suit People flooding in. It was the Bitcoin veterans the ones who’d been coming to the conference for years, dressed in loud Versace jackets or old holey t-shirts – who were now in business attire. “They’re now recognizing the level of formality and how serious it is.”According to the Bitcoin Conference organizers, out of the 35,000-plus attendees in Vegas this year, 17.1 percent of them were categorized as “institutional and corporate decision-makers” — a vague way to describe politicians, corporate executives, and the rest of the C-suite world. Whenever they weren’t speaking onstage, they were conducting interviews with outlets hand-selected from dozens of media requests that had been filtered through the conference organizers, or in Q&A sessions with people who’d bought the $21,000 Whale Pass and could access the VIP Lounge. (Yes, the industry-only day of the conference had an even more exclusive tier.) They were sidebarring with crypto CEOs outside the conference for round tables, privately meeting Senators for lunch and White House officials for dinner. Gordon himself had just held a private breakfast for industry insiders, with GOP Senators Marsha Blackburn and Cynthia Lummis as special guests. And for the very, very wealthy, MAGA Inc., Trump’s primary super PAC, was holding a fundraising dinner in Vegas that night, with Vance, Don Jr., and Eric Trump in attendance. That ticket, according to The Washington Post, cost $1 million per person.It was the kind of amoral, backroom behavior that would have sent the General Admission attendees into a rage — and they did the next day, when the convention opened to them. During one extremely packed talk at the Genesis Stage called Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sycophants of the State?, a moderator asked the four panelists what they’d like to say to Vance and Sacks and all the politicians who’d been there yesterday. And Erik Cason erupted.“‘What you’re doing is actually immoral and bad. You hurt people. You actively want to use the state to implement violence against others.’ 
That’s like, fucked up and wrong,” said Cason, the author of “Cryptosovereignty,” to a crowd of hundreds. “If you personally wanna like, go to Yemen and try to stab those people, that’s on you. But asking other people to go do that – it is a fucked up and terrible thing.” He grew more heated. “And also fuck you. You’re not, like, a king. You’re supposed to be liable to the law, too. 
And I don’t appreciate you trying to think that that you just get to advance the state however the fuck you want, because you have power.”“These are the violent thugs who killed hundreds of millions of people over the last century,” agreed Bruce Fenton of Chainstone Labs. “They have nothing on us. All we wanna do is run some code and trade it around our nerd money. Leave us alone.”The audience burst into cheers and applause. Bitcoin was the promise of freedom from the government, who’d murdered and stolen and tried to control their lives, and now that their wealth was on the blockchain, no one could take their sovereignty. “Personally, I don’t really care what they [the politicians] think,” said American HODL, whose title on the conference site was “guy with 6.15 bitcoin,” the derision clear in his voice. “They are employees who work for us, so their thoughts and opinions on the matter are irrelevant. Do what the fuck we tell you to do.
 I don’t work for you. I’m not underneath you. You’re underneath me.” But the politicians weren’t going to listen to them, much less talk to them. The politicians spent the conference surrounded by aides and security who stopped people from approaching – I’m sorry, the Senator has to leave for an engagement now – or safely inside the VIP rooms with the $21,000-dollar Whale Pass holders and the million-dollar donors. By the time American HODL said that the politicians worked for him, they were on flights out of Vegas, having gotten what they wanted from Code and Country, an event that was closed to General Admission pass holders.Coinbase’s executives were at Code and Country, however. Coinbase held over 984,000 Bitcoin, more coins than American HODL could mine in a lifetime. And Coinbase was now a sponsor of Donald Trump’s birthday military parade. The Nakamoto Stage during Code + Country at the Bitcoin Conference.After David Sacks and the Winklevoss twins finished explaining how Trump had saved the crypto industry from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (or as one Winklevoss called her, “Pocahontas”), I was jonesing for a drink. A few other reporters on the ground had told me about “Code, Country and Cocktails,” the America250 afterparty held at the Ayu Dayclub at Resort World, and I signed up immediately. Reporters at past Bitcoin Conferences had promised legendary side-event depravity, and I hoped I would find it there. As I entered the lush, tropical nightclub, I saw two white-gloved hands sticking out the side of the wall, each holding a glass of champagne at crotch level. I reached out for a flute, thinking it was maybe just a fucked-up piece of art, and gasped as the hand let go of the stem, disappeared into the hole, and emerged seconds later with another full champagne glass. Past the champagne glory hole wall — there was really no other way to describe it — was a massive outdoor swimming pool, surrounded by chefs serving up endless portions of steak frites, unguarded magnums of Moët casually stacked in ice buckets, the professional Beautiful Women of Las Vegas draped around Peter Schiff, the famous economist/podcaster/Bitcoin skeptic. When not booked for private events, the crescent-shaped pool at Ayu would be filled with drunk people in swim suits, dancing to DJ Kaskade. No one was in the pool tonight. Depravity was not happening here. In fact, there was more networking going on than partying, and it was somehow more engaging than Bone Thugs-N-Harmony suddenly appearing onstage to perform. And it was distinctly not just about making money in crypto. A good percentage of this crowd wore some derivative of a MAGA hat, and anyone who could show off their photos of them with Trump did so. This, I realized, was how crypto bros did politics — a new game for them, where success and influence was not necessarily quantifiable. “Crypto got Trump elected,” Greg Grseziak, an agent who manages crypto influencers, told me, showing me his Trump photo opp. “In four years, this is going to be the biggest event in the presidential race.”Grzesiak walked off to do more networking, I finished my glory hole champagne, and in the meantime, Bone Thugs had started performing “East 1999”. A fellow reporter leaned over. “Who do you think those guys are?” he asked, pointing to a group of extremely tall white men in suits and lanyards, standing behind a velvet rope to the left of the stage.I walked over to investigate. They looked like the group of Steak ‘n Shake executives I met at the Expo Hall — the ones with the beef tallow jars and derivative MAGA hats — and they were lurking next to the stage, watching the rappers like vultures but barely moving to the music. This scene was too preposterous to actually be real: Steak ‘n Shake executives, at the Bitcoin Conference, attending a party for America250, in the VIP section, during a Bone Thugs-n-Harmony set? “Shout out to Steak ‘n Shake for being the first fast food restaurant to accept Bitcoin!” announced one of the Bones. The company logo appeared on a screen above his head.No flashy Vegas magic (or dancers in cow costumes, now shimmying onstage with Steak ‘n Shake signs) could mask what I just saw. This party was co-sponsored by a MAGA-branded fast-food chain owned by Sardar Biglari, a businessman who had purchased Maxim, became its editor-in-chief, and used the smutty magazine to endorse Trump in 2024. So was Frax, the stablecoin exchange, and Exodus, one of the biggest crypto wallet companies in the market. Bitcoin Magazine’s logo flashed across the stage at one point, as editor-in-chief David Bailey, in his own derivative MAGA hat, tried to hype up the crowd for J.D. Vance’s speech the next day. (“You only get to live history once,” he said, to faint cheers.)For some unknown reason, these companies were all putting their money into America250, and as I had to keep reminding myself, America250 — the government nonprofit in charge of planning the country’s celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing — was currently working to get tanks in the streets of Washington DC for Donald Trump’s birthday. I went for one last champagne flute from the glory hole, just for the novelty, and as the hand disappeared back into the wall, I caught something I’d missed earlier: above the hole was a logo for TRON, the blockchain exchange run by billionaire Justin Sun. He had faced several fraud investigations from the SEC that magically disappeared after he invested $75 million in a Trump family crypto company, and seemed more than happy to keep throwing crypto money at Trump. Recently, he won the $TRUMP meme coin dinner, spending over $16 million on the token in exchange for a private and controversial dinner with the president.TRON was also cosponsoring the America250 party.Earlier, I’d run into the Australian emcee in the elevator of The Palazzo. She’d spent the day teetering across the Nakamoto Stage in dainty kitten heels, a pinstriped blazer and miniskirt suit set, and given the gratuitous Trump praising and the fact she was blonde, I had stereotyped her as MAGA to the core. But the program was over and she was holding her heels by their ankle straps, barefoot and sighing in relief. This was not her usual style, she told an attendee. She’d take a pair of sneakers over heels if she could. But the conference organizers had told her to dress up because there were senators in attendance. “Tomorrow, the real Bitcoiners are coming,” she said, and she’d get to wear flat shoes. And the next morning, on the day of Vance’s speech, I found myself stuck outside the conference with the “real Bitcoiners.” In spite of all the emails that the conference had sent me reminding me of how strict security measures would be, possibly to overcorrect from last year’s utter shitshow around Trump’s appearance, I’d woken up too late, eaten my bagel too leisurely, got sidetracked by a police officer-turned-Bitcoin investor excited I was wearing orange (whoops), and barely missed the cutoff for the Secret Service to let me in. But the conference had set up televisions with a live feed of Vance’s speech, and the rest of the general admission attendees were remarkably chill about it, opting to mingle in the hallways until the Secret Service left. I found myself in a smaller crowd near the expo hall door, next to a young man carrying a live miniature Shiba Inu (“It’s a tiny doge!” he said proudly), and the podcaster I’d seen earlier in the sequined bomber jacket. He introduced himself as Action CEO, and with nothing else to do but wait — “You can watch the [Vance] replay,” he reassured me, “these events are mainly about networking” — we got to talking. “I’m actually excited that Trump isn’t even here, I’ll be honest with you,” he said, speaking with a rapid cadence. Trump was ultimately just one guy, and the fact that he sent his underlings and political allies — the ones who could actually implement his grand promises for the crypto industry — proved he hadn’t just been paying lip service. That said, it had come with some uncomfortable changes, including the re-emergence of Justin Sun. “It’s a little bit concerning when you say, All right, we don’t care what you did in the past. Come on out, clean slate,” he continued. “That’s the concern right now for most people. Seeing people that did wrong by the space coming back and acting like nothing happened? That’s a little concerning.” And not just that: Sun was back in the United States, having dinner with Trump, and giving him millions of dollars. “If you’re sitting in a room and having a conversation, people are literally gonna go, yeah, it’s kind of sketch that this guy is back here after everything that’s happened. You’re not gonna see it published, because it’s not a popular opinion, but we’re all definitely talking about it.” If Action’s friends weren’t comfortable talking about it openly, that fraudsters with enough money were suddenly back in the mix, it was certainly not the kind of conversation the CEOs were going to have in front of the General Admission crowd. (Though it did mean that the emcee, looking much happier than she did the day before, got to wear low-heeled boots and shorts.) But behind closed doors — or at least at the Code and Country panels, where the base pass attendees couldn’t boo them — they gave a sense of what their backroom conversations with the Trump administration did look like.“I was actually at a dinner last night and one of the things that someone from the admin said was, What if we give you guys everything you want and then you guys forget? Because there’s midterms in 2026, and hopefully 2028, and beyond,” said Sam Kazemian, the founder and CEO of Frax, which had sponsored the America250 party. “But one of the things I said was: We as an industry are very, very loyal. The crypto community has a very, very, very strong memory. And once this industry is legalized, is transparent, is safe, all of the big players understand that this wasn’t possible without this administration, this Congress, this Senate. We’re lifelong, career-long allies.”“Loyalty” is a dangerous concept with this president, who’s cheated on his three wives, stopped paying the legal fees for employees who’d taken the fall for him, ended the careers of sympathetic MAGA Republicans for insufficiently coddling him, withdrew security for government employees experiencing death threats for the sin of contradicting him in public by citing facts. It was only weeks ago that he and Vance were publicly screaming at Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who was at the White House to request more aid in the war against Russia, for not saying “thank you” in front of the cameras. It would be less than a week before he began threatening to cancel all of Elon Musk’s government contracts when the billionaire criticized the size of Trump’s budget, even though Musk had given him millions and helped him purge the government. And if you were to find a photo of any political leader, billionaire or CEO standing vacant-eyed next to Trump and shaking his hand, the circumstances are practically a given: they had recently made him unhappy, either for criticizing him, making an imagined slight, or simply asserting themselves. The only way they could avoid public humiliation, or their businesses being crushed via executive order, was to go to Mar-a-Lago, tell the world that the president was wonderful, and underwrite a giant party for his birthday military parade. Maybe Kazemian knew he was being tested, or maybe the 32-year old Ron Paul superfan had no idea what the administration was asking of him. Either way, he responded correctly. At least one person at the conference was thinking about ways that the government could betray the Bitcoin community. As the panel on Bitcoiners becoming sycophants of the state wrapped up, and the other panelists finished telling the government pigs to go fuck themselves and keep their hands off their nerd money, the moderator turned to Casey Rodarmor, a software engineer-turned-crypto influencer, for the last question: “Tell everyone here why Bitcoin wins, regardless of what happens.”“Oh, man, I don’t know if Bitcoin wins, regardless of what happens,” he responded, frowning. He had already gamed out one feasible situation where Bitcoin lost: “If we all of a sudden saw a very rapid inflation in a lot of fiat currencies, and there was a plausible scapegoat in Bitcoin all over the world, and they were able to make a sort of marketing claim that Bitcoin is causing this — Bitcoin is making your savings go to zero, it’s causing this carnage to the economy — 
If that happens worldwide, I think that’s really scary.” The moderator froze, the crowd murmured nervously, and I thought about the number of times Trump had blamed a group of people for problems they’d never caused. An awful lot of them were now being deported. “I take that seriously,” Rodarmor continued. “I don’t know that Bitcoin will succeed. I think that Bitcoin is incredibly strong, it’s incredibly difficult to fuck up. But in that case… man, I don’t know.” I had asked Action CEO earlier if Kazemian, the Frax CEO, was right — if the crypto world was unquestioningly loyal to Trump, if their support of him was unconditional. “Oh, it’s definitely conditional,” he said without hesitation, as his Trump jacket glittered under the fluorescent lights. “It’s a matter of, are you going to be doing the right things by us, by the people who are here?” We walked down the expo hall, past booths promising life-changing technological marvels, alongside thousands of people flooding into Nakamoto Hall, ready to learn how to become unfathomably rich, who paid $199 to be there.The audience of “Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sychophants of the State?”, Day Two of the Bitcoin ConferenceSee More:

Once again, Sam Altman wants to show you the future. The CEO of OpenAI is standing on a sparse stage in San Francisco, preparing to reveal his next move to an attentive crowd. “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI,” Altman explains, referring to artificial general intelligence. “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central.” The solution Altman came up with is looming behind him. It’s a white sphere about the size of a beach ball, with a camera at its center. The company that makes it, known as Tools for Humanity, calls this mysterious device the Orb. Stare into the heart of the plastic-and-silicon globe and it will map the unique furrows and ciliary zones of your iris. Seconds later, you’ll receive inviolable proof of your humanity: a 12,800-digit binary number, known as an iris code, sent to an app on your phone. At the same time, a packet of cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, worth approximately $42, will be transferred to your digital wallet—your reward for becoming a “verified human.” Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity in 2019 as part of a suite of companies he believed would reshape the world. Once the tech he was developing at OpenAI passed a certain level of intelligence, he reasoned, it would mark the end of one era on the Internet and the beginning of another, in which AI became so advanced, so human-like, that you would no longer be able to tell whether what you read, saw, or heard online came from a real person. When that happened, Altman imagined, we would need a new kind of online infrastructure: a human-verification layer for the Internet, to distinguish real people from the proliferating number of bots and AI “agents.”And so Tools for Humanity set out to build a global “proof-of-humanity” network. It aims to verify 50 million people by the end of 2025; ultimately its goal is to sign up every single human being on the planet. The free crypto serves as both an incentive for users to sign up, and also an entry point into what the company hopes will become the world’s largest financial network, through which it believes “double-digit percentages of the global economy” will eventually flow. Even for Altman, these missions are audacious. “If this really works, it’s like a fundamental piece of infrastructure for the world,” Altman tells TIME in a video interview from the passenger seat of a car a few days before his April 30 keynote address.Internal hardware of the Orb in mid-assembly in March. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe project’s goal is to solve a problem partly of Altman’s own making. In the near future, he and other tech leaders say, advanced AIs will be imbued with agency: the ability to not just respond to human prompting, but to take actions independently in the world. This will enable the creation of AI coworkers that can drop into your company and begin solving problems; AI tutors that can adapt their teaching style to students’ preferences; even AI doctors that can diagnose routine cases and handle scheduling or logistics. The arrival of these virtual agents, their venture capitalist backers predict, will turbocharge our productivity and unleash an age of material abundance.But AI agents will also have cascading consequences for the human experience online. “As AI systems become harder to distinguish from people, websites may face difficult trade-offs,” says a recent paper by researchers from 25 different universities, nonprofits, and tech companies, including OpenAI. “There is a significant risk that digital institutions will be unprepared for a time when AI-powered agents, including those leveraged by malicious actors, overwhelm other activity online.” On social-media platforms like X and Facebook, bot-driven accounts are amassing billions of views on AI-generated content. In April, the foundation that runs Wikipedia disclosed that AI bots scraping their site were making the encyclopedia too costly to sustainably run. Later the same month, researchers from the University of Zurich found that AI-generated comments on the subreddit /r/ChangeMyView were up to six times more successful than human-written ones at persuading unknowing users to change their minds.  Photograph by Davide Monteleone for TIMEBuy a copy of the Orb issue hereThe arrival of agents won’t only threaten our ability to distinguish between authentic and AI content online. It will also challenge the Internet’s core business model, online advertising, which relies on the assumption that ads are being viewed by humans. “The Internet will change very drastically sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” says Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania. “So we have to succeed, or I’m not sure what else would happen.”For four years, Blania’s team has been testing the Orb’s hardware abroad. Now the U.S. rollout has arrived. Over the next 12 months, 7,500 Orbs will be arriving in dozens of American cities, in locations like gas stations, bodegas, and flagship stores in Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami. The project’s founders and fans hope the Orb’s U.S. debut will kickstart a new phase of growth. The San Francisco keynote was titled: “At Last.” It’s not clear the public appetite matches the exultant branding. Tools for Humanity has “verified” just 12 million humans since mid 2023, a pace Blania concedes is well behind schedule. Few online platforms currently support the so-called “World ID” that the Orb bestows upon its visitors, leaving little to entice users to give up their biometrics beyond the lure of free crypto. Even Altman isn’t sure whether the whole thing can work. “I can see [how] this becomes a fairly mainstream thing in a few years,” he says. “Or I can see that it’s still only used by a small subset of people who think about the world in a certain way.” Blania (left) and Altman debut the Orb at World’s U.S. launch in San Francisco on April 30, 2025. Jason Henry—The New York Times/ReduxYet as the Internet becomes overrun with AI, the creators of this strange new piece of hardware are betting that everybody in the world will soon want—or need—to visit an Orb. The biometric code it creates, they predict, will become a new type of digital passport, without which you might be denied passage to the Internet of the future, from dating apps to government services. In a best-case scenario, World ID could be a privacy-preserving way to fortify the Internet against an AI-driven deluge of fake or deceptive content. It could also enable the distribution of universal basic income (UBI)—a policy that Altman has previously touted—as AI automation transforms the global economy. To examine what this new technology might mean, I reported from three continents, interviewed 10 Tools for Humanity executives and investors, reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, and “verified” my own humanity. The Internet will inevitably need some kind of proof-of-humanity system in the near future, says Divya Siddarth, founder of the nonprofit Collective Intelligence Project. The real question, she argues, is whether such a system will be centralized—“a big security nightmare that enables a lot of surveillance”—or privacy-preserving, as the Orb claims to be. Questions remain about Tools for Humanity’s corporate structure, its yoking to an unstable cryptocurrency, and what power it would concentrate in the hands of its owners if successful. Yet it’s also one of the only attempts to solve what many see as an increasingly urgent problem. “There are some issues with it,” Siddarth says of World ID. “But you can’t preserve the Internet in amber. Something in this direction is necessary.”In March, I met Blania at Tools for Humanity’s San Francisco headquarters, where a large screen displays the number of weekly “Orb verifications” by country. A few days earlier, the CEO had attended a $1 million-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump, whom he credits with clearing the way for the company’s U.S. launch by relaxing crypto regulations. “Given Sam is a very high profile target,” Blania says, “we just decided that we would let other companies fight that fight, and enter the U.S. once the air is clear.” As a kid growing up in Germany, Blania was a little different than his peers. “Other kids were, like, drinking a lot, or doing a lot of parties, and I was just building a lot of things that could potentially blow up,” he recalls. At the California Institute of Technology, where he was pursuing research for a masters degree, he spent many evenings reading the blogs of startup gurus like Paul Graham and Altman. Then, in 2019, Blania received an email from Max Novendstern, an entrepreneur who had been kicking around a concept with Altman to build a global cryptocurrency network. They were looking for technical minds to help with the project. Over cappuccinos, Altman told Blania he was certain about three things. First, smarter-than-human AI was not only possible, but inevitable—and it would soon mean you could no longer assume that anything you read, saw, or heard on the Internet was human-created. Second, cryptocurrency and other decentralized technologies would be a massive force for change in the world. And third, scale was essential to any crypto network’s value. The Orb is tested on a calibration rig, surrounded by checkerboard targets to ensure precision in iris detection. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe goal of Worldcoin, as the project was initially called, was to combine those three insights. Altman took a lesson from PayPal, the company co-founded by his mentor Peter Thiel. Of its initial funding, PayPal spent less than $10 million actually building its app—but pumped an additional $70 million or so into a referral program, whereby new users and the person who invited them would each receive $10 in credit. The referral program helped make PayPal a leading payment platform. Altman thought a version of that strategy would propel Worldcoin to similar heights. He wanted to create a new cryptocurrency and give it to users as a reward for signing up. The more people who joined the system, the higher the token’s value would theoretically rise. Since 2019, the project has raised $244 million from investors like Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That money paid for the $50 million cost of designing the Orb, plus maintaining the software it runs on. The total market value of all Worldcoins in existence, however, is far higher—around $12 billion. That number is a bit misleading: most of those coins are not in circulation and Worldcoin’s price has fluctuated wildly. Still, it allows the company to reward users for signing up at no cost to itself. The main lure for investors is the crypto upside. Some 75% of all Worldcoins are set aside for humans to claim when they sign up, or as referral bonuses. The remaining 25% are split between Tools for Humanity’s backers and staff, including Blania and Altman. “I’m really excited to make a lot of money,” ” Blania says.From the beginning, Altman was thinking about the consequences of the AI revolution he intended to unleash. (On May 21, he announced plans to team up with famed former Apple designer Jony Ive on a new AI personal device.) A future in which advanced AI could perform most tasks more effectively than humans would bring a wave of unemployment and economic dislocation, he reasoned. Some kind of wealth redistribution might be necessary. In 2016, he partially funded a study of basic income, which gave $1,000 per-month handouts to low-income individuals in Illinois and Texas. But there was no single financial system that would allow money to be sent to everybody in the world. Nor was there a way to stop an individual human from claiming their share twice—or to identify a sophisticated AI pretending to be human and pocketing some cash of its own. In 2023, Tools for Humanity raised the possibility of using the network to redistribute the profits of AI labs that were able to automate human labor. “As AI advances,” it said, “fairly distributing access and some of the created value through UBI will play an increasingly vital role in counteracting the concentration of economic power.”Blania was taken by the pitch, and agreed to join the project as a co-founder. “Most people told us we were very stupid or crazy or insane, including Silicon Valley investors,” Blania says. At least until ChatGPT came out in 2022, transforming OpenAI into one of the world’s most famous tech companies and kickstarting a market bull-run. “Things suddenly started to make more and more sense to the external world,” Blania says of the vision to develop a global “proof-of-humanity” network. “You have to imagine a world in which you will have very smart and competent systems somehow flying through the Internet with different goals and ideas of what they want to do, and us having no idea anymore what we’re dealing with.”After our interview, Blania’s head of communications ushers me over to a circular wooden structure where eight Orbs face one another. The scene feels like a cross between an Apple Store and a ceremonial altar. “Do you want to get verified?” she asks. Putting aside my reservations for the purposes of research, I download the World App and follow its prompts. I flash a QR code at the Orb, then gaze into it. A minute or so later, my phone buzzes with confirmation: I’ve been issued my own personal World ID and some Worldcoin.The first thing the Orb does is check if you’re human, using a neural network that takes input from various sensors, including an infrared camera and a thermometer. Davide Monteleone for TIMEWhile I stared into the Orb, several complex procedures had taken place at once. A neural network took inputs from multiple sensors—an infrared camera, a thermometer—to confirm I was a living human. Simultaneously, a telephoto lens zoomed in on my iris, capturing the physical traits within that distinguish me from every other human on Earth. It then converted that image into an iris code: a numerical abstraction of my unique biometric data. Then the Orb checked to see if my iris code matched any it had seen before, using a technique allowing encrypted data to be compared without revealing the underlying information. Before the Orb deleted my data, it turned my iris code into several derivative codes—none of which on its own can be linked back to the original—encrypted them, deleted the only copies of the decryption keys, and sent each one to a different secure server, so that future users’ iris codes can be checked for uniqueness against mine. If I were to use my World ID to access a website, that site would learn nothing about me except that I’m human. The Orb is open-source, so outside experts can examine its code and verify the company’s privacy claims. “I did a colonoscopy on this company and these technologies before I agreed to join,” says Trevor Traina, a Trump donor and former U.S. ambassador to Austria who now serves as Tools for Humanity’s chief business officer. “It is the most privacy-preserving technology on the planet.”Only weeks later, when researching what would happen if I wanted to delete my data, do I discover that Tools for Humanity’s privacy claims rest on what feels like a sleight of hand. The company argues that in modifying your iris code, it has “effectively anonymized” your biometric data. If you ask Tools for Humanity to delete your iris codes, they will delete the one stored on your phone, but not the derivatives. Those, they argue, are no longer your personal data at all. But if I were to return to an Orb after deleting my data, it would still recognize those codes as uniquely mine. Once you look into the Orb, a piece of your identity remains in the system forever. If users could truly delete that data, the premise of one ID per human would collapse, Tools for Humanity’s chief privacy officer Damien Kieran tells me when I call seeking an explanation. People could delete and sign up for new World IDs after being suspended from a platform. Or claim their Worldcoin tokens, sell them, delete their data, and cash in again. This argument fell flat with European Union regulators in Germany, who recently declared that the Orb posed “fundamental data protection issues” and ordered the company to allow European users to fully delete even their anonymized data. (Tools for Humanity has appealed; the regulator is now reassessing the decision.) “Just like any other technology service, users cannot delete data that is not personal data,” Kieran said in a statement. “If a person could delete anonymized data that can’t be linked to them by World or any third party, it would allow bad actors to circumvent the security and safety that World ID is working to bring to every human.”On a balmy afternoon this spring, I climb a flight of stairs up to a room above a restaurant in an outer suburb of Seoul. Five elderly South Koreans tap on their phones as they wait to be “verified” by the two Orbs in the center of the room. “We don’t really know how to distinguish between AI and humans anymore,” an attendant in a company t-shirt explains in Korean, gesturing toward the spheres. “We need a way to verify that we’re human and not AI. So how do we do that? Well, humans have irises, but AI doesn’t.”The attendant ushers an elderly woman over to an Orb. It bleeps. “Open your eyes,” a disembodied voice says in English. The woman stares into the camera. Seconds later, she checks her phone and sees that a packet of Worldcoin worth 75,000 Korean won (about $54) has landed in her digital wallet. Congratulations, the app tells her. You are now a verified human.A visitor views the Orbs in Seoul on April 14, 2025. Taemin Ha for TIMETools for Humanity aims to “verify” 1 million Koreans over the next year. Taemin Ha for TIMEA couple dozen Orbs have been available in South Korea since 2023, verifying roughly 55,000 people. Now Tools for Humanity is redoubling its efforts there. At an event in a traditional wooden hanok house in central Seoul, an executive announces that 250 Orbs will soon be dispersed around the country—with the aim of verifying 1 million Koreans in the next 12 months. South Korea has high levels of smartphone usage, crypto and AI adoption, and Internet access, while average wages are modest enough for the free Worldcoin on offer to still be an enticing draw—all of which makes it fertile testing ground for the company’s ambitious global expansion. Yet things seem off to a slow start. In a retail space I visited in central Seoul, Tools for Humanity had constructed a wooden structure with eight Orbs facing each other. Locals and tourists wander past looking bemused; few volunteer themselves up. Most who do tell me they are crypto enthusiasts who came intentionally, driven more by the spirit of early adoption than the free coins. The next day, I visit a coffee shop in central Seoul where a chrome Orb sits unassumingly in one corner. Wu Ruijun, a 20-year-old student from China, strikes up a conversation with the barista, who doubles as the Orb’s operator. Wu was invited here by a friend who said both could claim free cryptocurrency if he signed up. The barista speeds him through the process. Wu accepts the privacy disclosure without reading it, and widens his eyes for the Orb. Soon he’s verified. “I wasn’t told anything about the privacy policy,” he says on his way out. “I just came for the money.”As Altman’s car winds through San Francisco, I ask about the vision he laid out in 2019: that AI would make it harder for us to trust each other online. To my surprise, he rejects the framing. “I’m much more [about] like: what is the good we can create, rather than the bad we can stop?” he says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to avoid the bot overrun’ or whatever. It’s just that we can do a lot of special things for humans.” It’s an answer that may reflect how his role has changed over the years. Altman is now the chief public cheerleader of a $300 billion company that’s touting the transformative utility of AI agents. The rise of agents, he and others say, will be a boon for our quality of life—like having an assistant on hand who can answer your most pressing questions, carry out mundane tasks, and help you develop new skills. It’s an optimistic vision that may well pan out. But it doesn’t quite fit with the prophecies of AI-enabled infopocalypse that Tools for Humanity was founded upon.Altman waves away a question about the influence he and other investors stand to gain if their vision is realized. Most holders, he assumes, will have already started selling their tokens—too early, he adds. “What I think would be bad is if an early crew had a lot of control over the protocol,” he says, “and that’s where I think the commitment to decentralization is so cool.” Altman is referring to the World Protocol, the underlying technology upon which the Orb, Worldcoin, and World ID all rely. Tools for Humanity is developing it, but has committed to giving control to its users over time—a process they say will prevent power from being concentrated in the hands of a few executives or investors. Tools for Humanity would remain a for-profit company, and could levy fees on platforms that use World ID, but other companies would be able to compete for customers by building alternative apps—or even alternative Orbs. The plan draws on ideas that animated the crypto ecosystem in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when evangelists for emerging blockchain technologies argued that the centralization of power—especially in large so-called “Web 2.0” tech companies—was responsible for many of the problems plaguing the modern Internet. Just as decentralized cryptocurrencies could reform a financial system controlled by economic elites, so too would it be possible to create decentralized organizations, run by their members instead of CEOs. How such a system might work in practice remains unclear. “Building a community-based governance system,” Tools for Humanity says in a 2023 white paper, “represents perhaps the most formidable challenge of the entire project.”Altman has a pattern of making idealistic promises that shift over time. He founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, with a mission to develop AGI safely and for the benefit of all humanity. To raise money, OpenAI restructured itself as a for-profit company in 2019, but with overall control still in the hands of its nonprofit board. Last year, Altman proposed yet another restructure—one which would dilute the board’s control and allow more profits to flow to shareholders. Why, I ask, should the public trust Tools for Humanity’s commitment to freely surrender influence and power? “I think you will just see the continued decentralization via the protocol,” he says. “The value here is going to live in the network, and the network will be owned and governed by a lot of people.” Altman talks less about universal basic income these days. He recently mused about an alternative, which he called “universal basic compute.” Instead of AI companies redistributing their profits, he seemed to suggest, they could instead give everyone in the world fair access to super-powerful AI. Blania tells me he recently “made the decision to stop talking” about UBI at Tools for Humanity. “UBI is one potential answer,” he says. “Just giving [people] access to the latest [AI] models and having them learn faster and better is another.” Says Altman: “I still don’t know what the right answer is. I believe we should do a better job of distribution of resources than we currently do.” When I probe the question of why people should trust him, Altman gets irritated. “I understand that you hate AI, and that’s fine,” he says. “If you want to frame it as the downside of AI is that there’s going to be a proliferation of very convincing AI systems that are pretending to be human, and we need ways to know what is really human-authorized versus not, then yeah, I think you can call that a downside of AI. It’s not how I would naturally frame it.” The phrase human-authorized hints at a tension between World ID and OpenAI’s plans for AI agents. An Internet where a World ID is required to access most services might impede the usefulness of the agents that OpenAI and others are developing. So Tools for Humanity is building a system that would allow users to delegate their World ID to an agent, allowing the bot to take actions online on their behalf, according to Tiago Sada, the company’s chief product officer. “We’ve built everything in a way that can be very easily delegatable to an agent,” Sada says. It’s a measure that would allow humans to be held accountable for the actions of their AIs. But it suggests that Tools for Humanity’s mission may be shifting beyond simply proving humanity, and toward becoming the infrastructure that enables AI agents to proliferate with human authorization. World ID doesn’t tell you whether a piece of content is AI-generated or human-generated; all it tells you is whether the account that posted it is a human or a bot. Even in a world where everybody had a World ID, our online spaces might still be filled with AI-generated text, images, and videos.As I say goodbye to Altman, I’m left feeling conflicted about his project. If the Internet is going to be transformed by AI agents, then some kind of proof-of-humanity system will almost certainly be necessary. Yet if the Orb becomes a piece of Internet infrastructure, it could give Altman—a beneficiary of the proliferation of AI content—significant influence over a leading defense mechanism against it. People might have no choice but to participate in the network in order to access social media or online services.I thought of an encounter I witnessed in Seoul. In the room above the restaurant, Cho Jeong-yeon, 75, watched her friend get verified by an Orb. Cho had been invited to do the same, but demurred. The reward wasn’t enough for her to surrender a part of her identity. “Your iris is uniquely yours, and we don’t really know how it might be used,” she says. “Seeing the machine made me think: are we becoming machines instead of humans now? Everything is changing, and we don’t know how it’ll all turn out.”—With reporting by Stephen Kim/Seoul. This story was supported by Tarbell Grants.Correction, May 30The original version of this story misstated the market capitalization of Worldcoin if all coins were in circulation. It is $12 billion, not $1.2 billion.

For the past two years, it’s been a ghost in the machine of American tech. Between 2022 and today, a little-noticed tweak to the U.S. tax code has quietly rewired the financial logic of how American companies invest in research and development. Outside of CFO and accounting circles, almost no one knew it existed. “I work on these tax write-offs and still hadn’t heard about this,” a chief operating officer at a private-equity-backed tech company told Quartz. “It’s just been so weirdly silent.”AdvertisementStill, the delayed change to a decades-old tax provision — buried deep in the 2017 tax law — has contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of high-paying, white-collar jobs. That’s the picture that emerges from a review of corporate filings, public financial data, analysis of timelines, and interviews with industry insiders. One accountant, working in-house at a tech company, described it as a “niche issue with broad impact,” echoing sentiments from venture capital investors also interviewed for this article. Some spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive political matters.Since the start of 2023, more than half-a-million tech workers have been laid off, according to industry tallies. Headlines have blamed over-hiring during the pandemic and, more recently, AI. But beneath the surface was a hidden accelerant: a change to what’s known as Section 174 that helped gut in-house software and product development teams everywhere from tech giants such as Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta (META) to much smaller, private, direct-to-consumer and other internet-first companies.Now, as a bipartisan effort to repeal the Section 174 change moves through Congress, bigger questions are surfacing: How did a single line in the tax code help trigger a tsunami of mass layoffs? And why did no one see it coming? For almost 70 years, American companies could deduct 100% of qualified research and development spending in the year they incurred the costs. Salaries, software, contractor payments — if it contributed to creating or improving a product, it came off the top of a firm’s taxable income.AdvertisementThe deduction was guaranteed by Section 174 of the IRS Code of 1954, and under the provision, R&D flourished in the U.S.Microsoft was founded in 1975. Apple (AAPL) launched its first computer in 1976. Google (GOOGL) incorporated in 1998. Facebook opened to the general public in 2006. All these companies, now among the most valuable in the world, developed their earliest products — programming tools, hardware, search engines — under a tax system that rewarded building now, not later.The subsequent rise of smartphones, cloud computing, and mobile apps also happened in an America where companies could immediately write off their investments in engineering, infrastructure, and experimentation. It was a baseline assumption — innovation and risk-taking subsidized by the tax code — that shaped how founders operated and how investors made decisions.In turn, tech companies largely built their products in the U.S. AdvertisementMicrosoft’s operating systems were coded in Washington state. Apple’s early hardware and software teams were in California. Google’s search engine was born at Stanford and scaled from Mountain View. Facebook’s entire social architecture was developed in Menlo Park. The deduction directly incentivized keeping R&D close to home, rewarding companies for investing in American workers, engineers, and infrastructure.That’s what makes the politics of Section 174 so revealing. For all the rhetoric about bringing jobs back and making things in America, the first Trump administration’s major tax bill arguably helped accomplish the opposite.When Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the signature legislative achievement of President Donald Trump’s first term, it slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% — a massive revenue loss on paper for the federal government.To make the 2017 bill comply with Senate budget rules, lawmakers needed to offset the cost. So they added future tax hikes that wouldn’t kick in right away, wouldn’t provoke immediate backlash from businesses, and could, in theory, be quietly repealed later.AdvertisementThe delayed change to Section 174 — from immediate expensing of R&D to mandatory amortization, meaning that companies must spread the deduction out in smaller chunks over five or even 15-year periods — was that kind of provision. It didn’t start affecting the budget until 2022, but it helped the TCJA appear “deficit neutral” over the 10-year window used for legislative scoring.The delay wasn’t a technical necessity. It was a political tactic. Such moves are common in tax legislation. Phase-ins and delayed provisions let lawmakers game how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) — Congress’ nonpartisan analyst of how bills impact budgets and deficits — scores legislation, pushing costs or revenue losses outside official forecasting windows.And so, on schedule in 2022, the change to Section 174 went into effect. Companies filed their 2022 tax returns under the new rules in early 2023. And suddenly, R&D wasn’t a full, immediate write-off anymore. The tax benefits of salaries for engineers, product and project managers, data scientists, and even some user experience and marketing staff — all of which had previously reduced taxable income in year one — now had to be spread out over five- or 15-year periods. To understand the impact, imagine a personal tax code change that allowed you to deduct 100% of your biggest source of expenses, and that becoming a 20% deduction. For cash-strapped companies, especially those not yet profitable, the result was a painful tax bill just as venture funding dried up and interest rates soared.AdvertisementSalesforce office buildings in San Francisco.Photo: Jason Henry/Bloomberg (Getty Images)It’s no coincidence that Meta announced its “Year of Efficiency” immediately after the Section 174 change took effect. Ditto Microsoft laying off 10,000 employees in January 2023 despite strong earnings, or Google parent Alphabet cutting 12,000 jobs around the same time.Amazon (AMZN) also laid off almost 30,000 people, with cuts focused not just on logistics but on Alexa and internal cloud tools — precisely the kinds of projects that would have once qualified as immediately deductible R&D. Salesforce (CRM) eliminated 10% of its staff, or 8,000 people, including entire product teams.In public, companies blamed bloat and AI. But inside boardrooms, spreadsheets were telling a quieter story. And MD&A notes — management’s notes on the numbers — buried deep in 10-K filings recorded the change, too. R&D had become more expensive to carry. Headcount, the leading R&D expense across the tech industry, was the easiest thing to cut.AdvertisementIn its 2023 annual report, Meta described salaries as its single biggest R&D expense. Between the first and second years that the Section 174 change began affecting tax returns, Meta cut its total workforce by almost 25%. Over the same period, Microsoft reduced its global headcount by about 7%, with cuts concentrated in product-facing, engineering-heavy roles.Smaller companies without the fortress-like balance sheets of Big Tech have arguably been hit even harder. Twilio (TWLO) slashed 22% of its workforce in 2023 alone. Shopify (SHOP) (headquartered in Canada but with much of its R&D teams in the U.S.) cut almost 30% of staff in 2022 and 2023. Coinbase (COIN) reduced headcount by 36% across a pair of brutal restructuring waves.Since going into effect, the provision has hit at the very heart of America’s economic growth engine: the tech sector.By market cap, tech giants dominate the S&P 500, with the “Magnificent 7” alone accounting for more than a third of the index’s total value. Workforce numbers tell a similar story, with tech employing millions of Americans directly and supporting the employment of tens of millions more. As measured by GDP, capital-T tech contributes about 10% of national output.AdvertisementIt’s not just that tech layoffs were large, it’s that they were massively disproportionate. Across the broader U.S. economy, job cuts hovered around in low single digits across most sectors. But in tech, entire divisions vanished, with a whopping 60% jump in layoffs between 2022 and 2023. Some cuts reflected real inefficiencies — a response to over-hiring during the zero-interest rate boom. At the same time, many of the roles eliminated were in R&D, product, and engineering, precisely the kind of functions that had once benefitted from generous tax treatment under Section 174.Throughout the 2010s, a broad swath of startups, direct-to-consumer brands, and internet-first firms — basically every company you recognize from Instagram or Facebook ads — built their growth models around a kind of engineered break-even.The tax code allowed them to spend aggressively on product and engineering, then write it all off as R&D, keeping their taxable income close to zero by design. It worked because taxable income and actual cash flow were often notGAAP accounting practices. Basically, as long as spending counted as R&D, companies could report losses to investors while owing almost nothing to the IRS.But the Section 174 change broke that model. Once those same expenses had to be spread out, or amortized, over multiple years, the tax shield vanished. Companies that were still burning cash suddenly looked profitable on paper, triggering real tax bills on imaginary gains.AdvertisementThe logic that once fueled a generation of digital-first growth collapsed overnight.So it wasn’t just tech experiencing effects. From 1954 until 2022, the U.S. tax code had encouraged businesses of all stripes to behave like tech companies. From retail to logistics, healthcare to media, if firms built internal tools, customized a software stack, or invested in business intelligence and data-driven product development, they could expense those costs. The write-off incentivized in-house builds and fast growth well outside the capital-T tech sector. This lines up with OECD research showing that immediate deductions foster innovation more than spread-out ones.And American companies ran with that logic. According to government data, U.S. businesses reported about $500 billion in R&D expenditures in 2019 alone, and almost half of that came from industries outside traditional tech. The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that this sector, the broader digital economy, accounts for another 10% of GDP.Add that to core tech’s contribution, and the Section 174 shift has likely touched at least 20% of the U.S. economy.AdvertisementThe result? A tax policy aimed at raising short-term revenue effectively hid a time bomb inside the growth engines of thousands of companies. And when it detonated, it kneecapped the incentive for hiring American engineers or investing in American-made tech and digital products.It made building tech companies in America look irrational on a spreadsheet.A bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing to repeal the Section 174 change, with business groups, CFOs, crypto executives, and venture capitalists lobbying hard for retroactive relief. But the politics are messy. Fixing 174 would mean handing a tax break to the same companies many voters in both parties see as symbols of corporate excess. Any repeal would also come too late for the hundreds of thousands of workers already laid off.And of course, the losses don’t stop at Meta’s or Google’s campus gates. They ripple out. When high-paid tech workers disappear, so do the lunch orders. The house tours. The contract gigs. The spending habits that sustain entire urban economies and thousands of other jobs. Sandwich artists. Rideshare drivers. Realtors. Personal trainers. House cleaners. In tech-heavy cities, the fallout runs deep — and it’s still unfolding.AdvertisementWashington is now poised to pass a second Trump tax bill — one packed with more obscure provisions, more delayed impacts, more quiet redistribution. And it comes as analysts are only just beginning to understand the real-world effects of the last round.The Section 174 change “significantly increased the tax burden on companies investing in innovation, potentially stifling economic growth and reducing the United States’ competitiveness on the global stage,” according to the tax consulting firm KBKG. Whether the U.S. will reverse course — or simply adapt to a new normal — remains to be seen.

Cyber threats don't show up one at a time anymore. They're layered, planned, and often stay hidden until it's too late. For cybersecurity teams, the key isn't just reacting to alerts—it's spotting early signs of trouble before they become real threats. This update is designed to deliver clear, accurate insights based on real patterns and changes we can verify. With today's complex systems, we need focused analysis—not noise. What you'll see here isn't just a list of incidents, but a clear look at where control is being gained, lost, or quietly tested. ⚡ Threat of the Week Lumma Stealer, DanaBot Operations Disrupted — A coalition of private sector companies and law enforcement agencies have taken down the infrastructure associated with Lumma Stealer and DanaBot. Charges have also been unsealed against 16 individuals for their alleged involvement in the development and deployment of DanaBot. The malware is equipped to siphon data from victim computers, hijack banking sessions, and steal device information. More uniquely, though, DanaBot has also been used for hacking campaigns that appear to be linked to Russian state-sponsored interests. All of that makes DanaBot a particularly clear example of how commodity malware has been repurposed by Russian state hackers for their own goals. In tandem, about 2,300 domains that acted as the command-and-control (C2) backbone for the Lumma information stealer have been seized, alongside taking down 300 servers and neutralizing 650 domains that were used to launch ransomware attacks. The actions against international cybercrime in the past few days constituted the latest phase of Operation Endgame. Get the Guide ➝ 🔔 Top News Threat Actors Use TikTok Videos to Distribute Stealers — While ClickFix has become a popular social engineering tactic to deliver malware, threat actors have been observed using artificial intelligence (AI)-generated videos uploaded to TikTok to deceive users into running malicious commands on their systems and deploy malware like Vidar and StealC under the guise of activating pirated version of Windows, Microsoft Office, CapCut, and Spotify. "This campaign highlights how attackers are ready to weaponize whichever social media platforms are currently popular to distribute malware," Trend Micro said. APT28 Hackers Target Western Logistics and Tech Firms — Several cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from Australia, Europe, and the United States issued a joint alert warning of a state-sponsored campaign orchestrated by the Russian state-sponsored threat actor APT28 targeting Western logistics entities and technology companies since 2022. "This cyber espionage-oriented campaign targeting logistics entities and technology companies uses a mix of previously disclosed TTPs and is likely connected to these actors' wide scale targeting of IP cameras in Ukraine and bordering NATO nations," the agencies said. The attacks are designed to steal sensitive information and maintain long-term persistence on compromised hosts. Chinese Threat Actors Exploit Ivanti EPMM Flaws — The China-nexus cyber espionage group tracked as UNC5221 has been attributed to the exploitation of a pair of security flaws affecting Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) software (CVE-2025-4427 and CVE-2025-4428) to target a wide range of sectors across Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region. The intrusions leverage the vulnerabilities to obtain a reverse shell and drop malicious payloads like KrustyLoader, which is known to deliver the Sliver command-and-control (C2) framework. "UNC5221 demonstrates a deep understanding of EPMM's internal architecture, repurposing legitimate system components for covert data exfiltration," EclecticIQ said. "Given EPMM's role in managing and pushing configurations to enterprise mobile devices, a successful exploitation could allow threat actors to remotely access, manipulate, or compromise thousands of managed devices across an organization." Over 100 Google Chrome Extensions Mimic Popular Tools — An unknown threat actor has been attributed to creating several malicious Chrome Browser extensions since February 2024 that masquerade as seemingly benign utilities such as DeepSeek, Manus, DeBank, FortiVPN, and Site Stats but incorporate covert functionality to exfiltrate data, receive commands, and execute arbitrary code. Links to these browser add-ons are hosted on specially crafted sites to which users are likely redirected to via phishing and social media posts. While the extensions appear to offer the advertised features, they also stealthily facilitate credential and cookie theft, session hijacking, ad injection, malicious redirects, traffic manipulation, and phishing via DOM manipulation. Several of these extensions have been taken down by Google. CISA Warns of SaaS Providers of Attacks Targeting Cloud Environments — The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned that SaaS companies are under threat from bad actors who are on the prowl for cloud applications with default configurations and elevated permissions. While the agency did not attribute the activity to a specific group, the advisory said enterprise backup platform Commvault is monitoring cyber threat activity targeting applications hosted in their Microsoft Azure cloud environment. "Threat actors may have accessed client secrets for Commvault's (Metallic) Microsoft 365 (M365) backup software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, hosted in Azure," CISA said. "This provided the threat actors with unauthorized access to Commvault's customers' M365 environments that have application secrets stored by Commvault." GitLab AI Coding Assistant Flaws Could Be Used to Inject Malicious Code — Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an indirect prompt injection flaw in GitLab's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Duo that could have allowed attackers to steal source code and inject untrusted HTML into its responses, which could then be used to direct victims to malicious websites. The attack could also leak confidential issue data, such as zero-day vulnerability details. All that's required is for the attacker to instruct the chatbot to interact with a merge request (or commit, issue, or source code) by taking advantage of the fact that GitLab Duo has extensive access to the platform. "By embedding hidden instructions in seemingly harmless project content, we were able to manipulate Duo's behavior, exfiltrate private source code, and demonstrate how AI responses can be leveraged for unintended and harmful outcomes," Legit Security said. One variation of the attack involved hiding a malicious instruction in an otherwise legitimate piece of source code, while another exploited Duo's parsing of markdown responses in real-time asynchronously. An attacker could leverage this behavior – that Duo begins rendering the output line by line rather than waiting until the entire response is generated and sending it all at once – to introduce malicious HTML code that can access sensitive data and exfiltrate the information to a remote server. The issues have been patched by GitLab following responsible disclosure. ‎️‍🔥 Trending CVEs Software vulnerabilities remain one of the simplest—and most effective—entry points for attackers. Each week uncovers new flaws, and even small delays in patching can escalate into serious security incidents. Staying ahead means acting fast. Below is this week's list of high-risk vulnerabilities that demand attention. Review them carefully, apply updates without delay, and close the doors before they're forced open. This week's list includes — CVE-2025-34025, CVE-2025-34026, CVE-2025-34027 (Versa Concerto), CVE-2025-30911 (RomethemeKit For Elementor WordPress plugin), CVE-2024-57273, CVE-2024-54780, and CVE-2024-54779 (pfSense), CVE-2025-41229 (VMware Cloud Foundation), CVE-2025-4322 (Motors WordPress theme), CVE-2025-47934 (OpenPGP.js), CVE-2025-30193 (PowerDNS), CVE-2025-0993 (GitLab), CVE-2025-36535 (AutomationDirect MB-Gateway), CVE-2025-47949 (Samlify), CVE-2025-40775 (BIND DNS), CVE-2025-20152 (Cisco Identity Services Engine), CVE-2025-4123 (Grafana), CVE-2025-5063 (Google Chrome), CVE-2025-37899 (Linux Kernel), CVE-2025-26817 (Netwrix Password Secure), CVE-2025-47947 (ModSecurity), CVE-2025-3078, CVE-2025-3079 (Canon Printers), and CVE-2025-4978 (NETGEAR). 📰 Around the Cyber World Sandworm Drops New Wiper in Ukraine — The Russia-aligned Sandworm group intensified destructive operations against Ukrainian energy companies, deploying a new wiper named ZEROLOT. "The infamous Sandworm group concentrated heavily on compromising Ukrainian energy infrastructure. In recent cases, it deployed the ZEROLOT wiper in Ukraine. For this, the attackers abused Active Directory Group Policy in the affected organizations," ESET Director of Threat Research, Jean-Ian Boutin, said. Another Russian hacking group, Gamaredon, remained the most prolific actor targeting the East European nation, enhancing malware obfuscation and introducing PteroBox, a file stealer leveraging Dropbox. Signal Says No to Recall — Signal has released a new version of its messaging app for Windows that, by default, blocks the ability of Windows to use Recall to periodically take screenshots of the app. "Although Microsoft made several adjustments over the past twelve months in response to critical feedback, the revamped version of Recall still places any content that's displayed within privacy-preserving apps like Signal at risk," Signal said. "As a result, we are enabling an extra layer of protection by default on Windows 11 in order to help maintain the security of Signal Desktop on that platform even though it introduces some usability trade-offs. Microsoft has simply given us no other option." Microsoft began officially rolling out Recall last month. Russia Introduces New Law to Track Foreigners Using Their Smartphones — The Russian government has introduced a new law that makes installing a tracking app mandatory for all foreign nationals in the Moscow region. This includes gathering their real-time locations, fingerprint, face photograph, and residential information. "The adopted mechanism will allow, using modern technologies, to strengthen control in the field of migration and will also contribute to reducing the number of violations and crimes in this area," Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the State Duma, said. "If migrants change their actual place of residence, they will be required to inform the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) within three working days." A proposed four-year trial period begins on September 1, 2025, and runs until September 1, 2029. Dutch Government Passes Law to Criminalize Cyber Espionage — The Dutch government has approved a law criminalizing a wide range of espionage activities, including digital espionage, in an effort to protect national security, critical infrastructure, and high-quality technologies. Under the amended law, leaking sensitive information that is not classified as a state secret or engaging in activities on behalf of a foreign government that harm Dutch interests can also result in criminal charges. "Foreign governments are also interested in non-state-secret, sensitive information about a particular economic sector or about political decision-making," the government said. "Such information can be used to influence political processes, weaken the Dutch economy or play allies against each other. Espionage can also involve actions other than sharing information." Microsoft Announces Availability of Quantum-Resistant Algorithms to SymCrypt — Microsoft has revealed that it's making post-quantum cryptography (PQC) capabilities, including ML-KEM and ML-DSA, available for Windows Insiders, Canary Channel Build 27852 and higher, and Linux, SymCrypt-OpenSSL version 1.9.0. "This advancement will enable customers to commence their exploration and experimentation of PQC within their operational environments," Microsoft said. "By obtaining early access to PQC capabilities, organizations can proactively assess the compatibility, performance, and integration of these novel algorithms alongside their existing security infrastructure." New Malware DOUBLELOADER Uses ALCATRAZ for Obfuscation — The open-source obfuscator ALCATRAZ has been seen within a new generic loader dubbed DOUBLELOADER, which has been deployed alongside Rhadamanthys Stealer infections starting December 2024. The malware collects host information, requests an updated version of itself, and starts beaconing to a hardcoded IP address (185.147.125[.]81) stored within the binary. "Obfuscators such as ALCATRAZ end up increasing the complexity when triaging malware," Elastic Security Labs said. "Its main goal is to hinder binary analysis tools and increase the time of the reverse engineering process through different techniques; such as hiding the control flow or making decompilation hard to follow." New Formjacking Campaign Targets WooCommerce Sites — Cybersecurity researchers have detected a sophisticated formjacking campaign targeting WooCommerce sites. The malware, per Wordfence, injects a fake but professional-looking payment form into legitimate checkout processes and exfiltrates sensitive customer data to an external server. Further analysis has revealed that the infection likely originated from a compromised WordPress admin account, which was used to inject malicious JavaScript via a Simple Custom CSS and JS plugin (or something similar) that allows administrators to add custom code. "Unlike traditional card skimmers that simply overlay existing forms, this variant carefully integrates with the WooCommerce site's design and payment workflow, making it particularly difficult for site owners and users to detect," the WordPress security company said. "The malware author repurposed the browser's localStorage mechanism – typically used by websites to remember user preferences – to silently store stolen data and maintain access even after page reloads or when navigating away from the checkout page." E.U. Sanctions Stark Industries — The European Union (E.U.) has announced sanctions against 21 individuals and six entities in Russia over its "destabilising actions" in the region. One of the sanctioned entities is Stark Industries, a bulletproof hosting provider that has been accused of acting as "enablers of various Russian state-sponsored and affiliated actors to conduct destabilising activities including, information manipulation interference and cyber attacks against the Union and third countries." The sanctions also target its CEO Iurie Neculiti and owner Ivan Neculiti. Stark Industries was previously spotlighted by independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, detailing its use in DDoS attacks in Ukraine and across Europe. In August 2024, Team Cymru said it discovered 25 Stark-assigned IP addresses used to host domains associated with FIN7 activities and that it had been working with Stark Industries for several months to identify and reduce abuse of their systems. The sanctions have also targeted Kremlin-backed manufacturers of drones and radio communication equipment used by the Russian military, as well as those involved in GPS signal jamming in Baltic states and disrupting civil aviation. The Mask APT Unmasked as Tied to the Spanish Government — The mysterious threat actor known as The Mask (aka Careto) has been identified as run by the Spanish government, according to a report published by TechCrunch, citing people who worked at Kaspersky at the time and had knowledge of the investigation. The Russian cybersecurity company first exposed the hacking group in 2014, linking it to highly sophisticated attacks since at least 2007 targeting high-profile organizations, such as governments, diplomatic entities, and research institutions. A majority of the group's attacks have targeted Cuba, followed by hundreds of victims in Brazil, Morocco, Spain, and Gibraltar. While Kaspersky has not publicly attributed it to a specific country, the latest revelation makes The Mask one of the few Western government hacking groups that has ever been discussed in public. This includes the Equation Group, the Lamberts (the U.S.), and Animal Farm (France). Social Engineering Scams Target Coinbase Users — Earlier this month, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase revealed that it was the victim of a malicious attack perpetrated by unknown threat actors to breach its systems by bribing customer support agents in India and siphon funds from nearly 70,000 customers. According to Blockchain security firm SlowMist, Coinbase users have been the target of social engineering scams since the start of the year, bombarding with SMS messages claiming to be fake withdrawal requests and seeking their confirmation as part of a "sustained and organized scam campaign." The goal is to induce a false sense of urgency and trick them into calling a number, eventually convincing them to transfer the funds to a secure wallet with a seed phrase pre-generated by the attackers and ultimately drain the assets. It's assessed that the activities are primarily carried out by two groups: low-level skid attackers from the Com community and organized cybercrime groups based in India. "Using spoofed PBX phone systems, scammers impersonate Coinbase support and claim there's been 'unauthorized access' or 'suspicious withdrawals' on the user's account," SlowMist said. "They create a sense of urgency, then follow up with phishing emails or texts containing fake ticket numbers or 'recovery links.'" Delta Can Sue CrowdStrike Over July 2024 Mega Outage — Delta Air Lines, which had its systems crippled and almost 7,000 flights canceled in the wake of a massive outage caused by a faulty update issued by CrowdStrike in mid-July 2024, has been given the green light to pursue to its lawsuit against the cybersecurity company. A judge in the U.S. state of Georgia stating Delta can try to prove that CrowdStrike was grossly negligent by pushing a defective update to its Falcon software to customers. The update crashed 8.5 million Windows devices across the world. Crowdstrike previously claimed that the airline had rejected technical support offers both from itself and Microsoft. In a statement shared with Reuters, lawyers representing CrowdStrike said they were "confident the judge will find Delta's case has no merit, or will limit damages to the 'single-digit millions of dollars' under Georgia law." The development comes months after MGM Resorts International agreed to pay $45 million to settle multiple class-action lawsuits related to a data breach in 2019 and a ransomware attack the company experienced in 2023. Storm-1516 Uses AI-Generated Media to Spread Disinformation — The Russian influence operation known as Storm-1516 (aka CopyCop) sought to spread narratives that undermined the European support for Ukraine by amplifying fabricated stories on X about European leaders using drugs while traveling by train to Kyiv for peace talks. One of the posts was subsequently shared by Russian state media and Maria Zakharova, a senior official in Russia's foreign ministry, as part of what has been described as a coordinated disinformation campaign by EclecticIQ. The activity is also notable for the use of synthetic content depicting French President Emmanuel Macron, U.K. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, and German chancellor Friedrich Merz of drug possession during their return from Ukraine. "By attacking the reputation of these leaders, the campaign likely aimed to turn their own voters against them, using influence operations (IO) to reduce public support for Ukraine by discrediting the politicians who back it," the Dutch threat intelligence firm said. Turkish Users Targeted by DBatLoader — AhnLab has disclosed details of a malware campaign that's distributing a malware loader called DBatLoader (aka ModiLoader) via banking-themed banking emails, which then acts as a conduit to deliver SnakeKeylogger, an information stealer developed in .NET. "The DBatLoader malware distributed through phishing emails has the cunning behavior of exploiting normal processes (easinvoker.exe, loader.exe) through techniques such as DLL side-loading and injection for most of its behaviors, and it also utilizes normal processes (cmd.exe, powershell.exe, esentutl.exe, extrac32.exe) for behaviors such as file copying and changing policies," the company said. SEC SIM-Swapper Sentenced to 14 Months for SEC X Account Hack — A 26-year-old Alabama man, Eric Council Jr., has been sentenced to 14 months in prison and three years of supervised release for using SIM swapping attacks to breach the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) official X account in January 2024 and falsely announced that the SEC approved Bitcoin (BTC) Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). Council Jr. (aka Ronin, Agiantschnauzer, and @EasyMunny) was arrested in October 2024 and pleaded guilty to the crime earlier this February. He has also been ordered to forfeit $50,000. According to court documents, Council used his personal computer to search incriminating phrases such as "SECGOV hack," "telegram sim swap," "how can I know for sure if I am being investigated by the FBI," "What are the signs that you are under investigation by law enforcement or the FBI even if you have not been contacted by them," "what are some signs that the FBI is after you," "Verizon store list," "federal identity theft statute," and "how long does it take to delete telegram account." FBI Warns of Malicious Campaign Impersonating Government Officials — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning of a new campaign that involves malicious actors impersonating senior U.S. federal or state government officials and their contacts to target individuals since April 2025. "The malicious actors have sent text messages and AI-generated voice messages — techniques known as smishing and vishing, respectively — that claim to come from a senior US official in an effort to establish rapport before gaining access to personal accounts," the FBI said. "One way the actors gain such access is by sending targeted individuals a malicious link under the guise of transitioning to a separate messaging platform." From there, the actor may present malware or introduce hyperlinks that lead intended targets to an actor-controlled site that steals login information. DICOM Flaw Enables Attackers to Embed Malicious Code Within Medical Image Files — Praetorian has released a proof-of-concept (PoC) for a high-severity security flaw in Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM), predominant file format for medical images, that enables attackers to embed malicious code within legitimate medical image files. CVE-2019-11687 (CVSS score: 7.8), originally disclosed in 2019 by Markel Picado Ortiz, stems from a design decision that allows arbitrary content at the start of the file, otherwise called the Preamble, which enables the creation of malicious polyglots. Codenamed ELFDICOM, the PoC extends the attack surface to Linux environments, making it a much more potent threat. As mitigations, it's advised to implement a DICOM preamble whitelist. "DICOM's file structure inherently allows arbitrary bytes at the beginning of the file, where Linux and most operating systems will look for magic bytes," Praetorian researcher Ryan Hennessee said. "[The whitelist] would check a DICOM file's preamble before it is imported into the system. This would allow known good patterns, such as 'TIFF' magic bytes, or '\x00' null bytes, while files with the ELF magic bytes would be blocked." Cookie-Bite Attack Uses Chrome Extension to Steal Session Tokens — Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated a new attack technique called Cookie-Bite that employs custom-made malicious browser extensions to steal "ESTAUTH" and "ESTSAUTHPERSISTNT" cookies in Microsoft Azure Entra ID and bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA). The attack has multiple moving parts to it: A custom Chrome extension that monitors authentication events and captures cookies; a PowerShell script that automates the extension deployment and ensures persistence; an exfiltration mechanism to send the cookies to a remote collection point; and a complementary extension to inject the captured cookies into the attacker's browser. "Threat actors often use infostealers to extract authentication tokens directly from a victim's machine or buy them directly through darkness markets, allowing adversaries to hijack active cloud sessions without triggering MFA," Varonis said. "By injecting these cookies while mimicking the victim's OS, browser, and network, attackers can evade Conditional Access Policies (CAPs) and maintain persistent access." Authentication cookies can also be stolen using adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing kits in real-time, or using rogue browser extensions that request excessive permissions to interact with web sessions, modify page content, and extract stored authentication data. Once installed, the extension can access the browser's storage API, intercept network requests, or inject malicious JavaScript into active sessions to harvest real-time session cookies. "By leveraging stolen session cookies, an adversary can bypass authentication mechanisms, gaining seamless entry into cloud environments without requiring user credentials," Varonis said. "Beyond initial access, session hijacking can facilitate lateral movement across the tenant, allowing attackers to explore additional resources, access sensitive data, and escalate privileges by abusing existing permissions or misconfigured roles." 🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars Non-Human Identities: The AI Backdoor You're Not Watching → AI agents rely on Non-Human Identities (like service accounts and API keys) to function—but these are often left untracked and unsecured. As attackers shift focus to this hidden layer, the risk is growing fast. In this session, you'll learn how to find, secure, and monitor these identities before they're exploited. Join the webinar to understand the real risks behind AI adoption—and how to stay ahead. Inside the LOTS Playbook: How Hackers Stay Undetected → Attackers are using trusted sites to stay hidden. In this webinar, Zscaler experts share how they detect these stealthy LOTS attacks using insights from the world's largest security cloud. Join to learn how to spot hidden threats and improve your defense. 🔧 Cybersecurity Tools ScriptSentry → It is a free tool that scans your environment for dangerous logon script misconfigurations—like plaintext credentials, insecure file/share permissions, and references to non-existent servers. These overlooked issues can enable lateral movement, privilege escalation, or even credential theft. ScriptSentry helps you quickly identify and fix them across large Active Directory environments. Aftermath → It is a Swift-based, open-source tool for macOS incident response. It collects forensic data—like logs, browser activity, and process info—from compromised systems, then analyzes it to build timelines and track infection paths. Deploy via MDM or run manually. Fast, lightweight, and ideal for post-incident investigation. AI Red Teaming Playground Labs → It is an open-source training suite with hands-on challenges designed to teach security professionals how to red team AI systems. Originally developed for Black Hat USA 2024, the labs cover prompt injections, safety bypasses, indirect attacks, and Responsible AI failures. Built on Chat Copilot and deployable via Docker, it's a practical resource for testing and understanding real-world AI vulnerabilities. 🔒 Tip of the Week Review and Revoke Old OAuth App Permissions — They're Silent Backdoor → You've likely logged into apps using "Continue with Google," "Sign in with Microsoft," or GitHub/Twitter/Facebook logins. That's OAuth. But did you know many of those apps still have access to your data long after you stop using them? Why it matters: Even if you delete the app or forget it existed, it might still have ongoing access to your calendar, email, cloud files, or contact list — no password needed. If that third-party gets breached, your data is at risk. What to do: Go through your connected apps here: Google: myaccount.google.com/permissions Microsoft: account.live.com/consent/Manage GitHub: github.com/settings/applications Facebook: facebook.com/settings?tab=applications Revoke anything you don't actively use. It's a fast, silent cleanup — and it closes doors you didn't know were open. Conclusion Looking ahead, it's not just about tracking threats—it's about understanding what they reveal. Every tactic used, every system tested, points to deeper issues in how trust, access, and visibility are managed. As attackers adapt quickly, defenders need sharper awareness and faster response loops. The takeaways from this week aren't just technical—they speak to how teams prioritize risk, design safeguards, and make choices under pressure. Use these insights not just to react, but to rethink what "secure" really needs to mean in today's environment. Found this article interesting? 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Last month, Donald Trump pushed the boundaries of government and financial ethics by announcing a contest: whoever bought and held the highest amount of the $TRUMP meme coin for an entire month would win an invite to a private dinner with the President. That dinner took place on Thursday at the Trump National Golf Course in Virginia, with attendees reportedly dropping nearly $394 million on $TRUMP in order to win the privilege. According to an analysis by The Guardian of the winners’ wallets, over half of them lost money participating in this contest. But that’s only if you’re analyzing the wallets visible on the contest site’s leaderboard. The real money was being made elsewhere.“Bet you 10 percent of dinner participants are doing this”I interviewed an enthusiastic crypto trader who figured out how to win the contest without losing any money: buy enough $TRUMP to get onto the leaderboard — and then in a separate wallet on a separate exchange, buy $TRUMP perpetual futures that would be profitable if (or as he saw it, when) the value of $TRUMP dropped. Yes, he did The Big Short, except with Donald Trump’s meme coin. “Bet you 10 percent of dinner participants are doing this,” he told me before the contest ended. “Everyone knows $TRUMP price will fall inevitably as more supply comes online in the future and gets dumped on retail.” When I spoke to him again after the dinner, he told me that “the majority of people I spoke with, particularly the crypto traders and folks who are very close to the crypto ecosystem, are like, ‘Yeah, I dumped this. I already sold the coin.’” “A lot of people put on the same hedge trade as I did, because they didn’t wanna take risk on the coin,” he added.I can’t reveal his name, his position on the leaderboard, how much he spent, or the dates of specific trades he made. I can say that he did this for shits and giggles. But as he told me, when there’s such a clear and obvious set of financial incentives behind the $TRUMP dinner contest, it’s worth making the gamble.Did it pay off? “Um, I basically was flat,” he said. “I originally wanted to make some money, but I think the shorting I did — it was okay?” He did, however, get a free dinner out of it. The following interview has been edited for clarity.Let’s just start from the beginning. What made you want to enter this? I think meme coins have a lot of staying power because humans just want things to gamble on. What was fascinating when the Trump token launched in January right before the inauguration, was that it effectively was like a black hole that sucked money away from all these other tokens in the ecosystem. That’s why the Trump token ran up to some preposterous number immediately after it was dropped. When I saw this competition launch, it was clear that there was going to be a tremendous amount of grift in this space, and the presidential family was only interested in self-enrichment and all that. 
It was clear that there was going to be a tremendous amount of grift in this spaceBut putting that aside, I’ve just been interested in the Trump token and I think I’ve just been structurally bearish, because the Trump token has a bunch of supply that’s currently controlled by, effectively, the Trump family and the associates. It’s only a matter of time before the supply unlocks. When that supply unlocks, in the crypto community, people call this dumping: they’ll just dump it onto retail and that’s how they get their exit liquidity. So that’s one way the Trump family can make money. The other way is obviously whenever there’s trades that happen, the trading fees also accrue to the family. I know that the Trump token is going to go down. If you put a gun into my head and ask, what will the price be two years from now? It’s going to be much lower than where it is today. When this contest launched, I was like, okay, this is clearly a way for the affiliates and the Trump family to find a way to drive up the price temporarily. And having been in this space for a while, it’s clear that these events only drive the price up for a period of time and then people lose interest. Unless you feed them something else, it’s going to drop. Everyone expects the token to dumpThey launched the contest right around when the first tranche of Trump tokens were going to unlock, which was supposed to be 90 days after the launch of the token back in January. And so this whole contest was kind of timed at an apt moment where it’s like, okay, supply’s going to unlock. Everyone expects the token to dump. But then, on Twitter, they agreed to delay the unlock for another 90 days. But once the unlock happens and they start dumping, that’s when the price is going to drop a lot. 
So this contest was interesting. I was like, okay, well, I feel like I can put on a trade here where I’m not taking on any real risk and I think it’ll be cool to meet random people at this dinner and see who else is interested. It seems like there are a lot of folks from out of the country who are flying in to attend the dinner, and a lot of crypto whales. There’s one that I follow, he’s mentioned in his Telegram that he’s one of the big holders. He’s talked these last few days about how he’s preparing for this dinner. So talk me through how you generated the funds to buy the Trump coin. Did you use your own personal funds?I use my personal funds. All the crypto trading I do is with my personal funds. Some of the trading I do is on Coinbase through a centralized exchange. And the rest of the trading I do is on chain through self-custody wallets. When this opportunity came up, the only way you can actually be in a position to be in the top 220 is if you own $TRUMP tokens in a self-custody wallet. Some of the exchanges, including Coinbase, allow you to buy the $TRUMP token, but that would not count towards this contest. What I did was I moved stablecoins like USDC to my Solana wallet, and then I used a decentralized exchange to buy the $TRUMP token. The way the contest works is you have to register your wallet before you are counted towards the ranking system. And unfortunately, I did that like a couple days late, so I had to size up a little bit more to ensure that I could catch up to the people who had registered a couple days prior. But that’s a nuance. So explain the process of shorting $TRUMP coin on a secondary market. Like how does one do that? I am a dumb person who only understands shorting markets through watching The Big Short. Basically when you short, you’re hoping that the price goes down, right? And the mechanism of shorting here is slightly different than shorting stocks, but we don’t need to go into the specifics here. The way to short [crypto] is, you can do it in two ways. One is through a centralized exchange that offers, effectively, shorting services. And what I mean here by shorting services is, there is a “perpetual future” that is offered at these exchanges. When I talk about exchanges that offer this, it’s mostly going to be like Binance or Bybits and some of the bigger exchanges outside of the US. Coinbase is very far behind when it comes to offering derivative products that goes above and beyond just buying the token. I couldn’t do it through Coinbase, and I can’t short through an exchange like Binance, because there’s a lot of restrictions around who can actually use Binance. I’m in the US and Binance has very strict VPN rules. I can’t just open a Binance account and short. The only real way for me was to short on a decentralized exchangeSo the only real way for me was to short on a decentralized exchange, which has actually become really popular in the last year or so. It’s like the same concept as shorting on Binance, but you can do it on chain. I use a service called Hyper Liquid, which is a very popular decentralized exchange. And on this exchange, they offer derivative products that basically track the movement of different tokens. And so they offer, effectively, $TRUMP perpetual futures, and you can effectively initiate a short position through that. I’m happy to go into the details if you want, but that’s like the high level. Yeah, yes, please please tell me these details. So that is basically how to set up the short position. Conceptually, there’s a few things to keep in mind. First thing is: because I’m shorting in a separate wallet that’s completely detached from $TRUMP, 
I have to put up additional capital in another wallet to do this. It’s not like I can just use my $TRUMP tokens as collateral and use the same pool of money to short. And the way shorting works and the way perpetual futures work in general is you put up a certain margin. So let’s keep it simple: say I put up $100k in margin and I choose to short the $TRUMP token. Now, if $TRUMP goes up in price, then I’m hurting, because I’m betting on the token falling. If the $TRUMP token doubles in price, well, then I will have lost a hundred thousand dollars in which case, my margin gets wiped out and this [futures] contract will have to be closed because I’ve lost all my money. If the token goes down in price, that’s when I profit — as long as I close out the position in the green. So you basically are juggling two wallets. One is the wallet in which you’re holding all this $TRUMP coin. 
The other one is like, how would you describe it? Is that the money that you’re generating in order to pay for participating in the contest? The most important wallet here is the Solana wallet with the $TRUMP tokens, because that’s what’s being used by the contest organizers to determine who makes the top 220. But as I mentioned earlier, I am structurally bearish on the $TRUMP token and I wouldn’t want to go for dinner and like, see my money go down when the $TRUMP token goes down in price. I decided I wanted to basically put on a hedge, where, using the other wallet and the short position, I’m basically agnostic to any sort of price movement. That’s the reason why I set up the other wallet. I could have taken on the price risk, but that’s pretty risky, because typically what happens with these events is that as we get close to the end of the contest date, people start dumping the $TRUMP tokens. The value of the $TRUMP token will have gone down — let’s say it went down to 90,000 — it would be offset by the short wallet, which would be like 110,000. And then they add up to 200,000, which is how much I hypothetically put in from the start. 
Did you make money off of this?Um, I basically was flat. I originally wanted to make some money, but I think the shorting I did — it was okay? I basically just broke even on this entire tradeLet me take a step back.
So initially I shorted the same amount as the token. But then as the time went on, as we got close to the contest end date, I decided to increase the size of the short position, because I thought that based on the thesis I had, people are going to start selling because there’s nothing to look forward to. And so I increased that size. But it just so happened that towards the end of the contest was also when the crypto markets started ripping after May 8th. So net-net, I think I basically just broke even on this entire trade.Define the crypto markets “ripping.”May 8th was basically the Thursday right before that weekend when the US representatives were going to meet the Chinese representatives in Switzerland [for tariff negotiations]. That day was also when the UK deal announcement was made. And so the market basically took that as a bullish sign, and then that got parlayed into the positive euphoria of the US-China negotiations. Everything started going up. Okay. So every market just started getting bullish. 
Yeah, all the tokens ran up a lot. If you look at the token price, $TRUMP coin on May 7th was roughly 11 bucks, and then on May 9th it was like 14 bucks. Over time that token has come down in price. But yeah, it ran up 40 percent in the span of like two days.What was the strategy going into the end game? 
Because it sounds like it was super volatile around the end and that’s why you needed to increase your short position. I thought that towards the end, I could opportunistically make some profits by shorting more than I owned, if that makes sense.[The previous week, the contest organizers announced a new incentive for winners to not sell the coin before the dinner: a rare “TRUMP DIAMOND HANDS” NFT.]What is the point of encouraging people to go diamond hands by offering this NFT? So I think this goes back to the incentives of Trump’s affiliates, right? They have a lot of supply that they own. Last I looked, they own eighty percent of the supply. But all of that, as with many other [crypto] projects, gets locked up and only gets released over time, so that you don’t have all this supply pressure on day one. Because then no one wants to buy the token. The whole point of the NFT and this subsequent rewards program that they’ve talked about, but haven’t given the details for, is to incentivize people to hold the token longer. The longer people hold the token, then the price arguably would not fall as much. 
The only way to keep the price high is if you introduce all these little games to keep retail engagedThe eventual setup, I’m sure, whether that’s in three months or in a year or two, is that the affiliates will then have their supply unlock, and they will want to sell. They obviously want to sell at a higher price. And the only way to keep the price high is if you introduce all these little games to keep retail engaged and interested in holding tokens. How do you get the NFT now? Do you have to rebuy all the coin?Yeah, my understanding based on that tweet they sent is, they basically look at your wallet holdings on the day of the dinner and compare that to your wallet holdings on the last day of the contest. And so if those match or if you own more, then they’ll give you an NFT. I was kind of dumb. What I should have done was, right before the 1:30PM cut off, I should have sold like, 90 percent of my tokens. In this way, on the dinner day, I would only have to buy 10 percent of what I bought previously, and I think I would qualify for this NFT. 
Wow. Have people done that? Well, the NFT hasn’t been dropped yet.
I don’t know the specifics. There are definitely people who sold before the end of the deadline, and that’s clear from even looking at that leaderboard page, right? There’s one column with current holdings and a bunch were zeroed out, but they are still in the top 220 because it’s a time-weighted calculation.Why did they do time-weighted calculations rather than like, just a cumulative amount of money you held at the end? I think this goes back to solving not only how much do you hold, but how long do you hold it for, and rewarding people differently. So if you held $60 over the entire stretch of the contest, you should be rewarded more than someone who held like $200 for one day on the last day. I think the time-weighted calculation effectively is trying to normalize for that. They also gave me a call the same day, which I thought was spam for a secondHow have the organizers been in their interactions with you for the contest and for the dinner and everything?They emailed me the day of, as soon as the
contest ended, saying that I had made it into the top 220. And they also gave me a call the same day, which I thought was spam for a second. But when the voicemail thing came up, I’m like, oh, this is actually a real thing. So I picked up the phone and then they just confirmed that I got the email and that I would have to do a KYC [Know Your Customer check, part of anti-money laundering regulatory compliance for banks, crypto exchanges, and other entities] in order to qualify for the dinner. Please give us your data, references, whatever. 
Yeah, nothing that sophisticated. They outsourced it to another party and I just provided my name, my nationality, where I live. No social security number or anything like that. Plus my birthday. and I think they just ran like an external check to make sure that I wasn’t a criminal or anything like that. I feel like it was pretty light vettingHow thoroughly do you think they’re been vetting you, how professional has the process been? I feel like it was pretty light vetting. I talked to someone about, let’s say, getting into the White House and it’s a lot more strict in terms of, you have to show your passport and all that. And here, you don’t really have to do that. You just have to show your ID at the door. At least that’s what they said. And as long as your ID matches the information you gave, you’re fine. So I don’t think the security is that strict, per se, but it’s good enough, I guess. Have you participated in any contests like this or heard of anything similar? No, I have not.That’s wild. This is rather innovative if one thinks about it in a “divorced from most governmental ethics” manner. Did you read about how it’s possible that Trump just doesn’t show up to this?I did see something that basically said, yeah, based on the terms and conditions, the president does not have to be there, I think. Honestly, I think a lot of people aren’t really there to see Trump. I could be totally wrong, but I get the sense from, let’s say, like looking at the crypto whales’ Telegram, that [they’re] more interested in just meeting other crypto folks so that [they] can network. If Justin Sun is there, that’s pretty good, right? Like being able to talk to him and maybe, you know, get his contact information and all that. RelatedThe many escapes of Justin SunI think for me and probably other people, we’re more interested in seeing if there’s any other interesting news that comes out of this dinner. I will have my wallet ready, and if some great news gets dropped at the dinner, that could potentially positively influence the $TRUMP token price or any other token price, I will buy it on the spot and try to profit. This is something that other attendees are thinking about doing too?I can’t say with certainty, but based on that one Telegram guy, it seemed like it was implied. Like, if they announced a rewards program for a Trump thing – say, the NFT will be used for this, and then the rewards will give you some really impressive thing in three months, that could probably move the price. Then I would take on a short-term trade literally at the dinner table. That’s why after the $TRUMP token dropped right before inauguration, I finally decided to download Truth SocialThat’s a first mover advantage right there.In crypto, half of it is just being a first mover advantage. That’s why after the $TRUMP token dropped right before inauguration, I finally decided to download Truth Social. I only follow Trump. He’s the only guy I follow and I have notifications on, which actually served me well. Was it April 9th when he sent out that tweet saying that tariffs are now delayed for 90 days? That was first out on Truth Social and I saw that immediately, and I’m like, oh, time to trade my equities, because I will be first to the news. So he’s dropped some nuggets for sure on his account. So the dinner itself is a good money making opportunity?Possibly. It’s hard to say, but in the event that it does, there is some information that gets dropped, that could be actionable.Is there anything you’re particularly proud of about the process of executing this short?I don’t know if there’s anything I’d really brag about or be like, super proud of.
I think this hedge trade, for someone who’s pretty involved in crypto, would be fairly obvious. Net-net, I think I broke even because I did basically go a bit big around my short towards the end of the contest. So that made up for some of the fees I had to pay and whatnot. I’m pretty happy.
I feel like I didn’t take on any risk and I’m able to go to this dinner. That’s probably a win in my books. One thing is, if I had real capital, I would have tried to make the top 25. That requires a lot of money, which I don’t have. I don’t really care about seeing Trump at all. I care more about seeing who else is there, of the top 25I think it’s like a couple million.I think you’d have to have 200,000 tokens, so yeah, roughly like two, three million USD. 
And if you want to not take on the risk of the token price moving, you’d want to take a short position of roughly the same size. It would be like a four or five million dollar capital outlay to make it happen. But the benefit of being in the top 25 is you get to meet Trump, and also get to be in a more intimate networking session, which I would actually enjoy being at. I don’t really care about seeing Trump at all. I care more about seeing who else is there, of the top 25. What was the minimum size of the wallet that made 220, do you know? It’s hard to say because what someone could have done is they could have bought a lot initially, and then halfway through they sold most of them, because they were pretty confident that they would make the top 220, because it’s time weighted. [Calculating out loud omitted.] I guess only fifty thousand [if you held the total amount from day one through the end].Honestly, that’s not a lot. It’s not. 
Realistically that number is probably higher. The thing is, this is not like a $50,000 disbursement where you’re never seeing that money again. After the dinner, you could choose to sell your token. Now, maybe the price will have moved from when you first bought it to when you sold it, but the actual loss, or potentially profit, is not obvious.Oh, that makes this some really interesting campaign finance implications. I guess the one thing I’ll say is, the Trump team probably won’t sell for a couple months at very least. And so whatever happens between now and then theoretically doesn’t really impact the team, right? Because if they had not launched this dinner contest and they did nothing, and then right before the unlock happens, they launch another campaign or they do something weird like this, then that will immediately pump up the price because crypto is so reflexive. And they can then sell into the strength of the price movement, theoretically. But here, I think what they want to do is actually show that this $TRUMP token has utility, and that it’s actually useful rather than just being a meme coin. And this is one way of making the $TRUMP token worth holding, because it’s not just a meme. If you buy it, you can go to dinner, you can earn points. You can get an NFT. It’s basically the playbook that a lot of folks will potentially run if they’re launching a meme coin with utility value. Oh, utility value is definitely a good way of saying it. Yeah, utility value in the sense that yeah, you can go to dinner, you can get an NFT, you can earn points that will get you something in the future. But yeah, this is a little bit different from memes like Pepe or Doge or Shiba Inu. Those have zero utility values. They’re literally just a meme. You can’t go to a dinner if you own a lot of it. It’s just a meme. The morning after the dinner:How are you? How was your crazy night out?It was good. And yeah, there was a sponsor who wanted to do an afterparty afterwards. They basically rented out the rooftop bar on top of the Marriott. I stayed out until 1 AM. But it was good. The actual event was quite interesting. The protests outside the dinner obviously were just kind of off-putting. I was like, damn, should I really walk into this thing?Activists staged an “America Is Not For Sale” protest while President Trump hosted the winners of his meme coin contest at the Trump National golf club. Getty ImagesI’ve actually never been to the Trump National. How is it as a venue? It’s on the Potomac River. When you are in the club you can see the really nice golf course and then the river is right there. The room was long and the podium was right up in the front and the tables were almost set up in a way where there were many rows of tables, but not that many columns, if it makes sense.I didn’t recognize this until maybe like, after an hour in, but people started taking seats because they wanted to be closer to the podium. And eventually, I’m like, damn, I gotta get a seat. But all that didn’t end up mattering because when Trump walked in, basically like a celebrity, everyone rushed up to the front and pulled out their phones and started recording. Who did you meet that was interesting or fun?Justin Sun was there, it was just that everyone wanted to talk to him. I guess the only thing I could do was just say hi to him. There were a bunch of international folks. A few folks were from Poland, who came all the way here from Portugal, where they now live. There was a lot of Asian people there. I met some folks from South Korea. Some guys from France, Italy. There was this hedge fund manager from Croatia who came just to check this out. Some guy from Sweden.There were also some market-making firms, like really big in crypto, like Wintermute. And then another guy who works at Kronos Research. The organizers also brought some folks, like the founder of the Moonshot app. I guess Moonshot had partnered with folks with the $TRUMP launch back in January. He said he didn’t buy any tokens because none of the employees are allowed to trade [the meme coins on their own platform, because it would be a conflict of interest], and so he was just invited by the organizers.[According to Crunchbase, Moonshot, an app that enables users to purchase meme coins, was acquired by Jupiter, a Solana trading platform. No named individuals appear to be publicly associated with either enterprise, although Jupiter’s founder is apparently someone going by the name “Meow.” The guest interviewed by The Verge did not recognize Meow from photos. – Ed.]There were a bunch of folks in the crypto ecosystem, now that I think about it, who actually had effectively insider knowledge that Trump was gonna launch a coin. They didn’t know exactly what that was gonna be, but they knew it was coming and it was gonna be a real coin.
For the first hour or two [after the announcement], people were wondering if Trump’s account got hacked. I just thought that was interesting, that it was effectively prewired to a lot of folks. Ah, so like: if those people knew, then they had that first mover advantage for that full hour – that it was a legitimate coin?Yeah, the public didn’t know whether it was an intentional drop or if some hackers hacked the Twitter account. I ended up meeting one of the top winners, and he was telling me how he hedged his tradeDid you find any really diehard MAGA people there?I’m sure that there were a couple of folks.
I just never got a chance to speak with someone who’s like, super pro-Trump. I’d say the majority of people I spoke with, particularly the crypto traders and folks who are very close to the crypto ecosystem are like, yeah, I dumped this. I already sold the coin. A lot of people put on the same hedge trade as I did, because they didn’t wanna take risk on the coin. I ended up meeting one of the top winners, and he was telling me how he hedged his trade. So effectively, he was taking on no price risk. Now the only thing is when you short these tokens, there’s a funding cost, but because he had such a big position the funding was actually pretty significant. 
So he said he paid, I don’t know, like $50,000 in funding costs, but to him it was still worth it, especially since he got a watch that’s supposedly worth $100,000 if you’re in the top four. Wait, they gave out watches?
Yeah. When Justin went up and gave the speech, after that, he got the watch.Honestly $50,000 to meet the president and get a watch that’s twice that amount, is a pretty good deal. Yeah. I had no idea yet that there’s a TrumpWatches.com. I think the host referenced this — like, if you want a watch, just go on the website. I was like, this is real? And then I actually went on the website and it turned out it is. Swiss-made chrono movement – oh my God, there are so many watches. Do you see that one on the very front page? They gave out two of those as prizes for raffle winners. Oh, that’s only $500, man.Yeah, I know, right?Lame. I guess you can’t yet buy the $100,000 watch on this website. They were specially designed and they only were able to have two ready for the event, and the other two will get shipped to the winners. 
[The website currently lists the “Crypto President Tourbillon Watch” for pre-order, claiming that “only 10” have been made. – Ed.]A commemorative hat.Did people post photos or selfies, or was there a sense of discretion?There were obviously crypto traders who didn’t wanna give their real names, and some folks who were trying to be camera shy and avoid the limelight, but I feel like for the most part, people were taking selfies and they were just having a good time. And there were photographers walking around taking photos of everyone. And then at the end, this was after Trump and after all the gifts were given out, the host was like, everyone put on your hat that you got — it’s in my bag,
it’s a Trump meme dinner hat — let’s all put it on and take a photo and then hashtag “trumpmemedinner” or whatever.[The White House is refusing to release the guest list with names of attendees. The New York Times has since said that it has acquired a copy of that list.Although photos of the gifted hats have circulated on social media, no related hashtag seems to have taken off. – Ed.] Oh, okay, so they actually encouraged you to put it on the Internet. 
I guess the host took the photo and it was like a selfie or something. The other funny moment was during the Trump speech. For the most part, it was just him talking about his campaign, and about how he beat Biden, and blah, blah, blah, how we were in a terrible place with crypto before he got elected and now we’re in a great place. That sounds exactly like a thing Trump would say. That was pretty accurate. At one point, the microphone made a cracking sound and then he was like, whoops, my ear. and he made a joke referencing the assassination attempt. A poster promoting the afterparty.How did you figure out about the afterparty? Was it the official afterparty? 
A lot of folks were saying there was gonna be some afterparty exclusive to VIPs, like the top 25 holders. There were a few folks who were trying to get into this party, but then it turns out it was actually not that exclusive. This MemeCore group, the number two holder, they rented out space at the rooftop of this Marriott and effectively invited everyone. So when you were leaving the venue, they had a couple buses that would come every 10 minutes and they were like, yeah, feel free to take this bus and we’ll take you to the after-party. A lot of people ended up going. 
[On TikTok, an attendee wearing a giant mask of what appears to be the MemeCore mascot, was accused of covering his face “to hide their identities” at “Trump’s crypto bribery event.” – Ed.] How was the afterparty? Was it well funded? They had an open bar, free drinks. It was fine, nothing like that noteworthy.
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The UK government is set to tighten compliance mandates for crypto firms by deepening the regulatory governance over the sector. In new guidelines issued to improve tax compliance, crypto firms in the UK have been directed to collect user details including transaction data under the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF). Paris-based Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) had announced the CARF legislation back in October 2023, and the UK wishes to adopt these rules ahead of plans to introduce regulations for the crypto sector by 2026.Crypto Firms to Collect User Details Including Transaction DataNew guidance issued by the UK government has directed crypto firms to collect name, date of birth, and home addresses of their respective retail users. Other information like the country of residence, their National Insurance number, and the Unique Taxpayer Reference, must also be collected from crypto purchasers and holders.For business users, the crypto firms must maintain legal business names, main business addresses, and company registration numbers, as per the announcement."Depending on the information you collect, you may need to submit a report to His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) each year," the announcement said.When dealing with transaction details, crypto firms will have to maintain logs of data including the value of funds and the type of crypto used under the guidelines."You'll need to verify that the information you collect is accurate by carrying out due diligence. We'll update the guidance with information about how to do this in due course," the announcement added.UK officials have said that crypto companies found in violation of these laws can invite penalties of up to GBP 300 (roughly Rs. 35,000) per user.Firms must align their operations as per the CARF laws by January 1, 2026The UK is actively participating in the globally evolving crypto regulatory landscape. UK'S Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) aims to fianlise a national crypto legislation by 2026.In the meantime, the Bank of England's (BOE) Prudential Regulation Authority has instructed UK-based corporates to disclose their exposure to crypto assets.The BoE also joined forces with the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) to exchange senior staff officials with a proficiency in managing sectors like digital assets and emerging payments.In recent months, US-based Coinbase and Austria's BitPanda have secured FCA approvals in the UK to legalise their businesses.The UK Treasury has also clarified that the country does not plan to create a US-like national crypto reserve. For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube. Further reading: Cryptocurrency, Crypto Firms, UK, CARF Radhika Parashar Radhika Parashar is a senior correspondent for Gadgets 360. She has been reporting on tech and telecom for the last three years now and will be focussing on writing about all things crypto. Besides this, she is a major sitcom nerd and often replies in Chandler Bing and Michael Scott references. For tips or queries you could reach out to her at RadhikaP@ndtv.com. More Related Stories

The leaders of OpenAI and Google have been living rent-free in each other’s heads since ChatGPT caught the world by storm. Heading into this week’s I/O, Googlers were on edge about whether Sam Altman would try to upstage their show like last year, when OpenAI held an event the day before to showcase ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode. This time, OpenAI dropped its bombshell the day after.OpenAI buying the “io” hardware division of Jony Ive’s design studio, LoveFrom, is a delightfully petty bit of SEO sabotage, though I’m told the name stands for “input output” and was decided a while ago. Even still, the news of Ive and Altman teaming up quickly shifted the conversation away from what was a strong showing from Google at this year’s I/O. The dueling announcements say a lot about what are arguably the world’s two foremost AI companies: Google’s models may be technically superior and more widely deployed, but OpenAI is kicking everyone’s ass at capturing mindshare and buzz. Speaking of buzz, it’s worth looking past the headlines to what OpenAI actually announced this week: it’s paying $6.5 billion in equity to hire roughly 55 people from LoveFrom, including ex-Apple design leaders Evans Hankey, Tang Tan, and Scott Cannon. They’ll report to Peter Welinder, a veteran OpenAI product leader who reports directly to Altman. The rest of LoveFrom’s designers, including legends like Mike Matas, are staying put with Ive, who is currently designing the first-ever electric Ferrari and advising the man who introduced him to Altman, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. OpenAI’s press release says Ive and LoveFrom “will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI.”When LoveFrom’s existing client work is wrapped up, Ive and his design team plan to focus solely on OpenAI while staying independent. OpenAI, meanwhile, already has open “future of computing” roles for others to join the io team it brought over. One job listing for a senior research engineer says the ideal candidate has already “spent time in the weeds teaching models to speak and perceive.” (Total compensation: $460K to $555K plus equity.)The rough timeline that led up to this moment goes as follows: Altman and Ive met two years ago and decided to officially work on hardware together this time last year. The io division was set up at LoveFrom to work with a small group of OpenAI employees. OpenAI and Laurene Powell Jobs invested in the effort toward the end of 2024, when there were quiet talks of raising hundreds of millions of dollars to make it a fully standalone company. (The OpenAI startup fund, which is bizarrely not owned by OpenAI, also invested around this time.) Importantly, Ive ended his consulting relationship with Apple in 2022, the year before he met Altman. That deal was highly lucrative for Ive, but kept him from working on products that could compete with Apple’s. Now, Ive and Altman are teaming up to announce what I expect to be a voice-first AI device later next year. Early prototypes of the device exist (Altman mentioned taking one home in his promo video with Ive). Altman told OpenAI employees this week that it will be able to sit on a desk or be carried around. Supply chain rumors suggest it will be roughly the size of an iPod Shuffle and also be worn like a necklace. Like just about every other big hardware company, Ive and Altman have also been working on AI earbuds. Altman is set on bundling hardware as an upsell for ChatGPT subscriptions and envisions a suite of AI-first products that help lessen the company’s reliance on Apple and Google for distribution. With his Apple relationship in the rear-view mirror, Ive now seems set on unseating the company he helped build. Google, meanwhile, was firing on all cylinders this week. AI Mode in Google Search is being rolled out widely. Its product strategy is still disjointed compared to OpenAI’s, but it’s starting to leverage the immense amount of personal data it has on people to differentiate what Gemini can do. If Gemini can hook into Gmail, Workspace, YouTube, etc., in a way that people want to use, it will likely keep many people from shifting to ChatGPT — just like Meta did to Snapchat with Stories in Instagram. After meeting with Google employees up and down the org chart, I came away from I/O with the feeling that the company doesn’t see a catastrophe on the horizon like a lot of outsiders. There’s a recognition that the ability to buy out distribution for search on Apple devices is probably coming to a close, but Gemini is approaching 500 million monthly users. ChatGPT is undoubtedly eating into search (it’s impossible to get Google execs to comment on the actual health of query volume), but Google has shown a willingness to modernize search faster than I expected. The situation differs from Apple, which isn’t competitive in the model race and is suffering from the kind of political infighting that Google mostly worked through over the last couple of years.There’s also no question that Google is well-positioned to continue leading on the frontier of model development. The latest Gemini models are very good, and Google is clearly positioning its AI for a post-phone world with Project Astra. The company also has the compute to roll out tools like the impressive new Veo video model, while OpenAI’s Sora remains heavily gated due to GPU constraints. It’s still quite possible that ChatGPT’s growth continues unabated while Gemini struggles to become a household name. That would be a generational shift in how people use technology that would hurt Google’s business over the long term. For now, though, it looks like Google might be okay. ElsewhereAnthropic couldn’t sit this week out either. The company held an event on Thursday in San Francisco to debut its Claude 4 models, which it claims are the world’s best for coding. With OpenAI, Google, and Meta all battling to win the interface layer of AI, Anthropic is positioning itself as the model arms dealer of choice. It was telling that Windsurf, which is in talks to sell to OpenAI, was seemingly intentionally left out of getting day-one access to the new models. “If models are countries, this is the equivalent of a trade ban,” Nathan Benaich wrote on X. (Also, what does it say about the state of the industry when the supposed safety-first AI lab is releasing models that it knows want to blackmail people?) Microsoft Build was overshadowed by protests. There were several interesting announcements at Build this week, including Elon Musk’s Grok model coming to Azure and Microsoft’s bet on how to evolve the plumbing of the web for AI agents. All of that was overshadowed by protestors who kept disrupting the company’s keynotes to protest the business it does with Israel. The situation has gotten so tense that Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to block the ability for employees to send internal emails with the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “Genocide.” I tried Google’s smart glasses prototype. I spent about five minutes wearing the reference design prototype of Google’s new smart glasses. They had a small, low-res waveguide in the center of each lens that showed voice interactions with Gemini, a basic version of Google Maps directions, and photos I took. They were… fine? Google knows this tech is super early and that full AR glasses are still years away. In the meantime, it’s smart of them to partner with Warby Parker, Gentle Monster, and Kering to put Android XR in glasses that I expect to start coming out next year. With Apple now planning a similar pair of AI-powered glasses in 2026, Meta’s window of being the only major player in the space is closing.Personnel logYouTube hired Justin Connolly from Disney as its head of media and sports, a move that Disney is suing over. Tinder CEO Faye Iosotaluno is stepping down. Her role will now be overseen by parent company Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff. Vladimir Fedorov, a longtime Meta engineering exec, joined Github as CTO.Will Robinson, Coinbase’s former VP of engineering, has joined Plaid as CTO.Stephen Deadman, Meta’s VP of data protection in Europe, is leaving due to “structural changes.”Link listMore to click on:If you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe to The Verge, which includes unlimited access to Command Line and all of our reporting.As always, I welcome your feedback, especially if you have thoughts on this issue, an opinion about stackable simulations, or a story idea to share. 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It seems like a triumph for a cryptocurrency industry that has long sought mainstream acceptance: Top investors in one of President Donald Trump’s crypto projects invited to dine with him at his luxury golf club in Northern Virginia on the heels of the Senate advancing key pro-crypto legislation and while bitcoin prices soar.But Thursday night’s dinner for the 220 biggest investors in the $TRUMP meme coin has raised uncomfortable questions about potentially shadowy buyers using the anonymity of the internet to buy access to the president.While Democrats charge that Trump is using the power of the presidency to boost profits for his family business, even some pro-Trump crypto enthusiasts worry that the president’s push into meme coins isn’t helping their efforts to establish the credibility, stability and legitimacy they had thought his administration would bring to their businesses.After feeling unfairly targeted by the Biden administration, the industry has quickly become a dominant political force, donating huge sums to help Trump and crypto-friendly lawmakers. But that’s also served to tether the industry—sometimes uncomfortably—to a president who is using crypto as a platform to make money for his brand in unprecedented ways.“It’s distasteful and an unnecessary distraction,” said Nic Carter, a Trump supporter and partner at the crypto investment firm Castle Island Ventures, who said the president is “hugging us to death” with his private crypto businesses. “We would much rather that he passes common-sense legislation and leave it at that.” Concerns about Trump’s crypto ventures predate Inauguration Day At the swanky Crypto Ball held down the street from the White House three days before he took office on Jan. 20, Trump announced the creation of the meme coin $TRUMP as a way for his supporters to “have fun.”Meme coins are the crypto sector’s black sheep. They are often created as a joke, with no real utility and prone to extremely wild price swings that tend to enrich a small group of insiders at the expense of less sophisticated investors.The president’s meme coin is different, however, and has a clear utility: access to Trump. The top 25 investors of $TRUMP are set to attend a private reception with the president Thursday, with the top four getting $100,000 crypto-themed and Trump-branded watches.Trump’s meme coin saw an initial spike in value, followed by a steep drop. The price saw a significant increase after the dinner contest was announced. Its creators, which include an entity controlled by the Trump Organization, have made hundreds of millions of dollars by collecting fees on trades.First lady Melania Trump has her own meme coin, and Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr.—who are running the Trump Organization while their father is president—announced they are partnering with an existing firm to create a crypto mining company.The Trump family also holds about a 60% stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto project that provides yet another avenue where investors are buying in and enriching the president’s relatives. World Liberty has launched its own stablecoin, USD1. The project got a boost recently when World Liberty announced an investment fund in the United Arab Emirates would be using $2 billion worth of USD1 to purchase a stake in Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.A rapidly growing form of crypto, stablecoins have values pegged to fixed assets like the U.S. dollar. Issuers profit by collecting the interest on the Treasury bonds and other assets used to back the stablecoins.Crypto is now one of the most significant sources of the Trump family’s wealth.“He’s becoming a salesman-in-chief,” said James Thurber, an American University professor emeritus who has long studied and taught about corruption around the world. “It allows for foreign influence easily. It allows for crypto lobbying going on at this dinner, and other ways. It allows for huge conflicts of interest.” How Trump changed his mind on crypto “I’m a big crypto fan,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One during last week’s trip to the Middle East. “I’ve been that from the beginning, right from the campaign.”That wasn’t always true. During his first term, Trump posted in July 2019 that cryptocurrencies were “not money” and had value that was “highly volatile and based on thin air.”“Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade,” he added then. Even after leaving office in 2021, Trump told Fox Business Network that bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, “seems like a scam.”Trump began to shift during a crypto event at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in May 2024, receiving assurances that industry backers would spend lavishly to get him reelected. Another major milestone came last June, when Trump attended a high-dollar fundraiser at the San Francisco home of David Sacks.He further warmed to the industry weeks later, when Trump met at Mar-a-Lago with bitcoin miners. The following month, he addressed a major crypto conference in Nashville, promising to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.”Those close to Trump, including his sons and billionaire Elon Musk, helped further push his embrace of the industry. Sacks is now the Trump administration’s crypto czar, and many Cabinet members—including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—have long been enthusiastic crypto boosters.“I don’t have faith in the dollar,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a 2023 interview. “I’m bullish on bitcoin.” Trump + crypto: A political marriage of convenience Many top crypto backers were naturally wary of traditional politics, but gravitated toward Trump last year. They bristled at Democratic President Joe Biden ‘s Securities and Exchange Commission aggressively bringing civil suits against several major crypto companies.Since Trump took office, many such cases have been dropped or paused, including one alleging that Justin Sun, a China-born crypto entrepreneur, and his company engaged in market manipulation and paid celebrities for undisclosed promotions.Sun, who once paid $6.2 million for a piece of art involving a banana taped to a wall, and then ate the banana, helped the Trumps start World Liberty Financial with an early $75 million investment.Sun has disclosed on social media that he is the biggest holder of $TRUMP meme coins and is attending Thursday’s dinner.“I’m excited to connect with everyone, talk crypto, and discuss the future of our industry,” Sun said. Are Trump family profits hurting other crypto investors? Trump has signed executive orders promoting the industry, including calls to create a government bitcoin reserve. In March, Trump convened the first cryptocurrency summit at the White House.But some of the industry’s biggest names, often brash and outspoken, have kept mostly mum on Trump’s meme coins and other projects.“It’s not my place to really comment on President Trump’s activity,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said at a recent public event.Meanwhile, a top legislative priority for crypto-backers, a bill clarifying how digital assets are to be regulated, has advanced in the Senate. But some Democrats have tried to stall other pro-crypto legislation over the president’s personal dealings.“Never in American history has a sitting president so blatantly violated the ethics laws,” Democratic Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts said during a contentious House hearing earlier this month.The White House referred questions about dinner attendees to the Trump Organization, which didn’t provide a list of who is coming.“The President is working to secure GOOD deals for the American people, not for himself,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement.In addition to Sun, however, some attendees have publicized qualifying for the dinner. Another will be Sheldon Xia, the founder of a cryptocurrency exchange called BitMart that’s registered in the Cayman Islands.“Proud to support President Trump’s pro-crypto vision.” Xia wrote in both English and Chinese on social media.Thurber, the expert on government and ethics, said Trump’s “personal attention to crypto at this dinner helps the crypto industry.”“But also it’s risky,” he said, “because they could all lose a lot of money.” —Will Weissert and Alan Suderman, Associated Press

Plenty of sensitive data was stolen after contractors were bribed.