US heavy metal giants Metallica have warned fans to steer clear of crypto giveaway scams looking to piggyback on the news of the band’s upcoming new album and tour.

Despite the warnings, more than $7,000 worth of bitcoin and ether has been sent to crypto addresses linked to the con.

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The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) FTX may have serious repercussions for the Bahamas as a financial services jurisdiction and its ongoing efforts to be seen as a legitimate jurisdiction for crypto exchanges.

Politicians and regulatory authorities in the region are certainly aware of this risk and there's a consistent air of panic in their statements on the subject. And who can blame them when the stakes are so high.

Last week, member of parliament James Kwasi Thompson made a statement in support of the attorney general's comments on FTX. He also criticized the Bahamian government for causing "irreputable damage" to the country with its silence.

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Relm Insurance, a subsidiary of the Deltec International Group, the parent company of Deltec Bank & Trust, has issued a statement attempting to distance itself from the fallout from FTX and Alameda – companies it was, at least partially, insuring.

In a statement from CEO, Joseph Ziolkowski, Relm admits to insuring West Realm Shires (aka FTX US), FTX Australia Pty. Ltd., and "companies that have been compromised due to their relationship with FTX and Alameda.”

"Following a detailed review of our entire portfolio, we remain confident that we will continue to be well-capitalized to serve the needs of the industry as the fallout from this event evolves," wrote Ziolkowski.

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Sam Trabucco, former co-CEO of bankrupt crypto investing firm Alameda Research, purchased two luxury apartments in San Francisco last year, documents verified by Protos reveal.

Trabucco announced an early retirement just months before Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Alameda collapsed in November. He appears to have vanished entirely from social media — yet went on a massive all-cash property shopping spree in the run-up to the complete financial ruin of the company.

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DeFi has had a rough two years. During the halcyon days of DeFi Summer 2020, it promised to build an alternative to banks and the traditional financial system. Two years later, bad actors have stolen billions of dollars through a series of hacks, scams, and pyramid schemes and many are questioning how decentralized DeFi really is -- or ever was.

Returning to the word “decentralized,” many critics now view the descriptor as misleading. Is a DeFi protocol actually decentralized if it has, say, fewer than 50 liquidity providers, fewer than 50 controlling voters, or fewer than 50 Discord participants? What about if it has fewer than 50 GitHub commits or fewer than 50 administrators selecting governance topics and tabulating Snapshot.org votes?

By any of those standards, only a small handful of DeFi protocols would qualify.

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A compromised private key has led to an ‘infinite mint’ exploit targeting Ankr, with the fallout causing amplified collateral damage to stablecoin project Helio Money.

Ankr provides liquid staking services on Binance’s BNB blockchain, among others. Users can deposit BNB which is locked up to secure the chain under the Proof of Stake model, receiving a deposit token in return.

The exploited token, aBNBc, accumulates staking rewards via Ankr while allowing users to use their capital elsewhere in DeFi, or effectively withdraw their staking position by swapping back to BNB.

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As more and more of the tentacles from Alameda, FTX, and Sam Bankman-Fried are exposed within the financial system, regulators continue to be asked difficult questions in the wake of the devastation.

In a previous discussion with Protos, the Federal Reserve admitted, “Bad things can happen, even when you think things are in order.”

Most recently, we reached out to the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions (DFI), which had a much different perspective on the current state of regulatory affairs.

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Crypto lender BlockFi is blaming its recent bankruptcy on now-infamous Bahama’s-based exchange FTX, citing an unpaid and uncollateralized debt of $275 million.

However, despite the money owed from Sam Bankman-Fried’s imploding empire, BlockFi also lists more than $1 billion in additional uncollateralized debt to other borrowers and massive amounts of supposedly collateralized debt.

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Videogame giant Rockstar has announced new user guidelines for its roleplaying servers, that effectively outlaw the buying and selling of blockchain products.

As reported by TechRadar, the new measures will have a particular effect on Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto Online servers. Some gamers had been using these servers, many of which are not officially supervised by Rockstar, to trade digital assets like cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

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