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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is suing crypto exchange Binance and its CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao on allegations of violating federal securities laws.

Cryptocurrency’s virtual reality sector has surged by almost 8% over the past 24 hours as investors anticipate Apple’s VR headset reveal on Monday.

Stablecoin issuer Tether has backed a startup called Volcano Energy that aims to build a bitcoin mining farm in El Salvador.

Tether has invested in Volcano Energy’s first round of funding, it announced Monday. The first round is worth $250 million and Tether backed only a part of this round, Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino told The Block.

It is unclear whether the total $250 million in funding has been raised. Volcano Energy did not immediately respond to The Block’s request for comment.

“Tether is one of the investors and the current size of our investment in Volcano Energy is quite contained, being well within our own excess reserves, so it’s not taken from the reserves backing the tokens,” Ardoino told The Block. Tether’s excess reserves are its profits, on top of the 100% minimum reserves the company holds to back all issued tokens. Its excess reserves stood at around $2.5 billion at the end of the first quarter of this year.

Volcano Energy is co-led by Josue Lopez, a 23-year-old bitcoin advocate from El Salvador who serves as the CEO, and Max Keiser, who serves as chairman and is an advisor to El Salvador President Nayib Bukele. 

The size of the planned bitcoin mining farm is 241 megawatts (MW) — to be divided between 169 MW of photovoltaic solar energy and 72 MW of wind energy — in Metapan, a municipality in El Salvador, located in the Santa Ana department. This output is expected to generate a computing power of over 1.3 EH/s (exahashes per second). One EH/s is equivalent to one quintillion hashes per second.

“We are excited to be among the initial pioneers of renewable energy in El Salvador as an equity investor and advisor,” said Ardoino. “This investment continues Tether’s journey in diversifying its strategic ecosystem.”

The news comes a week after Tether said it will produce energy and mine bitcoin in Uruguay.

Last month, the company said it will invest up to 15% of its profits in bitcoin on a regular basis to strengthen its reserves. Besides mining, Tether recently invested in CityPay.io, a payment processor based in Georgia.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Velodrome’s upgrade is slated for June 15 and is a complete overhaul of the protocol.

Some Consensus 2023 participants argue that the economic benefits of CBDCs are not worth the threats to privacy in an excerpt from CoinDesk’s first-ever Consensus @ Consensus Report.

Based on intimate, curated group discussions that took place at Consensus 2023, it covers a wide range of pressing issues for the digital assets industry.

The 241 MW site will be powered by wind and solar energy.

Binance.US has always claimed to be independent from Binance, a stance that may come under scrutiny following this news.

Its R stablecoin is collateralized by one crypto asset: liquid staking leader Lido’s staked ether (stETH).

Kraken’s new chief technology officer thinks it will be hard to ignore the growing impact of artificial intelligence and large language models, and he’s paying attention to areas where it could be deployed across the crypto industry.

“It will be interesting to see what business models sustain through the initial hype cycle and journey to product-market fit, revenue and ebitda,” Vishnu Patankar said in a blog post, in which he noted some fundamental differences between the two technologies. “It might be okay to have a 90% correct answer from an AI chatbot, but there’s less use for a password that is 90% correct.”

Patankar, whose appointment to Kraken was announced by the company on Monday, said that generative AI and personalization applied to NFTs, fraud prevention, cybersecurity are all “symbiotic areas” between crypto and AI. 

“Beyond these, both AI and crypto explore large amounts of data through massive computational power,” he said. “There are areas in computer science and physics that could lead to further breakthroughs over the next couple of decades. One area I’m excited by is quantum computing and its interplay with factorization of large numbers.”

Before joining Kraken, Patankar was the CTO at StockX, where he helped launch the company’s NFT offering. He brings more than 20 years of experience and has helped companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Intel and Groupon, Kraken said in an emailed statement on Monday.

Kraken said his focus will be on scaling the company into “the most promising areas of crypto” while maintaining a focus on security and clients.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.