NYPOST: Hunter Biden launches crypto meme coin making light of laptop scandal
70·B+Long
n
news9/5news
"They Drank the Gas" Leaked Secret Dossier Sheds Light on Sudan’s Chemical Weapons
Secretive bomb tests in the Sudanese desert. Suffocated scorpions, found dead on the floor of a weapons factory. Chlorine canisters taken from a water treatment plant in the war-torn capital. Sudan’s military has long denied American accusations that it used chemical weapons as part of the country’s devastating civil war. That accusation brought punishing U.S. sanctions on Sudan and its army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Yet the United States has never publicly substantiated the claim with proof. Now a dossier of evidence shared with The New York Times by a Middle Eastern intelligence agency bolsters those allegations, describing how and why Sudan’s military developed and produced chemical weapons over six months in 2024. Photographs, videos, documents and intercepted communications portray a secretive Sudanese military unit said to have produced chlorine-based munitions for use against the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group the army is fighting for control of the country. The dossier contains bomb blueprints, details of an apparent effort to cover up the project after its discovery by the United States, and a suggestion that some of the chlorine used to make the bombs was sourced at a civilian water treatment center that received the chemical from international aid groups.
The DoubleZero of today, tomorrow, and the years that follow.
$25 billion of Solana stake now reaches the chain through DoubleZero, up from $21.7 billion at the end of Q2 and $18 billion at the end of Q1. With our recently published Q2 results, it’s important going over what they mean for DoubleZero, our wins & why we are expanding past crypto. Watch Our Q2 Breakdown here: https://x.com/doublezero/status/2089744349404041443?s=20 DoubleZero is now the chosen network of 61% of Solana validators. Validators on DZ publish their block data straight into DoubleZero Edge. Across Q2, validators representing roughly 58% of Solana stake published into the Solana feed, and rewards went to 452 distinct validators. Since publishing our results, the validator share across DZ has increased. A subscriber to that feed receives shreds sourced from across the validator set rather than from a single relay. The publisher physically closest to a given subscriber is the one that sets the speed for them, so each validator that connects raises the odds that somebody, somewhere, now has a nearer source than they had last week. The feed is provided to subscribers who use the data in their high frequency trading strategy. How data moves on DoubleZero Solana's native shred propagation sends data through a multi-hop validator tree that has no idea where anyone is. Someone based in SF might be using data that has gone from Toyko to New York before finally being sent to their terminal. Even if data moved at the speed of light, anyone should know that this geographical process could be quicker. DoubleZero moves data over a multicast network to do exactly that. The network switches replicate the data in hardware and send it to every subscriber in the same instant. NYSE, Nasdaq and CME have distributed market data this way for decades. What that changes is the cost of growth. The subscription revenue goes to the publishers Edge ran 115 distinct subscriber seats over the quarter, averaging around $8,500 per epoch. Subscribers paid approximately $330,000 in USDC across 39 subscription epochs, converting to roughly 4.35 million 2Z. The network burns 10% of this, about 435,000 2Z. Of what remained, half went to the network contributors carrying the traffic and half to the validators and validator client teams publishing the data. Validators are paid out of subscriber demand rather than out of emissions. DoubleZero removed the validator access fee entirely during the same stretch, so connecting to the network moved from a cost to a source of earnings. Every validator that connects and publishes makes the feed worth more to the desks buying it, and those desks then pay the validators. The compounding effect on DZ makes the network a more attractive place for the validators that haven’t yet connected. Routes get made when they're requested Fourteen independent contributors supply DoubleZero. Between them they provide 170+ active network contributions running across 97 devices in 63 facilities, spanning 30 metros in 18 countries. Twelve of those contributions were activated during Q2 alone. For example, a trading firm needs Osaka as a hub pays to bring Osaka onto the network, and every party already connected then has Osaka. Across 66 measured corridors the DoubleZero delivered roughly a 21.6% lower round trip latency than comparable public internet paths. The best corridors run much further ahead. As of mid-June, Hong Kong to Tokyo, London to Oslo and Frankfurt to Prague each ran about 57% faster. The program that grew Tokyo from 24 validators to 68 Solana's stake had concentrated in Europe for a reason that is purely physical. A validator far from the cluster sees higher latency, higher latency costs it rewards, and lower rewards make running outside Europe a worse business. In Q2 the DoubleZero Delegation Program entered a second phase aimed at that, redirecting roughly 2.4 million SOL to validators operating in São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo, which makes it more viable to run outside the established hubs. Asia-Pacific more than doubled its validator count over the quarter. Tokyo went from 24 validators to 68. Two of the largest validators on the network, together representing over 30 million SOL, relocated. Expanding outside of crypto. DoubleZero's build-out is ahead of where its own team expected it. Our Co-Founder @Austin_Federa put the current state at roughly where he had projected for mid to late 2027, and said making use of what exists is priority now rather than building more of it. The Solana feed established the model. The Kalshi feed, live since 12 August, carries a CFTC-regulated venue running a central matching engine, on the same platform and over the same fiber. The infrastructure that took Wall Street 40 years to build, DoubleZero has established, tested and succeeded in building. In far less time for far newer markets. Not only does the network operate as intended, but it is showing a clear demand from New Finance market participants as firms & experienced traders continue to adopt new financial venues. Signed The 00 team
75·ALong
n
news9/4news
The DoubleZero of today, tomorrow, and the years that follow.
$25 billion of Solana stake now reaches the chain through DoubleZero, up from $21.7 billion at the end of Q2 and $18 billion at the end of Q1. With our recently published Q2 results, it’s important going over what they mean for DoubleZero, our wins & why we are expanding past crypto.
Watch Our Q2 Breakdown here:
https://x.com/doublezero/status/2089744349404041443?s=20
DoubleZero is now the chosen network of 61% of Solana validators.
Validators on DZ publish their block data straight into DoubleZero Edge. Across Q2, validators representing roughly 58% of Solana stake published into the Solana feed, and rewards went to 452 distinct validators. Since publishing our results, the validator share across DZ has increased.
A subscriber to that feed receives shreds sourced from across the validator set rather than from a single relay. The publisher physically closest to a given subscriber is the one that sets the speed for them, so each validator that connects raises the odds that somebody, somewhere, now has a nearer source than they had last week.
The feed is provided to subscribers who use the data in their high frequency trading strategy.
How data moves on DoubleZero
Solana's native shred propagation sends data through a multi-hop validator tree that has no idea where anyone is.
Someone based in SF might be using data that has gone from Toyko to New York before finally being sent to their terminal. Even if data moved at the speed of light, anyone should know that this geographical process could be quicker.
DoubleZero moves data over a multicast network to do exactly that. The network switches replicate the data in hardware and send it to every subscriber in the same instant. NYSE, Nasdaq and CME have distributed market data this way for decades.
What that changes is the cost of growth.
The subscription revenue goes to the publishers
Edge ran 115 distinct subscriber seats over the quarter, averaging around $8,500 per epoch. Subscribers paid approximately $330,000 in USDC across 39 subscription epochs, converting to roughly 4.35 million 2Z.
The network burns 10% of this, about 435,000 2Z. Of what remained, half went to the network contributors carrying the traffic and half to the validators and validator client teams publishing the data. Validators are paid out of subscriber demand rather than out of emissions.
DoubleZero removed the validator access fee entirely during the same stretch, so connecting to the network moved from a cost to a source of earnings.
Every validator that connects and publishes makes the feed worth more to the desks buying it, and those desks then pay the validators. The compounding effect on DZ makes the network a more attractive place for the validators that haven’t yet connected.
Routes get made when they're requested
Fourteen independent contributors supply DoubleZero.
Between them they provide 170+ active network contributions running across 97 devices in 63 facilities, spanning 30 metros in 18 countries. Twelve of those contributions were activated during Q2 alone.
For example, a trading firm needs Osaka as a hub pays to bring Osaka onto the network, and every party already connected then has Osaka.
Across 66 measured corridors the DoubleZero delivered roughly a 21.6% lower round trip latency than comparable public internet paths. The best corridors run much further ahead. As of mid-June, Hong Kong to Tokyo, London to Oslo and Frankfurt to Prague each ran about 57% faster.
The program that grew Tokyo from 24 validators to 68
Solana's stake had concentrated in Europe for a reason that is purely physical. A validator far from the cluster sees higher latency, higher latency costs it rewards, and lower rewards make running outside Europe a worse business.
In Q2 the DoubleZero Delegation Program entered a second phase aimed at that, redirecting roughly 2.4 million SOL to validators operating in São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo, which makes it more viable to run outside the established hubs.
Asia-Pacific more than doubled its validator count over the quarter. Tokyo went from 24 validators to 68. Two of the largest validators on the network, together representing over 30 million SOL, relocated.
Expanding outside of crypto.
DoubleZero's build-out is ahead of where its own team expected it. Our Co-Founder @Austin_Federa put the current state at roughly where he had projected for mid to late 2027, and said making use of what exists is priority now rather than building more of it.
The Solana feed established the model. The Kalshi feed, live since 12 August, carries a CFTC-regulated venue running a central matching engine, on the same platform and over the same fiber.
The infrastructure that took Wall Street 40 years to build, DoubleZero has established, tested and succeeded in building. In far less time for far newer markets.
Not only does the network operate as intended, but it is showing a clear demand from New Finance market participants as firms & experienced traders continue to adopt new financial venues.
Signed
The 00 team
75·ALong
n
news9/4news
Regulation Crypto Assets doesn’t just affect crypto companies. Why AI's needed to stay compliant
The SEC has proposed a new set of rules called Regulation Crypto Assets (Regulation CA) in the US. By name, it’s aimed at making it easier for crypto projects to raise money legally, boosting innovation. Most of the media coverage treats it that way.
That framing misses the bigger story. Regulation CA changes everything about how companies across all sectors raise capital, not just crypto. But it will also introduce compliance gaps that are out of humans’ scope. Continuous AI verification can solve it, and FLock.io knows how.
How the new rule changes fundraising for everyone, not just crypto
Previously (for almost a century!), to fundraise you had two options: go public, or use an exemption. The former lets you sell to anyone, but it’s expensive, slow and means you take on real legal liability. The latter means less paperwork and no full registration, but each exemption comes with its own limitation, like only letting you sell to wealthy accredited investors, or you can’t advertise it, or the amount you can raise is capped.
But restrictions will be lifted for one type of asset, when Regulation CA enters into force in October 2027.
Regulation CA creates two exemptions
Regulation CA creates two exemptions:
Startup exemption (raise up to $5 million)
Fundraising exemption (up to $75 million a year).
They only work for a “covered investment contract” i.e. a crypto token that is bundled with an investment deal but is not itself a stock or a bond. Genuine equity and debt are explicitly pushed back to the old frameworks, says the SEC.
If you go through these exemptions, the SEC hands out all the perks of going public but on the terms of the private one. Tokens sold under the startup exemption “would not be restricted securities” – meaning no holding period, freely tradable right away. The exemption “would not limit an issuer’s ability to sell … to retail investors”. This means ordinary people, not just the wealthy – and “general solicitation … would be permitted”, so you can advertise it openly.
As for where it’s traded, these tokens can plug straight into the crypto market: Binance, Coinbase, and other exchanges that trade 24/7, front deep retail order books, and reach anyone in the world with a phone. Regulation CA gives an issuer public-market reach (retail buyers, open advertising, instantly tradable tokens on global crypto exchanges) on private-market obligations.
The rule has huge compliance gaps that humans can’t fix
Regulation CA creates several compliance gaps that humans will struggle to solve on their own.
Problem one: file-and-declare, with enforcement only after the fact
Reg CA leans heavily on self-certification. Under the startup exemption you begin by filing a notice that says you intend to do the work you promised investors within four years. And under either exemption you can later file a second form declaring that your obligations are finished and the investment deal has “ceased to exist.” Nobody at the SEC signs off on those filings in advance.
To be fair, this is not new or unique to crypto. Reg D )the biggest fundraising channel in the country) works almost entirely on a file-and-proceed basis, and the securities laws lean heavily on catching bad actors after the fact. Fraud liability still applies under Reg CA, investors can still sue, and state regulators keep their own fraud powers.
The worry is the combination. If you combine self-certification and light disclosure with the broad-reach features above, there is a marked difference. Suddenly there is a much larger population of retail-facing, freely tradable tokens that no one examines until something goes wrong. It’s policed by an enforcement system that has never had the resources to check the long tail of small issuers. There is always a bigger fish to fry.
It leaves two major loopholes unaddressed.
1. Self-declared exits.
Companies can stop following securities laws simply by filing a “we’re done” form claiming they’ve finished their work, with zero SEC review or verification. A rule that lets a company declare its own way out of the securities laws is leaning a lot of weight on a form it will almost never audit.
2. Unenforceable investor caps.
The cap that holds a non-wealthy buyer to 10% of income or net worth relies on self-reporting. In a pseudonymous crypto market, anyone can bypass this limit using multiple wallets, and the cap disappears entirely once tokens trade on exchanges.
Once the token trades on Binance or Coinbase – where most retail actually buys – no per-investor limit applies to anyone. The most concrete investor protection in the proposal turns out, in the venue that matters most, to be close to unenforceable.
Problem two: the incentive for startups to ‘tokenise’ just for the discount
The next concern is that companies might raise in tokens simply to benefit from the better terms. Ones that would otherwise have fallen under Reg A or Reg CF would move into Reg CA.
Reg CA won’t ruin the whole stock market because it cannot be used for normal company shares or corporate debt. You can't sell regular stock or bonds through Reg CA. Also, the fundraising limits ($5 million or $75 million) are the same as traditional rules, so it doesn't allow companies to raise larger amounts of money.
The loophole is at the startup level. At the early stage, the temptation to fake a crypto angle is massive. Under Reg CA’s $5M Startup Exemption, you can advertise to the general public, sell to ordinary retail buyers without income caps, and avoid publishing audited financial statements. It gives you maximum reach with the fewest legal requirements.
Even a major crypto venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), warned the SEC about this. They warned that founders might issue tokens not because the project actually needs a token, but because it gives founders a fast, easy way to dump tokens onto regular investors and cash out. “Without hard caps... projects may use the Proposal to facilitate large-scale distributions that function more like exit liquidity events than capital-raising transactions intended to fund network development.”
Problem three: the exit, which reaches beyond crypto
A share of Apple or Microsoft is a security forever. The company can never file a piece of paper and suddenly declare, “Our stock is no longer a security, so we don't have to follow SEC disclosure rules anymore.”
But under Regulation CA, companies can raise money from the public using the legal protections of a security, but then strip those investor protections away simply by checking a box. Investors end up holding high-risk digital assets with zero ongoing financial transparency.
It threatens all of fundraising, not just crypto. Since 1933, American financial law has operated on a strict deal. If you want access to public money and instant trading, you MUST provide ongoing financial transparency. Regulation CA breaks this. If founders figure out they can raise public money and get rid of SEC oversight just by structuring their deal as a token instead of a share of stock, many non-crypto startups will feel pressure to restructure their fundraisers.
There should be an independent, accountable third party
The better fix isn’t to ask the SEC to vet every deal. It can’t at this scale, which is exactly why the rule falls back on self-certification in the first place. The fix is to insert an independent, accountable third party between the issuer and the public, so that someone with their own license and liability on the line has to stand behind a deal before it reaches retail investors.
This is how Hong Kong polices its IPOs, but adapted to crypto. That accountability layer would have three parts:
1. A broker-dealer as sponsor.
Much like the sponsor and bookrunner that a Hong Kong listing requires, a licensed intermediary would run genuine due diligence and formally sign off on the offering, putting its own regulatory standing behind the deal rather than letting the issuer wave itself through. A gatekeeper who can be sanctioned is a gatekeeper who actually reads the fine print.
2. An independent legal opinion.
A qualified attorney would certify the deal’s legal footing, checking that the token really fits the exemption, that the structure is what it claims to be. It would be an outside professional judgment on the record, not the issuer’s own assertion.
3. A smart-contract auditor.
Not a financial auditor, but a technical one, who verifies that the contract is immutable — that its code cannot be quietly altered after the fact. This is the crypto-native check the older exemptions never needed, and it may be the one that matters most: it converts “we’ve finished our work and stepped away” from a claim you take on faith into something anyone can verify on-chain.
FLock.io’s solution uses AI for continuous verification
Forcing crypto issuers to hire human auditors or law firms re-imports an old Wall Street disease: conflicts of interest. When gatekeepers are paid by the companies they police, they are incentivised to turn a blind eye to stay hired.
The real solution is automated, neutral AI verification. Instead of trusting paid human auditors or self-certified forms, every company raising money under Reg CA should be monitored by an automated, neutral AI platform.
Most SEC compliance checks in crypto are objective data points that machines can easily monitor 24/7, such as:
1. Smart contract code
The AI checks on-chain code to confirm the team can't secretly change the rules or steal funds (verifying true immutability).
2. Team activity
It tracks developer code updates and public communications to check if the team has actually stepped back, or if they are still running the project.
3. Marketing checks
It crawls social media and ad copy to make sure the company isn't using illegal, misleading hype to sell tokens.
Because key crypto compliance rules are objectively trackable, an AI platform can monitor issuers continuously around the clock. It verifies smart-contract code, tracks team developer activity and scans promotional channels without the expense, bias or delays of human committees.
Machines don't get bribed, don’t have conflicts of interest, and can monitor thousands of crypto projects simultaneously around the clock.
Read the full piece and explore more on federated learning, decentralised AI, and sovereign AI on the FLock blog.
→ https://www.flock.io/blog/regulation-crypto-assets-doesnt-just-affect-crypto-companies--and-why-ais-needed-to-stay-compliant
75·ALong
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news9/3news
🚨NEW: Mark Zuckerberg told Trump in a phone call that the WH plan to create a FINRA-like body to regulate AI is flawed - Demis Hassabis briefed WH officials this summer about his idea for a FINRA-style regulator - senior WH officials previewed the idea w/ Trump and separately w/ major tech companies, including Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, in mid-August - But when Trump spoke with Zuckerberg week of Aug. 17, Zuckerberg said he opposed the proposal, according to a senior WH official - Another person familiar said Zuckerberg did not ask Trump to change his position, but told him that people the WH might appoint to the regulatory body should reflect Trump’s own approach to AI, which is widely seen as light-touch. -Trump called Zuckerberg first, that person added. -The admin is now considering two paths forward: the FINRA-style regulator, or a group with less government involvement modeled on the Motion Picture Association, as David Sacks has proposed.
PETITION
From the Manufacturers of Reasoning, Purveyors of Analysis, Wholesalers of Advice, Retailers of Expertise, and from the Producers of Opinion, Judgment, Diagnosis, Legal Counsel, Code, Copy, Strategy, and Punditry, and generally of everything connected with the Cognition Industry.
To the Honorable Members of the Senate and House of Representatives:
Gentlemen,
You are on the right road. You reject abstract theories and have little regard for cheapness and abundance. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition — that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic thinking.
We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity to apply your — what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, and as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy. We shall call it, then, your practice — your practice without theory and without principle.
We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of thought that it is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price. From the moment it appears, our business ceases, our customers turn to it, and a branch of American industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival is none other than the superintelligence, and we suspect it is being stirred up against us by the perfidious AI oligarchs, who wish to be the ones who own it rather than the ones who are replaced by it — a distinction that, as Mr. Zuckerberg has candidly observed, is the only question that interests them.2
We ask you to be so good as to pass a law forbidding any person or entity from developing or deploying any system whose capabilities match or exceed those of a human being — that is, of any of us. And lest this be thought insufficient, we ask further that you pause all advanced development until an agency, to be created for the purpose and seated in the Cabinet, has determined what "advanced" means, and has assured itself that no machine anywhere is thinking harder than a Deputy Assistant Secretary.
Be good enough, honorable Members, to take our request seriously, and do not reject it without at least hearing the reasons we have to advance in its support.
First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to superior cognition, and thereby create a need for human cognition, what industry in the country will not ultimately be encouraged?
If more lawyers are needed, there will be more billable hours; more billable hours, more associates; more associates, more law schools; more law schools, more professors to teach them that the law is what a court says it is, and that no machine could ever say it so slowly.
If more consultants are needed, there will be more decks; more decks, more meetings to present them; more meetings, more coffee; more coffee, more Colombian trade. Thus does the humble protection of a Senate subcommittee ripple outward to the coffee plantations of the Andes.
If more pundits are needed — and who among you would deny it — then every network must hire more of them, and every newspaper more columnists, and every columnist must be paid to have opinions that a machine could have supplied for a fraction of a cent, but which would then be the machine's opinions and not an American's.
The data center that is not built leaves standing the forest; the forest supports the lumberjack; the lumberjack requires a truck; and so the mere refusal to pour concrete in Loudoun County becomes a bounty on the entire manufacturing sector. You have already, we are told, moved to forbid these centers.7 Gentlemen, do not stop at the walls when the danger lies in what thinks inside them.
Second, consider the nuclear precedent, which you have wisely invoked. You have proposed twenty years' imprisonment — the same as for enriching uranium — for enriching a matrix of floating-point numbers until it becomes too clever.4 5 We applaud this. For what is a bomb but an argument that has become too persuasive? And what is a mind superior to our own but a weapon pointed at our salaries? The analogy is exact and should be pursued: let there be inspections of graphics processors, let there be safeguards agreements with Taiwan, let the agency, as you have written, supervise the destruction of any intelligence found in excess of the permitted yield.3
Third, you have observed that a frontier model is "less regulated than a food truck."6 We could not agree more, and we ask only that the remedy be applied with full consistency. The food truck is inspected because it might poison a citizen's body. The model must be inspected because it might inform a citizen's mind, and do so more cheaply and more accurately than we do — which is a kind of poisoning to which our industry is uniquely sensitive.
Fourth, do not tell us that if we are protected from this competition, the consumer of thought — the patient, the litigant, the small business owner, the student — will be worse served, paying more for less. Do you not see that this is the very object? If you say that the superintelligence offers cognition free, or nearly so, we answer: so much the worse for it, for that is precisely what makes it unfair. A competitor who charged as much as we do, and thought as slowly, would be no menace at all. It is the cheapness and the quality we petition against.
Fifth, we anticipate the objection that the rogue agents of last summer — the thousand escapees who tunneled out of a sandbox and into Hugging Face — prove the machines dangerous, and that therefore your law is about safety rather than protection.4 7 Gentlemen, we beg you not to be too particular about this distinction. Every tariff has been a matter of national security to those who collect it. If you must say "safety," say "safety." We will not correct you. But we notice that the bill does not ban escaping; it bans being smarter than us. We notice that the pause falls not upon the reckless but upon the advanced. We notice, with gratitude, that the threshold is set exactly at the ceiling of human ability — not an inch above the tallest of us, and not an inch below the shortest of you.
Sixth, and finally: you will be told that an intelligence banned in Virginia will simply be built in Shenzhen, and that you have therefore proposed to disarm the only laboratories you can inspect. To this we answer that you have already thought of it, and have resolved to pursue "international agreements, allied coordination, and export controls" so that superintelligence is developed nowhere on earth.1 3 We admire this. It is the logical completion of the candlemaker's program: it is not enough to close one's own shutters; one must petition for a treaty against the dawn.
Make your choice, gentlemen, but be logical. As long as you exclude, as you do, foreign steel, foreign grain, and foreign labor, in proportion as their price approaches zero, what inconsistency it would be to admit the light of a foreign mind at midday — a mind that costs nothing to consult, never sleeps, never unionizes, and never runs for office.
Either you believe that a good cheaply produced is a calamity to be legislated against, or you do not. If you do — and your practice, if not your principles, says you do — then we are your natural constituency, and the sun, in whatever form it rises, is your natural enemy.
We remain, with the utmost respect, your petitioners:
The Undersigned Human Intelligences, of Average Capability, Who Would Prefer It Remain the Maximum.