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Sam Altman's World ID project is taking an unusual turn, partnering with Jared Leto's band Thirty Seconds to Mars to get concert-goers to scan their eyeballs at shows. The idea is to normalize biometric identity verification through live entertainment — which tells you something about how hard it is to convince people to hand over their iris data voluntarily.
Meanwhile, Spotify and Universal Music Group are launching a licensed AI remix platform that lets fans create covers and remixes while compensating participating artists and songwriters. It's a notable shift from the industry's usual posture toward AI-generated music, and it raises real questions about what counts as creativity, what counts as compensation, and who actually benefits when a fan reimagines someone else's song.
And in the Ethereum world, prominent researcher Dankrad Feist is proposing a one billion dollar ETH organization, taking what appear to be pointed shots at co-founder Vitalik Buterin in the process. Governance battles in open-source crypto projects are nothing new, but when the numbers get that large, the philosophical disagreements tend to get a lot more personal.
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