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A federal task force has frozen three point eight million dollars in cryptocurrency tied to organized crime networks operating out of Southeast Asia, and the operation came with some notable help. Coinbase, SpaceX, and Meta all cooperated with the Department of Justice, marking a significant moment of coordination between Silicon Valley and federal law enforcement in the fight against crypto fraud.
From crypto crime to crypto as collateral — Coinbase is announcing what it calls a first: a Michigan couple has closed on a conventional home mortgage backed by Fannie Mae, using Bitcoin as collateral. If that arrangement scales, it could fundamentally reshape how Americans leverage digital assets to build traditional wealth, though the risks of collateral volatility are far from settled.
And in a story that sits at the intersection of mathematics and machine intelligence, a researcher appears to have made progress on a major unsolved problem in percolation theory — with meaningful assistance from ChatGPT. The details are still being scrutinized by the mathematical community, but if the result holds, it raises genuinely interesting questions about where AI fits in the practice of pure mathematics.
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