Lawyers say privacy laws and AML laws sometimes conflict and there’s no clear path to compliance for decentralized blockchain projects. Crypto was originally most closely associated with anonymity, but in 2025, the crypto ecosystem has changed. User privacy is diminishing, as new laws in different jurisdictions across the globe require Know Your Customer and ID checks for wallets or exchange accounts to combat money laundering. The increasing sophistication of blockchain analysis tools means that every transaction has a transparent trail that can be traced back to its source. As a result, onchain privacy has become a major theme. In October, the Ethereum Foundation announced the formation of its Privacy Cluster, a group of some 47 researchers, engineers and cryptographers who are working to make the base layer of Ethereum private. Read more
Lawyers say privacy laws and AML laws sometimes conflict and there’s no clear path to compliance for decentralized blockchain projects. Crypto was originally most closely associated with anonymity, but in 2025, the crypto ecosystem has changed. User privacy is diminishing, as new laws in different jurisdictions across the globe require Know Your Customer and ID checks for wallets or exchange accounts to combat money laundering. The increasing sophistication of blockchain analysis tools means that every transaction has a transparent trail that can be traced back to its source. As a result, onchain privacy has become a major theme. In October, the Ethereum Foundation announced the formation of its Privacy Cluster, a group of some 47 researchers, engineers and cryptographers who are working to make the base layer of Ethereum private. Read more
With Predator: Badlands, director Dan Trachtenberg (of the brilliant 10 Cloverfield Lane) brings one of cinema’s most semi-appealing alien species closer to first-tier status — if not fully, then nearly. But to make it to the big league, the aliens from the hardcore hunting species, the Yautja (that’s their name) needed a bigger brand and a little mythic scaffolding: the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, the malevolent backbone of the Aliens franchise. For those to whom these names sound like gobbledygook, here’s the gist: since the first two Predator movies — the wildly popular 1987 original with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the less financially successful 1990 sequel with Danny Glover — the franchise has been in a persistent rut. Despite novel and comic publishers regularly putting Predators on shelves (the Yautja have fought Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wolverine and even crossed paths with Archie), the films were sporadic and uneven in terms of their storytelling and lore-making. Predators (2010), starring Adrien...
A malicious Chrome extension called Crypto Copilot lets users trade Solana directly from X but secretly skims a small portion of the transaction. A malicious Google Chrome browser extension is letting users trade on Solana, while quietly skimming a fee from every swap into the creator’s wallet. According to a Tuesday report by cybersecurity company Socket, the Google Chrome extension allows users to trade on Solana (SOL) from their X social media feed. Unlike typical wallet-draining malware that tries to steal the entire balance, Crypto Copilot “injects an extra transfer into every Solana swap, siphoning a minimum of 0.0013 SOL or 0.05% of the trade,” Socket found. On the back end, Crypto Copilot uses the decentralized exchange Raydium to perform swaps for the user, but appends a second instruction that transfers SOL from the user to the attacker. The user interface only shows the swap details while wallet confirmation screens “summarize the transaction without surfacing individual instructions.” Read more