Investigators say the GainBitcoin case involves about 8,000 investors and losses estimated at roughly 6,606 crore rupees ($790 million). India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has arrested Ayush Varshney, co-founder and chief technology officer of Darwin Labs Private Limited, in connection with the long-running GainBitcoin cryptocurrency fraud investigation. According to a Wednesday press release shared via the CBIs official X account, Varshney was detained at Mumbai airport on Monday while attempting to leave India after a Look Out Circular had been issued against him. He was formally arrested and handed over to the CBI on Tuesday. The CBI said Darwin Labs played a central role in building the technological infrastructure used by the alleged scheme, including the GainBitcoin investor platform and associated tools used to manage payments and wallets. Read more
Democratic Senator Adam Schiff introduced a bill to ban prediction markets related to war, death and terrorism amid escalating insider trading concerns related to military operations. US Democratic Party Senator Adam Schiff introduced legislation Tuesday that would explicitly bar federally regulated prediction-market platforms from listing contracts tied to war, terrorism, assassination and individual deaths. The bill, called the DEATH BETS Act, would amend the Commodity Exchange Act to make those contracts prohibited for entities overseen by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). In a statement announcing the bill, Schiff said markets that let traders profit from violent events create incentives for the misuse of classified information, threaten national security and encourage violence. He said prediction markets had become a “Wild West” and called for Congress and the CFTC to make clear that such “death bets” are not allowed. Read more
AI scaling drains trillions in energy while amplifying errors. Neurosymbolic reasoning and decentralized cognitive systems deliver reliable intelligence without the risk. Opinion by: Mohammed Marikar, co-founder at Neem Capital Artificial intelligence has consistently been defined by scale, so far — bigger models, faster processing, expanding data centers. The assumption, based on traditional technology cycles, was that scale would keep improving performance and, over time, costs would fall and access would expand. That assumption is now breaking down. AI is not scaling like other software. Instead, it is capital-intensive, constrained by physical limits, and hitting diminishing returns far earlier than expected. Read more