In our crypto news overview today, the official account of the artificial intelligence lab OpenAI was hacked to promote a fake token. Cryptocurrency online ticketing service Travala adds the Solana blockchain for seamless crypto payments. Read about this and much more in the cryptocurrency news digest.
An Official OpenAI X was Maliciously Used to Spread the Scam
On 23 September, the official account of the artificial intelligence laboratory OpenAI was hacked to promote a fake token. In a post posted on the page, the attackers promoted the OPENAI token, which is designed to ‘bridge the gap between AI and blockchain’.
According to Bloomberg, the fraudulent post, full of typos, called the token ‘$OPEANAI’ instead of ‘$OPENAI’ and contained a link to a phishing website ‘token-openai.com’ designed to steal users’ crypto wallet credentials. The post was subsequently removed, but it managed to attract the attention of thousands of users before it was deleted. It is currently unknown whether there were any victims and what losses they suffered.
The community noted that this was not the first hacker attack targeting the company’s social media and members of its management. In particular, in June 2023, the account of X’s CTO Mira Murati was hacked.
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Celestia Foundation Receives $100M Investment
On 23 September, the Celestia Foundation announced that it had raised $100 million in investments. It is known that the funding round was led by Bain Capital with the participation of Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, Placeholder, and others. According to the publication, the raised capital increased Celestia’s total funding to $155 million after the recent launch of one of the first modular data access protocols.
The team did not disclose what the new capital will be used for but added that the core developers are focused on implementing the new roadmap, which was unveiled in early September 2024. The statement also said that Celestia is the industry’s first dedicated modular network and that the developers have deployed 20 rollouts since its launch.
“When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, it scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era. Now, the core developers have introduced the technical roadmap to scale block space to the fiber optic era – while keeping it verifiable and low latency,” said Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia.
Google has Released New Gemini 1.5 Models
On 24 September, Google announced the launch of two stable versions of its Gemini 1.5 application programming interface (API) models for developers looking for greater productivity and lower costs for building applications.
Compared to the previous version 001, the new production-ready Gemini models show significant improvements in code generation, maths, reasoning, and video analysis. Among other innovations:
- Google has cut the price of its production-ready Gemini 1.5 Pro by more than 50%, claiming three times the speed and lower latency of previous releases of experimental models.
- Both Gemini 1.5 models provide a significant increase in actual data and a reduction in model hallucinations, instruction execution, multilingual understanding of 102 languages, SQL creation, audio and document understanding.
- Google has reduced the amount of summary data for both models and advised chat product developers to offer options to increase the conversational capabilities of the API.
- Google also announced the launch of Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B, a scaled-down experimental version of 1.5 Flash with lower testing metrics. This update provides significant performance improvements for both text and multimodal use cases.
Both versions are available through Google AI Studio and the Gemini API.
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Travala Integrates Solana blockchain for Seamless Crypto Payments
Earlier this week, at the Solana Breakpoint conference in Singapore, Juan Otero, CEO of Travala, a cryptocurrency-based online airline ticketing service, announced an integration with the Solana blockchain.
As part of this partnership, users will be able to book hotels and flights using Solana’s token, SOL, as well as major stablecoins such as USDT and USDC. As a result of this integration, Travala is expanding its existing payment options, which previously included Bitcoin and Ethereum, to allow direct deposits and withdrawals of SOL, USDT, and USDC to users’ accounts. Transactions on the platform will be commission-free, simplifying the booking process for travelers.
This integration reflects the growing trend among businesses to use blockchain technology for efficient payment solutions. In September 2023, according to Buy Bitcoin Worldwide, there were more than 15,000 businesses worldwide that accepted cryptocurrency payments. Today, users can buy almost anything with crypto payments: from expensive cars to everyday expenses such as food or coffee. In particular, cryptocurrency payment platforms such as CryptoPay, BitPay, Whitepay, and others provide a simplified process for conducting cryptocurrency transactions. With the help of such platforms, users have the opportunity to pay for purchases in cryptocurrency in many areas.
Ocean Protocol Partners with Zero1 Labs
Ocean Labs, the decentralized data exchange protocol, has announced a new collaboration with Zero1 Labs to improve the performance of AI solutions and data privacy. Zero1 Labs is known for empowering next-generation decentralized AI developers and will now leverage its expertise to improve AI security. The two fintech companies announced the collaboration to their users via posts on the X social network.
As part of this collaboration, Ocean Protocol will provide Zero1 Labs with access to its decentralized data marketplace to store, share, and distribute data in a safe and secure environment. Through Ocean Protocol’s data privacy features, many projects can ensure the security of their AI models and algorithms. Through this strategic collaboration, projects affiliated with Zero1 Labs will have access to global data providers, and Ocean Protocol will help them find relevant data to make better decisions.
In addition, Ocean Protocol will ensure data security for the benefit of projects and the Zero1 user community. In addition, this collaboration allows projects to sell their data through the Ocean Protocol data marketplace to generate additional revenue to support growth and sustainability.
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Vladislav Hryniv
Vladislav Hryniv is a digital journalist. For several years, he has worked as a copywriter for Web3 companies, where he gained interest in the industry. Currently, he writes articles on blockchain technology, finance, statistics, and digital asset analytics for various publications.