Friday, 13th of May. As the week comes to an end, we can focus on the highlights of the crypto industry over the past few days.
Instagram disclosed details of NFT support testing
Later this week, a number of Instagram users will begin using and posting NFTs as their profile photos.
Contributors will need to link their digital wallet and choose any NFT to be displayed on the platform. No commission fees are provided. The social network reports updated security policies to enhance account and wallet protection when linking.
Once a token is published, it will get a shimmering effect and will be able to display token-related publicly available information from the blockchain. You can automatically add tags to the collection as well as the token owner if you set the appropriate privacy settings.
Instagram confirms its support for Ethereum and Polygon. Flow and Solana will be added later.
Among the wallets available for connection you will find Rainbow, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, Dapper and Phantom.
Meta announced that the functionality associated with non-fungible tokens will also emerge in Facebook. Users in Instagram would be able to use NFT in Stories through SparkAR technology.
The development team will do further work on introducing new features.
Back in January 2022, the Financial Times revealed that the corporation would integrate NFT into Facebook and Instagram, in addition to working on a prototype platform to issue these digital assets.
As you may remember, Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Instagram, said in March that the new feature to create NFTs may appear on Instagram “in the coming months”.
Elon Musk upholds the EU law to regulate social media
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO expressed his support of the Digital Services Act (DSA) by the European Union. He said so in a video posted by Thierry Breton, who is the EU Commissioner for the Internal Market.
“I think it’s exactly aligned with the future goals for the Twitter platform,” Musk said.
According to him, the initiatives proposed in the DSA “would be beneficial to Europe”.
“I really think I agree with everything you said, really. We are very much on the same page”, the billionaire added.
Musk’s personal vision for the future of the social network is much the same as the law. Previously, the entrepreneur suggested revealing the source code of Twitter’s content recommendation algorithms. The same transparency requirement is included in the law.
Still, data privacy experts are of the opinion that such a move will not solve Twitter’s woes.
Just to refresh you memory, this April the EU reached an agreement on a law aimed at increasing the responsibility of tech giants in matters of recommendation algorithms and targeting advertising.
In that same month, Twitter executives agreed to sell the social network to Elon Musk for $44B.
OneCoin foundress appears among Europe’s most-wanted criminals
The European Police Office (Europol) has included the creator of the OneCoin pyramid, Ruja Ignatova, on its list of world’ greatest fugitives. You can check the relevant information on the website of the Office.
Ignatova’s criminal record shows that she is accused of fraud, “including against the financial interests of the European Communities in accordance with the Convention of July 26, 1995.”
“A reward of up to 5.000 € is offered to any crucial information leading to an arrest of the perpetrator. This reward is intended exclusively for private individuals and not for public officials whose professional duties include the prosecution of criminal offenses,” Europol’s website says.
As reported by Europol, since October 25, 2017, Ignatova’s current whereabouts are unknown.
Ruja Ignatova is the originator of the OneCoin pyramid scheme.
From the beginning, the project was positioned as a high-yielding cryptocurrency, where investors made a profit not only from the asset’s growth in price, but for engaging new shareholders as well.
It was in Nov. 2019 that a court in the Southern District of New York found Mark Scott, a OneCoin lawyer, guilty of laundering nearly $400 million. Ignatova was prosecuted in the United States in absentia.
As of March 2020, Konstantin Ignatov, the brother of the OneCoin founder, was busted at the Los Angeles airport. He later pleaded guilty to several charges and faced up to 90 years in prison.
In the case of Ignatov, the U.S. government negotiated a stay of his sentence, stating there was still ongoing work with him.
One of the defendants in the investors’ class action lawsuit against the pyramid organizers was the financial holding company Bank of New York Mellon.
In Aug. 2021, Italian authorities accused 14 people associated with OneCoin of aggravated fraud. According to law enforcers, transactions totaling about €11 million passed through local banks benefiting the pyramid. Around €5 million of this was collected by the promoters from 3,700 South Tyrol residents.