Crypto exchange Binance has announced that it is ceasing operations in Canada due to challenging regulatory environment.
CoinDesk quoted a Tweet, in which Binance said that it had “high hopes for the rest of the Canadian Blockchain industry,” but that “new guidance related to Stablecoins and investor limits provided to crypto exchanges makes the Canada market no longer tenable for Binance at this time.”
The new guidance, which was issued by the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) in February 2023, prohibits crypto asset trading platforms within the country from allowing customers to buy or deposit Stablecoins without the CSA’s prior approval.
Obtaining approval would require the crypto trading platform to pass the CSA’s various due diligence checks.
Binance said that it did not agree with the new regulations, but that it still hopes to work with Canadian regulators to further develop a regulatory framework around cryptocurrencies.
Binance’s exit from Canada comes as the cryptocurrency industry faces increasing regulatory scrutiny around the world.
Ethereum Network Suffers Finality Issues Creating Confusion
The Ethereum network suffered a technical issue on May 12, 2023, causing the network to halt finalising blocks for more than an hour.
Finality refers to the guarantee that a block cannot be altered or removed from the Blockchain without burning at least 33 per cent of the total staked ETH, Decrypt quoted the Ethereum Foundation.
The network lost finality for roughly an hour on midday Friday, in what appears to be the second issue of its kind in 24 hours. Earlier, blocks were being proposed but not validated during a 25-minute window on Thursday. The cause of these outages still remains unclear, which has spurred many in the crypto community to take to social media to discuss and try to figure out what went wrong.
Prominent venture capitalist and Ethereum supporter Adam Cochran said in a Tweet: “ETH beacon chain finality has now failed for over an hour, we’re at inactivity leak time and there is no denying this is now a liveness fault. Hoping that this is just an implementation issue for a single client to fix and not a larger protocol issue… either way, not good.”
Ethereum core developer Eric Conner said on Twitter that the network “did not go down,” but rather that there was a bug in some clients that has already been fixed.
The finality issue, regardless of its origin or duration, remains controversial. Despite transactions appearing to process, the fact they don’t get finalised can mean they can potentially be re-ordered or simply ignored.
Google’s Bard Takes On OpenAI’s ChatGPT
Google’s Bard AI chatbot is giving OpenAI’s ChatGPT a run for its money, according to a report by Decrypt.
Bard was first introduced in February 2023, but it did not make a good impression. It hallucinated live and falsely claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope took the very first pictures of “exoplanets”. Google’s stock sank, and its parent company Alphabet lost $100 billion, but Bard has been improved since then.
Bard now runs on PaLM 2, which Google says “significantly outperforms PaLM while using significantly less compute at inference time.” Google has also announced different versions of its model, including “Gecko,” which is primed for smartphone integration.
Bard is still under development, but has the potential to be a major player in the AI chatbot market. It is free to use and is available in over 180 countries.
