The Protocol: CZ's out, Altman's in, and Kraken's Sued
The past week in tech news was dominated by the drama at OpenAI and the crypto world with Binance's CEO, Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, stepping down amid a plea agreement with U.S. prosecutors. Under the deal, Binance will pay over $7 billion in fines to the U.S. Treasury and Commodity Futures Trading Commission for sanction incompliance and defiance of money-transmitting laws. In other tech news, the demand for faster decentralized finance apps is mounting, with oracle firms such as Chainlink and Pyth Network striving to provide lower-latency pricing data to blockchains. Blockchain tech development and upgrades are also a focus, with Fhenix introducing FHE Rollups to boost privacy on Ethereum, and DLN partnering with bloXroute for faster cross-chain value exchange. Meanwhile, Frax Finance's community has approved an expansion plan, Strike is expanding its bitcoin buying services, and ZkLink has launched Nexus, a layer that aims to bridge different ZK Rollup ecosystems.
