The AI industry is split over new legislation in California that would implement a sort of emergency stop in AI systems.
Industry figures are divided on a contentious Californian artificial intelligence bill that passed on Aug. 28.
The new legislation will compel AI firms to implement new safety protocols, including an “emergency stop” button for AI models.
The Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act (SB 1047) passed the California Senate 29–9 on Aug. 28.
Despite running on a Polkadot parachain, Grill.chat lets users post using Ethereum wallets and send payments via Polygon.
Grill.chat, a chat app based on the Subsocial network, has now implemented Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) wallet compatibility, allowing users to chat using their Ethereum identities and send crypto to each other via Polygon, according to a June 7 announcement.
Subsocial is a Polkadot parachain designed for social media applications.
Grill.chat allows users to participate in over 70 chat rooms focused on mostly crypto-related topics. The development team seeks to attract new Web3 projects to build their communities on the platform.
The integration means that users can now connect their Subsocial wallets to their EVM wallets by signing a transaction verifying that they are the wallet’s owner. This prevents them from needing to own SUB tokens to donate to other users, and it allows them to prove their Ethereum identities to users in chat rooms. In the future, the developers plan to use this integration to allow nonfungible token (NFT) collections to be shown to other users.
In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Subsocial CEO Zachary Edwards stated that Grill.chat is targeting crypto projects as potential sponsors of chat rooms. Currently, many crypto communities are built around Discord servers and Telegram channels. These channels cannot be integrated into the developer’s website, which means that users need to load a separate program to join the community or interact with it, creating what Edwards sees as unneeded friction for users.
By contrast, chat groups on Grill.chat can be integrated into a development team’s website or application interface. Edwards pointed to the example of Zeitgeist, a blockchain-based predictions market app. Its interface features a “chat” icon that opens directly into a Zeitgeist chat room on Grill.chat.
However, the app’s users previously encountered friction from another source, Edwards said. Many of the biggest crypto projects are on EVM-based networks such as Ethereum, Polygon and Avalanche. Crypto users are accustomed to using wallets from these networks and don’t necessarily want to download a new wallet to use a chat app.
Related: Decentralized social media: The next big thing in crypto?
To partially solve this problem, the team implemented a feature that lets users create a Subsocial wallet directly from the app’s interface. They also paid for users’ gas fees via a smart contract that can delegate signing privileges for a limited number of functions.
But this still didn’t completely solve the problem, as it siloed the user’s Ethereum identity from their Grill.chat posts. The team implemented EVM compatibility to make it easier for Ethereum users to switch to the app, Edwards explained.
“The cool thing is it's sort of using this off-chain signer technology because, at the end of the day, it’s all running on Substrate [Polkadot parachain technology], and EVM wallets aren’t compatible with Substrate,” Edwards stated. “But we can still connect those two accounts together so you can chat on the substrate chain, but your EVM account is linked, so you can have identity, donations, NFTs, all of this sort of stuff.”
Grill.chat isn’t the only social media app trying to entice crypto projects into building communities on it. OpenChat is a chat app on the Internet Computer network. Its team told Cointelegraph it’s working on a similar feature to show OpenChat chat rooms on a project’s website.
Web3 companies are racing to create a blockchain-based social media app that will see mass adoption. On April 26, the Polygon-based Lens network announced a new scaling solution that it said would allow for “instant posts.” The same day, MeWe said it would move its 20 million users to the Polkadot parachain network Frequency.
SBF’s last tweet before his arrest for reportedly committing wire fraud was dispelling his involvement in a group chat purportedly called “Wirefraud.”
Merely hours before news of his arrest by Bahamian police, Sam Bankman-Fried took to Twitter denying his involvement or knowledge of a secret group chat named “Wirefraud” — which allegedly involved former FTX and Alameda ranking executives.
In a Dec. 12 response to a report from the Australian Financial Review (AFR), Bankman-Fried used Twitter to deny involvement in or knowledge of a “Wirefraud” group chat on messaging app Signal, which reportedly included members of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle, including FTX co-founder Zixiao “Gary” Wang, FTX engineer Nishad Singh and former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison.
The AFR report said the chat was used to send secret information about FTX and Alameda's operations in the lead-up to its failure.
Bankman-Fried however said on Twitter that if the group chat was “true” he “wasn't a member” and was “quite sure it's just false” as he had “never heard of such a group.”
If this is true then I wasn't a member of that inner circle
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) December 12, 2022
(I'm quite sure it's just false; I have never heard of such a group)
Sam Bankman-Fried was, until very recently, expected to appear remotely before a United States House Committee hearing on Dec. 13 to explain the collapse of the FTX exchange, but was taken into custody by Bahamian authorities on Dec. 12 with extradition to the U.S. likely to follow.
Committee Chair Maxine Waters on Dec. 12 later confirmed that it “will not be able to hear” his testimony at the House Committees hearing due to the arrest.
Bankman-Fried was also requested to attend a separate hearing on Dec. 14 with the Senate Committee on Banking but had never confirmed his attendance, while his lawyers had reportedly refused to accept a subpoena compelling his testimony, according to a Dec. 12 joint statement from Senators Sherrod Brown and Pat Toomey.
Related: $75M worth of FTX’s political donations at risk of being recalled due to bankruptcy: Report
Chief restructuring officer and FTX CEO John Ray in written testimony before his appearance at the House Committee hearing said FTX customer assets were “commingled” with Alameda’s.
Ray asserted Alameda “used client funds to engage in margin trading which exposed customer funds to massive losses” and the trading firm's business model required it to deploy those funds to “various [...] exchanges which were inherently unsafe.”
