Trump taps intel chief Jay Clayton to lead new Super Intelligence Force
President Donald Trump has named Jay Clayton, US director of national intelligence, to lead the country’s new Super Intelligence Force, according to a post on Truth Social on Sunday.
The announcement followed media reports on Friday of the appointment. Cointelegraph reported Sept. 20 that Trump planned to create an “AI Force” modeled after the Space Force and appoint an artificial intelligence czar.
“The Super Intelligence Force is tasked with coordinating the effort of the Federal Government to ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence,” Trump wrote in his post.
Clayton led the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term and launched a prosecution against Ripple for selling securities on his last day in office, and as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York led the criminal trial against Roman Storm for his involvement in Tornado Cash. Storm commented:
“It doesn’t look like we’re headed toward a future that supports open-source AI.”
Trump’s good buddy Elon Musk is renaming SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI to honor the President’s directive renaming “artificial intelligence” to “superintelligence.”
Source: Roman Storm
NEAR Intents hack has a happy ending
NEAR has been riding a wave of positive sentiment lately and has more than doubled in price over the past month. This week it received praise in some quarters — and criticism in others — after its SHIELD AI system blocked Bitget’s hacked funds from its INTENTS cross chain swaps platform. Its Bitwise ETF debuted this week with almost $60 million of inflows.
SHEILD also helped to halt a $3.8 million exploit of NEAR Intents due to a “bug in the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interaction with NEAR Intents smart contract.”
Sentiment flipped bearish for about seven and a half minutes, until NEAR Intents general manager Alex Shevchenko posted like a boss “we have identified you, sir” and issued a 48 hour ultimatum to return the funds or to presumably face the full force of the law.
“You know better than most how responsible disclosure works — this is the last window to use it. After 48 hours, that window closes.”
The funds were duly returned, and Shevchenko urged other exploiters thinking of LARPing as white hat hackers to “use bug bounties instead of disrupting the services.”
The move to block Bitget’s stolen funds was controversial however and in stark contract to THORChain which has refused to block swaps on its platform, pointing to ideals around decentralization. There is also a live debate over whether SHIELD blocking funds leaves it legally liable for everything that happens on the platform in future.
NEAR is down 11% this week.
Arthur Hayes says money printing is inevitable
Money printing is coming due to the AI revolution, the United State’s debt crisis, and increasing financial stress in France, says Arthur Hayes, chief investment officer at Maelstrom fund.
AI companies need trillions of dollars to finance data centers even as the prices of their services fall, Hayes said at a fireside chat at CONNECT by Cointelegraph: Seoul Edition, on Tuesday during Korea Blockchain Week.
“They’ve not really given themselves a lot of options other than print money and make it less bad,” he said.
Hayes also discussed China potentially moving to monetary stimulus along with increasing financial stress in France, including credit-default swaps tied to BNP Paribas and French government bond spreads.
I think the money printing will essentially happen at some point, but that’s sort of a slow motion train wreck happening underneath the surface.”
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes speaking at CONNECT by Cointelegraph: Seoul Edition.
Blast to wind down Ethereum L2 after costs outpace revenue
Ethereum layer-2 network Blast is shutting down after its operating costs exceeded the revenue generated by the chain.
In a Friday post on X, Blast said it sees no “credible path” to making the network economically sustainable and asked users to withdraw their assets to Ethereum mainnet.
“We launched Blast with the goal of building a self-sustaining chain for users and developers,” the team said.
“Unfortunately, the economics of operating the chain no longer make sense.”
Blast was founded by Tieshun “Pacman” Roquerre, the founder of NFT marketplace Blur, in November 2023 with native yield on Ether (ETH) and stablecoins and a points program tied to an anticipated token airdrop.
The strategy helped attract more than $2 billion in deposits before its mainnet launched in February 2024. Its DeFi total value locked has fallen by more than 98% since its June 2024 peak, according to DeFiLlama data.
Ethereum schedules Glamsterdam upgrade on Sepolia for Oct. 6
Ethereum developers have scheduled the network’s next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, to activate on the Sepolia testnet on Oct….
cointelegraph.com