Crypto Vesting

Opinion by: Fraser Edwards, co-founder and CEO, Cheqd

Brutal honesty has its place, especially when confronting discomfort, so here’s one that can’t be sweetened with honey: 96% of imported honey in the UK is fake! Tests found that 24 of 25 jars were suspicious or didn’t meet regulatory standards. 

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) can fix this. 

The UK Food Standards Agency and the European Commission both urge reform to tackle this concern by creating a robust traceability database within supply chain networks to ensure consumer transparency and trust. Data, however, is not the problem. The issue is people tampering with it. 

This is not the first time products have been revealed to be inauthentic, with the Honey Authenticity Network highlighting that one-third of all honey products were fake in 2020, a fraudulent industry amounting to

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April 2025 witnessed crypto markets rocked by more tariffs at the direction of US President Donald Trump — controversial policies that could have influenced the outcome of Canada’s elections on April 28.

On April 2, Trump levied “discounted reciprocal tariffs” on 185 countries and territories. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 2,200 points on April 4, while the S&P 500 dropped nearly 6%, its largest decline since March 2020. Bitcoin (BTC) went along for the ride but broke from stocks as it recovered toward the end of the month. 

Blockchain adoption metrics for Ethereum are looking good, as the network now boasts 60% real-world asset (RWA) tokenization value. Major firms like BlackRock are sure the blockchain will be the standard for RWAs, but other observers believe that scaling issues could create problems.

On matters of policy, pro-crypto legislators in a number of US states are pushing

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Chinese artificial intelligence development company DeepSeek has released a new open-weight large language model (LLM).

DeepSeek uploaded its newest model, Prover V2, to the hosting service Hugging Face on April 30. The latest model, released under the permissive open-source MIT license, aims to tackle math proof verification.

DeepSeek-Prover-V2 HuggingFace repository. Source: HuggingFace

Prover V2 has 671 billion parameters, making it significantly larger than its predecessors, Prover V1 and Prover V1.5, which were released in August 2024. The paper accompanying the first version explained that the model was trained to translate math competition problems into formal logic using the Lean 4 programming language — a tool widely used for proving theorems.

The developers say Prover V2 compresses mathematical knowledge into a format that allows it to generate and verify

Read More at https://cointelegraph.com/news/china-s-deep-seek-launches-new-open-source-ai-after-its-r1-took-on-open-ai?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released another update on what he believes the future of the network should entail.

In an April 30 post on blockchain-based social media platform Farcaster, Buterin outlined his personal areas of focus for Ethereum development this year. These include investigating changes to the network infrastructure to achieve single-slot finality, updates to smart contract execution and enhancements to privacy.

The post comes as the Ethereum network hits a new milestone. GrowThePie data shows that the weekly number of unique addresses interacting with the Ethereum ecosystem reached a new high of over 15.4 million, with nearly 13.45 million on layer-2 protocols.

Weekly chart of unique active addresses in the Ethereum ecosystem. Source: GrowThePie

Buterin recently argued that privacy should be a top priority for developers and proposed solutions to boost

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An elderly US individual is reportedly the victim of a devastating $330 million Bitcoin heist, now ranked as the fifth-largest crypto hack in history.

The attacker used advanced social engineering tactics to gain access to the victim’s wallet, onchain investigator ZachXBT said in an April 30 update on X.

The hack took place on April 28, 2025, when ZachXBT flagged a suspicious transfer involving 3,520 Bitcoin (BTC), valued at $330.7 million.

Following the transfer, the stolen stash was quickly laundered through over six instant exchanges and swapped into privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero (XMR).

Onchain data shows that the victim had held over 3,000 BTC since 2017, with no prior history of large-scale transactions.

ZachXBT confirming the victim of the hack. Source: ZachXBT

Once stolen, the attacker wasted no time laundering the Bitcoin using a peel chain method — a common obfuscation technique

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Crypto was born from an open-source ethos, where code was shared publicly, accessible for review and shaped by community contributions. Transparency and verifiability are foundational principles that enable trust in Bitcoin.

But as the space matured, some disadvantages of open source surfaced. Innovative smart contract platforms and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications were forked to create direct competitors — from the wave of Uniswap clones to Ethereum forks — which prioritized speed and lower fees over decentralization.

As a result, some projects opted for closed-source development to protect proprietary designs and reduce the risk of exploits, hoping to delay or deter malicious actors by making the code harder to analyze. This approach is often criticized as “security through obscurity,” where hiding vulnerabilities instead of fixing them becomes a line of defense.

Closed-source systems run counter to crypto’s original vision

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Cryptocurrency hackers stole more than $90 million in April, dealing another blow to the industry’s mainstream reputation despite ongoing efforts to improve cybersecurity.

Hackers made off with $92 million of digital assets across 15 incidents in April, according to an April 30 research report by blockchain cybersecurity firm Immunefi.

The total marks a 124% month-over-month increase from March, when hackers stole $41 million.

Crypto stole in April 2025. Source: Immunefi

The month’s largest hack on open-source platform UPCX accounted for most of the damage in April, with over $70 million in losses, while KiloEx lost $7.5 million as April’s second-largest hack.

The KiloEx exploiter returned the stolen funds just days after the attack occurred.

All of April’s reported attacks targeted decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms. Centralized exchanges reported no incidents during the month, the report noted.

Top 10 losses in April. Source:

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Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Mantra has called for industry-wide cooperation to reduce investor risks in the aftermath of its OM token crash.

On April 30, Mantra published its latest update since the sudden collapse of its OM token, claiming that the incident was “bigger than Mantra.”

“Liquidation cascades could happen to any project in the crypto industry,” Mantra CEO John Mullin warned in the post, pointing to the role of “aggressive leverage positions” on exchanges as a broader threat to investor safety.

Mantra’s industry-wide call to action is the biggest section in the latest OM crash update. Source: Mantra

“We’re cooperating with major exchanges to improve market stability, and we’re calling on the rest of our industry to provide input on how exchange policies can minimize — or continue to permit — policies that create risk to investors,” the update states.

Progress includes governance improvements

Aside from calling global

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The Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) plans to launch a new blockchain network to support its non-fungible token (NFT) collectibles, the organization announced on April 30.

FIFA will launch its “FIFA Blockchain,” with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility and aims to provide “better performance, future features, and improved scalability.”

As part of the move, FIFA Collect — its official NFT collection — will migrate from the Algorand blockchain to the new FIFA Blockchain. The migration is scheduled to begin no earlier than May 20, FIFA said.

FIFA announces new blockchain for FIFA collection migration. Source: collect.fifa.com

“At this stage, no immediate action is required. When the migration process begins, we will provide clear, step-by-step instructions on what (if anything) you need to do,” the announcement stated.

The collection’s migration will take place “not earlier than” May 20, FIFA said, adding that it will confirm the exact date

Read More at https://cointelegraph.com/news/fifa-collect-nfts-move-to-evm-blockchain?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound

Vanar Chain, a layer-1 blockchain network, has launched a new artificial intelligence-powered compression and data authentication layer designed to address the industry’s longstanding issue with onchain storage.

Vanar Chain is launching Neutron, an AI-native blockchain layer with data compression ratios of up to 500:1, which can reduce a standard 25 megabyte file to just 50 kilobytes, transforming it into a “Neutron Seed” that can be stored on the blockchain ledger.

The new blockchain compression layer aims to solve the industry’s data storage issue, with traditional blockchains lacking the capacity to store data, only to reference it.

This design introduces potential single points of failure. Vanar’s Neutron aims to solve this by enabling fully onchain, verifiable data storage.

Neutron is a “world first” which “handles both physical file compression and semantic compression, meaning it compresses not just the file itself but the meaning inside it,” Jawad Ashraf, CEO of Vanar

Read More at https://cointelegraph.com/news/vanar-chain-launches-neutron-ai-onchain-compression?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound