• Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Crime Family faces new criminal charges, including bank fraud and operating an unlicensed money transmitter. • The charges reveal that Bankman-Fried was attempting to curry favor in Washington, D.C. in order to escape the consequences of his actions. • Federal officials are now charging Bankman-Fried with additional offences beyond the eight

• Japan is set to launch a pilot program in April to test the use of its version of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) known as the digital yen. • The move comes after more than two years of proof-of-concept experiments by the BoJ around the digital yen, even as China’s digital yuan continues

• Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street bond trading powerhouse, is managing $39 billion of Tether’s reserves. • The reserves are part of the $67 billion in bonds, cash and loans backing Tether’s stablecoin (USDT). • Tether reported assets at year-end 2022 of $67 billion, with the majority in U.S. Treasury bills. Cantor Fitzgerald Managing Tether’s

• Altcoins from the DeFi and smart contracts sector outperformed bitcoin on Thursday after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell offered unexpectedly less hawkish remarks. • Uniswap’s UNI token and Avalanche’s AVAX token were recently up about 4.5% and 3.4%; ether rose 3% at one point Thursday. • Bitcoin (BTC) was recently trading above $23,560, roughly

• Developers behind the Solana-based crypto exchange Mango Markets are pushing forward with a relaunch despite scrutiny from federal regulators. • The SEC has accused MNGO trader Avraham Eisenberg of securities market manipulation and is implying that it has the authority to bring a case against the exchange that issued MNGO. • Securities lawyers have

• Sports-focused non-fungible token (NFT) company Candy Digital has raised $38M in an equity offering. • The offering opened on Jan. 3, following reports that Fanatics was selling its 60% stake in Candy Digital to a group led by Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital. • Candy Digital was founded in 2021 by Galaxy Digital, Gary Vaynerchuk,

• MakerDAO’s community voted to keep the Gemini USD (GUSD) stablecoin as part of its reserve system for its DAI stablecoin. • 50.85% of the votes favored keeping the GUSD debt ceiling at $500 million level in Maker’s Peg Stability Module (PSM), while 49.15% voted for decreasing to zero. • Venture capital firm ParaFi Capital