Tesla CEO Elon Musk has regained his status as the world’s richest man once again as he overtakes Bernard Arnault.
Elon Musk toured China for the first time in three years on May 31, 2023, meeting China’s foreign minister Qin Gang.
Musk commented on the status of China and America as co-joined twins saying the two world’s largest economies shouldn’t be breaking their ties through de-dollarisation
Elon Musk regains his richest man status as he tours China
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has regained his status as the world’s richest man. According to a report by Bloomberg, Tesla’s CEO and Twitter’s new owner passed Benard Arnault as the richest man on Wednesday after the shares of Arnault’s LVMH fell by 2.6% in Paris Trading.
Now, Musk’s total net worth stands at around $192B. The report comes when Elon Musk is on his Chinese tour for the first time in the last 3 years. Musk met with China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jin Zhuanglong, and discussed the development of electric vehicles.
Though Musk has yet to speak publicly about the contents of his meeting with the Chinese executive, the minister said that Elon Musk agreed to build more factories to produce electric vehicles.
Elon Musk is now among a growing list of US executives to visit China this year on business trips as economic relations continue to sour. JP Morgan Bank Chief Executive Officer also visited China this week. Apple CEO Tim Cook was also there in March following a series of strikes that had affected his company in earlier months.
Though the ties between Washington and China are growing as the Asian nation is planning on ditching the dollar in favor of a new economic trade bloc, BRICS, Dan Ives from investment firm Wedbush Securities has said that it’s a key chess move for Wall Street executives to foster a great business relationship with Beijing.
U.S. Treasury Yields have fallen as investors wait for a crucial debt ceiling vote to be held in the House of Representatives later in the day.
House Rules Committee voted in favor of the debt ceiling vote on Tuesday with a 7-6 majority.
April’s JOLTs job opening report is due today.
U.S. Treasury Yield recedes as investors await debt ceiling vote
U.S. Treasury yields declined on May 31, 2023, as investors fretted over the ongoing debt ceiling crisis. The House of Representatives is set to vote for a bill that could see the U.S. evade defaulting on its debt, which could have adverse effects and be the first one in its history. Additionally, Investors are also awaiting the April report on key jobs data.
At 5:34 a.m. ET, the yield on the 10-year Treasury was trading 4 basis points lower at 3.654%. The 2-year Treasury yield was last down by more than 3 basis points at 4.436%.
The U.S. markets are reacting to the Fiscal Responsibility ACT that seeks to raise the debt ceiling to avoid the government defaulting on its debt which could happen as soon as June 5.
The bill received a win in the House Rules Committee with a 7-6 vote and is now headed to the House of Representatives floor today for tentative voting. If the bill is passed, it would need approval from the Senate before it is effected.
However, a straight win is not guaranteed as politicians on both sides of the aisle have criticized Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Biden’s compromise. At least 20 Republican lawmakers have asserted that they would vote against the bill. The market is under stress and tensions regarding what might happen.
Meanwhile, a key report on April JOLTs job openings is due today, which will give key hints about the state of the economy and massively affect the decision of the Federal Reserve regarding the next interest rates policy decision.
Whether the bill will pass or not and if the Federal Reserve will hike or pause interest rates again is yet to be seen. Keep watching Fintech Express for updates on this and other stories.
Tron Network has been discovered to have a $500M vulnerability. This vulnerability was first discovered in February and reported to the right team, which was resolved in a few days. Today, the research team at dWallet Labs published an article detailing how they discovered the zero-day vulnerability in Tron’s multi-signature accounts and helped resolve it.
Security firm finds vulnerabilities in Tron Network
DWallet Labs found a bug in Justin Sun’s Tron Network that would allow an attacker to bypass the network multi-sig accounts mechanism and sign transactions using one signature only.
The team posted an article earlier today saying that the network’s vulnerability could impact around $500 million in assets stored in the multi-sig wallets. It explained that the bug could allow any signer to overcome the multi-sig security designed by TRON, giving full access to the accounts.
Since multi-signature accounts are meant to be used and authorized by multiple parties, such a vulnerability could spell doom to the network and shouldn’t be taken lightly. The research team said:
“We can bypass the multisig verification process by signing the same message with non-deterministic nonces of our choice. By doing so, we will be able to generate many valid different signatures for the same message by the same private key.”
The team explained that the network needed to catch up by ensuring the signatures used were unique rather than checking if the signers were unique. As such, the signers could double vote, an action that the network’s security measures could easily overlook, resulting in a potential exploit.
However, the researchers have explained that they reported the matter in February, and the network’s developers fixed it. Keep watching Fintech Express for updates on cyber security and other developments surrounding the fintech industry.
Bitcoin Ordinals NFTs are set to get bridgeable with the Ethereum blockchain as a new token standard is launched to facilitate inter-chain communication. The BRC-721E token standard launched by the Ordinals market and Miladys NFT collection allows users to migrate their ERC-721 NFTs to Ordinals.
Bitcoin and Ethereum finally become co-joined for the NFT community
The NFT community will have even more options after the Ordinals Market and Milady’s NFT collection pull forces together to build a token standard to support migrations of NFTs from the Ethereum network to Bitcoin network.
The BRC-721E standard enables the conversion of immutable, verifiable ERC-721 NFTs to Ordinals inscriptions on the Bitcoin network. Initially, the metadata of these images won’t be stored on-chain. However, users can store the assets in lower-quality preview images and include a reference to the Ethereum burn in raw image data.
How to migrate your ERC-721 NFTs to Ordinals
The migration process of the NFTs starts by burying ERC-721 NFTs via an ETH call function. This burning process is irreversible and acts as an on-chain inscription method. To claim the Ethereum burn on Bitcoin, a user must inscribe valid BRC-721E data, after which the bridged NFT will appear on a custom Ordinals market collection page with its complete metadata.
The indexers that were responsible for checking the burned NFT data inscriptions, ensure that the new Ordinals token has only one valid inscription and that the Genesis address matches the burn transaction call data to prevent double entries.
This news comes when the craze around Bitcoin NFTs is still alive. These inscriptions have spiked a debate about whether they affect Satoshi’s original purpose of the network or not. However, the Bitcoin inscriptions have appeared to receive massive support from maximalists like Michael Saylor, who believe that they may be a chance to allow innovation to continue on the network and increase its use cases.
Keep watching Fintech Express for updates on this and other Fintech-related news.
Michael Saylor, who founded and heads Microstrategy, one of the largest institutional holders of Bitcoin, has been a vocal voice in the crypto space. At the Bitcoin Conference 2023, he said that using public blockchains like Bitcoin could solve most problems facing the cybersecurity space.
Michael Saylor says most emerging problems could be solved via Bitcoin
At the Bitcoin Conference 2023, Michael Saylor touched on how cybersecurity is becoming a threat today. He reflected on fake accounts constantly being purged off social media platforms like Twitter, saying that such fake accounts could be weaponized to drive divisive political agendas.
However, he explained how cryptographic security solutions like Bitcoin’s Ordinals and inscriptions could be used to do away with such misuse of technology. Michael Saylor said that digital identities could be inscribed on base layers of public blockchains like Bitcoin then the data is also copied to a universal database that is immutable and thus records any social media presence that a given individual builds.
He proposed that the use of such innovation could effectively control the rise of fake social media presences, giving an example of how an individual who generates 1 million fake bots and is caught and blocked loses a significant amount of money, thus serving as an example to others.
It’s not the first time that Saylor has praised the innovation behind Bitcoin. However, the effectiveness of such a technology in cybersecurity on a large scale remains untested as crypto adoption rates still need to be higher. However, some similar applications in things like Domain Names like Unstoppable Domains and Ethereum Name Service have already been seen though they still need to be more effective than Saylor explained.
