Today in Crypto: DOJ Charges Crypto-Paid Murder Plot

An Iranian national and member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been charged in an alleged murder-for-hire plot in which cryptocurrency was involved for payment, according to a press release from the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Shahram Poursafi, alias Mehdi Rezayi, 45, was charged with attempting to arrange the assassination of former national security adviser John Bolton.

Poursafi allegedly contacted a source to try to facilitate payment for the job by opening a cryptocurrency account, saying the other person would “probably have to do the killing” before he was paid.

Meanwhile, NFTs that are part of a pool will have to use new crypto rules from the EU’s Markets in Crypto Act (MiCA), a Coindesk report said.

There had been claims that tokens would be excluded from the MiCA Act.

The current draft is likely to exempt NFTs unless they constitute another form of crypto-asset.

But in practice there may not be much of a relief, as EU legislators have a narrow view of what an NFT is. So, if a token is part of a collection or a series, it will not be considered an NFT and therefore must apply according to the MiCA rules.

Issuers of NFT pools would have to publish details of the protocol for NFTs and would not be able to make “relentless promises” of future value that could mislead people.

Elsewhere, Ansible Labs, which is building a blockchain account payment platform, has raised $7 million in a seed funding round, Coindesk reported on Wednesday (Aug 10).

The company said the money will go toward hiring, liquidity and operating costs as it plans to debut its first project.

Ansible Labs co-founder and CEO Daniel Mottice said the company sees the off-ramp as a “missing piece” that could improve mainstream Web3 adoption and use. Mottice was a key player at Visa Crypto and Visa Direct Payouts before starting Ansible.

The round was led by Archetype, an early stage crypto venture capital firm.

In other news, crypto trading platform Hotbit has suspended trading, withdrawals, deposits and funding functions for the foreseeable future, the company said in a blog post.

This comes because a former employee of the company, who left in April, was involved in a project that may have broken the criminal law.

Many senior executives of Hotbit have been subpoenaed by law enforcement since late July, and law enforcement has frozen some of the company’s funds, making it impossible for Hotbit to run normally.

The project was “against Hotbit’s internal principles and of which Hotbit was unaware,” according to the company.

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