According to BlockBeats, on September 9th, Malone Lam (nicknamed "Greavys"), a 22-year-old Singaporean man, pleaded guilty on September 8th to one count of federal conspiracy to commit racketeering in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, involving $245 million. Prosecutors allege that he organized a transnational "social engineering" network to steal victims' crypto assets through methods such as impersonating customer service scams, database intrusions, and hardware wallet theft.

The U.S. Department of Justice stated that the criminal gang had been operating since at least October 2023, using social engineering and occasional burglaries to obtain victims' information and then transfer their cryptocurrency. The stolen funds were used to purchase luxury cars, luxury watches, private jet rentals, and nightclub spending, with the highest single nightclub expenditure reaching $500,000.

Evan Tangeman, an accomplice in the same case, was sentenced to 70 months in prison in April of this year for money laundering. Lam faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and his sentencing hearing is scheduled for December 8.

According to BlockBeats, on September 9th, CoinGecko stated in its latest RWA report that synthetic pre-IPO markets have begun to become an effective valuation metric for traditional IPOs. On-chain perpetual contracts can provide continuous price discovery and market sentiment anchors for popular unlisted companies before the official opening of exchanges.

The report uses SpaceX and Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT) as examples, stating that before SpaceX's IPO, the price of perpetual contracts on various platforms fluctuated between $158 and $170, subsequently converging to around $157.40; when its first transaction price on Nasdaq fell to $150.05, the deviation between the two was approximately 4.9%. The deviation between CXMT's pre-IPO perpetual contract price and its actual opening price was also approximately 4.6%.

CoinGecko believes that in the absence of physical stocks as an immediate arbitrage anchor, traders will still form relatively concentrated quotes based on valuation, listing popularity, and future liquidity. On-chain pre-IPO perpetual contracts will therefore become an important reference price before the traditional order book opens, and will also provide global investors with a 24-hour channel to express their bullish or bearish expectations.

According to BlockBeats, on September 9th, Loracle, the largest short seller of PONS on Hyperliquid, posted on X, calling out Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev, asking if he could ask his market makers to increase the liquidity of PONS/USDG on the Lighter platform.

Loracle previously attracted market attention for shorting PONS. Its short positions in PONS once reached tens of millions of dollars, and it continued to increase its positions. The community even launched a "whale hunt" campaign to trade against its short positions.

Loracle later revealed that it has launched PONS-related trading products. The fee routing function is not yet enabled, but will be available later. As the safe position limit will be reached soon, new positions will be gradually opened. It stated that the vault holds funds and uses some profits and losses for buybacks, while also authorizing off-chain Keepers to execute transactions via API Key.

This move also sparked heated discussions in the Robinhood Chain community, with some PONS longs publicly calling for increased spot buying to squeeze out short positions in Loracle and attempt to push it to liquidation.

According to Tradingbeats, Loracle currently holds approximately $21.83 million worth of short PONS positions, with unrealized losses exceeding $3.37 million.

Beating AI News Flash: OpenAI releases ChatGPT Images 2.5. Compared to the previous generation, the new version reduces latency by up to 50% for raw images, and makes it easier to preserve the appearance and details of people and pets when editing photos.

This image editing tool is also much easier to use now. Users can directly select a specific area in the image and then tell ChatGPT how to modify it, such as changing only a single petal or the color of only an object. When making multiple edits consecutively, it's also less likely to accidentally change other areas as well.

ChatGPT now supports direct sketching to control composition and also includes commonly used image templates such as posters and merchandise.

Images 2.5 is now available to ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex users.

The API offers both Flare and Sunburst versions. Flare is faster and suitable for producing a large number of raw images; Sunburst is more detailed and suitable for scenarios with higher image quality requirements.

In Arena's latest evaluation, Sunburst ranked first and Flare ranked second, with both models simultaneously taking the top two spots on three lists: raw text editing, single image editing, and multi-image editing.