Eliza Labs and founder Shaw Walters filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against social media platform X on Aug. 27.

According to the lawsuit, the plaintiffs are alleging that the social media platform fraudulently extracted technical information about their AI agents before deplatforming them and launching competing products.

The complaint seeks damages exceeding $75,000 and immediate restoration of the account.

In an Aug. 28 statement, Walters described the lawsuit as a last resort after months of failed negotiations.

He said:

“X and xAI realize this on some level – they just filed a lawsuit alleging that Apple and OpenAI are doing the same anticompetitive conduct to them that X is doing to us.”

Walters added that X initially invited collaboration after seeing widespread adoption of Eliza’s open-source AI agent framework.

Following meetings at X headquarters in February, the platform demanded Eliza purchase a $600,000 annual enterprise license despite already paying over $20,000 annually in fees.

Antitrust claims

An antitrust lawsuit challenges practices that harm fair competition, such as monopolies and anticompetitive behavior, to protect consumers and ensure open markets.

Eliza’s complaint alleges X violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by leveraging monopoly power in short-form social media to suppress AI competition.

The lawsuit details how X suspended Eliza’s accounts in June 2025, then demanded extensive technical documentation under the pretense of account reinstatement.

Walters claims that X used this information to develop nearly identical AI features, including 3D avatars, voice integration, and telephone capabilities, which were launched through xAI’s products.

He added that X requested detailed explanations of Eliza’s framework architecture, endpoint functionality, and implementation specifics while developing competing products.

Remedies include platform restoration

The lawsuit seeks multiple forms of relief, including a declaratory judgment that X lacks Section 230 immunity for anticompetitive deplatforming, injunctions preventing future exclusionary conduct, and account restoration with full platform access.

Monetary remedies include disgorgement of X’s unjust enrichment from copying Eliza’s technology, compensation for fraudulent misrepresentation, and unfair competition damages, as well as treble damages under the Sherman Act provisions.

The plaintiffs also request punitive damages and attorneys’ fees. The lawsuit comes days after Elon Musk’s xAI sued Apple and OpenAI on Aug. 25.

Musk’s lawsuit alleged that the companies conspired to suppress AI competition through Apple’s exclusive ChatGPT integration and App Store favoritism. The lawsuit claims Apple’s partnership with OpenAI makes it “impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store.”

The parallel litigation highlights escalating legal battles over AI market control, with Musk pursuing antitrust claims while facing very similar allegations from Eliza Labs.

The post Eliza Labs files antitrust lawsuit against X, alleging AI agent monopolization appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Kraken has opened a new round of dialogue with the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Crypto Task Force, focusing on how tokenization could be integrated into regulated financial markets.

An internal agency memo confirmed that the exchange met with the task force on Aug. 25 to present ideas on how tokenized trading systems might function under existing US law.

During the session, Kraken’s presentation outlined the architecture of such a system, explained the lifecycle of various transaction types, and examined the legal obligations tied to securities regulations.

The crypto exchange also pressed for clearer regulatory guidance, stressing that constructive oversight could encourage innovation while safeguarding investors.

The engagement follows the exchange’s recent launch of “xStocks,” a platform designed to issue tokenized versions of more than 50 US equities and exchange-traded funds.

The assets have been launched on Solana and the Binance-backed BSC blockchain, but are currently limited to offshore clients.

Tokenization gains momentum

The timing of this meeting reflects wider industry interest in real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.

Advocates argue that moving traditional instruments such as bonds or equities on-chain could expand access to investment opportunities and lower costs for market participants.

Interestingly, that argument has recently found support from US regulators.

At the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium, Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman said:

“The speed and cost of wholesale payments, especially internationally, is a longstanding problem that tokenization could help to address. Banks of all sizes, including community banks, can benefit from efficiency gains that flow from asset tokenization.”

So, it is unsurprising that the RWA sector is rapidly expanding. Data from analytics firm RWA.xyz shows tokenized assets reached $26.5 billion in August, a month-on-month increase of more than 4%. Wallet addresses holding these instruments grew by 11% to about 367,000.

Considering this level of growth, industry experts expect the sector to scale significantly. The 2025 Skynet RWA Security Report estimates that tokenized RWAs could represent as much as $16 trillion in value by 2030.

The post Kraken lobbies SEC to integrate tokenization into financial markets appeared first on CryptoSlate.

US tokenized treasury products reached a new all-time high of $7.45 billion on Aug. 27, surpassing the previous peak of $7.42 billion registered on July 15.

According to rwa.xyz data, the milestone caps a 14% recovery over two weeks following a market correction that bottomed out at $6.51 billion on Aug. 13. The tokenized treasury sector experienced a 12% decline from its mid-July peak.

BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) maintains market leadership with $2.38 billion in assets, representing 32% of total tokenized treasury market capitalization.

Top 30-day performers

Net flow data for the 30 days ending Aug. 28 shows WisdomTree Government Money Market Digital Fund (WTGXX) leading inflows with $440 million, followed by Circle’s USD Coin (USYC) at $253 million.

OpenEden Dollar (TBILL) captured $95 million in new deposits during the recovery period.

Libeara and Ondo Finance also contributed to the rebound, with their ULTRA and OUSG products attracting $36 million and $24 million, respectively.

These inflows offset outflows from Franklin Templeton’s OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (BENJI), which recorded $78 million in redemptions, and Centrifuge (JTFSY) with $49 million in net outflows.

The five largest tokenized treasury products by market capitalization represent a concentrated market share of 73.6%.

WisdomTree ranks second at $931 million, down from recent highs, while Franklin Templeton’s BENJI holds $744 million. Ondo’s OUSG and USDY products round out the top five with $732 million and $689 million, respectively.

Market structure evolution

The recovery demonstrates growing institutional appetite for blockchain-based treasury exposure despite traditional fixed-income market volatility. Most of these funds have high minimum investment thresholds, such as BUILD’s $5 million minimum deposit.

Tokenized treasuries provide 24/7 trading capabilities and programmable features that are not available in conventional government bond markets. The liquidity model, available at any time, prompted a 256% year-over-year growth in tokenized US treasuries.

Despite the increased appetite for tokenized real-world assets, they still have a long way to go.

Max Gokhman, Deputy Chief Investment Officer for Franklin Templeton Investment Solutions, recently stated that most fund managers are not interested in cryptocurrency.

However, education and yield-related moves, such as approving crypto exchange-traded funds with staking, could help drive more adoption among these investors.

The post Tokenized US Treasuries reach $7.45 billion all-time high after July correction appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin Magazine

Google’s Android Lockdown: Are You Really in Control of Your Phone?

Android, Google’s mobile operating system, announced on August 25 that it will be requiring all app developers to verify their identity with the organization before their apps can run on “certified android devices.”

While this might sound like a common sense policy by Google, this new standard is not just going to be applied to apps downloaded from Google Play store, but all apps, even those “side loaded” — installed directly into devices by side-stepping the Google Play store. Apps of the sort can be found online in Github repositories or on project websites and installed on Android devices directly by downloading the installation files (known as APKs).

What this means is that, if there is an application that Google does not like, be it because it does not conform to its policies, politics or economic incentives, they can simply keep you from running that application on your own device. They are locking down Android devices from running applications not with their purview. The ask? All developers, whether submitting their apps through the Play store or not, need to give their personal information to Google.

The decision begs the question, if you can not run whatever app you want on your device without the permission of Google, then is it really your device? How would you respond if Windows decided you could only install programs from the Microsoft app store?

The move has of course made news in tech and cyber security media and caused quite a stir as it has profound consequences for the free and open web. For years, Android has been touted as an open source operating system, and through this strategy has gained massive distribution throughout the world with users in developing countries where Apple’s “walled garden” model and luxury devices are not affordable.

This new policy will tighten up controls over applications and its developers, and threatens the freedom to run whatever software you like on your own device in a very subversive and legalistic way. Because of Google’s influence over the Android variety of phones, the consequences of this policy are likely to be felt by the majority of users and devices, throughout the world.

Android justifies the policy change with concerns about the cyber security of their users. Malicious apps side-loaded into devices have led to “over 50 times more malware” Android claims in their announcement blog. As a measure of “accountability,” and with the council of various governments throughout the world, Android has decided to take a “balanced approach,” and the language couldn’t be more Orwellian.

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” – Benjamin Franklin

Put in simpler terms, Google is looking to collect the personal information of software developers, centralizing it in its data centers alongside that of all of its users, in order to “protect” users from hackers that Google can’t seem to stop today in the first place.

After all, if Google and Android could actually keep personal user data secure in the first place, this would not be a problem, right?

Google’s solution to user data leaks is to collect more user data, ironically enough, in this case the data of developers who use the Android platform. A remarkable leap of logic, lazy and fundamentally decadent, a sign that they’ve lost their edge and arguably truly forgotten their now scrubbed “don’t be evil” motto.

Information Wants To Be Free

The reality is that Google finds itself trapped by a dilemma set up by the nature of information and the digital age, to quote the 90’s cypherpunk Steward Brand, “information almost wants to be free”.

Every hop that personal data, like your name, face, home address or social security number, makes throughout the internet is an opportunity for it to get copied and leaked. As your information moves from your phone, to a server in your city to another server in a google datacenter, every hop increases the likelihood that your data gets hacked and ends up on the dark web for sale. A thorny problem when user data is the primary business model of a giant like Google who processes it and sells it to advertisers who in turn create targeted ads.

We can measure the veracity of Brand’s information principle by looking at two fascinating statistics, which not too many people seem to talk about oddly enough. The first is the absurd amount of data hacks that have taken place in the last 20 years. For example, the Equifax Data Breach in 2017, affected 147 million Americans, and the National Public Data Breach of 2024 affected over 200 million Americans leading to leaked data including social security numbers which likely ended up for sale in the dark web.

While legendary hacks like that of the Office of Personal Management of the U.S. government, compromised a large amount of the U.S. Government officials at the time, including everything from social security numbers to medical records.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that a majority of Americans have had their data hacked and leaked already, and there’s no easy way to reverse that. How does one change their face, medical history or social security number after all?

The second statistic, which no one seems to connect to the first, is the rise of identity theft and fraud in the United States. Did you know that in 2012, 24 billion dollars’ worth of identity theft were reported? Twice as much as all other forms of theft combined that same year. Business Insider reported at the time from Bureau of Justice statistics that “identity theft cost Americans $24.7 billion in 2012, losses for household burglary, motor vehicle theft, and property theft totaled just $14 billion.” Eight years later that number doubled, costing Americans $56 billion in losses in 2020. Both of these trends continue to grow to this day. It may indeed already be too late for the old identity system which we still rely so heavily on.

Generative AI adds fuel to the fire, in some cases trained in leaked user data with examples of image models able to create high quality images of humans holding fake IDs. As AI continues to improve, it is increasingly capable of fooling humans into thinking they are talking to another human as well, rather than a robot, creating new attack vectors for identity fraud and theft.

Nevertheless, Google insists that if we just collect a bit more personal user data, maybe then the problem will just go away. Convenient for a corporation whose main business model is the collection and sale of such data. Has any other corporation done more damage to civilian privacy than Google btw? Facebook I suppose.

In Cryptography We Trust

Now to be fair to the 2000’s Web2 tech giants the problem of secure identity in the digital age is not easy to solve. The legal structures of our societies around identity were created long before the internet emerged and moved all that data to the cloud. The only real solution to this problem now is actually cryptography, and its application to the trust that humans build in their relationships in the real world, over time.

The 90s cypherpunks understood this, which is why they invented two important technologies, PGP and webs of trust.

PGP

PGP invented in 1991 by Phill Zimmerman, pioneered the use of asymmetric cryptography to solve this fundamental problem of protecting user data privacy while also enabling secure user authentication, identification and secure communication.

How? It’s simple actually, by using cryptography in a similar way as Bitcoin does today to secure over a trillion dollars of value. You have a secure ‘password’ and keep it as secret as possible, you don’t share it with anybody, and your apps use it carefully to unlock services but the password never leaves your phone. We can do this, it works, there’s even custom made hardware to lock down precisely this kind of information. The person or company you want to connect with also creates a secure ‘password’, and with that password we each generate a public address or digital pseudonymous ID.

The company encrypts a message with their password and your public address and sends you a message. Well thanks to the magic of cryptography, you can decrypt that message with your password and the company’s public address. That is all we need to secure the web. These public IDs do not have to reveal any information about you and you could have one for every brand or identity you have online.

Webs Of Trust

But there is also the question of reputation, how do you know that the company you are trying to connect with is who they claim to be? In cyber security this is called a man in the middle attack, where a malicious third party impersonates who you actually wish to connect to.

The way cypherpunks solved this problem in the 90s was by developing the concept of webs of trust, through real world ceremonies called ‘signing parties’.

When we meet in person, we decide that we trust each other or affirm that we already know and trust each other enough to co-sign each other’s public IDs. We give each other a cryptographic vote of confidence — so to speak – weighed by our brand or publicly known nym. This is similar to giving a follow to someone on a public forum like X.com, It is the PGP equivalent to saying ‘I’ve met Bob, I recognize XYZ as his public ID, and I vouch that he is real’.

While this sounds tedious, antiquated and like it would never scale to the whole world, technology has advanced a great deal since the 90’s, in fact this fundamental logic is how the internet is sort of secured today.

Remember that green lock that used to be displayed on every website? That was a PGP-like cryptographic handshake between your computer and the website you were visiting, signed off by some ‘certificate authority’ or third party out on the internet. Those certificate authorities became centralized custodians of public trust and like many other institutions today probably need to be decentralized.

The same logic can be applied to the verification and authentication of APKs, by scaling up webs of trust. In fact in the open source world, software hashed into a unique ID derived from the data of the software, and that hash is signed by developer PGP keys to this day. The software hashes, PGP public IDs and signatures are all published alongside software for people to review and verify.

However if you don’t know whether the PGP public ID is authentic, then the signature is not useful, since it could have been created by an impersonator online. So as users we need a link that authenticates that public ID as belonging to the real world developer of the app.

The good news is that this problem can probably be solved without having to create a global surveillance state giving all our data to the Googles of the world.

For example, if I wanted to download an app from a developer in eastern europe, I likely won’t know him or be able to verify this public ID, but perhaps I know someone that vouched for someone that knows this developer. While I may be three or four hops away from this person, the likelihood that they are real suddenly goes up a lot. Faking three or four hops of connection in a web of trust is very expensive for mercenary hackers looking to score a quick win.

Unfortunately, these technologies have not been adopted widely, beyond the high tech paranoid world, nor gotten as much funding as the data mining business model of most of the web.

MODERN SOLUTIONS

Some modern software projects recognize this logic and are working to solve the problems at hand, making it easy for users to leverage and scale cryptographic webs of trust. Zapstore.dev for example is building an alternative app store secured by cryptographic webs of trust using Bitcoin compatible cryptography, the project is funded by OpenSats, a non profit that funds open source Bitcoin related software development.

Graphene, an Android operating system fork that’s become popular among cyber security enthusiasts, has also implemented an alternative app store that addresses many of these issues without having to DOX app developers, and serves as a high security operating system, looking to solve many of the privacy and security issues in Android today.

Far fetched as it may seem, cryptographic authentication of communication channels and digital identities is the only thing that can protect us from personal data hacks. Entropy and the security created from randomness via cryptography is the only thing AI can not fake. That same cryptography can help us authenticate ourselves in the digital age without having to share our personal data with every intermediary out there, if we use it right.

Whether this new policy by Android is sustained, or whether enough public outcry can stop it and better solutions do get popularized and adopted remains to be seen, but the truth of the matter is clear. There is a better way forward, we just have to see it and choose it.

This post Google’s Android Lockdown: Are You Really in Control of Your Phone? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Crypto advertising is often characterized by big promises and technological jargon. Yet, Coinbase’s “Everything Is Fine” campaign stands out for its wicked humor, cultural savvy, and unapologetic take on inflation, the housing market, and the general state of the United Kingdom in 2025.

Released on Thursday, Coinbase’s dark satire was quickly spotlighted by Ad Age for its wit and originality, marking a creative shift in how financial brands tackle the everyday anxieties facing consumers.

Coinbase presents a satirical mirror on financial reality

Created in partnership with the agency Mother and directed by the acclaimed Steve Rogers, “Everything Is Fine” coincides with a moment of heightened public awareness about economic instability.

The commercial opens with reassuring narration (“Everything is fine”), but the imagery starkly and comically tells a drastically different story: a leaking roof collapses, houseplants wilt, wallpaper peels, and rats scurry around amid the garbage. Each visual is a metaphor for inflation, the state of the economy, and the fragility of financial security, realities that traditional institutions rarely confront so openly.

Unlike most crypto ads, “Everything Is Fine” doesn’t shout about technological utopia or imminent riches. Instead, it leans into the quiet dread and surreal comedy people feel when their money seems to be shrinking in value while daily life gets more expensive. The result is a campaign that’s instantly relatable and eerily memorable.

Creative strategy: humor and honesty

Instead of scaring viewers or bombarding them with technical jargon, Coinbase and its creative team use deadpan humor and universal symbols of decline (filthy streets, dirty clothes) to capture what so many consumers feel: that official reassurances don’t always match their lived experience.

Perhaps the most on-point moment of the ad is the part where an affluent couple in a convertible pulls up, saying:

“We’re off to Dubai, it’s time to jump ship.”

This is a commentary on the exodus of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) from the UK, with an estimated 16,500 millionaires leaving the country in 2025 so far, according to Henley & Partners. These figures mark the steepest annual increase in millionaire outflows ever recorded, more than doubling the number from the previous year, with many opting for friendlier pastures like Portugal or Dubai.

The commercial unsurprisingly sparked a lot of comments from the crypto community. Former What Bitcoin Did podcast host, Peter McCormack, congratulated Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, saying:

“This is brilliant.”

As a Brit based in Bedford, UK, and now hosting The Peter McCormack show, which dives into the issues affecting the country, if anyone has a finger on the pulse of UK society, it’s McCormack.

“Everything Is Fine” exemplifies a new phase of advertising in crypto, where the best campaigns don’t simply explain blockchain; they reflect culture, poke fun at the absurd, and use storytelling to build trust, making Coinbase feel radically more human than competitors still pitching dreams.

The post Coinbase presents a darkly comic take on the state of the UK with ‘Everything Is Fine’ campaign appeared first on CryptoSlate.