Musk’s X to fund legal bills if posters treated ‘unfairly’ by bosses, NFT artist royalty cuts roil market

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Elon Musk vowed to support legal costs incurred by users of his social media company X (formerly Twitter) who are treated unfairly by employers because they posted or liked something on his platform. A depressed NFT market is slashing artists’ royalties, but the FBI says scammers are still active in that arena. Read on!

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Musk vows legal aid funding

Billionaire Elon Musk posted that his social media company X will fund legal costs of users “treated unfairly” by employers for “posting or liking something” on his platform.

He added that there were no limits of scale for such support. Musk’s post had more than 300,000 “likes” at the time of publication.

Reduced NFT royalties roil market

NFT exchanges Blur and OpenSea have created tensions by paring royalties payable to artists when NFTs are traded in the hope that lower costs might buoy a depressed market, Bloomberg reported.

Still, dwindling artist income may impede the flow of new work, the report noted. Royalties peaked in January 2022 at $269 million, and fell to $4.3 million last month as rates plummeted to 0.6% per transaction from as much as 5%, Bloomberg said, citing researcher Nansen.

FBI warns of NFT scams

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation warned in an announcement that financial scammers have been posing as NFT developers and targeting users.

Criminals manage to gain access to social media accounts of NFT developers or make fake accounts to simulate NFT releases, often creating a sense of urgency with phrases like “limited supply” and linking to spoofed websites that invite victims to connect their crypto wallets for purchases, the FBI said.

Kenya orders Worldcoin scan halt

Kenya ordered cryptocurrency project Worldcoin to stop signing up new users, citing data privacy concerns, the BBC reported. Worldcoin offers free crypto tokens to those who have their eyeball scanned for unique identification.

The Kenyan government said in a posted statement that its concerns include how the biometric data is stored, offering money in exchange for data, and having so much data in the hands of a private company.

Latvian crypto purchases decline 50%

According to Latvijas Banka, the central bank of Latvia, 4% of the population bought crypto assets in February, down from 8% a year earlier, Cointelegraph reported.

Crypto asset buying in Latvia is declining, Latvijas Banka said in its 2023 Financial Stability Report, attributing falling interest to negative sentiment linked to fraud and insolvency among major market participants.

What we’re reading around the web

DeFi Definitely Isn’t Dead — CoinDesk

Crypto firm sounds alarm on law that collects user IDs on $10,000 purchases — DL News

Silbert’s Crypto Empire DCG Faces NY Attorney General Probe Over Genesis Ties — Bloomberg