Singapore-headquartered crypto exchange Phemex is investigating a $70 million hot wallet exploit as hackers continue to siphon funds into Ethereum wallets.

Blockchain analytics firm PeckShield reported that Phemex lost $69.1 million in a Jan. 23 exploit targeting the exchange’s hot wallets, marking what appears to be the largest crypto hack of 2025 so far. In a Jan. 24 post on X, PeckShield revealed that the hack impacted wallets across multiple blockchains, including Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), XRP (XRP), and Bitcoin (BTC).

[PRESS RELEASE George Town, Cayman Islands, January 24th, 2025]

Silencio, the world’s first decentralized noise data engine, has officially launched, setting a new standard in environmental data utilization. Powered by community contributions, Silencio transforms smartphones into secure, anonymous sensors that crowdsource real-time, hyper-local noise data. At its launch, Silencio Network is operational with almost 800k members in over 180 countries, covering 43.86 billion square meters (+560 times the size of New York) and recording 8.1 million hours of data collection.

$SLC Token Lists on Major Exchanges as Silencio Ecosystem Expands

Central to the Silencio ecosystem is the $SLC token, powered by the Blocksound Foundation, which is used for rewarding contributors, transactions, staking, and governance across the network. As of its launch on January 24, 2025, $SLC is available on leading exchanges such as KuCoin, Gate.io, MEXC, Bitmart, and BingX, with more to be added soon. The $SLC token is designed to incentivize the collection of noise data, supporting the network’s expansion with an initial issuance geared towards fostering sustainable growth.

Silencio’s Vision: Transforming Noise Into Actionable Insights for a Quieter World

Silencio’s mission is to harness real-time noise data to enable smarter decisions for individuals, businesses, and governments. With its cutting-edge approach, the network aims to address critical issues such as urban planning, public health, and environmental management, making it especially relevant for sectors aiming for decentralization and enhanced community engagement.

Silencio is set to change the way people value real estate, select restaurants, and decide where to live. By providing actionable noise data, Silencio aims to impact the decision-making of millions of people worldwide, offering a new layer of insight that influences everyday choices and long-term planning. This approach ensures that noise levels, often overlooked, are now a central consideration in creating quieter, more enjoyable living and working environments.

Leading the Web3 Revolution with Real-World, Decentralized Solutions

Beyond its token utility, Silencio is also pioneering in governance and community engagement through its transparent, blockchain-based ecosystem. The network allows contributors to earn $SLC tokens in reward for their data contributions, ensuring that every user is a stakeholder in the network’s success. Plans are underway to expand into the global personal data market, estimated to be worth more than $300 billion according to a McKinsey report. Silencio aims to commercialize any smartphone-collected data in a transparent and anonymized manner, providing full control and rewards to users.

Looking ahead, Silencio plans to further expand its platform to include more diverse data applications, potentially integrating additional environmental variables and enhancing its impact on global data-driven decision-making. With a robust user base and a clear vision, Silencio is poised to lead the Web3 revolution, bringing blockchain solutions to the real-world challenges of noise pollution and beyond.

Joining the Silencio Revolution

Silencio paves the way for a quieter, more informed world, it invites individuals and industries to join its network, contribute data, and benefit from the insights generated. With its official launch, Silencio reaffirms its commitment to a sustainable and participatory approach to environmental data, welcoming all to be part of this revolutionary journey.

About Silencio Network

Silencio Network is revolutionizing the global approach to capturing, processing, and utilizing noise intelligence data. By transforming everyday smartphones into real-time noise sensors, Silencio provides hyper-local insights that drive impactful decisions across industries such as urban planning, real estate, and hospitality. Envisioning a future where noise-level data influences real estate pricing and guides daily choices in selecting hotels and restaurants, Silencio is paving the way for smarter, more informed decisions. With operations spanning over 180 countries and a network of almost 800k sensors, the platform generates more than 100,000 daily on-chain transactions, solidifying its position as the world’s largest noise intelligence platform.

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 3991.46, up 2.5% (+97.0) since 4 p.m. ET on Thursday.

Nineteen of 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: HBAR (+8.0%) and SOL (+4.8%).

Laggards: ETC (-0.1%) and BTC (+0.4%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

Every Thursday, our Money blog team interviews chefs from around the UK, hearing about their cheap food hacks and more. This week, we chat to award-winning TV chef Andi Oliver.

It’s very hard to make money in hospitality… People think you are making out like a bandit if you have got a busy restaurant five or six days a week, but just turning the lights on costs a fortune, your business rates cost a fortune, your VAT costs a fortune, everything costs a lot of money. Good ingredients cost a lot of money. It’s also expensive emotionally and physically to deliver really great food. You can’t take your eye off the ball for a second because the standard can drop really easily.

We have had 14, 15 years of quite destructive governmental rule… We are in a bit of a catch-22 situation. It’s got harder for a lot of people but I also think the national living wage has to go up. Getting this country sorted out is going to take some doing.

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If you go to a restaurant and you have to wait an extra five minutes for your meal, just be patient… Have a drink and don’t have a big fit about it. People are doing their absolute best.

There’s a reason there are so many pizza restaurants around… You have to simplify your menu to reduce the financial difficulty. You have to pay people properly and you have to be responsible as an employer. But I think that the best thing to do is deliver something simple and deliver it well and you’ll be able to keep your costs down.

Bad communication is my pet peeve anywhere… particularly in restaurants. It’s okay not to know the answer to a question, but go and find out. Train your staff properly, give them the information they need to be empowered on the floor, behind the bar, in the kitchen, wherever it is because knowledge is power.

Miserable people in restaurants… I can’t bear it.

For cheap substitutes… I’m a fan of things like ox tail, brisket and pork cheeks. They deliver on flavour in the most amazing way. Slow cooking them, layering spice complexity, using things like stouts or dark red wines. These kind of things will really give you depth of flavour.

Put a bowl next to your cooker while you’re cooking… Anything I’m cutting, ends of the onions, carrot peelings, stalks and herbs, goes into the stock pot bowl. I start the stock pot on a Sunday and then throughout the week I’m adding to that all the time, putting a bit more water in, and then maybe I’ll roast some chicken wings and then I can use that stock to make a lovely chicken wing soup. Add a bit of rice to it or noodles and you’ve got a chicken noodle soup. If you’ve always got a stock pot, you have the basis for a sauce, a soup, a broth, and it means you are using up all your endy bits. It’s really easy to do, just chucking in a few coriander seeds, juniper seeds, some fresh thyme, and you’ve got a really flavoursome broth going all week.

People cook too quickly… Time develops flavour. If you are going to roast a chicken, don’t try to do it in 40 minutes – take a good hour and 45 minutes. Make sure you do your shopping the night before. I say this all the time because I think it is a really big thing – people go shopping and then they come home and they have to cook and they get overwhelmed.

Turn the heat down a bit… If you have it up so high, you lose control of what’s happening on the stove. I like gentle cooking.

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If you are boiling potatoes… put a little bit of fresh thyme, a clove of garlic and a bit of onion in the water with the salt and the potatoes. When you come to mash it, they will become infused with a lovely flavour.

I use turmeric ghee all the time… Turmeric Super Ghee I absolutely love. It’s clarified butter with turmeric in it. So at the end of a sauce, you take a spoonful of it and stir it in and then the whole thing becomes silken and golden and lovely.

My favourite cookery writer is a woman called Edna Lewis... She died a while ago, but she was an African American chef and she wrote a beautiful book called The Taste of Country Cooking. It is one of the most beautiful cookbooks I have ever read in my life.

Don’t try to be impressive, try to be delicious… Being delicious in turn will become impressive.

One restaurant that’s worth splashing out on is… The Dorian in Notting Hill – incredible. Max Coen is the chef there and his food is unbelievable. We went there for my daughter’s 40th. And obviously, it’s a very, very special occasion. It’s not cheap by any stretch of the imagination but it’s worth every single penny. He’s a very soulful cook and he is so imaginative and he makes stunning food.

My favourite cheap meal out is… my friend’s restaurant Shankeys in Hackney or The Raglan in Walthamstow. They are amazing and they have an incredible range which is an Indian Irish mix. Sasha in the kitchen is making the most delicious food. He is making things like curry cauliflower cheese paratha and they are crisp and silky and gooey and spicy all at the same time. The most incredible food. I’d order the cauliflower paratha, the most incredible fried chicken and the extraordinary oysters. Get yourself down there and get his chicken and a curried cauliflower paratha, and you’ll thank me for it. At The Raglan, they do this thing called a spice bag where you get fries or you get chicken and you drop them in the bag with a whole bunch of spices and shake it up and it’s absolutely delicious.

The announcement of the 2025 Oscar nominees marks the countdown to the biggest and most respected awards ceremony in entertainment, and although I had a strong idea of which new movies would be nominated (thanks to the 2025 Golden Globe awards) that’s not saying that I wasn’t left bewildered beyond comprehension when a certain Netflix movie scored big with nods. I’m of course talking about Emilia Pérez (2024), the crime-thriller musical hybrid that follows a cartel boss’ gender transition.

I won’t lie, I was expecting Jacques Audiard’s drama to get some recognition at the 2025 Oscars, but I wasn’t expecting Emilia Pérez to receive 13 nominations. 13 nominations?! This puts Emilia Pérez above fellow nominees The Brutalist, Conclave, and The Substance, which make up some of the best movies of 2024. If you were to ask me, Emilia Pérez doesn’t even come close and frankly, I’d rather put myself through Joker: Folie a Deux again.

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British Land and Singapore’s GIC have sold half of Citadel’s new City of London office tower, currently under construction at Broadgate, to Abu Dhabi’s Modon Holding.

A deal to bring in a new investor at 2 Finsbury Avenue, which is one-third pre-let to Ken Griffin’s Citadel and due to complete in 2027, has been hotly anticipated as a sign of growing international investor confidence in the top end of London’s office market, despite concerns about post-Covid demand.

Modon is an Abu Dhabi-listed real estate group backed by sovereign wealth fund ADQ and International Holding Company, which is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, one of the United Arab Emirates’ most powerful men.

Simon Carter, chief executive of British Land, said the deal was “a vote of confidence for both Broadgate and the City”.

British Land, the FTSE 100 UK landlord, and GIC will each retain 25 per cent ownership of the tower through their Broadgate joint venture.

The willingness of an international sovereign-backed investor to bet on City office development is a positive sign for the market after a brutal two-year downturn.

Investment in London offices in the first three quarters of 2024 was the lowest since 2003, according to MSCI, with scant investor interest in large blocks. Blackstone’s roughly £300mn bid to acquire the “Can of Ham” skyscraper was seen as a positive indicator, but the deal with seller Nuveen fell through last year.

Modon’s chief executive Bill O’Regan said: “The quality and leasing potential of 2 Finsbury Avenue together with the experience and reputation of our partners, made this a compelling entry for Modon into the London real estate market.”

2 Finsbury Avenue will consist of two towers of 21 and 36 storeys, linked by a 12-storey podium. It marks a major expansion of the Broadgate campus in the City of London, which is already home to UBS.

Financial terms of the sale were not disclosed on Friday. British Land valued the development at £310mn in September 2024, with £628mn of costs still to come before the project is complete.

Ken Griffin’s hedge fund Citadel and its sister firm, market-maker Citadel Securities, agreed to let 250,000 sq ft last spring, marking a two-thirds expansion of Citadel’s London office space. The deal includes an option for the US firm to increase its lease to half of the building.

The transaction represented a record rent for the City of London at the time, British Land said. The landlord later launched a search for a new investor, saying it wanted a partner to “share [the] risk and cost” of the project and free up capital for its other developments.

Many developers slammed the brakes on new flagship office projects in recent years, as construction and financing costs rose, office values faltered and investors worried about the impact of homeworking on office demand.

Those factors have resulted in a limited supply of top-quality buildings coming to market, allowing landlords to boost rents.

Carter said he expected a “significant imbalance between demand and supply for new and substantially refurbished space, particularly in the City, leading to strong rental growth at the top end of the market”.

CBRE and Knight Frank advised British Land and GIC. Cushman & Wakefield represented Modon.

Slowly but surely, we are making good on the gadgets we imagined, as kids, that the future would hold. Penny Brown’s video watch from Inspector Gadget? Check. The Starfleet tricoder from Star Trek? Almost there. But web-shooting? Web-slinging? That wasn’t one we really thought would make the crossover. And it wasn’t exactly in the plans for the scientist who has made the strong, sticky air-spun web a reality either, Marco Lo Presti, from Tufts University’s Silklab.

Back in 2020, Lo Presti, a research assistant professor in biomedical engineering, was working on the challenge of underwater adhesives. The first material he chose to work on was made up of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it mimics the way that mussels stick firmly to rock surfaces in water—something that has been useful in other applications.

“While using acetone to clean the glassware of this silk and dopamine substance,” he says, “I noticed it was undergoing a transition into a solid format, into a web-looking material, into something that looked like a fiber. I showed the vials to Fio, and we immediately started thinking about how we could make a remote adhesive [a substance that sticks to an object from a distance] out of it.”

Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, professor of engineering at Tufts and “puppeteer” of the Silklab. “We’d like to say that every experiment is painstakingly planned with equations and lots of forethought but it’s really about connection,” he says. “You explore and you play and you sort of connect the dots. Part of the play that is very underestimated is where you say “hey, wait a second, is this like a Spider-Man thing?” And you brush it off at first, but a material that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing.”

Before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these accidental webs, though, he had to complete his paper on underwater adhesives using biomolecules, which he did in 2021. A lot of the Silklab’s work is “bio-inspired” by spiders and silkworms, mussels and barnacles, velvet worm slime, even tropical orchids—so working out if this sticky web could become something useful might seem like an easy side-step for the team.

However, Lo Presti points out that while the new material does mimic spider threads, “there is no spider able to eject, to shoot a stream of solution, which turns into a fiber and does the remote capturing of a distant object”. This was something new, for the real world at least.

But as the research paper in Advanced Functional Materials notes—enter fictional characters. In Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original 1960s comic books, starting with Amazing Fantasy #15, Peter Parker builds a “little device”, one fastened to each wrist and triggered by finger pressure, to produce strands of ejectable ‘spider webs’. By the time of the mid-2000s Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, the web-shooting switched from a wrist-worn spinneret gadget to an organic part of his superhero transformation.

NatWest is set to close 53 of its bank branches in a blow to the financial institution’s customers and the economy of Britain’s high streets.

Bank branch closures have become the norm in recent years with consumer champion Which? claiming that 6,000 sites have shut down for good since 2015.

NatWest is among the high street banks closing its branches

PA

Here is the full list of NatWest branches closing in 2025:

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• Accrington
• Alfreton
• Beverley
• Bishop Auckland
• Blackburn – Audley – Copy Nook
• Bridlington
• Cannock
• Cleveleys
• Derby – Allenton
• Dewsbury
• Ellesmere Port
• Failsworth – Hollinwood – Oldham Road
• Farnworth
• Garstang
• Goole
• Keighley
• Leeds – Chapel Allerton – Harrogate Road
• Leeds – Cross Gates
• Leek
• Leyland – Golden Hill – Chapel Brow
• Liverpool – Walton Vale
• Long Eaton
• Louth
• Manchester
• Mansfield
• Market Drayton
• Mexborough
• Middleton
• Morley
• Nantwich
• Newark-on-Trent
• Newcastle upon Tyne – West Denton
• Nottingham – Sherwood – Hucknall Road
• Nottingham – West Bridgford
• Rawtenstall
• Rochdale
• Salford – Trafford Park – Third Avenue
• Sheffield – Ecclesall Road
• St Annes On Sea
• Stafford
• Stockport – Hazel Grove
• Stockport – Heaton Moor
• Stockton-on-Tees
• Stoke-on-Trent – Longton
• Urmston
• Uttoxeter
• Wallasey
• Washington
• Widnes
• Willerby
• Wilmslow
• Windermere
• Worksop

Bank branch closures are continuing at an “alarming rate”, according to Which?GETTY

Speaking to The Sun, a NatWest spokesperson: “Our customers are using digital banking more than ever before – over 80 per cent of our active current account holders now use our digital services and over 97 per cent of retail accounts with us are now opened online.

“We are also significantly investing in refreshing our network – we expect to invest in excess of £20million in our network across the UK in 2025 to improve customer service, enhance the look and feel of our branches, and reduce the environmental impact of our buildings, as well as continuing to invest in shared solutions like the Post Office and Banking Hubs.”

“Like any business, we strive to meet our customers’ changing needs and expectations and we’ve been responding to the industry wide shift towards digital services by investing to broaden what customers can do themselves and to offer them greater personalisation.”

The exact dates of these bank branch closures have yet to be confirmed by NatWest

Under new rules laid out by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), high street banks and building societies have to ensure their customers still have access to cash services in areas where closures are taking place.

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When shutting down sites, banking groups must check if communities will still be able to use alternative branches or ATMs. Banks will have to action to make any gaps in peoples’ access to cash are addresssed.

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People are worried about their access to cash GETTY

However, the FCA has asserted that its new rules would not prevent bank branches from closing down.

The country’s financial services regulator argued that its powers would “have an impact where branches are a key local source of cash”

To mitigate the impact of branch closures on local areas, high street financial institiions have agreed to fund shared banking hubs on a voluntary basis.

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