ChainCatcher News: A U.S. court dismissed the allegations that basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal was the "controller" of the NFT project Astrals. The court ruled that Shaquille O'Neal participated in the Solana NFT project Astrals as a "seller" rather than a "controller," and granted Shaquille's request, dismissing some of the allegations against him in the unregistered securities class action that began in May 2023.The court dismissed the claims that the legendary basketball player was the "controller" of Astrals, with the plaintiffs alleging that O'Neal exercised "actual power or control" over the project. However, U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno ruled that O'Neal was a successful "seller" who attracted buyers for Astrals products. The judge also denied the defendants' motion to dismiss the allegations that Astrals NFTs and Galaxy tokens are financial securities.Astrals is a Solana-based NFT project featuring 10,000 unique 3D avatars, aimed at promoting investment in a virtual world and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Astralverse. The project also has its own cryptocurrency, Galaxy, which serves as the governance token for the DAO.

ChainCatcher news, Google held its annual developer conference "I/O 2024" early this morning, announcing a brand new AI agent product Project Astra, which can achieve cross-text, audio, and video multimodal real-time reasoning, similar to OpenAI's released GPT4o.It also launched an update for Gemini 1.5 Pro, whose AI model will soon be able to handle more data, along with a new smaller Gemini 1.5 Flash AI model.Additionally, Google released its latest model "Veo" for generating high-definition videos, as well as the highest quality text-to-image model Imagen 3, which promises to deliver realistic images and "less distracting visual artifacts than our previous models."