Author: José Oramas

José is a journalist and translator with a keen interest in blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

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Bitcoin Hackers Scams

Bitcoin.org Hacked and Promotes ‘Double Your Bitcoin’ Scam

Educational content platform Bitcoin.org has suffered a security breach and ended up in the hands of unidentified attackers who started promoting a shady bitcoin scam on the homepage.

On September 23, several users reported that the Bitcoin.org homepage was displaying a pop-up window requesting users to send BTC to a specific address and receive twice the amount in return. This, of course, rang alarm bells in the crypto community and Bitcoin.org soon announced via Twitter that the site had been compromised.

Bitcoin.org subpages were limited as result of the attack, which did not allow users to scroll through the page and precluded access to the PDF version of the Bitcoin whitepaper. While the site is now virtually up and running again, the URL to the whitepaper displays a “this site can’t be reached” message.

The address displayed on the site received 0.4 BTC (around US$17,000) in a few hours. It’s unknown if those funds belong to any victim who fell for the scam.

Not the First Bitcoin.org Attack

This is not the first time Bitcoin.org has been attacked. Early this year, Crypto News Australia reported that the site had been hit by a DDoS (Denial Of Service) attack. This happened shortly after Bitcoin.org lost a legal battle against self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator Craig Wright, who requested that a British court force the organisation to remove the BTC whitepaper for UK visitors.

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Coinbase Crypto News Regulation

Coinbase Abandons Lending Product After SEC Threats, Now Rolling Out Regulatory Proposal

Leading cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has suspended its plans to launch a high-yield lending product, called Lend, after the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) threatened the company with a lawsuit.

As Crypto News Australia reported earlier this month, Coinbase announced plans for launching Lend but the company immediately received a warning from the SEC, which viewed the product as a “security”.

The SEC told us they consider Lend to involve a security, but wouldn’t say why or how they’d reached that conclusion. Rather than get discouraged, we chose to continue taking things slowly. In June, we announced our Lend program publicly and opened a waitlist but did not set a public launch date. But once again, we got no explanation from the SEC. Instead, they opened a formal investigation. 

Coinbase blog post

In a series of tweets, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong expressed his frustration as to why the SEC didn’t disclose the reason it viewed the lending product as a security.

Coinbase to Submit a Regulatory Proposal, Confirms COO

The Twitter thread sparked rumours about Armstrong working on a regulatory proposal submitted to the regulatory institution. These rumours were confirmed by Coinbase COO Emilie Choi, who also expressed her concerns for the lack of regulatory certainty in the US.

We are regulated by more than 50 regulators right now, [though] I think it’s actually much more than that. If we’re struggling with this, then what is your audience going to be able to do?

Emilie Choi, COO, Coinbase

By “audience” Choi was referring to other crypto companies that are under scrutiny for their lending offerings, some of whom have complied after cease and desist letters from US authorities. The regulatory proposal will have a series of pillars to make it fair for all parties, among them fairness and regulatory clearance. 

We just want to make sure that there’s an even playing field, and when we talk about that, I’m talking about traditional financial services and crypto. There should be even playing fields in these different industries.

Emilie Choi, COO, Coinbase

A month ago, several US legal firms joined forces to file class action lawsuits against Coinbase and its executives, including Armstrong, and other officers, for “securities fraud” in relation to Coinbase’s public listing in April.

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Crypto News Ethereum NFTs

Snoop Dogg Reveals He Owns $17 Million worth of NFTs

American rapper Snoop Dogg is in the headlines after revealing he’s the person behind the Twitter handle Cozomo de’ Medici – until now, the mystery owner of a US$17 million NFT collection.

In a September 21 tweet, the superstar US rapper revealed his alter ego, an NFT collector who joined Twitter only last month. 

At that time, the account didn’t have any ties to the rapper as such, and its pseudonymous owner steadily tweeted about his journey as a collector and the large sums of money spent on his NFT collection.

As per DappRadar’s portfolio estimate tool, de’ Medici’s wallet stores US$17 million worth of collectibles. Cozomo’s wallet also owns the Snoop x Nyan Cat NFT that the rapper is currently using as his profile pic.

Superstar Rapper Rubs Shoulders With CryptoPunks

Snoop first flagged his interest in crypto assets in an April interview with Vanity Fair magazine. His portfolio consists mainly of CryptoPunks – a series of unique avatars and the first NFTs developed on the Ethereum blockchain, the most valuable of which is priced at US$4.6 million based on current market value. He also owns 10 Meebits, a series of unique 3D voxel characters, and several pieces of Tom Sachs Rocket Factory NFTs, the same collection that beer giant Budweiser bought into last month.

Snoop’s own NFT collection has been released on crypto exchange and NFT marketplace Crypto.com, with the first NFT titled “A Journey With the Dogg”. Crypto.com has put together numerous artists keen to explore the emerging NFTs market. As well as the Dogg, they include Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One, Axel Mansoor, Lionel Richie and more.

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Blockchain Crypto News DeFi Tokens

ATOM Token Surges 25% in a Week Through Inter-Blockchain Growth

While the crypto market has been stagnating for the past couple of days, ATOM – Cosmos Network’s native token – reached new all-time highs overnight. 

ATOM Blowing Up

The ATOM/USDT pair had a 10 percent increase over the weekend and crossed the US$40 mark, making it one of the top-performing coins in the market – US$10 up in a single week and a 180 percent increase from a low of $8 on July 20. The token was trading $34 per coin at the time of writing. 

Source: Binance

Bulls are now in control of the Cosmos market, and some of the hype comes after numerous DeFi project integrations and other novelties, such as the launch of Sifchain, a decentralised exchange (DEX) that allows users to exchange assets between Cosmos and Ethereum.

Another boost for the ATOM token came after the recent launch of Emeris, Cosmos’s first functioning user interface for DeFi, introducing cross-chain exchange capabilities.

What is Cosmos Network?

Cosmos is usually called “the internet of blockchain” as it allows different blockchains to interact, share data, and transact tokens with each other. Every blockchain freely interacts and operates in the network through the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. This mechanism allows information to flow through the network and reach its destined blockchain.

At its core, IBC is a method of securely exchanging data between two independent [sovereign] blockchains. This means that any two blockchains that support IBC can send communication back and forth in a permissionless manner. Previously, ATOM was relegated to the Cosmos Hub with regard to its utility as a governance token. It is now transferable and interoperable with all blockchains that support IBC.

Zarko Milosevic, chief scientist, Informal Systems

Since its debut, Cosmos has set itself apart from its competitors for its innovative approach to interoperability and blockchain customisation. Cosmos Hub is the first blockchain launched on the Cosmos Network, designed to act as a bridge and facilitate communication between different blockchains, called zones, by keeping track of their states.

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Crypto News DeFi Investing Tokens

AVAX Skyrockets Amid $230 Million Investment

Avalanche (AVAX) has completed a US$230 million investment round from several crypto funds and angel investors, catapulting its native token, AVAX, to a fresh all-time high of US$64. 

AVAX Token Surges 23% Amid Tokens Private Sale

The investment round was led by crypto funds Polychain and Three Arrows Capital. R/Crypto Fund, Dragonfly CMS, Collab + Currency and Lvna Capital are among the top investors that participated in the private sale, according to an announcement by the Avalanche Foundation. As per its blog post, Avalanche will use the funds to expand its operation in the DeFi space and support DeFi projects by providing grants, liquidity and token purchases.

Avalanche has quickly turned promise and potential into real-world impact and value creation for DeFi users and developers. The community of builders rallying around the network is a testament to its competitive edge, and there is still so much potential yet to be tapped at the intersection of institutional and decentralised finance on Avalanche.

Emin Gün Sirer, director, Avalanche Foundation

Avalanche completed the investment round in June but disclosed this latest news on September 16. The announcement quickly boosted the AVAX token by 23 percent, now trading at US$64.11 with a 24-hour trading volume of US$2,156,526,602, according to data from CoinGecko.

Further data shows AVAX outperformed its top 20 competitors with a 65 percent gain last week, and is now sitting at 14th place in the crypto market.

Source: Coinmarketcap

AVAX Shows its Competitive Edge

Avalanche is a high-performance blockchain with an estimated rate of 4,500 TPS (Transactions per Second). It currently competes with other high-performance platforms like Solana to become the alternative solution for DeFi protocol developers.

Users can build fast, low-cost and solidity-compatible dApps, besides launching customised private and public blockchains.

Both platforms are challenging Ethereum as leader of the DeFi ecosystem. Several content creators are considering switching to Solana to showcase their NFTs as Ethereum gas fees increasingly present a hurdle for them.

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Cardano Crypto News

Cardano Hard Fork Heralded a Success as 2,334 Smart Contracts Deploy in 5 Days

Smart contracts have finally arrived for Cardano (ADA) as of September 12, soon after the Alonzo hard fork was launched. Developers can now create their dApps and provide them to users on the network.

The smart contract platform for Cardano is called Plutus Platform, and it was part of the Alonzo hard fork successfully completed on September 13. In just 24 hours, Alonzo saw over 100 smart contracts created, signalling developers’ hype for creating dApps on the network. But the hype didn’t stop there; at the time of writing, the Vercel app showed 2,334 smart contracts were ready to be launched.

This upgrade is the culmination of six years of hard work with some of the brightest minds in blockchain and beyond. The focus is now on improving the platform further and ensuring that Cardano is adopted by corporations and governments.

Charles Hoskinson, IOHK founder

DeFi is ‘Up for Grabs’, Says Hoskinson

Now that Cardano supports smart contract programmability, founder Charles Hoskinson has said that DeFi is now “up for grabs”. Cardano was built for the second wave of DeFi, as he calls it, which will see the ecosystem having liquidity, interoperability, and cross-chain and multi-chain capabilities.

The winners of the future in the DeFi space are going to have liquidity and interoperability, the ability to move multi-chain. And finally, cost predictability is such an important thing. It’s so bizarre how we just tolerate massive swings in the price of doing business. We need governance, we need certification, we need insurance, we need regulation on these things, metadata identity … at the same time, you need to decentralise. The way we constructed Cardano was for that second wave.

Charles Hoskinson

ADA Skyrockets Amid Alonzo Hard Fork Launch

The addition of smart contract programmability – integrated as part of the Alonzo hard fork – catapulted ADA to US$3 per coin. Cardano rose nearly 10 percent, marking its all-time high to US$3.09, just a day after Hoskinson announced the Alonzo update.

With so much hype going on, we could soon see Cardano become the alternative blockchain for developers and the main host for NFTs, decentralised applications, with more technology and financial projects coming to the platform.

Further information will be provided at the 2021 Cardano Summit on September 25-26, which will host speakers from the World Economic Forum, Southbank, and Financial Times to discuss how Cardano could be integrated as a de facto operating system for supply chains, global financial corporations and governments.

Categories
Crypto News NFTs

OpenSea Confirms Insider Trading, Head of Product Development Resigns

OpenSea’s product lead, Nate Chastain, has been accused of insider trading of NFTs promoted on the front page of the platform, allegations confirmed by the OpenSea team. He has since resigned from his position.

The accusations were first made by a Twitter user who discovered that Chastain had been snapping up NFTs for a while.

Chastain reportedly bought NFTs using secret Ethereum burner wallets before they were unloaded on the homepage, benefiting from the front-page hype spike and then selling them for a quick profit. This is similar to when a token’s price boosts after getting listed in a crypto exchange such as Coinbase or Binance.

According to data from OpenSea, Chastain is the owner of CryptoPunk #3501, purchased for 26.98 ETH. This NFT revealed his address to the community, allowing anyone to see the transactions. What gave Chastain away was that he made the mistake of sending the profits to that public address.

It also appears this isn’t the first time Chastain has been caught snapping NFTs:

OpenSea Confirms Insider Trading Allegations

OpenSea confirmed the allegations in a blog post. “This behaviour does not represent the team’s core values,” the team said.

Yesterday we learned that one of our employees purchased items that they knew were set to display on our front page before they appeared there publicly. We are taking this very seriously and are conducting an immediate and thorough review of this incident so we have a full understanding of the facts and additional steps we need to take.

OpenSea blog post

While OpenSea has seen record growth over recent months, this event has once again opened up criticism of the protocol. Some users were calling out market manipulation and centralisation, yet the most strident critics are NFT collectors – as Crypto News Australia reported last week, over US$100k worth of NFTs were recently lost due to an OpenSea bug found in the protocol by a user.

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Blockchain Crypto News Solana

SOL Drops 15% After Solana Network Crashes From Cyber Attack

The high-performance blockchain Solana recently suffered a DoS (Denial of Service) as result of resource exhaustion in the network, which also caused the SOL token to tumble 15 percent. 

On September 14 at 12:38 UTC, Solana experienced “intermittent instability” and stopped processing transactions. The Ethereum Layer-2 solution Arbitrum also suffered an outage. This is the second time this month the protocol has gone down – on September 2, Solana suffered a period of intermittent performance degradation that lasted about an hour. 

Engineers at Solana found a “large increase” in transaction load that peaked at 400,000 TPS, flooding the transaction processing queue. Some users reported their funds were stuck as result of the DoS. To solve the issue, 80 percent of validators had to restart and upgrade the network to version 1.6.25, turning the Solana mainnet up again. 

While the SOL token experienced a slight drop, it has recovered since then, trading at US$157.55 at press time. The SOL token has been one of the top performance coins in the market, delivering its holders more than 13,700 percent growth since the beginning of the year.

Solana Gaining Ground Despite Network Problems

Despite this month’s hurdles, Solana has managed to gain ground, especially in the NFT space. Crypto News Australia reported Solana’s first million-dollar NFT deal this week when it traded a Degenerate Ape Academy token for 5980 SOL, worth US$1.11 million at the time.

There are several projects coming to Solana, including Play-to-Earn NFT games which have become a popular trend on social media, especially for users from third world countries who can make a steady income playing crypto games. Solana will soon launch three exciting NFT games to help it gain ground in the blockchain gaming space: Star Atlas, Aurory, and Genopets.

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Crypto News DeFi Hackers Tokens

ZABU Token Tanks 99% After $3.2 Million DeFi Hack

Zabu Finance, a DeFi project running on the Avalanche blockchain, has been exploited for around US$3.2 million worth of its native token, Zabu – plunging its price within minutes to zero.

First DeFi Hack on the Avalanche Blockchain

In what was the first exploit on the Avalanche blockchain, the attacker drained the funds from the SPORE pool, exploiting the “Transfer Tax” mechanism to mint tokens and subsequently plunging its value to zero. The SPORE pool contained 402,9 Wrapped Ether (WETH), 23,157 Wrapped AVAX (WAVAX), 21,501 Pangolen (PNG), 106,848 Avaware (AVE), 361,267 Tether (USDT), and 23,958 JOE.

The attacker found a bug in the contract used by yield farms to distribute rewards. According to security firm PeckShield, the bug has “happened many times before”.

Yet the Zabu Finance team tried to calm down its community, outlining it wasn’t behind the attack and burned all team tokens. The protocol burned the remaining 93.21 million Zabu tokens – around US$360,000 worth.

Another Day, Another DeFi Hack

Zabu Finance is the latest protocol to be hacked, adding to a list of hacked projects this year. A similar case involving Popsicle Finance occurred on August 7 when an attacker manage to drain 85 percent of the deposit pools by taking advantage of a bug found on the smart contracts.

Just a few days later, an unknown attacker managed to drain US$600 million from cross-chain protocol Poly Network. While not a DeFi hack per se, as the attacker turned out to be a white hat hacker (an ethical hacker), it was by far the biggest amount stolen in DeFi history.

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Bitcoin Mining Crime Crypto News Mining

Government Employee Faces Jail for Installing Crypto Miners Inside Office Walls

An IT operations supervisor in New York state is being prosecuted for allegedly installing BTC mining rigs and other devices inside government offices, costing his Long Island civic employer thousands of dollars in electricity, according to a report last week by The New York Times.

Over $6,000 in Electricity Bills

Christopher Naples, 42, allegedly hid 46 mining devices in various areas in the Suffolk County Center in Riverhead. The Long Island resident now faces up to 15 years in jail for grand larceny, official misconduct, public corruption and computer trespass.

The Suffolk County Center now has to pay more than US$6,000 in restitution for the power used, but it’s likely Naples has cost the county thousands more as another 36 machines were later discovered.

Timothy D. Sini, the Suffolk County district attorney, said that the first 10 mining rigs discovered had been operating since early February, some of them hidden in at least six rooms – including beneath floorboards and in an unused electrical panel.

Mining cryptocurrency requires an enormous amount of resources, and miners have to navigate how to cover all of those electricity and cooling costs. [Naples] found a way to do it; unfortunately, it was on the backs of taxpayers.

Timothy D. Sini, district attorney, Suffolk County

Sini told The New York Times that Naples placed so many mining rigs inside the building that it required an “unusual level of expertise from investigators” to discover them. Several employees even complained about slow internet speeds and an unusual rise in temperature. Once the machines were removed, the temperature dropped by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit (6.6ºC).

Miners Forced to Emigrate as Countries Tighten Mining Regulations

Mining cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin consumes a lot of electricity and can even cause massive power outages. Such was the case in Iran, where in June the government confiscated over 45,000 mining rigs due to high energy consumption sparking power outages across the country.

Other countries like China have been more aggressive toward miners. As Crypto News Australia reported, also in June, China’s State Council released a document saying it would “crack down on bitcoin mining and trading activities” in order to “prevent possible financial risks”.

As a consequence, miners were forced to set up shop overseas to continue their operations in more receptive environments.