Over 5 million Ether (ETH) has been sent to the ETH 2.0 deposit contract, surpassing the Ethereum community’s expectations by nearly 1,000% from its previous threshold.
According to data from Dune Analytics, there are now 27,132 “unique” depositors, and a total of 5,223,042 ETH — around US$14 billion at press time. This surpassed the original 524,000 ETH threshold by 996.22%.
Data from Dune Analytics
Community Optimism for a PoS Shift
The locked up amount shows optimism for shifting Ethereum to ETH 2.0 — a significant upgrade that not only lowers fees and increments scalability, but also implements Proof of Stake, a consensus algorithm where validators are responsible for transaction confirmation instead of miners.
Speaking at the StartmeupHK virtual festival, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin said Proof of Stake will shrink cryptocurrencies’ carbon footprint in the long run, besides providing other benefits to the blockchain.
“Proof-of-stake is a solution to the environmental issues of Bitcoin, which needs far less resources to maintain.”
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder
Those who want to stake can do so by depositing 32 ETH. By now there are 152,000 validators processing blocks on ETH 2.0, with a 99% success rate for blocks and 1% missed blocks.
The popularity of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has surged in Australia, and traditional and digital artists are embracing the movement.
Australia’s First NFT Gallery
Hobart’s Museum of Art & Philosophy (MAP) has launched Australia’s first NFT gallery in the Tasmanian capital, where digital and traditional artists from all around the world will display their creations later this month.
The first exhibition is scheduled for the week of June 16-22, coinciding with Hobart’s annual Dark Mofo festival, and it will showcase the work of artists featured in the magazines New Philosopher and Womankind. Antonia Case, curator of MAP and editor of Womankind, says NFTs can bridge the gap between traditional and digital artists.
NFTs enable digital artists to compete in the art world alongside fine artists in more traditional media.”
Antonia Case, MAP curator
Artists Making a Living out of NFTs
Case outlined the advantages of tokenising digital content and promoting it on decentralised marketplaces. For instance, NFTs have a certificate on its property — it can’t be destroyed, deleted or replicated. Besides, artists can make better revenues through royalties.
“In the past, digital artists whose work was emailed to publishers via JPEG, GIF, or TIF struggled to show ownership as digital files could be reproduced at will. If a JPEG of a digital work goes online, anyone can download it, which puts digital artists at a disadvantage compared to artists whose work is tangible, such as paintings on canvas, or sculpture.”
Antonia Case
NFTs are giving artists the opportunity to make a living with their work in a more free and decentralised way. An example is Lushxus, a Melbourne street artist famous for his controversial and unique paintings on walls across the city. As reported, Lushxus has earned over $500,000 by auctioning his work on marketplaces like Rarible.
Taproot activation for Bitcoin (BTC) is likely to happen this year as over 90% of the 2,016 mined blocks have already signalled for it.
Yesterday was the fourth day of the two-week period for the Taproot activation, which follows the rules of the Speedy Trial — a deployment method merged into Bitcoin Core. The mechanism will allow miners and mining pools to coordinate the softfork deployment by signalling support in their mined blocks.
At press time, 97.63% of blocks had signalled for Taproot between May and August.
Mara Pool, a BTC mining pool operated by Marathon Digital Holdings, signalled for Taproot on May 31 after adopting the latest codebases offered by Bitcoin Core developers.
While not all of Mara Pool’s mined blocks have signalled, as the company upgrades its miners it may start signalling support in the coming week.
A Vital Upgrade for Bitcoin
Taproot is likely to mark 2021 as a historic year for Bitcoin. It would improve BTC’s network privacy by only revealing relevant parts of smart contracts when spending, besides providing scalability to the network, lower fees and faster transactions.
A week ago, 95% of major BTC mining pools briefly signalled for Taproot, but declined to almost 60% in a short period. The upgrade lock-in was unlikely at that stage, but if the current signalling ratio remains above 90%, then Taproot will be implemented in November.
COMIT Network, an Australian-based decentralised exchange (DEX), now allows atomic swaps between Monero and Bitcoin.
This means users can directly swap Monero (XMR) for Bitcoin (BTC) without intermediaries. This is currently only available on wallets that support the new functionality. Modern crypto wallets such as Samourai Wallet proved earlier this month that atomic swaps using XMR is working.
We're excited to share that COMIT's XMR <-> BTC Atomic Swaps tool is now available on mainnet! https://t.co/B9fqFjWUGv
“The decentralized Monero exchange technology is here, so now it’s a race for wallets to provide the best user experience. With such high user demand for easy and private peer-to-peer exchanges, it’s only a matter of time before wallets widely implement them.”
Justin Ehrenhofer, an organiser of Monero Space.
The Monero community is working with the Australian COMIT project to build a PoC (Proof of Concept) DEX for the BTC-XMR direct swaps.
Traders Are Using Monero To Avoid Taxes
Monero is best known for its private and fungible characteristics, like hiding the sender, receiver and amount details for all transactions. This allows crypto traders to use XMR to avoid crypto taxes.
This is made possible as XMR uses a special advanced cryptography to facilitate anonymous transactions on decentralised exchanges. This makes it very difficult to prove who actually owns a Monero token.
The Australian Tax Office (ATO) warned crypto traders to report their cryptocurrency holdings in this years tax returns, which could directly affect up to 600,000 aussies.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed a lawsuit against five individuals linked to BitConnect for promoting and selling unregistered securities.
$2B in Unregistered Sales
According to the filing, the SEC stated that BitConnect’s lending program constituted a $2 billion USD unregistered securities offering ever since the platform was not operating with a broker-dealer license.
Four BitConnect promoters —Trevon Brown, Craig Grant, Ryan Maasen and Michael Noble— plus Joshua Jeppesen are now facing disgorgement (repayment of ill-gotten gains) plus interest, injunctive relief and civil penalties. In particular, Jeppesen served as a liaison between BitConnect and its promoters and represented the company at promotional events and conferences.
We allege that these defendants unlawfully sold unregistered digital asset securities by actively promoting the BitConnect lending program to retail investors. We will seek to hold accountable those who illegally profit by capitalizing on the public’s interest in digital assets.
Lara Shalov Mehraban, Associate Regional Director of SEC’s New York Regional Office
As reported, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission accused John Bigatton, a former BitConnect promoter, of ripping off small investors in Australia, back in 2017/2018. Despite the various counts of financial crime, Bigatton pleaded not guilty at Downing Centre Local Court.
Biggest Scam in Crypto History?
Carlos Matos, leader of BitConnect, during an event
BitConnect has been considered one of the largest scams in crypto history. The platform debuted in 2016 with great success but shut its lending platform in 2018 following allegations of fraud and warnings from regulators.
The scam has also been compared to OneCoin, a Ponzi scheme promoted as a cryptocurrency, which had connections with Phoenix Holding Group Ltd — a Dubai-based company recently accused of money laundering through horse racing in Australia.
Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson has said his blockchain could overtake Ethereum in the long run.
During a Yahoo Finance interview, Hoskinson denounced Ethereum’s bottlenecks like throughput and gas fees. “It’s overrated,” he added, saying that the largest DeFi ecosystem will rather fall behind Cardano.
Comments came after Hoskinson said his team will soon work on the Alonzo upgrade, bringing smart contracts for developers and competing with other DeFi networks such as Binance Smart Chain (BSC) Ethereum and Polkadot.
Ethereum is “Killing Itself”
While ETH 2.0 is on the way to solving some of the issues with the original network, Hoskinson said it will only replace ETH in the long run:
First of all Ethereum is killing itself. They are replacing Ethereum with Ethereum 2.0. In the end ETH 2.0 will kill ETH 1.0.
Charles Hoskinson
Hoskinson said that Ethereum could only process smart contracts, while Cardano can do that with “governance and compliance”. He added that Cardano could operate with metadata besides automated regulation.
After denouncing Ethereum’s capabilities, he went on to criticise Bitcoin maximalists, comparing the required energy usage to “clear cutting of the forests in Europe in the 19th century”.
Cardano Providing Digital Identities with Blockchain
Hoskinson outlined how Cardano is helping to bring identity through blockchain, something that Ethereum “has never done”, citing Africa as an example.
IOHK, the company behind Cardano, has partnered with several countries on the African continent, including Tanzania and Ethiopia. Their goal is to provide quality internet connection after these countries have experienced large internet shutdowns, and to create digital identities through blockchain technology.
PayPal will soon allow users to withdraw their crypto funds, according to PayPal’s blockchain executive.
Speaking at Consensus 2021, Jose Fernandez da Ponte, VP at PayPal, said that a withdrawal function is on the way and will allow users to send their crypto to third-party wallets.
The withdrawal function comes after PayPal registered a tremendous interest in its crypto custodial service. “We want to make it as open as possible, and we want to give choice to our consumers,” he said.
PayPal’s Q1 results even surpassed the company’s expectations with over 6 billion in revenues in the first quarter of 2021 —a 31% record spot. Dan Schulman, the CEO, said the results were mainly thanks to their decision to integrate cryptocurrencies into Paypal.
Bitcoin for Paypal in Australia
Currently, PayPal does not support Bitcoin as a payment option for Australia. This services is currently only available in the USA (except Hawaii) for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. Stay tuned, we will let you know once they enable this feature for us Aussies.
PayPal’s Own Stablecoin
After PayPal’s vice president Jonathan Auerbach reunited with central bankers worldwide, rumours circulated about a possible stablecoin issued by the payment giant. However, da Ponte said it is “too early to think about that.”
Sometimes we position the debate as CBDCs versus stablecoins, but it’s a bit of a fake debate. There is no trade-off. We think they will co-exist.
Jose Fernandez da Ponte, VP at PayPal
Speaking about stablecoins and CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currency) —and whether one will overtake the other by global usage— da Ponte stated there is no debate against the two.
PayPal as the Gateway for CBDCs
While the payment processor is not currently working on its own stablecoin, da Ponte said financial institutions like PayPal can serve as a bridge for the distribution of CBDCs when the time comes.
To reinforce his view, he referred to how Americans had to go to a bank to cash their stimulus checks, in the midst of a pandemic. “I think we can do better than that” he added.
Dust attacks have become a popular way of malicious activity for hackers trying to break blockchain privacy. Dusting was used at first by programmers performing stress tests on a network and email blasts, but scammers are now using it to unmask address anonymity.
What is a Dusting Attack?
Crypto dust is referred to a very small amount of a certain coin or token, which could accumulate in a wallet for example as a result of airdrops or rounding of transactions.
Users sometimes don’t notice crypto dust because it tends to have very little fiat value. Certain wallets and exchanges even have functions to hide small balances. For example, the smallest unit into which a Bitcoin (BTC) can be subdivided is 0.00000001 BTC (by design). Usually referred to as 1 satoshi, it is currently worth around $0.0005 AUD – in other words, it would take about 20 satoshis for 1 cent AUD.
Dusting basically means sending a tiny amount of cryptos to various wallet addresses in an attempt to deanonymise them. By linking together the addresses of a given crypto asset, the hackers then track down the transactional activity of the corresponding wallets, analysing every address while looking for clues to identify the person or company behind each wallet.
This manuver does not give the attacker access to your funds, as if you were under attack instead. Dusting could only allow guessing the identity behind those addresses.
Scammers and criminals are not the only ones to perform these kinds of activities, though. Law enforcement agencies could use this technique to bind an individual or even criminal organizations to an address, for example to target money launderers, contraband, or any large criminal network.
Dusting Attacks on the Rise
A reason why these malicious attacks are becoming so popular for hackers is that traders and large holders don’t seem to pay much attention to the small amount of tokens showing up in their wallet addresses.
Dust attacks were first seen on the Bitcoin network but are quickly expanding to Litecoin, BNB (Binance Coin) and other cryptocurrencies. A popular example of a dust attack occurred in late October 2018, when Samourai Wallet developers warned some users were under dusting attacks.
If you have recently received a very small amount of BTC in your wallet unexpectedly, you may be the target of a "dusting attack" designed to deanonymise you by linking your inputs together – Samourai users can mark this utxo as "Do Not Spend" to nip the attack in the bud. pic.twitter.com/23MLFj4eXQ
First, get an export of your addresses and review the balances in each one. Check your addresses on a block explorer like Etherscan.io or Blockchair.com to see if you’re under attack.
To spot one, a dust transaction typically has one address on the sender side and hundreds or thousands of addresses on the other with the same small traces ent to them.
If you have been “dusted”, look for wallets that show dusty UTXOs (unspent transaction) and mark them as “do not spend” if your wallet or exchange allows you to do so. This will prevent them from being used for later transactions.
Notice the BTC trace behind the pop-up window [source]
You can also use a hardware wallet to protect yourself as well – while expensive, they can be safer storage for your private keys.
May has been definitely one of the craziest and most volatile months for the crypto market so far in 2021.
There are several possible reasons why the market has shaken so much. The previous bull run attracted new traders and investors entering the crypto world, sometimes without any proper training and buying at the top of the market.
With so much happening, some crypto traders have taken their stories to Reddit, especially sharing their frustrations and to blow off some steam.
Some Lost Everything
Some traders were hit hard by the crypto crash — seeing even 50% of their portfolio vanished, losing life savings, the chance to pay their houses, car, or even rent.
One user shared his story on how he and his wife lost 50% in their total investments, and now they can’t buy a car and their dreams of being homeowners will be put on hold — and to complete the picture, they have a baby incoming.
However, despite the adversity, they still don’t plan to sell.
She was upset, but she said we shouldn’t sell for a loss, and just to keep holding for the next few years and act as if the money doesn’t exist. […] Remember, if you do all the investing, that means you did all the losing. Don’t deny this.
A Reddit user
Some are Staying Optimistic
One trader said the crypto crash came amid an already rough month for him. Despite the adversity, he incited everyone in the community to not let themselves go in a downward spiral if they’re going through a similar situation. “Remember to consider the good things in life first before dwelling on depressing news and events”, he said.
Excited for crypto to change the world for the better, just going to take a little bit longer than we want but the good things always take patience and especially this year, I am trying to be as patient as any sane person in these tumultuous times.
A Reddit user
Some traders believe the current situation is an opportunity for everyone that wants to join the crypto space but thought they were already too late. One user bought ETH when it was priced around $120 USD. However, he emphasised the difficulty of buying the dip especially when there’s a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) going on and the markets are in red, adding “it takes courage to buy dips”.
The thing I’m trying to say is that it’s impossible to time the market, but don’t call people who buy at dips ‘lucky’. It takes courage to buy at long time lows, not knowing if the market is going to back up. It’s much easier in hindsight, during a bull run. Remember this.
Founder of Ethereum (ETH) Vitalik Buterin said the idea of scaling Doge is “fundamentally flawed,” as Elon Musk plans to.
CEO of Tesla Elon Musk said that Dogecoin (DOGE) could scale its block production by 900%. This sparked a long and heated Twitter thread between Doge defenders and detractors, including other prominent personalities in the crypto space like Michael Saylor and Anthony Pompliano.
Ideally, Doge speeds up block time 10X, increases block size 10X & drops fee 100X. Then it wins hands down.
However, Buterin wasn’t so convinced. In an article published on his personal blog, Buterin addressed the limits and subtle technical issues of scaling a blockchain, adding the risk of centralization—which would change a blockchain’s original concept.
Vitalik Responds to Elon
In summary, Buterin said there are two ways to try scaling a blockchain: by simply adjusting its parameters or implementing fundamental technical changes. While the first one is the most attractive for developers, he outlines as follows why the approach is “fundamentally flawed”.
Computers can’t provide 100% of their CPU power because it would leave them unusable for other applications while it’s running a blockchain node.
Computers need a safe margin to prevent DoS (Denial-of-Service) attack.
Computers need spare capacity for other tasks like processing transactions in the mempool.
Buterin added the importance of users being able to freely run nodes to make the ecosystem truly decentralised:
For a blockchain to be decentralised, it’s crucially important for regular users to be able to run a node, and to have a culture where running nodes is a common activity.
However, technical changes can greatly improve a blockchain over time, and that’s what Buterin is currently working with Ethereum developers. He added that sharding the Ethereum network (that is, “decoupling the data contained on a blockchain from the data that a single node needs to process and store”) could increase throughput to 1 million TPS (transactions per second) without risking network security.
The current bottleneck for Ethereum is storage size. Statelessness and state expiry can fix this and allow an increase of perhaps up to ~3x – but not more, as we want running a node to become easier than it is today
Elon Musk didn’t take too much time to reply the same way Buterin did. His only response to Buterin was “He fears the Doge,” with a poster of a Shiba Inu trying to bite a dollar bill underwater, with a caption saying, “You’ll never use the dollar again”.
