Blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs revealed that some major Russian-linked ransomware syndicates rebranded their activities in 2022 to avoid sanctions from Western countries. According to a new report published recently, the rebranding and other significant activities showed notable changes in the cybercrime space and darknet markets (DNMs) after Russia invaded Ukraine. Ransomware Operators Rebranded to...Read More
Crypto mining saw severe losses last year as prices went south. Several notable players in the space slid into bankruptcy, while others had to take cost-cut measures and shut down branches. This was also reflected in the Canadian cryptocurrency miner Hive Blockchain’s revenue, which halved to $14.3 million in Q3 as compared $29.6 million total...Read More
Matthew Klinger – a 51-year-old Jefferson City, Missouri resident – received five years of supervised probation after admitting to shooting a bitcoin ATM with a handgun. It remains unclear whether the machine had any faults, however, he said he did it “so that it could not take money from anyone else.” So Close to a...Read More
Despite the ups and downs of the crypto market, the Web3 and the NFT gaming industries continue to attract the attention of business leaders who are betting on technological innovation to push the whole ecosystem forward. On February 24, Trip Hawkins, one of the founders of Electronic Arts (EA), announced he was joining the Web3...Read More
There has been a tremendous transformation in the Bitcoin mining landscape since. Different countries have become the new harbors of miners. One European country has emerged as the world’s largest hash rate producer per capita. Owing to cheap electricity, Iceland is one of the first countries to see industrial-scale Bitcoin mining. According to Bitcoin mining...Read More
The Solana-based Wormhole Bridge was hacked for $325 million after the attacker managed to exploit a security flaw, making it one of the largest exploits in crypto history. A year later, a group of white hats, along with two crypto firms, launched a “counter-exploit” against the malicious entities and clawed back a portion of stolen...Read More
A recent report by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) revealed that the crypto industry lost over $650 billion after two major scandals that rocked the market last year. The report titled “Crypto Shocks and Retail Losses” explained investors’ trading behavior during and after the scandals, their profits and losses, and the effects of the...Read More
Block (formerly known as Square) – an American multinational technology conglomerate founded by Jack Dorsey – disclosed $1.83 billion of bitcoin revenue generated from its Cash App payment service in Q4, 2022. The figure was nearly $2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021, and the company blamed the decline of the crypto market for...Read More
Coinbase launched its own Layer-2 blockchain yesterday, built in collaboration with Optimism in its OP stack. The new Layer-2 blockchain, named Base, will host many of Coinbase’s on-chain products and offer EVMs at low costs to developers. Piggybacking on Recent News Unfortunately, opportunistic bad actors are once again trying to make a quick buck off...Read More
The reality TV star – Kim Kardashian, the boxing legend – Floyd Mayweather, and other celebrities filed a motion to a California federal judge, asking their renewed EMAX lawsuit to be removed. The magistrates dropped a similar indictment against the defendants in December last year. Urging for a Dismissal Kim Kardashian, Floyd Mayweather, Paul Pierce,...Read More
Bitcoin wallet service provider BlueWallet has decided to shut down Lndhub.io, a Lightning Network node on the Bitcoin Network used to store and trade satoshis (sats) – the smallest denomination of the primary cryptocurrency. The Lightning Network is a layer-2 protocol layered on the Bitcoin protocol, used to process micropayments among participating nodes to facilitate...Read More
Following the most recent crackdown by the US Securities and Exchange Commission against several crypto companies, Jeremy Allaire opined that the agency is not the best fit to oversee stablecoins in particular. He believes these assets are part of the banking sector, thus, they need to be regulated by another watchdog in the States. The...Read More
On Feb. 23, Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou sent a letter to the team announcing a “corporate restructure” and the layoffs. It is the second round of company layoffs following its downsizing of employees by 22% in November. Gharegozlou stated: “As part of this restructure, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with...Read More
The first Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting of G20 under India’s presidency, taking place from February 23 to 25 at Bengaluru, is expected to discuss cryptocurrencies, among other issues, Reuters said in a report. Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who plays the host, earlier said that the group is exploring if it can...Read More
Major Australian gaming firm Immutable slashed 11% of the company’s headcount, stating that the job cut happened in order to ensure cash reserves last for a long time. This is the second time Immutable is reducing its workers after the firm axed the number of its employees in July 2022. Immutable Incurred Losses Worth $56...Read More
Tencent Cloud announced strategic collaborations with prominent companies in the crypto industry namely – Ankr, Avalanche, Scroll, and Sui – to support the development of the Web3 ecosystem. According to the official statement by the subsidiary of the Chinese tech giant, the latest move aims to establish close relationships with industry partners to assist developers...Read More
Calls for more transparency in the process of crypto regulation in the U.S. are mounting. The latest to join the trend is the Blockchain Association, with the spate of enforcement action continuing as the Securities and Exchange Commission ramps up its war on crypto. On Feb. 22, Blockchain Association CEO Kristin Smith told Bloomberg that...Read More
Arbitrum has already been leading the pack in the layer 2 roll-up. However, the daily transactions on the protocol hit 1.14 million on February 21st, surpassing Ethereum mainnet, which recorded 1.05 million. According to the on-chain data on Dune Analytics, this is a new record high for the scaling solution. Since the beginning of the...Read More
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Hope Finance suffered a $2 million exploit on February 20th. The hacker purportedly stole everything from the protocol genesis, according to its Twitter account, which was the first to announce that the community was scammed. The Arbitrum-based protocol also shared the information of the person while attaching a photograph with a...Read More
Major blockchain infrastructure platform Paxos Trust Company is holding discussions with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concerning Binance stablecoin BUSD, according to a report by Reuters. The company earlier received a notice from New York authorities to cease minting BUSD. According to Reuters on Tuesday (Feb. 21, 2022), Charles Cascarilla, CEO of Paxos,...Read More
Last year was less profitable for crypto scammers as their revenue plunged nearly 50% in 2022, according to a new study by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. The blockchain company noted that the decrease in revenue could be linked to the decline in the value of cryptocurrencies due to the correlation of most scam types with...Read More
The United Kingdom’s crypto and fintech industries saw investment dry up in the latter half of 2022 amid a combination of turbulent macroeconomic conditions and record-high inflation. Businesses in the region completed a total of 591 fintech deals in 2022, compared to 724 in 2021. The Fintech Trajectory According to Bloomberg, the data comes from...Read More
A British pensioner living in Nottinghamshire parted with $207,000 after becoming a victim of a bitcoin romance scam. The police managed to restore some of the stolen funds and warned people to be extra vigilant with online dating due to the rise of similar frauds. The Latest BTC Romance Scheme The Nottinghamshire police said a woman...Read More
Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace giant OpenSea announced some changes to its fee structure. This comes amid an open challenge by one of its competitors, which suggested that NFT creators boycott OpenSea. In a tweet thread on Friday (Feb. 17, 2023), OpenSea made some structural changes in the wake of stiff competition by rival marketplace Blur....Read More
Hong Kong’s position as an upcoming hub of crypto businesses is being increasingly noticed and discussed in the relevant circles. In a tweet, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong referred to the city-state to stress that the United States may lose its position as the financial hub of the world for lacking crypto regulations. Armstrong Calls for...Read More
On February 17, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged NBA Hall of Famer Paul Pierce with illegally promoting the EMAX token on his social media accounts. The EMAX token was offered and sold by EthereumMax. According to the complaint, Pierce has agreed to pay a penalty of $1,115,000, plus approximately $240,000 in disgorgement and...Read More
Gilbert Armenta – the former boyfriend of Ruja Ignatova (more famous as the “Cryptoqueen”) – will reportedly spend five years in jail for participating in the fraudulent cryptocurrency project OneCoin. The Bulgarian-born Ignatova – the Founder of the infamous Ponzi scheme – sits on the FBI’s ten most-wanted list. She was last seen in 2017...Read More
The cash withdrawal restrictions imposed by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) have made a strong case for Bitcoin as a solid store of value and a censorship-resistant currency. Nigeria is currently facing a shortage of physical cash after the CBN redesigned its banknotes, causing the old bills of the local naira currency to become...Read More
Cathie Wood, Founder and CEO of Ark Invest, continues to be bullish on Coinbase, whose share price is down by nearly 85% from its all-time high of $348.98 on November 12, 2021. Making the third investment in two months and fourth since November, Ark Invest acquired $9.2 million worth of COIN shares on Friday, media...Read More
In a YouTube video shared on their channel, the cybersecurity team at Unciphered demonstrated a critical security vulnerability for the OneKey wallet that they discovered during research. As is customary for the white hat discovery of vulnerabilities, the video was released after it was patched. Lacking Customary Encryption Unciphered, a cybersecurity startup whose main focus...Read More
