Crypto Bears

2022-11-14 20:00:11 ​Liquidity hub Serum forked by developers after FTX hack

SRM and MSRM tokens and fees discounts were not changed and were working as before, said developers.

Solana’s developers forked the widely used token liquidity hub Serum after being compromised by a hack on the bankruptcy exchange FTX on Nov. 11 that led to a series of unauthorized transactions.

According to pseudonymous developer Mango Max on Twitter, a “verified build of the same version has been made and deployed” on Nov 12. Additionally, the upgrade authority and fee revenues “have been changed and are now managed by a multi-sig controlled by a team of trusted developers.” Serum (SRM) and MegaSerum (MSRM) tokens, as well as fee discounts, were not changed and were working as before.

The development took place on the weekend. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko tweeted that developers depending on serum were forking the code after the upgraded key was compromised, adding that many “protocols depend on serum markets for liquidity and liquidations.”

In a Twitter thread, Mango Max said that the Serum update key was not controlled by the Serum decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) but by a private key connected to FTX and no one could confirm who controlled the keys. The private key was necessary to update the original version of Serum, leading the developers to fork the code, as the private key is under FTX control.

Mango Max also noted that:

“When I reached out to a couple of people previously involved with Serum, I got answers like: ‘I wish I had more info to help you, but I really don’t.’”
Liquidity providers such as Jupiter, the most popular aggregator on Solana, confirmed turning off Serum as a liquidity source “due to security concerns about upgrade authorities, and we also encouraged all our integrators to do the same.” Other projects such as Mango Markets and SolBlaze also announced integration with the new fork.

As reported by Cointelegraph, an attack led to $659 million in outflows from FTX and FTX US on Nov 11. FTX US general counsel Ryne Miller confirmed later that the transactions were unauthorized and that FTX US had moved all remaining crypto into cold storage as a precaution.

A blog post from blockchain forensics firm Elliptic suggests that the drain has seen various tokens on Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain and Avalanche removed. Of the $663 million drained, around $477 million is suspected of having been stolen, while the remainder is believed to have been moved into secure storage by FTX. Open / Comment

2022-11-09 21:50:12 ​New Report: Russian Central Bank Looks to Integrate ‘Digital Assets’ Into its Financial System

The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has released a report that focuses on digital assets and how the new technology could be integrated into its traditional financial system.

On Monday, Russia’s central bank shared a 32-pages-long public consultation report titled 'Digital Assets in Russian Federation', drawing comparisons between this new technology and the traditional system, and seeking opinions on how the former could be included in the latter.

The paper opens with a discussion on the distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the emergence of “new tools and services”, including smart contracts, “digital (tokenized) assets”, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), cryptocurrencies, and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications (dapps).

Notably, all these are separate categories, and most are not discussed in this specific report. It mainly focuses on digital assets, a term it uses to refer to tokenized financial instruments, collateralized stablecoins, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). “The concept of digital finance,” it said, does not include cryptocurrencies and “unsecured (including algorithmic) stablecoins.”

While these new tools come with a significant set of benefits, said the report,

“The digital asset market is still in its initial stage of development and is many times inferior to the market of traditional financial instruments in terms of volume.”

The main goals when it comes to digital assets, the bank said, are regulation, financial stability, consumer protections, and compliance with Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) requirements.

Based on the results of discussions with market participants, it added, the Bank of Russia “formulated and prioritized areas for further improvement" in regard to "digital rights". These include:

taxation of digital rights;
circulation of digital rights within the traditional market infrastructure;
issues of regulatory arbitrage between digital rights and traditional financial instruments;
changes in AML/CFT regulation;
issues of circulation of digital rights issued in accordance with foreign legislation;
regulation of the use of smart contracts.
Furthermore, among the 20 questions listed for consultation, the bank asked who should determine the appropriate standard terms of a smart contract, offering the following options: market participants; the operator of the information system in which digital assets are issued; the Bank of Russia; or somebody else.

It also asked the participants if they think it is necessary to introduce mandatory disclosure requirements for digital rights issuers, and which entities should be subject to mandatory disclosure rules.

Meanwhile, as reported, at the very end of October, Anatoly Aksakov, the Chairman of the State Duma’s committee on the financial markets, said that a crypto mining regulation bill had been submitted to parliament – and that the bill would also allow Russians to use crypto “as a means of payment” outside the country. Moscow has previously banned the use of crypto pay domestically. Open / Comment

2022-11-07 20:45:44 ​Billionaire Tim Draper: Bitcoin to $250,000 by Mid-2023

The American venture capitalist and billionaire Tim Draper is sticking to his earlier $250,000 price prediction for Bitcoin (BTC), although he now believes the price will be hit six months later than before.

Speaking at the Web Summit 2022 event in Lisbon, Portugal, last week, Draper said his $250,000 prediction for the number one cryptocurrency still stands and that this price will be reached by mid-2023.

“By mid-2023, I’m expecting to see Bitcoin hit $250,000,” Draper said.

The new time horizon from the well-known venture investor came after he first predicted in 2018 that Bitcoin would hit that mark in 2022. This had come after Draper correctly predicted that Bitcoin would surpass $10,000 by 2017 back in 2014.

In May this year, Draper again reiterated his bullish stance on Bitcoin in a podcast interview with Scott Melker, saying he believes the coin will reach $250,00 “by the end of this year or early next year.”

“No reason to hold fiat currency”

At this year’s Web Summit, Draper also said that he expects Bitcoin adoption to accelerate once things like “food, clothing, and shelter” can be widely purchased with it. At that point, “there will be no reason to hold on to fiat currency,” he said.

Draper also noted that countries that take a restrictive approach to Bitcoin because they want to “control all the currency,” will suffer. “That’s the way it has been forever,” he said.

“Whenever there is a new technology, and if the government embraces it, let its people experiment with it, those people will often do great things […] we’re going through that right now, it’s going to be interesting,” he said.

Tim Draper has been a well-known investor in early-stage tech companies for several years now. Among his best-known investments are companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Robinhood, and Skype.

Draper has said he first bought Bitcoin in 2011 on now-defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, but lost it all when Mt. Gox collapsed. He still did not lose faith in the cryptocurrency, and in 2014 he won a US Marshals Service auction for nearly 30,000 BTC at a price of $472 per coin. Open / Comment

2022-11-06 21:42:44 ​SEC Charges Coin Club Founders for $295 Million Ponzi Scheme

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed charges against the founder and three promoters of Trade Coin Club, arguing that they duped investors into sinking money in a fraudulent crypto trading bot.

In a Friday announcement, the regulatory body said Douver Torres Braga, Joff Paradise, Keleionalani Akana Taylor, and Jonathan Tetreault, who were involved in the crypto project, raised 82,000 BTC (worth around $300 million) from over 100,000 investors worldwide between 2016 to 2018.

The Trade Coin Club founder Braga reportedly deceived investors by telling them they could generate “minimum returns of 0.35% daily” from a “crypto asset trading bot,” but instead used these funds to compensate himself, Paradise, Taylor, and Tetreault.

We allege that Braga used Trade Coin Club to steal hundreds of millions from investors around the world and enrich himself by exploiting their interest in investing in digital assets,” said David Hirsch, Chief of the Enforcement Division’s Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit.

“To ensure our markets are fair and safe, we will continue to use blockchain tracing and analytical tools to aid us in the pursuit of individuals who perpetrate securities fraud,” Hirsch added.

The SEC further claimed that Braga received at least $55 million worth of user funds (8,396 Bitcoin), while Paradise gained $1.4 million, Taylor $2.6 million, and Tetreault got around $625,000.

Notably, the price of Bitcoin has increased substantially since 2016, suggesting that they could have pocketed far more if they had held their coins. For instance, Braga's 8,396 BTC was worth a whopping $580 million in early November 2021 when the coin hit an all-time high of around $70,000.

The project's website is no longer accessible. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Braga currently lives in Brazil and Taylor lives in Hawaii.

Trade Coin Club, which marketed itself as a membership group for trading bitcoin, was "a multi-level marketing program" that operated from 2016 through 2018 and promised profits from the trading activities of a purported crypto asset trading bot, according to the SEC.

While crypto Ponzi schemes are nothing out of the norm, the SEC and other financial regulators have lately ramped up their efforts to make sure scammers don't go unpunished.

As reported, in early August, the SEC charged 11 individuals for their roles in an alleged crypto pyramid and Ponzi scheme, Forsage, that raised over USD 300m from millions of investors worldwide, including in the United States. Open / Comment

2022-11-02 21:00:05 ​CRYPTOBOTS GAME HAS LAUNCHED — EARN 2500% APY AND BATTLE FOR $50,000!

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2022-10-31 22:22:12 ​How not to Bitcoin: User pays 1,000x fee to send 4 BTC.

What could have inspired a Bitcoin user to overpay by 1,000 times the asking price to move roughly $63,000 in Bitcoin?

Fat fingers? A Bitcoin user spent over $200 to make a transaction, paying astronomically above the average fee.

In a transaction that entered Bitcoin block 760,077, a user paid 1,136,000 satoshis, (0.0136 BTC or $220.52) to move 3.8 BTC ($63,000). This extraordinarily high fee is a whopping 1,000 times the usual Bitcoin transaction fee, as at block height 760,077, the average transaction fee was roughly $0.20.

Twitter user Bitcoin QnA first spotted the out-of-the-ordinary transaction, asking, “Y tho?” The Bitcoin educator told Cointelegraph that “Ultimately, we’ll never know why they paid high, but there are a few possible answers.” QnA listed the following:

“1. Using a wallet with terrible fee estimations 2. A user making a typo when manually entering their fee rate 3. An exchange processing an urgent payout. They often overpay but never normally by this much!”

Finally, QnA told Cointelegraph that it could be that the user hasn’t done their homework, and the error could be explained by “a user not understanding how miner fees work (unlikely given the amounts seen in the tx in question).”

Transaction fees on the Bitcoin base chain vary from pennies to hundreds of dollars, depending on congestion levels in the Bitcoin memory pool, or “mem pool,” as well as transaction sizes. Transaction fees are priced in satoshis per unit of data, abbreviated to sats/vByte.

The sats/vByte rate is multiplied by the size of the transaction made to get the total fee you’ll pay. Generally speaking, the more money (or data) sent, the higher the transaction fee — although several other factors are at play.

If a user is in a hurry, they can choose to pay a higher sats/vByte fee to almost guarantee that miners will include their transaction in the next confirmed block. The cost of this luxury is a higher fee rate. The lowest fee is 1 sats/vByte; higher fees are generally considered as anything over 7 sats/vByte. For this fat-fingered Bitcoiner in question, they paid a whopping 8,042 sat/Byte, or 1,136,000 sats.

That’s more than 1,000 times the typical fee. The median transaction fee for block 760,077 was ~8 sat/vB or $0.22. Open / Comment

2022-10-28 19:30:01 ​This Eco-Friendly Crypto Has Raised Over $11 Million for its New Green Platform – How to Buy Early?

A brand new eco friendly crypto called IMPT has now raised $11m for its platform, in the mission of redefining the market of carbon credits for the better.

Making carbon credits more transparent

The carbon credits markets are notoriously difficult to navigate and extremely opaque. This means that it is very difficult for them to be easily traded, which opens the door for large market inefficiencies.

Blockchain means that NFTs can be traded in a seamless manner 24/7, without relying on counterparties in order to facilitate the trades themselves, since smart contracts can do this.

Not only does this make the entire process more efficient, but it also means that it is more transparent.

When one shops through the IMPT shopping platform with ESG friendly brands (of which more than 25,000 have now onboarded via the IMPT affiliate programme), they are rewarded for cash back in IMPT tokens.

The level of cash back will vary from brand to brand, with some choosing to allocate a higher percentage of the total spend to cash back rewards.

The rise in the ESG industry

One of the reasons that investors are so bullish on the IMPT project is the fact that both cryptocurrency and ESG industries have been going parabolic in their importance over the past decade, and IMPT hopes to capitalise on the nexus of the two.

By 2030, Broadridge Financial Solutions expects the total value of the ESG industry to have reached $30 trillion, and the carbon credits industry alone to have reached $50 billion.

One of the main reasons for this is thanks to the fact that investors around the world are mandated to invest in ESG companies with a specific percentage of their portfolio, and this makes it easier for "greener" companies to attract more capital than those that pollute the environment or are deemed to be net negative for humanity.

IMPT stands at the crossroads of these two industries, and hopes to perform well because of it.

IMPT has now raised $11m

The Dash 2 Trade presale has been extremely successful thus far, and has now raised in excess of $11m within a matter of weeks.

This is particularly remarkable when one considers that crypto is currently in the depths of a bear market, and the macroeconomic situation more generally has also been bearish as of late. Open / Comment

2022-10-25 20:00:05 ​ Join the Waitlist of Leech Protocol!

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2022-10-22 19:00:05 ​This New Crypto Shows Why Green Tokens Could Make Big Gains in 2023

IMPT is a brand new green project that hopes too capitalise on the trend of ESG investing by furthering their climate goals and incentivising individuals to reduce their carbon emissions by shopping responsibly.

IMPT has raised $7m at the presale

In just over two weeks, IMPT has managed to raise over $7m at their presale to further their goals and kickstart the project.

Those who wish to participate in the presale can do so at the website, where it is ongoing.

ESG investing continues to grow exponentially

The ESG industry has continued to expand over the last decade, with most companies around the world being forced to increase their ESG scores if they wish to continue to attract capital.

Capital allocators are constrained by mandates in order to effect this change, and are often constrained and incentivised by mandates in order to ensure that projects that are friendlier to the environment become the most well-capitalised.

This politicisation in the world of investing is a trend that is ongoing and likely to strengthen over the coming months and years, with companies such as Broadridge Financial Solutions predicting that by the year 2030 the total market cap of the ESG industry will have come to exceed $30 trillion, and the total value of the carbon credits industry will have exceeded $50 billion.

The nexus of ESG and investing in the crypto space is also a trend that has been increasing in the past few years, with ESG-favourable blockchains attracting a lot of institutional capital: proof of work is a consensus mechanism that requires blockchains to use a lot of energy in order to function effectively, whereas proof of stake use comparatively little energy.

Shop with over 25,000 companies through the platform

There are now over 25,000 companies that IMPT has established links with through their affiliate programme, and this number is increasing by 20% a month.

This means that individuals who wish to shop through the platform are eligible to earn rewards in IMPT as cashback.

These rewards can then either be traded on the open market, held for the long term, or redeemed for an NFT that showcases one's green credentials.

The process of redemption involves burning the IMPT, such that the token becomes gradually more deflationary and scarcer over time. Open / Comment

2022-10-20 23:19:59 ​Over 70% of Surveyed El Salvador Citizens Say the Country’s Bitcoin Strategy Has ‘Failed’

Just above three-quarters of surveyed Salvadorians reportedly see the adoption of bitcoin (BTC) as a failure.

According to the poll by the University of Central America (UCA), as reported by Barron’s, 77% of respondents consider the BTC adoption as legal tender in 2021, alongside the dollar, "to have been a failure."

75.6% of respondents said they haven’t used crypto in 2022 at all.

The UCA rector Andreu Oliva, commenting on the results of the study, was quoted as saying that,

“Bitcoin is the government's most unpopular measure, the most criticized and the most frowned upon.”

The UCA study also found that 77% of Salvadorans think that President Nayib Bukele "should not continue to spend public money to buy Bitcoin."

In July this year, Bukele announced that the country had bought yet another “dip” – purchasing BTC 80 at a price of USD 19,000 per coin. It appears that Bukele has authorized the purchase of some BTC 2,381 to date, spending almost $105 million of public funds in the process.

Bitcoin was adopted as a legal tender in the country in September 2021. Bukele aimed to promote crypto transfers from about three million Salvadorans living overseas to their relatives in the country, hence also saving on bank charges, the Barron’s noted, stating that it was a strategic decision as remittances make up more than a quarter of El Salvador's gross domestic product.

Yet, as reported in August this year, a report cited data from the Central Reserve Bank that claimed that under 2% of remittances made to El Salvador make use of the state-operated Chivo bitcoin app and wallet. Furthermore, bitcoin ATM booths in the nation were “empty” less than a year after their launch. The government, however, claimed that the app is still popular among many citizens.

In April, the American National Bureau of Economic Research published a survey that showed 20% of Salvadorans were continuing to make use of the Chivo Wallet.

But this is not the first time the 'bitcoin experiment' was deemed a failure in the country, with many critics, outlets, and organizations calling out the government for the lack of transparency when it comes to spending on BTC, and saying that spending on infrastructure for overseas bitcoiners hoping to relocate to El Salvador was also causing financial wrinkles. You can read more about this here. Open / Comment