Cryptospace Spotlight (12 Dec 2021)
Bitmart lost near 200mil to hacker, Solana fell short of expectation and Congress grilled Crypto firms!
Asia
Myanmar government in exile - National Unity Government (NUG) - recognised crypto stablecoin USD Tender (USDT) as its official currency (more).
Thailand’s central bank urged financial institutions not to offer services related to cryptocurrencies, indicating their high volatility (more).
Binance in talks with Indonesia’s state-owned telecoms operator to set up a cryptocurrency trading exchange (more)
Singapore goes to number one from third place, and Australia moved up the ranking from sixth place to number two in Q4/2021 ranking of the world's most dynamic crypto countries by Coincub. The rating is based on societal parameters such as government policy, financial sector acceptance, tax laws, regulations and legal requirements (more)
Technology
Solana’s network that usually processes over 2,000 transactions per second fell below 500 Thursday morning. It had impacted confidence and spurred various stakeholders to hold a roundtable (more). Although the network was suspected to have experienced a DDoS attack, Solana Foundation had not publicly acknowledged it (more).
Vision for Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2) was unveiled with roadmap to increase its scalability while meeting high standards for trustlessness and censorship resistance (more).
Industry
Visa started to offer consulting service to financial institutions, retailers and other firms on everything from rolling out crypto features and exploring nonfungible tokens to developing wallets for central bank digital currencies (more).
Whatsapp planned to start crypto service in US (more).
Ledger shared its plan to roll out its debit card in selected countries next year (more).
Security
Bitmart exchange lost nearly USD 200 million where hacker compromised two of its exchange hot wallets and made away a mix of over 20 tokens through Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (more-1) (more-2). Bitmart has indicated that it will compensate all affected customers (more).
Decentralised Finance (DeFi) platform BadgerDAO released its inital post-mortem report of its recent hack performed by its engineers and Mandiant. The report indicated the weakness in Cloudflare account creation process led to three privileged accounts being created and used by adversary. This has allowed the adversary to inject malicious script for intercepting and modifying Web3 transactions between users and the platform (more-1) (more-2).
Regulatory
Executives from Coinbase, Circle, FTX, Bitfury, Paxos, and Stellar Development Foundation testified before the Congress - House Financial Services Committee as regulators and lawmakers look to craft new rules for digital assets. Many of the executives voiced support for a new regulatory framework, rather than using existing banking laws to regulate the crypto space (more).
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Bank of France (BoF) and the Swiss National Bank (SNB) have concluded the combined study testing the wholesale use of central bank digital currency (CBDC) in international settlements between financial institutions.(more)