Cryptospace Spotlight #35 (28 Aug 2022)
Regression bugs noted in Ethereum clients as the Merge nears, over $100 million in NFTs have been stolen in the last year, and Ethereum Foundation boosted its bug bounty rewards ahead of the Merge!
Technology and Industry
The Ethereum Foundation has boosted its rewards up to 4 times for bugs discovered in code related to the upcoming merge. “Critical bugs” disclosed could get you a bug bounty of up to $1 million. [more]
Blockchain development company Alchemy today announced the acquisition of ChainShot, a Web3 education platform. [more]
Cloud service provider Hetzner, that hosts roughly 10% of all Ethereum nodes, has said that these nodes violated its terms of service. [more]
Web3 Domain Name Service provider’s domain name Eth.link expired on 26 Jul and will be up for grabs on 5 Sep as its programmer who can renew it is in jail. [more]
Three Arrows Capital co-founder Su Zhu said Teneo, the crypto hedge fund's liquidator, made "inaccurate and misleading" representations to the High Court of Singapore. [more]
In an affidavit delivered Aug. 19 in person in Bangkok, Zhu said the liquidator "had not provided an entirely complete or accurate version of events" to the court. The Singapore court has granted permission for Teneo to probe the local assets of Three Arrows Capital, a decision that means it legally recognizes the liquidation order originally filed in the British Virgin Islands.
MUFG Bank, the largest bank in Japan, invests $22.5m into Animoca Brands’ Japanese subsidiary for NFTs and Web3. [more]
Nike has raked in over $185 million in revenue from its NFT-related projects. [more]
Policy and Regulatory
Singapore - The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has sent highly granular questionnaire to some applicants and holders of its digital-payments license, and is expected to broaden cryptocurrency regulations soon. [more]
Europe - Blockchain associations lobbied as MiCA could impose restrictions on the issuance and use of stablecoins which aren’t denominated in euros or other official currency of an EU Member State. This would possibly ban Tether’s USDT, Circle’s USD coin and Binance’s binance USD, which account for an enormous chunk of crypto trade volumes globally. [more]
Australia - Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers said that his government will improve the way Australia’s system manages crypto assets and provide greater protections for consumers. [more]
United States - Gary Gensler wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that recent market events reinforcing the importance of bringing the weight of securities rules to crypto. [more]
Afghanistan - Crypto adoption in Afghanistan jumped after the Taliban takeover last year, but now police are reportedly clamping down on the local scene. At least 16 crypto exchanges were reportedly shut down. [more]
United Arab Emirates - Major crypto companies are flocking to the UAE in hopes of tapping a potentially lucrative market, but a long road still lays before them. [more]
Security and Risk
23 Aug - Near’s Rainbow Bridge (connects Near Protocol, Ethereum, and Aurora) blocked an attempted attack, costing attackers 5 Ethereum [more]
The attackers proposed a fabricated block on Near requiring a 5 Ethereum deposit. However, the block was challenged and rejected.
Regression bugs identified in Ethereum clients as it prepared for the Merge. The developers are working to resolve them. [more]
Over $100 million in NFTs have been stolen in the last year, according to a new report by blockchain analysis firm Elliptic. [more]
A group of anonymous hackers have exploited a zero-day bug in the General Bytes Bitcoin ATM servers to steal BTC from several customers. General Bytes has warned its customers not to use their Bitcoin ATMs until they applied two updated server patches. [more]
According to Patrick Hillmann, chief communications officer of Binance, his Deepfake AI hologram is being used by scammers to trick users into online meetings and target Binance clients’ crypto projects. [more]