Users of Luno’s new bitcoin “savings wallet” can earn up to 4% interest per year, the exchange said. Source link
Wallet
Ten years ago, humanity wrestled with a generational crisis named COVID-19. In the wake of the pandemic and its cataclysmic fallout, seismic changes occurred and a wellspring of ideas burst forth. The weaknesses of our society laid bare, people were freed to think differently about the social contract. Conversations around the function of money and who controlled its minting began, triggered by the unprecedented money printing provoked by the pandemic. Yoni Assia is the founder and CEO of eToro, the world’s largest social investment network, and the Founder of GoodDollar.org, a non-profit to enable basic income via blockchain technologies. This post […]
For Coinbase users who don’t want to keep their funds on an exchange, the buying and storing crypto just became a lot easier. On Monday afternoon, the company announced that Coinbase Wallet users would now have a fiat on-ramp within the wallet itself. Previously, users holding their crypto in the non-custodial wallet would have to buy crypto on the Coinbase app (or elsewhere) and then send funds to Coinbase Wallet. This meant users trying to use, say, a DeFi dapp would have to install two separate apps to get started, the company said in an emailed statement. For decentralized app creators, […]
On Thursday, ConsenSys-incubated startup Liquality released a new wallet that lets you atomically swap digital assets directly from your browser. The Liquality Atomic Swap Wallet can act as a trustless alternative to current methods of porting cryptocurrencies into the decentralized finance (DeFi) space due to the peer-to-peer (P2P) nature of atomic swaps, Liquality co-founder Thessy Mehrain told CoinDesk in a phone interview. The wallet interacts similarly to cryptocurrency wallet MetaMask, but with an entirely different end-game: swapping assets trustlessly. “It’s called a chain abstraction layer, which basically is a way of making different blockchains talk the same language and interact,” Liquality […]
DHS officials are putting up $25,000 in cash prizes to designers who win the month-long competition. Source link
Blockchain investment firm Digital Currency Group (DCG) has acquired Luno, a retail-focused cryptocurrency exchange with over five million customers spanning over 40 countries. Luno will continue to operate as an independent, wholly-owned subsidiary of DCG, the companies said. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed in an announcement Wednesday. The deal marks another shift in strategy for DCG (which also wholly owns CoinDesk) as it makes a full acquisition of a solidly retail-focused business. “We have invested in many retail businesses all over the world – including nearly two dozen exchanges,” said Mark Murphy, DCG’s chief operating officer. “But […]
Wasabi Wallet users need to upgrade to the latest version if they want to continue using the CoinJoin feature to keep their Bitcoin transaction histories private. That’s because those running older iterations of the wallet can no longer use this feature to mix their coins with users who have the newest version. The Wasabi Wallet team hard-forked the wallet Thursday to address a vulnerability discovered by a team member at Trezor, a leading maker of hardware wallets. A hard fork is a code change that makes older versions of a software incompatible with newer ones. The flaw’s discovery is another example […]
A hypothetical man-in-the-middle attack would have allowed an attacker to hold users’ crypto for ransom on Trezor and KeepKey hardware wallets. Source link
People may like the idea of blockchains and web 3.0, but they tend to hit an immediate obstacle in the form of private cryptographic keys and mnemonic seed phrases that cannot be lost, forgotten or divulged at any cost. Private key management specialist Torus replaces that jarring user experience with what appears to be a familiar single login, but one that’s reinforced behind the scenes by a clever distributed architecture built for web 3.0. Announced Monday, the Singapore-based startup has released a one-click Chrome browser extension for its Torus wallet and added a new product called tKey, a custom version of […]
Privacy-focused Bitcoin software wallet Wasabi is getting a major protocol overhaul. The Wasabi team is working on a new protocol design, dubbed WabiSabi, in a bid to improve the user experience and privacy guarantees of the wallet’s CoinJoin transactions. The major design change would allow users to coinjoin with different values than their peers, a first for the privacy-minded technology that could lead to new (and more flexible) use cases. Wasabi has been conceptualizing the design in a research group since the beginning of 2020 and has hired team members to work on the implementation. Out with the old Currently, Wasabi’s […]
The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups. Source link
Crypto exchange Shakepay, which describes itself as “Canada’s fastest-growing bitcoin platform,” conducted a “proof-of-reserves” audit and acquired an insurance policy to reinforce its security, perhaps learning a lesson from fellow Canadian platforms QuadrigaCX, Einstein and Coinsquare, which all lost customer funds or have otherwise been involved in scandals over the past 20 months. The Montreal-based crypto exchange hired blockchain forensics firm CipherBlade to conduct a full audit of its reserves and security policies. To safeguard its customers’ funds, the exchange also tapped a third-party custodian and secured a specific insurance policy for its cold wallets through Aon, underwritten by insurers with […]
The nation’s Securities Commission is seeking feedback before finalizing new rules to be applied to digital asset wallet services. Source link
Former British spy Christopher Steele insists he never wanted the notorious Trump dossier, which was central to the Russiagate investigation, to be made public. The belated pang of conscience emerged in response to a new lawsuit. Steele would have done “whatever I could do to prevent” BuzzFeed from publishing the dossier, he told London’s High Court in a written statement on Wednesday. The document, which Steele compiled at the behest of the US opposition research firm Fusion GPS and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, was published in early January 2017, shortly before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The former spy’s pang of conscience […]
Digital wallet provider Sylo has teamed up with India-based exchange Bitbns to serve the nation’s revitalized cryptocurrency market. Source link
Funds collected by the scam that breached twitter this week appear to be on the move, cryptocurrency tracing firm Elliptic said. According to transaction data associated with crypto wallets used in the security breach, a total of about $123,000 was collected by the attackers. Of that about 22%, 2.89 BTC, was transferred late last night to an address Elliptic said it “strongly believe(s)” is a Wasabi wallet. Disclosure The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of […]
One of the most popular Bitcoin wallets, Electrum, now supports Lightning Network payments. The latest swathe of major changes was released in version 4.0, one of its biggest upgrades since the Bitcoin wallet launched in 2011. (Note: Since the 4.0 release, some bug fixes have been added.) Lightning payments are seen as the future of Bitcoin because they’re cheaper and would allow many more users to make bitcoin cryptocurrency transactions at once. This makes Electrum the oldest wallet to have adopted Lightning payments so far. Lightning support in Electrum is a long time coming. Electrum founder Thomas Voegtlin first told CoinDesk […]
New research shows certain wallets are vulnerable to a quasi double-spending attack, a federal appeals court effectively said blockchain data is not protected under the Fourth Amendment and more. Here’s the story: You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. Law of the LandThe Senate Banking Committee plans to introduce legislation this week to study virtual currency’s role in illicit online activity. “Although the use and trading of virtual currencies are legal practices, some terrorists and criminals, including international criminal organizations, […]
A “high severity vulnerability” was found and patched in Ethereum wallet Argent, according to leading white-hat hackers OpenZeppelin. Disclosed Friday, OpenZeppelin security researcher Alice Henshaw discovered a vulnerability within Argent that would have allowed user funds to be drained from wallets that did not have Argent’s “guardian” feature. According to an OpenZepplin blog post and press release, news of the discovery was first shared with Argent on June 12: “OpenZeppelin’s research revealed an error in the latest version of Argent’s smart contracts that would allow anyone to trigger the wallet recovery process without a signature – on any wallet with zero […]
Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, has its eyes on the popular bitcoin privacy tool Wasabi Wallet, documents verified by CoinDesk show. Marked for “law enforcement only,” a two-part report by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) analyzed the privacy tool’s impact on using the Bitcoin blockchain to investigate crimes. “Things are not looking good” for law enforcement thanks to this relatively new software, the EC3 warned, citing data from leading blockchain analysis company Chainalysis estimating how much money is filtering through Wasabi for criminal purposes. “According to [Chainalysis], over the last three weeks, BTC in the amount of nearly 50 […]
The comedian Dennis Miller once joked about computer viruses, “When you link up to another computer, you’re linking up to every computer that that computer has ever linked up to.” If so, CoinKite, maker of the Coldcard hardware wallet, has invented an extra-strength prophylactic for bitcoin investors. The startup just released Coldpower, which allows users to charge their hardware wallets by connecting the USB plug to a 9-volt battery, rather than, say, plugging it into a laptop. Comparing it to a popular gizmo that prevents accidental data exchange when one device is plugged into another to charge, CoinKite says Coldpower is “like […]
We were meeting to talk about his recent lay-off, but as my client Jim* fought back tears, I knew we needed to talk about his dad. His dad had always been a tough cookie, dedicated to his family but not necessarily understanding of his dreamer son. Now that Jim (not his real name) had lost his job, it wasn’t just hard to look at the numbers because of what they said about how long he could pay his rent. The numbers were also saying, almost in his father’s voice, that it had been a mistake to pursue such an uncertain career […]
A national law enforcement agency in Ukraine has detained a hacker it claims is responsible for the country’s largest known theft of personal data, cryptocurrency wallets and other information. The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) reported detaining a hacker, known as Sanix, allegedly known for selling a database with 773 million e-mail addresses and 21 million unique passwords on various online forums in recent years. In addition to email logins and passwords, the database contained “PIN codes for bank cards, e-wallets of cryptocurrencies, PayPal accounts, information about computers hacked for further use in botnets and for organizing DDoS attacks,” the SSU […]