Peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX has reported an influx of attacks on user account credentials, according to an official blog post on June 11.

In addition to covering a litany of best practices for user security, the cryptocurrency exchange stressed the importance of using two-factor authentication (2FA) in particular. The report summarizes 2FA as follows:

“2FA, sometimes referred to as ‘two-step verification’ or ‘multi-factor authentication’, adds an additional layer of security to your account by requiring not only your username and password at login, but also the input of a unique, time-based token. Tokens can be stored on a cell phone within a software-based authenticator app such as Google Authenticator or Authy.”

According to BitMEX, research at Google has shown that virtually all attempts to steal account credentials can be prevented by enabling 2FA. BitMEX concurred that 2FA is the best way to prevent such attacks, and is considering making 2FA authentication mandatory on its platform.

BitMEX also noted that compromised accounts on the exchange are typically associated with weak or reused passwords, hacked emails, or computers infected with malware. Additionally, the exchange discovered some new tactics being deployed in these account hacks, and have updated its policies accordingly. 

First, there is no longer an option to disable email notifications about account logins, since hackers were disabling these notifications in order to further hide their tracks. Second, withdrawal requests must now be verified by email, since attackers were making API keys with the hacked accounts, which could be used on their own to authenticate withdrawals.

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, United States-based crypto exchange Kraken made 2FA mandatory for its platform at the end of March. According to Kraken’s announcement, 2FA has been optional on the platform since its inception in 2013. The exchange particularly supports 2FA programs Google Authenticator and YubiKey, as per the announcement.

Source

Former United States Senator Rick Santorum has joined the board of a Catholic community-oriented cryptocurrency project, according to a press release published on June 4.

The former senator and Republican presidential candidate is now a board member of the Catholic community-oriented cryptocurrency project dubbed Cathio.

The platform is designed to address the needs of the Catholic economy by ensuring lower costs, greater transaction visibility, and improved security for the community.

Santorum was a noted cultural conservative in U.S. politics, who strongly opposed abortion and same-sex marriage on his failed presidential campaigns in 2012 and 2016. Santorum argued that Cathio will also help better engage the youth:

"Millennials don't carry cash, they date on apps and watch on-demand entertainment. We have to be there, we have to learn from successful tech companies, and we have to provide a universal solution that makes it easy for younger generations to engage with the Church."

According to former Ambassador to the Holy See and Cathio Advisor Jim Nicholson, Cathio will not only save the Church money, but will also boost transparency of financial transactions and the connectivity of people, including greater donor development and promotion.

Commenting on the initiative, Cathio CEO Matthew Marcolini told the Financial Times that “when somebody’s doing the wrong thing, or if the government has a question, or if there’s any investigation into any wrongdoing, being able to track that information could be helpful for the Church.” However, when asked how to identify wrongdoers while keeping everyone else's donations anonymous, Marcolini stated:

“The better question to ask isn’t so much about tracking and visibility and everything. But it’s focusing on how to bring millennials and Gen Xers into the fold to help them cultivate a culture of philanthropy or a culture of giving.”

Religion has intersected with the cryptocurrency space in various instances around the world. Last November, Switzerland-based fintech firm X8 AG received a certification from the Shariyah Review Bureau for its Ethereum-based stablecoin. The debate over whether cryptocurrencies are Sharia-compliant is centered on their compatibility with the Islamic prohibition on monetary speculation.

By contrast, Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev of the Russian Orthodox Church condemned the new asset class last January. “This innovation is representative of the entire banking system, where real assets are converted into virtual ones. This paves the way for usury, which the church has always spoken out against, but can do nothing about — we all have to keep our money in banks,” Alfeyev said.

Source

As the initial release of Telegram‘s native Token approaches, Gram Asia, the highest holder of Grams in Asia has revealed that Liquid.com will be the exclusive issuer of the native token. Gram will be running on the Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain which is currently being built by the global messaging app, Telegram.

Another major token sale

While some record-breaking sales such as the BTT sales which ended within 15 minutes have come and gone, reports indicate that the Gram token sale may be another major event coming up exclusively on Liquid as it has been long awaited. The token sale is scheduled to commence on 10 July 2019 by 8 am UTC. Only verified Liquid users will be eligible to participate in the sale. In order to do so, users have to provide a state-issued identification and a selfie. The token can be bought with the USD or USDC, whichever is preferred.

Telegram is known for facilitating sending and receiving encrypted messages between users for 10 years now. With the experience of building user-friendly distributed data storage system during this time as well as capable developers and other professionals plus over 260 million users, it is expected that its token will be a reliable and worthy one for real adoption to improve the state of the digital currency market.

Those purchasing Grams will have their tokens sent to TON-compatible wallets that are safely integrated into Liquid platform once the blockchain mainnet is launched, hopefully before the end of October 2019. Participants, however, do not have to worry about their funds like the total sum realized from the sale will not be disbursed to Telegram if the blockchain is not launched and there will be a full refund to buyers.

A bright future for social networks?

A beta version of the TON testnet had been tested by a number of developers. The developers reported a very high transaction speed on the testnet, which hopefully will be the same for the mainnet and investors were informed accordingly of the capabilities of the TON Virtual Machine and the TON-specific Byzantine consensus algorithm to meet the expectations spelled out in the original whitepaper.

Facebook is planning to launch its own token, Globalcoin on 18 June 2019 as well. If not anything, experts say the entrance of these social media giants into the digital currency industry will significantly push adoption and make the industry stronger than it ever was. The entire industry is looking forward to Facebook’s launch as well.

Source

Outspoken blockchain analyst Tim Swanson is joining U.K.-based Clearmatics, one of the top rivals to his former employer R3.

Swanson, the founder and director of research at Post Oak Labs, has been on Clearmatics’ advisory board since 2015. He will come on board full-time next week as head of market intelligence, he told CoinDesk.

“It is a privilege to join a company that has had a consistent vision for the confluence of finance and technology,” Swanson said.

Before starting his own consultancy, Swanson was the director of market research at enterprise distributed ledger technology (DLT) builder R3, a position he held from near the time that consortium began growing in 2015 until late 2017.

Clearmatics may be best known as the technology partner for Fnality, the consortium of financial institutions building an interbank “utility settlement coin” (USC) which raised $63.2 million in funding last week.

Swanson said he will not be working directly on Fnality’s USC project but will be focused on a number of other Clearmatics initiatives. “Having pulled together regulators and institutions from across the world to incubate USC, I’m excited to contribute to the next generation of critical infrastructure,” he said.

Clearmatics itself raised $12 million in a series A round last October.

Something of a divisive figure in the crypto space, Swanson was described by Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna in their book “The Truth Machine” as “a vocal anti-bitcoin gadfly.”

A longtime student of blockchain, Swanson is also the author of “The Great Chain of Numbers,” published in 2014, an early look at “2.0” applications of the technology such as smart contracts.

Source

Data privacy startup Enigma is officially launching its second test network for ethereum developers.

While the code for the second testnet developer release has been up on GitHub since last week, the Enigma team announced today new developer guidelines and walk-through documentation to supplement the release.

In interview with CoinDesk,  Tor Bair – head of growth and marketing for Enigma – positioned the launch as a way for more developers than before to build specialized smart contracts called “secret contracts.” The Enigma project – originally incubated at MIT Media Labs – aims to create a secure, off-chain environment able to process sensitive and private blockchain data with end-to-end encryption.

These secret contracts are able to perform off-chain computations on encrypted data leveraging the Enigma protocol. While the protocol is not yet live on ethereum mainnet, the release sets up developers to start building code that can be then immediately deployed onto Enigma’s first networked protocol – dubbed Discovery – once officially activated.

“We’re releasing now the developer testnet release so that our partners and friends can get a jumpstart on development so that by the time Discovery is live on ethereum mainnet, we can have live applications [on the network] straightaway,” said Bair.

He added that unlike last year’s testnet release back in July 2018, today’s release is considered to be “from a developer experience almost identical to what it will be when the public networked version of the [Enigma] protocol actually launches.”

Bair emphasized:

“The developer experience is pretty much set with this release.”

Having fundraised $45 million in an initial coin offering back in 2017, Discovery was actually expected to go live on ethereum mainnet last year. However, for a variety of different reasons, the Enigma team announced back in September a delayed timeline to better secure the long-term interests of the project.

Next steps

The next major milestone for the Enigma project is a subsequent launch on a public ethereum test network, akin to the Ropsten or Rinkeby network.

Today’s release only supports testing for secret contracts locally in controlled virtual environments.

As Bair notes:

“From here on out, it’s just about making sure that the network is stable and the peer-to-peer network works appropriately.”

To this point, there will be a set of “genesis nodes” which can be thought of as the computer servers running Enigma’s encrypted data computations.

These nodes – similar in behavior to miners on a traditional proof-of-work blockchain – are rewarded for contributing computing power to the network by receiving network tokens. In this case, “worker nodes” on Enigma are rewarded ENG tokens which presently possess a total market capitalization of close to $40 million.

During Enigma’s next code release on a public ethereum testnet blockchain, there will be what Bair calls a “genesis game” in which people who want to run Enigma nodes will compete to be among the first 50 nodes whitelisted for Discovery mainnet launch.

“The next phase is the deployment on the ethereum testnet which is geared entirely towards node runners,” said Bair. “We’ve been in conversation with a lot of staking-as-a-service providers, funds, independent node runners, ENG holders who have been excited to run nodes on the network for at least the past year and a half.”

While not committing to an exact timeline for this upcoming milestone or a possible date for ethereum mainnet activation, Bair did share with CoinDesk that the team is “doing everything in our power to get mainnet out in 2019.”

Source

Ubisoft—the fourth largest publicly traded video game company known for Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Just Dance—is reportedly developing game features on the Ethereum blockchain, according to Les Echos.

Sources told Les Echos that the #DevelopmentTeam  at Ubisoft is in the advanced stages of creating a blockchain-based marketplace for in-game items, essentially enabling users to purchase game commodities using the blockchain and crypto assets like Ethereum.

A rough translation of the report read:

“The idea is to give a digital existence on the blockchain to the ‘items’ (accessories) available in video games; content that publishers monetize. Ubisoft is considering working on the blockchain Ethereum, which allows to operate this kind of operation.”

Designing games on Ethereum

The idea for integrating an Ethereum blockchain marketplace for in-game items isn’t new. There are several different blockchain startups which have tried to pitch the idea in late 2017.

Ubisoft began exploring the potential of blockchain technology in late 2018. In mid-2018, Ubisoft held a blockchain hackathon called Blockchain Heroes and the Strategic Innovation Lab of Ubisoft created a prototype of a blockchain game.

Speaking to VentureBeat, blockchain initiative associate manager at Ubisoft Anne Puck said:

“At Ubisoft, we think it’s crucial to be part of pioneering the ways players can benefit from what blockchain has to offer. We think that blockchain has the potential to transform the gaming experience and even maybe to empower players as true stakeholders in their worlds. That’s why our job is to accelerate the integration of blockchain at Ubisoft with this initiative.”

According to Puck, Yves Guillemot, the CEO of Ubisoft, suggested that blockchain technology is a “potential revolution for the video game industry in the future,” emphasizing the interest of the company towards building blockchain-based applications as early as August of last year.

Although it remains to be seen whether blockchain networks like Ethereum, with its current transaction throughput limitations, can handle a large base of active users in the near term. That said, open source developer communities are moving forward with the deployment of scaling solutions and companies anticipate that both on-chain and second-layer capacity will be expanded.

Hashcraft, a blockchain-based game created by Ubisoft (source: VentureBeat)

Ubisoft does not have plans to formally launch blockchain applications in the short term due to the regulatory uncertainty in France.

“For the time being, Ubisoft is thinking about this project and no timetable has been set. The group expects that the French legislation on blockchain to be clarified,” Les Echos reported.

Will regulations improve?

With the G20 moving towards the adoption of a standardized regulatory framework and the imposition of policies that can facilitate innovation in the crypto sector, there are hopes that France and the rest of the eurozone will adopt favorable legislation.

In April, France encouraged the EU to adopt its crypto regulatory framework proposed by pro-crypto regulator Bruno Le Maire.

“I will propose to my European partners that we set up a single regulatory framework on crypto-assets inspired by the French experience. Our model is the right one,” the Finance Minister said.

Until France passes the proposed crypto bill, large companies like Ubisoft are likely to remain on the sidelines and while waiting for the approval of regulators.

Source

Tether has just authorized the issuance of $150 million USDT on ethereum’s blockchain earlier today.

A fee of just $0.43 was paid to create $150 million worth of ERC-20 tokens with Tether’s market cap now rising to above $3.3 billion.

Tether prints $150 million on ethereum, June 2019

“This is authorized but not issued,” Paolo Ardoino, Bitfinex CTO said, meaning “these tethers were created in the treasury wallet that will be used to full fill future issuance requests.”

Last time we looked, on May 26th 2019, Tether had printed $500 million eth based USDT in total, with about $45 million authorized, but not issued.

That $45 million has presumably been taken up, so they’ve now minted $150 million more, about a third of all previous eth USDT, for whoever wants them.

With that generally being China. According to a report by Diar, China accounts for more than 60% of tether’s volumes. They say:

“Data provided to Diar by blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis highlights the magnitude of Chinese Tether demand with over $16Bn received by exchanges based in that market in 2018. This year the number has already surpassed an outstanding $10Bn, setting the stage for the biggest year yet.”

It’s not clear whether anything can be read by the fact this was issued on eth rather than the bitcoin based omni which has far more tokens running on it:

Tether stats, June 2019

There’s still $165 million to be taken up on bitcoin, while in eth it’s actually not very clear what that’s saying in light of Ardoino’s comment above.

The page itself shows eth USDT has grown from $500 million to $650 million with only about $3 million authorized, but not issued.

Whether someone has taken up this tether after Ardoino’s comment earlier today, is not clear, but apparently they issue tether on tron too and they even have 50 cent on eos.

Why do it over all these different blockchains, is not clear, but it may be they receive eth for the eth usdt, btc for the omni, and so on.

Or there’s no relation whatever between the crypto and the blockchain they’re using. However, the eth based USDT can far more easily be integrated with say eth decentralized exchanges.

So these $150 million ERC20 tokens do most likely have something to do with eth more than bitcoin or 50 cent.

Raising the question whether China is perhaps thinking of giving ethereum a try as it hasn’t quite debuted there even in narration as far as we are aware.

Yet China has been dominating ethereum Google searches since we can recall, with Solidity too ranking quite highly there.

Obviously in China they use Baidu quite a bit more, with information somewhat difficult to come out, but there have been some “stunts” where they’ve entered censored documents literally on ethereum’s blockchain, readable as if on a website.

So there is some awareness of ethereum, but they have been blockaded by the Chinese central bank starting in late 2017.

Since then there were numerous attempts to bypass the blockade leading to what now can be called a pipeline with USDT at the heart of it.

Chinese residents buy tether in a peer to peer manner Over the Counter (OTC) and then usually convert it to whatever other crypto in mainly centralized crypto-only exchanges.

Meaning what may have been a testing ground to see whether cryptos can be banned has clearly very badly failed.

They may now try and go further to even outright ban it with India here potentially being the testing ground.

A proposed draft law there says that exchanges themselves can potentially face up to ten years in prison, as well as anyone who possesses bitcoin.

Meaning centralized exchanges here, even if they are crypto only, wouldn’t work very well. They can’t arrest a smart contract though. With decentralized exchanges now finally made a reality by ethereum, these ERC20 USDT can be exchanged for any crypto, even bitcoin.

Nor would anyone be able to know that you have, bought, or sold bitcoin or eth as long as you use a VPN because the smart contract of course doesn’t ask for any ID or anything at all.

Making tether the rebel in quite a change now that it has largely proven itself to work and do so mostly in a “proper” manner with concerns of course because here there are counterparties, but so too there are in the blockade or worse, in Indian totalitarianism.

Source

Payments giant Visa announced the launch of its blockchain payments system B2B Connect this Tuesday.

“Launching Visa B2B Connect marks an important industry milestone which will accelerate the evolution of how commercial payments move around the world,” said Kevin Phalen, SVP, global head of Visa Business Solutions.

“By creating a solution that facilitates direct, bank to bank transactions, we are eliminating friction associated with key industry pain points.”

Visa first announced the B2B Connect project back in mid-2016 when it revealed it would be working with Chain, a blockchain technology company, to create a payments system.

The two companies were looking to develop a network that could facilitate instant payments and, simultaneously, have a ledger that would record all of those transactions.

B2B Connect appears to be just that.

Aimed at high-value corporates, Visa says that its new system will be particularly useful for making cross border payments.

Hit the corporates, then the banks

Currently, the new payments system is operational in 30 different markets. Visa says that it plans to expand into 90 jurisdictions by the end of this year.

And though it may be targeting corporates at the moment, Visa clearly has plans to expand into the banking market.

The payments company has already signed deals with financial services giant FIS and Bottomline Technologies so that it can enter the SWIFT-dominated inter-bank payments market.

“Bottomline is delighted to be working with Visa to accelerate the adoption of innovative ways for businesses to make faster cross-border payments,” said Rob Eberle, president & CEO, Bottomline.

“Our ability to provide our mutual financial institution clients globally with access to Visa B2B Connect will help these banks to continue to deliver differentiated payment capabilities to their corporate customers.”

Source