Earlier today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury updated its Specially Designated Nationals List, adding several individuals and a number of cryptocurrency addresses. One of the individuals added was Artem Mikhaylovich Lifshits — a Russian national, accused of interfering in the U.S. elections. In addition to disclosing his personal information, the site lists a number of cryptocurrency addresses that he allegedly controls. One of the Ethereum addresses, found at 0xa7e5d5a720f06526557c513402f2e6b5fa20b00, does not seem to exist, however. Source: U.S. Department of the Treasury. There was likely a mixup somewhere in the chain of command and…
Day: September 10, 2020
Bitcoin’s $12.5K pump didn’t do much to impress Peter Brandt
Trader and head of proprietary trading firm Factor LLC, Peter Brandt, said Bitcoin’s (BTC) recent run up past $12,000 did not excite him as much as it did the rest of the market. “I never got super super excited about the advance in Bitcoin,” Brandt told Cointelegraph in a Sept. 9 interview. “I thought it was constructive — the advance we had in Bitcoin starting in late July” he said, noting the chart looked good. On July 27, Bitcoin definitively broke $10,500, a level which previously stood as a wall against…
Alongside today’s sanctions, the US charges operators of Russian troll farm with fraud for using U.S. IDs to start crypto accounts
The U.S. filed criminal charges against Russian national Artem Lifshits for his management of an affiliate of the infamous Internet Research Agency, which U.S. authorities accuse of interfering in the 2016 election. The new complaint alleges that Lifshits has managed the translator department of Project Lakhta since 2017, in which capacity he illegally obtained U.S. identification documents in order to use “the means of identification of United States persons to open bank accounts, PayPal accounts, and cryptocurrency accounts.” The charge is conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The U.S. Department of Justice…
Another DeFi exit scam just made off with $20M in investor funds
The rapidly expanding DeFi space is becoming riddled with scams as another suspicious project has headed for the exits carrying speculators’ money. “A new liquidity mining pool DeFi project, Yfdexf.Finance has exited the market after defrauding investors of $20 million in total funds locked in its protocol,” media outlet ZyCrypto wrote on Sept. 10. The project shilled its vaporware hard via Twitter and messaging apps such as Discord over the past 48 hours, ZyCrypto detailed. Cointelegraph tried tracking down details of the effort, but all traces of the scam appear…
New US sanctions target crypto addresses of Russian hackers accused of election interference
Sept. 10 updates to the U.S. Treasury’s sanctions include Russian nationals who allegedly worked to interfere in U.S. elections. The updates specifically target a laundry list of crypto wallet addresses associated with these accused hackers. The new specially designated nationals include St. Petersburg residents Anton Nikolaeyvich Andreyev and Artem Mikhaylovich Lifshits and addresses associated with these two including Bitcoin, Litecoin, ZCash, Dash and Ether. This is not the first time that the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control has targeted crypto addresses. In March, OFAC added two Chinese nationals who…
Discussing BTC’s next big move
The price of Bitcoin (BTC) has been ranging between $9,800 and $10,500 for nearly a week after a short fall from almost $12,100 seen on Sept. 1. As BTC struggles to show any distinctive price movement, traders are generally cautious. Over the medium to long term, traders expect Bitcoin to recover and perceive the ongoing consolidation phase as a healthy pullback. From July 16 to Aug. 17, Bitcoin rose from $9,005 to $12,486 on Coinbase, with a pullback arguably necessary to neutralize the futures market. A large portion of Bitcoin’s…
Blockchain needs to walk before it runs to DeFi
Decentralized finance has become the fastest-growing sector of the blockchain industry. Today, there are over 200 projects working on a wide variety of decentralized financial products and services. That number continues to increase every day as new DeFi-related projects launch. The most telling figure of this rapid growth is the staggering amount of money that is locked in DeFi, recently having passed the $7 billion threshold. The challenge is that increased growth leads to higher risks. As DeFi continues to grow at a rapid pace, this burgeoning industry will experience…
Russian blockchain voting system shows up on GitHub
As Russia is set to pilot a blockchain-based e-voting system, the country’s federal elections authority has provided public access to the platform’s source code. According to an official announcement by Russia’s Central Election Commission, or CEC, the source code for the e-voting system was partly released on GitHub on Sept. 7. The initial release included the source code for smart contracts and front-end elements of the e-voting platform like developer libraries and servers responsible for the vote count. According to the CEC, the internal elements of the e-voting platform are…
Belarusian crypto exchange looks to Lithuania amid political turmoil
Amid the ongoing political unrest in Belarus, some local cryptocurrency-related companies are reportedly setting up backup offices in neighboring countries. Currency.com, a Minsk-headquartered crypto trading company, is reportedly planning to open an office in Lithuania to provide a safe place for its employees. According to a Sept. 8 report by local news agency TUT.BY, Currency.com is offering its Belarus-based employees to “take a sabbatical” in Vilnius amid election-fueled unrest. Cryptocurrency. com CEO Jonathan Squires reportedly said that the company will maintain its offices in Minsk, while relocation is voluntary. “We…
DCG’s Foundry to finance Bitmain customers in North America
China’s crypto mining giant Bitmain has entered a new partnership to streamline its operations in North America. As Bitmain officially announced on Sept. 10, the company has officially partnered with Foundry, a wholly-owned crypto mining subsidiary of major cryptocurrency firm, Digital Currency Group, or DCG. Within the partnership, Foundry will provide financing to Bitmain’s end customers in North America. According to Bitmain, obtaining financing is more difficult for crypto miners than for firms in other industries. Foundry, in its turn, will help “ship a significant number of machines into North…