Former Messari Head of Product and well known crypto trader Qiao Wang believes the nascent DeFi sector has enormous growth potential. DeFi has been on a tear this year, with the total value locked growing from under $1 billion to just under $8 billion today. Since the beginning of 2020, TVL across all DeFi platforms in dollar terms has increased over 1000% and it does not look like slowing down anytime soon. Wang compared this year’s DeFi boom to pre-2013 Bitcoin and pre-2015 Ethereum which, he stated, were “once-in-a-lifetime asymmetric…
Month: September 2020
The IRS offers a $625,000 bounty to anyone who can break Monero and Lightning
The United States Internal Revenue Services (IRS) has offered a bounty of up to $625,000 to anyone who can break purportedly untraceable privacy coins like Monero (XMR) as well as trace transactions on Bitcoin’s (BTC) Lightning Network. The official proposal, published last week, says the IRS will accept submissions in the form of working prototypes until September 16. If accepted, applicants will receive an initial payment of $500,000. This grant will allow applicants to develop their prototype into a working concept over the next eight months. Once the pilot test…
ERC-20 market cap differential over Ethereum hits all-time high
Ethereum’s economic metrics are strengthening as transfer value and ERC-20 market capitalization continue to build momentum. Research by on-chain analytics platform Santiment has revealed that the market capitalization for all ERC-20 based tokens has flipped that of Ethereum itself. It added that it is currently the all-time highest market cap differential of ERC-20 coins over Ethereum. The total market cap for all current ERC-20 assets is $46.7 billion whereas that for Ethereum is currently just over $41 billion at the time of writing. There have been a couple of similar,…
Stablecoins post triple-digit growth in 2020, but institutional rivals loom
The supply of the Coinbase-backed stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) has grown by 250% since the start of 2020, including an 80% expansion in just the past two months. After starting the year with a nearly $520 million market cap, USDC now ranks as the 16th-largest crypto asset with a $1.86 billion capitalization — beating out all other major stablecoins except for the $14.5 billion Tether (USDT) by at least four times. Meanwhile, other stablecoins (most of which are pegged to the value of $1 US) have also seen significant growth…
Pandemic has accelerated adoption of digital currency: ECB President
The pandemic has seen consumers adopt digital payments in increasing numbers and the trend was accelerating, said the President of the European Central Bank (ECB) Christine Lagarde. She also indicated a panel of euro-zone central bank officials is set to reveal a verdict on a European central bank digital currency (CBDC) imminently. Speaking at an online conference hosted by Deutsche Bundesbank on Sept. 10, Lagarde, stated that EU residents had embraced digitalization, with e-commerce sales increasing roughly 20% between February and June, even as total retail sales declined 1.2%. She…
US Treasury blacklisted a non-existent ETH address in connection with alleged Russian election interference
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…
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…