Over the weekend, hackers took nearly $ 200 million in 20 different tokens from the BitMart exchange, but it received unconditional support.

The doggy meme cryptocurrency community Shiba Inu and the Huobi exchange teamed up to help BitMart overcome the attack that occurred over the weekend.

After an almost $ 200 million worth attack on the BitMart exchange, the Shiba Inu (SHIB) community and Huobi Global now desire to help strengthen security and track entries of stolen assets.

On December 5, BitMart fell victim to a hot wallet violation that took place on the Ethereum (ETH) and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) blockchains. Hackers managed to extract more than $ 196 million, approximately $ 100 million through the Ethernet network, and at least $ 96 million through the BSC blockchain.

After BitMart CEO Sheldon Xia confirmed the attack, Huobi revealed that it would assist BitMart by tracking the entry of assets on its exchange and reporting where the stolen funds go. Huobi’s director of global strategy, Jeff Mei, explained that transparency and quick responses are vital factors when dealing with such attacks.

Exchanges must warn their users, exchanges, and law enforcement authorities as soon as possible. They must also be transparent about what they are doing to manage the attack and the loss of user funds.

Mei also clarified that users should not pool all their assets on a single platform or a wallet. The representative advised users to closely research a platform’s security measures before investing and immediately notify the relevant exchange staff if they become aware of any security incidents.

Shiba to the Rescue

The Shiba Inu community also confirmed that it would assist the hacked exchange, citing its existing efforts to review potential security threats to ShibaSwap, a decentralized exchange built by the community.

Xia explained that the exchange would compensate affected investors with its own funds. They said they are in conversations with other project teams to confirm quick solutions, such as token exchanges. The attack forced the platform to halt all withdrawals and deposits. However, Xia firmly believes that BitMart would resume services before December ends.

Another Case at the Same Time

While BitMart got hacked, another attack occurred, but it managed to get stopped. The Synapse Bridge protocol recently managed to stop a multi-million dollar exploit in the Metapool Avalanche Neutral Dollar (nUSD). Cointelegraph highlighted that Synapse Bridge prevented a hacker from extracting at least $ 8 million worth of cryptocurrencies:

BitMart encountered a contract error in the AMM Metapool contracts that handle calculations of virtual prices against the virtual price of the homegroup. While the threat got averted, Synapse Bridge soon rolled out new nUSD clusters as a means to further strengthen its security against similar attacks.

By: Jenson Nuñez

According to Snowden, a cryptocurrency project that centralizes decision-making is not a reliable project. According to Wood, the problem is not about centralization; but the tools that condition it.

Renowned cybersecurity expert Edward Snowden talked with Gavin Wood about decentralization on cryptocurrency networks. Snowden was adamant against centralization, while Wood chose other paths to talk about it.

On Friday, an online conference cycle known as DeData took place. The event got organized by BlockDown and was a stage for Snowden and Wood to have the chance to share their thoughts regarding different technological advances related to cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and web3.

Snowden insisted on the importance of privacy and the decentralization of power in different aspects of today’s life, such as communication, the management of personal and public data, finances, among other factors. Snowden got pursued by American justice because he remained true to his principles.

On the other hand, Wood is not as radical as Snowden when it comes to decentralization. According to Wood, the existence of a supreme authority in which a community must trust and that ensures compliance with the established policies is usually necessary.

Decentralization for Edward Snowden and Ethereum’s Co-founder

According to Wood, the decentralization and allegiances of Bitcoin are the properties that have made it an unstoppable force. Regarding the alliances of this cryptocurrency, Wood explained that he used that term since Bitcoin arose without having a legal framework that delimited it. No regulation proclaimed its use was legal, but any other procedure claimed otherwise.

Snowden fully agrees with Wood on these words. However, disagreements between the two would come later, when the former US government employee spoke about his lack of confidence in various projects that are issuing stablecoins.

According to Snowden, a project based on Bitcoin technology issuing some stablecoin or “stable cryptocurrency” enables the possibility of creating black lists of users. Users do not deserve to get recognized as the issuers of a stablecoin so, that plenipotentiary and censorship aspect makes it unstable, both to the project and to its product.

After highlighting his point, Snowden ended his participation by asking who else should have the right to spend their own money but themselves. This question referred to the fact that if there is someone with enough power in a network to take away the freedom to spend or keep a cryptocurrency from its owner, it is not a reliable project.

Wood went against Snowden’s words, saying that, there is nothing wrong with regulations and censorship in a network of this type.  A set of regulative tools must enter the scenario to channel the power of those who are leading these positions.

The arguments that both participants highlighted in favor of decentralization and centralization are valid points. No winner arrived from this debate, but it was a clash of ideas with a logical background, which is worth keeping in mind when undertaking a cryptocurrency project.

By: Jenson Nuñez

Ethereum 2.0 was about to arrive by the end of 2022. The Beacon Chain network is celebrating one year since it got launched.

Beacon Chain is celebrating one year since its activation in 2020. To highlight the celebration, Vitalik revealed all the progress that this update had made since it started. However, the post also shows that Ethereum 2.0 is still behind schedule, delaying its arrival to 2023.

In a tweet, Vitalik Buterin, co-creator of Ethereum, spoke about some progress currently being worked on on the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) mining to proof-of-stake (PoS) in Ethereum 2.0.

Vitalik highlighted all the advances that are currently operational within Ethereum 1.0, such as the Beacon Chain, activated in December last year, the Altair fork, commission burning, EIP-1559 for fees reduction, and the PoS client on Ethereum.

However, something really concerning is how many stages and modules are needed for the final activation of Ethereum 2.0. In the first stage, where Ethereum 1.0 and 2.0 would run in parallel, most of these modules are not ready to deal with this phase. This situation would prevent a final date from being set for the launch of the merger.

In this regard, it is important to keep in mind that Ethereum 2.0 has already suffered various delays. Vitalik Buterin stated that the Beacon Chain would arrive in mid-2020, but due to various complications in the development, the date got postponed until the end of the same year.

The rest of the stages mark a delay. Justin Drake, one of Ethereum’s first developers, highlighted that the merger of both protocols (PoW and PoS) would arrive by 2021. But it seems that it won’t get to happen this time.

Although some vital developments already have many advances, like various technical specifications for the merger, many others are still at work. On the other hand, the developers would be avoiding talking about a specific date of the final arrival of Ethereum 2.0.

Why Ethereum 2.0 and Proof-of-Stake Mining

Ethereum is a cryptocurrency network born in 2015, being a fork of Bitcoin, which offered a novelty such as smart contracts. This particularity caused that in the last two years, Ethereum suffered a high demand on its network due to the growth of the DeFi ecosystem, NFT, even that of Play to Earn games.

This demand became a headache for commissions. The network fees in Ethereum are near USD 30 for a particular transfer from one wallet to the other. For the application of smart contracts, the cost is usually much higher. With this level of rates, using this network would become unsustainable.

Ethereum is able to process at least 12 to 20 transactions per second (TPS,) with one block mined every 12 seconds. With the migration to PoS, in theory, the network would gain the possibility to process more than 100,000 TPS. An exponential increase. This situation would allow reducing network fees, but due to technical challenges that developers have encountered along the way, the arrival date of Ethereum 2.0 remains unclear.

By: Jenson Nuñez

The Celsius platform got affected by the $ 120 million attacks on BadgerDAO. Celsius has not confirmed the reports.

Cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius suffered part of the fallout from the recent attack on the decentralized finance protocol (DeFi) BadgerDAO.

The DeFi BadgerDAO protocol was the victim of a hack on Wednesday night that caused losses of USD 120 million. The investigations suggested that the attack took effect when the platform got broken and allowed hackers to extract funds from wallets.

Users highlighted that they dealt with various irregularities when interacting with the protocol. Many said they had received additional permission requests on their BadgerDAO-connected wallets. The team later confirmed the attack through its official Twitter channel, reporting that it had started an investigation.

Celsius was Also the Target of the Attack

While an investigation is ongoing, some more recent reports revealed that Celsius may have been affected by the exploit. According to Etherscan.io data highlighted by various users on social networks, the victim of the hack that received the most damage was an address from which just over USD 50 million got extracted and which allegedly has a link to Celsius.

According to various reports, the Ethereum address starting 0x534 saw the attacker drain 896.8 worth of wrapped bitcoins (WBTC) worth just over $ 51 million. The address transacts with an address that accounts for a balance of USD 67 million.

Additionally, the address also gets related to at least one other address labeled Celsius Network Wallet 5 on Etherscan.io, with which it shares several transactions.

The transactions between the address 0x534 led to speculation highlighting that the wallet got owned by Celsius. The address 0x534 currently has a balance of 10.8 ETH valued at a figure near $ 50,000.

Celsius Token Falls 3% Amid Reports

Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky told Blockworks that the company would provide a statement on Friday. Meanwhile, the Twitter user identified as BigTimeCali, who had shared several of the transactions in a tweet thread, assured that Celsius removed questions related to the incident from his Reddit page.

Rumors about the loss of funds from Celsius arrived after the company expanded its Series B funding round from $ 400 million from October to $ 750 million at the end of November. The round raised the company’s valuation above $ 3 billion.

The reports about the hack might be affecting the price of the CEL token, which this Friday registers a 3% drop to trade at USD 3.9. Celsius Network is a big cryptocurrency lending platform that enables users to earn interest on holding digital assets such as Bitcoin and has become the first player in DeFi.

Last Friday, the BadgerDAO team reported in a tweet that the investigation into the incident is still ongoing. The developers are contributing with the Chainalysis security team to understand the scale of the attack. They have also requested the support of the authorities in Canada and the US.

By Jenson Nuñez