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Bitfinex Permitted to Withhold Documents About Alleged $850 Million Cover-up

The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court has ruled that Bitfinex is legally allowed to withhold documents pertaining to the alleged cover-up of an $850 million loss on its trading platform.

A court order authorized by court justices David Friedman, Peter Tom, Troy Webber, Ellen Gesmar and Jeffrey Oing has stopped the previous ruling of New York Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen that required Bitfinex to produce documents and information related to the loss of $850 million from its trading platform.

The story so farIn April 2019, the New York Attorney General’s Office filed a complaint against Bitfinex, parent company iFinex and affiliated stablecoin issuer Tether—alleging that the companies were in violation of New York law in connection with activities that may have defrauded New York-based crypto investors by covering up the loss on the Bitfinex trading platform.

Attorney General Letitia James revealed that her office obtained a court filing which alleged that Tether had given Bitfinex access to $900 million of Tether’s cash reserves through a series of masked corporate transactions. The funds were then used to hide the losses and satiate clients’ withdrawal requests.

James wrote at the time that the Attorney General’s office had determined that, “Operators of the ‘Bitfinex’ trading platform, who also control the ‘tether’ virtual currency, have engaged in a cover-up to hide the apparent loss of $850 million dollars of co-mingled client and corporate funds. New York state has led the way in requiring virtual currency businesses to operate according to the law. And we will continue to stand up for investors and seek justice on their behalf when misled or cheated by any of these companies.”

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Genesis Capital Breaks Previous Quarter Record With 870M in New Loan Originations in Q3

Digital asset lending firm, Genesis Capital has reported significant and sustained growth in its Q3 report which highlights a growing demand for cash and an stablecoin lending. Genesis Capital released its quarterly report on Oct.30, reporting that the institution had added $870 million in new loan originations which marks a sixth consecutive quarter of sustained growth for the firm. Demand Rises For Cash and Stablecoins

The firm reported that its loan portfolio had largely sustained its value through increased cash (USD and stablecoin) loan issuance offset by a decrease in the notional value of outstanding cryptocurrency loans. Q3 cash loans represented 31.2% of the firm’s active loan portfolio, an increase from Q2 where cash loans represented 23.5%.

Genesis has continued to experience strong demand from the international community to borrow USD, as mentioned in their Q2 report. A large portion of the cash demand translated into stablecoins like USDC(USD Coin) and PAX (Paxos Standard Token).

Demand For BTC Loans FallThe report indicated that the new USD issuance in Q3 mostly took share away from active BTC loans, marking a slight demand increase for altcoins—which grew in popularity in Q3. Bitcoin loans fell from 68.1% in Q1 to 50.2% in Q3, with Ether having increased to 7.5% from less than 4% in the previous quarter.

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Amun AG: What are the Top Valuation Approaches for Altcoins?

We continue to explore the top Bitcoin valuation approaches stated in Part 1, which include NVT, NVRV, NVHR, Cost of Mining and Active Address method. In addition, we also looked at the field of altcoin valuation, including Ethereum, top privacy and payment coins.

Bitcoin Valuation

NVT/NVRV Ratio Method

The Network-Value-to-Transaction Ratio (NVT) measures the dollar value of on-chain transaction activity of a given crypto asset network relative to its Network Value. Its formula is as follows:

In the NVT approach, network value refers to all circulating units of a given crypto asset, which is similar to market capitalization of the stock. Value of on-chain transaction activity refers to the dollar value of transactions settled on the crypto asset’s blockchain. However, NVT is a lagging indicator and it cannot properly account for Bitcoin’s usefulness as a store of value.

The Network-value-to-Realized value (NVRV) measures the crypto asset’s realized value relative to its network value. Its formula is as follows:

Q1: What is the limitation of NVT ratio which can be addressed by the NVRV ratio?

A1: One limitation of the NVT ratio is that it tends to be a lagging indicator for Bitcoin’s price — Bitcoin’s NVT tends to reach a local maximum of six to nine months. After Bitcoin reaches its price peak. As such, it can be useful in ascertaining for a fact whether a bull or bear market had occurred but has little predictive power. Interestingly, the NVRV ratio seems to have a good amount of ability to predict the local minimum within a bear market — the point at which the market has bottomed out, for example in January 2019 — as these are typically periods where NVRV hits to below 1.

Q2: For NVRV ratio, it sounds very complicating to gather the information for Realized value, as it relates to the UTXO for the given Bitcoin was last spent. What measures can be taken to facilitate the gathering of such information?

A2: CoinMetrics is a great source for daily data on the NVRV metric for various UTXO-based coins. It would also be possible to write a simple script in SQL in one has a set-up that allows them to query blockchain data through a relational database — something like Google Bigquery. Data gathering for blockchains has never been easier!

Q3: For NVRV ratio, when are the high time preferences and low time preferences in 2019?

A3: According to woobull.com, Bitcoin’s NVRV peaked at 2.22 in late June 2019 and was at its low of 0.812 in January 2019. The higher the NVRV the more reason there is to suggest that the current’s market dynamic is being driven by those with high-time preferences — this is during price run-ups as we experienced in Q2 2019 — comparably, the periods where Bitcoin’s NVRV dropped below 1 signal that investors with high-time preferences no longer held significant positions of Bitcoin.

Cost of Mining

The Cost of Mining method assumes that the price of Bitcoin should be valued off the total cost of mining. The method also states that with the assumption of a competitive market, miners will produce until their marginal costs equal to their marginal product. The formula of Cost of Mining is as follows:

Source: Amun AG

Q4: Why does the result of the cost of mining method have a large deviation against other valuation approaches? Is it related to some of the key assumptions made?

A4: As mentioned earlier, the cost of mining is inherently problematic due to the endogeneity of difficulty variable — this explains why there is a large deviation against the other valuation approaches.

NVHR

The Network value to hash rate (NVHR) method measures the dollar value of crypto asset’s mining power or hash rate measured in terahashes per second (TH/s), relative to its Network Value. Its formula is as follows:

As defined in the Amun AG’s report, the network hash rate refers to the amount of computational power being used by Bitcoin miners to mine on the Bitcoin blockchain to help maintain Bitcoin’s economic security.

Q5: Is NVHR a valid valuation approach for cases such as hash war during the Bitcoin Cash hard fork?

A5: To some extent, yes. It can be argued that a decider of which crypto asset can be considered to be the ‘legitimate’ is the one that garners the most hash power following a fork— a variable which would show in the calculation of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash’s NVHR metric. However, it’s important to note that hash power isn’t the only way consensus is reached on which crypto asset post-fork can be considered the ‘legitimate one’; factors like community sentiment and infrastructural support are also major determinants.

Active Address Method

The active addresses method measures the number of individual Bitcoin addresses to transact or receive Bitcoin during a given time period. There are two ratios of this approach: Network value to Metcalfe’s Law (NVML) and Network value to Odlyzko’s Law (NVOL) and their formulas are as follows:

Source: Amun AG

Q6: What are the key differences between NVML and NVOL?

A6: The key difference between NVML and NVOL is the relationship that each ratio describes between the number of users within a network and the network’s value. NVML uses Metcalfe’s law which argues that a network’s value is proportional to the square of the network’s users; whilst NVOL uses Odlyzko’s law which states that a network’s value is proportional to the natural logarithm of a network’s users multiplied by the network’s users. As such, Odlyzko’s law models a network effect of adding new users as having diminishing returns as the network becomes larger and larger.

Valuation on Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies

Apart from Bitcoin, Lanre also shares with us some of the possible methodologies in valuing Ethereum, top privacy coins and payment coins like XRP.

Q7: Is relative valuation applicable to measure public blockchain protocols such as Ethereum, EOS and Cardano? What are the parameters?

A7: Many of the relative valuation metrics used in this report such as NVT, NVHR, and NVRV can be used for inter-crypto comparisons for assets such as Ether, EOS, and Cardano.

Q8: Do you have any appropriate valuation approaches in mind for privacy coins like Monero, Dash?

A8: One interesting metric that could be used to better understand the valuation for privacy coins would be the proportion of transactions on the network which are entirely private (in Zcash’s case, for example, the proportion of transactions that go from z-address to z-address). However, privacy coins share many similarities with an asset like Bitcoin from a valuation perspective and therefore can be valued in a similar way.

Q9: For valuation in Ripple and Stellar Lumens, do you think the remittance market will be the best comparable?

A9: Potentially, given that one of the ostensible use cases of XRP and Stellar is as a means to facilitate cross country payments like remittances. However, the question is over how exactly the crypto asset is involved in this process, that fact would determine whether the crypto assets can be used in the remittance market as a comparable.

Telegram Abandons TON and Gram Tokens, Durov Critical of US Regulating Whole World

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has announced that they are calling it quits on the Telegram Open Network (TON) and its Gram tokens after a long-drawn-out battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC).

In a message on May 12, Durov said, “Today is a sad day for us here at Telegram. We are announcing the discontinuation of our blockchain project. Below is a summary of what it was and why we had to abandon it.”

America Believes it Regulates the World

The message by Durov linked to a long explanation by the CEO entitled, “What was TON and Why is it Over?” But in summary, Durov explained that the primary reason to abandon the project ultimately came down to the US regulators somehow being able to encroach on the sovereign rights of other nations and dictate where Grams could be distributed for the entire world.

Durov wrote, “Perhaps even more paradoxically, the US court declared that Grams couldn’t be distributed not only in the United States, but globally. Why? Because, it said, a US citizen might find some way of accessing the TON platform after it launched. So, to prevent this, Grams shouldn’t be allowed to be distributed anywhere in the world – even if every other country on the planet seemed to be perfectly fine with TON.”

The Telegram CEO further reiterated that the US courts are exceeding its own jurisdiction and deciding what is best for the rest of the world and believes that they are exploiting their control over the dollar.

Durov stated, “Sadly, the US judge is right about one thing: we, the people outside the US, can vote for our presidents and elect our parliaments, but we are still dependent on the United States when it comes to finance and technology (luckily not coffee). The US can use its control over the dollar and the global financial system to shut down any bank or bank account in the world.”

The Story till Now

The decision comes after several months of legal battles between Telegram and the SEC.

Telegram, the online messaging app, had ambitious plans for its Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain ever since the announcement in 2017.

The company had one of the biggest token sales in 2018, which was the catalyst for the ensuing and long legal battle. The SEC filed a class-action lawsuit against Telegram to shut down the TON network, stating that the Gram tokens were unregistered securities.

While Telegram argued that Grams were a commodity, the US District Court for The Southern District Of New York issued a ruling earlier this year siding with the SEC, preventing Telegram from issuing tokens.

Telegram filed an order of consent on May 8, agreeing to hand over to the regulator information concerning tokens distributed to initial investors, including the funds it collected from the first buyers of its 2018 ICO.

TON Network Launched by Developers

As the picture began to look very grim for the launch of the Telegram Open Network (TON), those in the TON Community Foundation noted their ability to launch with or without the Telegram’s further participation and without regulatory approval.

Shortly before Durov’s announcement, the developers launched the Free TON network on May 7. Durov was clear that Telegram would no longer be involved but he applauds the action of the developers.

Durov said, “I want to conclude this post by wishing luck to all those striving for decentralization, balance, and equality in the world. You are fighting the right battle. This battle may well be the most important battle of our generation. We hope that you succeed where we have failed.”

Chainalysis Adds Compliance Support to Track Privacy Coins Dash and Zcash

Chainalysis has just launched support for two of the most popular privacy coins, Dash and Zcash. Privacy coins are cryptocurrencies with privacy-enhancing features that allow users to gain total anonymity when making blockchain transactions.

Privacy coins protect the identity of the users and the origins of the transactions, taking the anonymous and private nature of Bitcoin to the next level. Comparatively, Bitcoin protects some information, hence remaining pseudo-anonymous. The rest of the information, including transactions, addresses, and balances, is recorded in a public and permanently available ledger.

With around 63 different privacy coins in the cryptocurrency market, each project tries to offer the best approach to privacy, however, five projects overshadow the rest. These include Monero, Dash, Zcash, Verge, and Bitcoin Private.

Although privacy coins are known to be used for illicit purposes, research by the RAND corporation mentioned that 0.2 percent of all the cryptocurrency addresses mentioned on the dark web was either for Dash or Zcash.

Dash

Dash is a fork of the original Bitcoin code, similar to many other altcoins. Launched in 2014, Dash is a combination of the words digital and cash and is considered the first-ever privacy coin in the crypto history.

Dash uses an anonymization strategy revolving around PrivateSend, which hides transactions by mixing them together as a single transaction, which is then added to the blockchain.

Although Dash is known for its privacy features, only 9 percent of all Dash transactions make use of mixing transactions related to PrivateSend. This portion of Dash transactions take up a relatively small and declining percentage of Dash transactions, according to Chainalysis.

Zcash

Zcash uses an anonymity tool called Zero-Knowledge Proof, which allows users to transact with each other without revealing addresses to anyone. These transactions on the Zcash network are verified, using zk-SNARKS, also known as Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge.

Launched in 2016, Zcash (ZEC) also allows the encryption of blockchain activity, known as shielding, and Zcash provides this using shielded pools. Of the transactions that interact with a shielded pool, only 6 percent is completely shielded, and around 14 percent of all Zcash transactions involve shielded pools.

Chainalysis claims that it can provide the transaction value and at least one address for over 99 percent of ZEC activity.

Chainlink’s LINK Crypto Price Surges to a New All-Time High, Signaling a Strong Altcoin Season

Chainlink has surged to an all-time high, $8.48, as recent new partnerships have instigated its bull run. Likely factors that pushed the crypto into its strong momentum were recent high-profile partnerships, price discovery, and the strong altcoin market.

Chainlink (LINK) has reached its risen by more than 34%, reaching its new all-time high and a market capitalization of $2.5 million. A week earlier, on July 6, LINK’s price also hit a record high at $5.31, which at the time, entered a price discovery phase which led to a new rally among investors.

Cane Island Digital Research previously analyzed LINK and predicted that the cryptocurrency would reach $8 by December 2020, and LINK has already exceeded this expectation.

Chainlink has been one of the major beneficiaries of the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) in 2020, has it has been chosen to provide decentralized oracles services to a range of applications.

Chainlink’s recent surge in partnerships caught the eye of former NBA player

Chainlink recently partnered with crypto lender Nexo, a platform that has over 800,000 users who will implement the Oracle solution presented by Chainlink. Nexos provides loans in US dollars, and other currencies backed by digital assets. With this partnership, Nexos would be able to use Chainlink price feeds to ensure borrowers have enough collateral to secure their loans.

According to former NBA player Kris Humphries, since April 7, Chainlink has had over 45 additional partnerships — including with China’s Blockchain Service Network (BSN). Humphries made a comment saying that in a world that “increasingly relies on data,” Chainlink would be influential in transitioning the world to decentralized and blockchain-based systems.

China’s Blockchain Service Network integrated Chainlink Oracles into its ecosystem. According to Yifan He, CEO of Red Date Technology and BSN co-founder, Chainlink was initially the top choice for BSN; however, the network was convinced by the strength of Chainlink’s community and team.

Recently, Cardano’s ADA cryptocurrency has also surged dramatically, reaching a two-year high on July 8. The recent surge in ADA price has pushed rankings up, surpassing Chainlink’s LINK, and VeChain’s VET. While its market capitalization remains lower than Bitcoin and Ethereum, Cardano’s ADA has surpassed Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV), which currently ranks the seventh.

Worries of a dump ahead

Whale alert tweeted today regarding 1 million LINK tokens, worth almost $8 million, were transferred from an unknown wallet to Binance. In a previous tweet, Whale Alert also found that another 1 million LINK tokens were transferred from Nexo to an unknown wallet.

The crypto community on Twitter has been worried about a possible dump, saying that a dump could be coming and that the rally was nice while it lasted.

Top Brazilian Crypto Exchange Mercado Bitcoin Adopts Sports Token Chiliz

Mercado Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Brazil, has announced its plans to add sports token Chiliz ($CHZ) to its existing list of digital assets.

This is big news for the developing blockchain fintech company specialized in sports and entertainment Chiliz, as Mercado consists of the largest digital asset trading platform in Latin America.

With $CHZ being accessible on the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Latin America, the fan token may significantly increase in popularity, as Mercado Bitcoin currently has more than 1.9 million registered users on its platform.

Introducing Chiliz

Chiliz is a sports blockchain platform focused on sports and entertainment, that developed Socios.com as an app that could be used for sports trading purposes. Socios.com encourages fans to vote in club polls and earn digital assets as rewards for their efforts. The payout is in $CHZ and is also known as “Fan Tokens”. Chiliz utilizes $CHZ as the sole on-platform currency and runs on a personalized blockchain infrastructure.

The sports-focused digital trading platform has previously extended its entertainment services and partnered with renowned “big names” in the sports industry, notably FC Barcelona, Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain, among others. Not only are their $CHZ tokens used in soccer-related sports entertainment, but in May, Chiliz has also partnered with UFC.

Tokenization in the Sports Industry

The sports industry appears to be also slowly making their way towards globalizing tokenization, with FC Barcelona launching their own Fan Token, $BAR, earlier in June 2020. This move generated $1.3M in sales revenue in less than 2 hours. Enthusiastic about the record sales time of fan tokens, CEO and Founder of Chiliz Alexandre Dreyfus took to his Twitter account and wrote that the token flash sale was a success, with fans and crypto enthusiasts from 106 countries buying the Fan Tokens.

Chiliz CEO Alexandre Dreyfus Likes Mercado

He also tweeted about his recent partnership with Mercado Bitcoin, saying that Chiliz is the first ‘altcoin’ or proper utility token to be listed on the leading Brazilian crypto exchange. He is enthusiastic about the fact that Mercado Bitcoin has a nearly 2M user base and thinks that the partnership with them will consolidate his strategy to expand his crypto company growth to Latin America and Brazilian teams.

Bitcoin Price Has Been Stable, It’s an Altcoin Season Right Now, Says CZ Binance

Bitcoin has been trading sideways for the last few months, with the stability around $9,100. Bitcoin (BTC) has been struggling to gain bullish momentum above $9,200.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the CEO of Binance commented on the stability of the recent Bitcoin price.

“I honestly don’t know what’s going to take Bitcoin to break this. There’s a number of factors that could happen but honestly, I think it’s just going to be time.

With all the macroeconomic things that are happening, and with the amount of fiat flowing into the economy, the Binance CEO says, “sooner or later, it’s going to break out.”

As CZ mentioned, Bitcoin has been very stable for the past few months, some have even called Bitcoin a “stablecoin,” he said. “It is pretty much an altseason right now.” On Binance futures, more than 60 percent of the volume is from altcoins, which is much higher than before, according to the Binance CEO.

Taking a look at the top performers from Q2 2020, of the 200 tokens listed on Binance, only 3 did not see a rise. CZ believes that there could be a number of reasons for the altcoin rally, including Elon Musk tweeting about Dogecoin.

Shortly after Algorand’s listing on Coinbase, Alogrand’s (ALGO) market capitalization hit a new all-time high on its third-strongest day of trading in the crypto’s history.

After the crypto market crash in March, Algorand has been trading at a high, at above $0.35 for its second time in its history.

Chainlink has also surged to an all-time high, $8.48, as recent new partnerships have instigated its bull run. Likely factors that pushed the crypto into its strong momentum were recent high-profile partnerships, price discovery, and the strong altcoin market.

Chainlink has been one of the major beneficiaries of the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) in 2020, has it has been chosen to provide decentralized oracles services to a range of applications.

The Latest Twitter Bitcoin hack

Twitter has gone haywire as news of a Bitcoin scam hack targeting multiple high-profile figures such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, and even multinational tech company Apple has broken out. The hackers of the incident took it to Twitter and used their accounts to put out a message that said they were giving back to their communities due to the pandemic and asked the community to donate to the Bitcoin address stated in the tweets.

CZ said: “Bitcoin is actually more transparent than traditional fiat. If somebody robbed a bank, it’s actually quite difficult to trace the fiat cash.”

Whereas with Bitcoin, there isn’t an audit trail if people know their addresses, this allows everyone to track these addresses.

Defending Bitcoin, and making sure the audience understand the situation, he explained:

“When someone robs a bank, we don’t say the cash is wrong, it’s just the bad players who want cash. […] I think people nowadays understand that it is not Bitcoin doing a crime, it’s just Bitcoin is valuable, Bitcoin is a better form of money than fiat.”

He added that Bitcoin is more transferable and is more anonymous, however, Bitcoin does not leave a clear trail on the blockchain although it is public and permanent.

Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin Concerned About Security Risks That Come With High ETH Transaction Fees

By now, it is no secret that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and his team are busy perfecting Ethereum 2.0 and preparing it for its official launch.

Ethereum 2.0

One of the key elements of the blockchain ecosystem is that it runs on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, as opposed to the conventional Proof-of-Work (PoW). This enables Ethereum blockchain users to reach distributed consensus when mining a block, and for bullish crypto investors to determine the next block.

Digital asset owners can also lock up their accumulated digital coins and get paid for helping the blockchain.

Will An Upgrade Make Ethereum Faster, Bigger, Stronger?

However, Buterin came forward and while he proudly announced that the data capacity of the developing blockchain will be huge, the Ethereum creator admitted that the higher transaction fee on the blockchain-network may cause unintentionally trigger security risks. Buterin, who can boast that he has co-founded the second largest blockchain network in the world, behind Bitcoin, came forward in a tweet and mentioned a research paper provided by highly reputed Ivy League university, Princeton U. Buterin wrote:

“Transaction fee revenue is now nearing half as high as block reward revenue. This actually risks making Ethereum *less* secure because of https://cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf. Fee market reform (ie. EIP 1559) fixes this; another reason why that EIP is important.”

In other words, though it may not be a security issue at this point in time, the higher fees that Ethereum 2.0 will run may potentially cause a security problem long term and be threatening for the blockchain network. The analysis conducted by Princeton university addressed this issue and voiced that selfish mining may pose a real threat, especially in cases where transaction fees surpass the block rewards.

The research paper goes on to name several malicious mining behaviors, that are deviant and may negatively impact Ethereum blockchain.

Introducing EIP 1559

The fee market reform that Buterin referred to in his tweet is none other than the “Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559”, which was first introduced in April 2019. The whitepaper proposes upgrades that would make transaction fees on Ethereum more predictable. This would enable the blockchain network to be more flexible, by dynamically alternating the block size based on the number of transactions that are queued and waiting for validation.

Furthermore, to prevent congestion from happening in the ecosystem, the whitepaper proposed charging users during times of high demand. Buterin publicly voiced his approval and support of EIP 1559 fee market reform.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race: Ethereum Surpasses Bitcoin

The market capitalization of Ethereum currently stands at approximately $26 billion dollars. The astonishing thing about this is that the given value does not even include all of the crypto assets founded atop the Ethereum blockchain ecosystems, such as the stablecoins – Tether and USDC – and altcoins.

Also, data from digital-asset data firm Messari showed that Ethereum had now surpassed Bitcoin as the network that settles the most value per day. Ethereum blockchain daily settlement value is estimated to be about $2.5 billion, which makes it the first time since early 2019 that the blockchain has outranked its rival Bitcoin.

Binance Contributes to Recovery and Return of $10,000 of Stolen Crypto To a Targeted Investor

Binance affiliate crypto security expert Harry Denley helped a victim recover $10, 000 worth of lost cryptocurrency recently.

Denley and Binance Collaborate

In his last blog post, the security expert detailed how he went about it, with Binance’s help. He explained that in this cyber scam, the phishing technique was advanced and sophisticated. It imitated two separate user interfaces (UIs) in order to steal the victim’s private keys, keystore file, mnemonic data and much more sensitive personal information. He went on to say that in the case of unsuspecting users, this can do the trick and the scam can easily be pulled off.

How It Works

In order to steal cryptocurrency, the culprit deployed a malicious Decentralized App (DApp) interface – so a fake Ui, prompting the victim to connect to their MetaMask account. The malware then mimicked the MetaMask popup and threw an error state warning, which led the targeted cryptocurrency owner to enter the secret. Once that is done, the user’s input is then sent to the villain’s data via a “REST application interface”, which consists of an interface that uses less bandwidth and faster technology for more efficient internet usage. The victim is then finally directed to the legitimate application.

The crypto scam artist now has access to all the private information of the user and can now transfer crypto funds to his own digital wallet.

Cybersecurity to the Rescue

In order to assist the targeted victim and recuperate the stolen cryptocurrency, cybersecurity expert Denley took advantage of the fact that the database was open for both read and write, and searched the entries for the specific collections; he then ran the keys through his custom sweeper, and began his analysis of tracing the stolen cryptocurrencies.

Denley was able to retrieve the phished information from the scam artist’s open data and he ran it through his sweeper. This in turn allowed him to recover some of the stolen crypto funds.

On top of assisting the victim, Denley also uncovered other malicious domains targeting cryptocurrency investors.

With his software in place, Denley was able to deduce that the victim address belonged to an investor that used Binance, and so he reached out to the coin exchange. He then communicated with the victim and retransferred the recovered cryptocurrencies to the user’s new wallet address. Finally, he provided the crypto investor with some safety guides, to protect against future digital asset attacks.

Crypto Theft on Twitter

Theft of cryptocurrency is a lot more common now, with the rise in popularity of Bitcoins and altcoins. Just recently, a massive Bitcoin scam attack erupted on Twitter’s social platform and consequently, the verified accounts of numerous celebrities, tech moguls such as Elon Musk and Bill Gates, and political figures were seized. This mass attack stirred a lot of motion within the social media community, as scam artists were able to get away with at least $100, 000 worth of Bitcoins.

Twitter is now still working on uncovering the identities of the hackers, and they have apologized for the inconveniences and security breaches this outbreak has caused.