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Nibbled some eth yesterday. Wish I waited.
.......... makes literally no sense but ok?
Don't you just hate it when you make a comment and instantly the market changes
French Luxury Brand Balenciaga to Accept Bitcoin, Ethereum as Payment
By Sander Lutz
May 23, 2022
2 min read
The luxury fashion brand is also privately designing a long-term metaverse business strategy.
Crypto is another step closer to mainstream acceptance as a payment method—if buying $1,250 hoodies that come pre-destroyed can be considered mainstream, that is.
Starting next month, French luxury fashion label Balenciaga will begin accepting Bitcoin and Ethereum as payment online and at select brick-and-mortar locations, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The move makes Balenciaga the latest legacy fashion brand to embrace cryptocurrencies as a payment method. Earlier this month, Gucci announced that it would begin permitting crypto payments online and at five in-store locations. Gucci currently accepts cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Shiba Inu as payment.
Balenciaga will initially permit payment only in Bitcoin or Ethereum, the two largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, but plans to expand the program to other coins in due time.
Luxury fashion is no stranger to Web3. The last year has seen numerous legacy brands, including Balenciaga, Gucci, Nike, Dolce & Gabbana, and Burberry, launch NFT collections and metaverse pop-ups. As traditional as these brands are in some respects, they’re all seemingly aligned on digital fashion as a business opportunity: According to several industry experts who spoke to Decrypt in October, the digital fashion industry could eventually approach or even match the $2 trillion value of the physical fashion market.
In December, Balenciaga announced the formation of an in-house metaverse business unit. While Cédric Charbit, the label’s CEO, declined to reveal anything to the WSJ regarding the unit’s plans or long-term strategy, he did say that he sees “the metaverse as a country,” a market just as important as any nation the brand currently operates in.
The news of Balenciaga’s embrace of cryptocurrencies comes as many believe the crypto market is entering another Crypto Winter. The amount of Bitcoin necessary to purchase a $1,250 Balenciaga hoodie in November would be worth a little under $563 today. But the turbulence of the crypto market does not intimidate the brand’s leadership. When asked if the market’s recent crash affected Balenciaga’s position on crypto, Charbit simply replied that his thinking was “long-term.”
https://decrypt.co/101183/balenciaga-accept-bitcoin-ethereum-metaverse
...... maybe read more than a headline. It's a testing merge.
Breaking News!
The Ethereum Merge Is Coming Sooner Than Expected -- Mark June 8 on the Calendar.
From what I'm reading 1200 is coming
Will the Ethereum 2.0 update reduce high gas fees?
Marcel Deer
MAY 14, 2022
1.What is the Ethereum 2.0 update?
Also called Eth2 and Serenity, Ethereum 2.0 is an upgrade to the Ethereum network that promises to bring several improvements.
Slated improvements to the network include reduced transaction fees, improved speed and better scalability. The update is currently in development and is expected to be rolled out in stages over the next few years.
One of the key features of Ethereum 2.0 is sharding, a way of splitting up the workload so that transaction requests can be processed in parallel. In addition, the Ethereum 2.0 update will make use of proof-of-stake (PoS) rather than proof-of-work (PoW) when validating transactions and blocks.
2.What is an Ethereum gas fee?
Every transaction on the Ethereum network costs a certain amount of "gas," which is essentially the fee paid to miners for processing the request.
The amount of gas required depends on the complexity of the transaction. For example, a simple transfer of ETH from one address to another requires less gas than a contract deployment or a token sale.
Currently, the network is only capable of processing a limited number of transactions per second, leading to high transaction fees and delays in processing. The Ethereum 2.0 update is expected to address these issues by improving scalability and reducing the amount of gas required for each transaction.
3.How are Ethereum’s gas fees determined?
The amount of gas required for a transaction is determined by the "gas price" set by the sender.
The gas price is usually expressed in GWEI, a fraction of Ethereum (ETH). Gas fees vary depending on the number of miners available, as well as the current projects and decentralized applications (DApps) running at the same time.
You can also decide on the amount you are willing to pay for the gas. For example, if you want a transaction to be done quickly, you can choose to pay a GWEI higher than the current market price. On the other hand, you can also select a lower gas fee if you are willing to wait for the miners to process your transaction.
4.Ethereum’s high gas fee and its impact on the platform’s scalability
Purpose of Ethereum 2.0
The primary goal of the Ethereum 2.0 update is to improve scalability so that the network can handle more transactions without delays or high fees.
While the full effects of the update will not be felt until it is fully rolled out, some of the possible use cases for Ethereum 2.0 include:
* Supporting the large-scale enterprise adoption of blockchain technology in
private corporations and businesses;
* Creating more decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and
governance models based on smart contracts and trustless interactions;
* Ethereum token launches that will allow new projects to fundraise and launch
their own tokens on the Ethereum network;
* The further expansion of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and other digital assets that
can be stored on the Ethereum blockchain; and
* Improved support for decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms and DApps is
expected to be widely used by crypto enthusiasts and the broader public.
In addition to these benefits, it is also likely that Ethereum 2.0 will enable a variety of new use cases that are not possible on the current network, such as:
* Distributing tokens that represent ownership rights as a method of managing
royalties in the music industry;
* Creating a decentralized AI (artificial intelligence) ecosystem that will allow users
to train and monetize their own machine learning models;
* Facilitating safe and inexpensive cross-border payments;
* Allowing supply chain managers to track product delivery without fear of
tampering;
* Providing a decentralized platform for gaming and predictive markets; and
* Increased privacy and the capacity to store large amounts of data, which can be
particularly helpful for storing sensitive information such as medical records and
financial data.
While there’s still time before the update is fully rolled out, the benefits it promises to bring are significant and could have a major impact on the way businesses and individuals use blockchain technology in the future.
The Ethereum platform's popularity
The blockchain network's popularity is expected to grow once Ethereum 2.0 is released.
Ethereum 2.0 will offer increased scalability, security and efficiency for businesses and individuals looking to take advantage of blockchain technology. Ethereum is currently one of the most well-known cryptocurrencies, alongside Bitcoin (BTC), with nearly 4 million wallets actively holding ETH as of February 2022.
The blockchain continues to be the place where most DeFi and NFT activities happen, with new DApps and projects being launched on the platform each day. According to analysts, Ethereum currently has 70% of all DeFi transactions in the cryptocurrency market, and its blockchain is used to support the majority of NFT and gaming projects.
The number of transactions on the Ethereum network
The average number of transactions on the Ethereum network is currently 1.1 to 1.5 million transactions per day.
These numbers are expected to increase exponentially after the launch of Ethereum 2.0, as it will allow significantly more transactions to be processed per day. At the moment, the network can only handle 15 transactions per second.
Ethereum 2.0 aims to increase this exponentially to about 150,000 by the time the upgrades are fully rolled out. If this becomes a reality, Ethereum will undoubtedly become one of the fastest and most scalable blockchains in existence, which should further increase its popularity.
Addressing scalability and high gas cost concerns with Ethereum 2.0
Scalability has always been one of Ethereum’s biggest challenges. This is especially true for developers seeking to build DApps and DeFi platforms on the blockchain, as transaction costs can be prohibitively high.
However, with the launch of Ethereum 2.0 (which introduces a new PoS consensus mechanism and shard chains), it will finally be possible to scale the network in a way that significantly reduces costs and facilitates faster transactions:
Proof of stake Shard chains
Tips and tricks to spend less gas fees on Ethereum
There are several ways you can reduce or even eliminate these costs when spending on gas fees on Ethereum.
* Use wallets that support batching: Batching is a feature offered by some wallets
that allows you to group multiple transactions into one, thereby reducing the
amount of gas you need to spend.
* Use ERC20 tokens: ERC20 tokens are digital assets that run on the Ethereum
blockchain and can be used in place of ETH when paying for gas. This is
because they often have much lower transaction fees than ETH, itself.
* Use a gas price calculator: Gas prices fluctuate frequently, so it's important to
use a gas price calculator to ensure you get the best possible price for your
transaction.
* Use a gas tracker: A gas tracker is a tool that allows you to monitor the current
gas prices on the Ethereum network in real-time. This can help ensure you're
always aware of the latest prices.
* Use a gas station: A gas station is a website that allows you to compare the gas
prices of different ETH wallets to find the best one for your needs.
By following these tips, you can significantly reduce the amount of money you spend on gas when using Ethereum. This will help make it more affordable for you to use the network and participate in DeFi and other activities until such time that Ethereum 2.0 has fully launched.
https://cointelegraph.com/explained/will-the-ethereum-20-update-reduce-high-gas-fees
Not sure if staking’s the answer but we all know big money is coming this next wave. Watch!
Thanks for the response. I think I’m good on that…..
I started on coinbase last April at 6 or 7% and was under the impression there would be a way to unstake it by now. Still locked up and interest rate keeps dropping
Mine are held on NEXO which pays the best interest in the coin you have there. They also have a 375 Millions insurance. Best place BY far, and you can exchange there without having to transfer coin off site. At nexo you'll get 4% or 5% if you lock it 30 days.
Anyone here stake. I was about to start doing it via CB until I saw the warning that staked funds could be lost. I’m terms of risk vs reward, staking my eth (currently valued at 16k) to make $50 from CB plus the 3% apr seems like a poor choice. Agree or disagree? Thanks
Robinhood Adds Grayscale Bitcoin and Ethereum Trusts
By Jeff Benson
May 6, 2022
3 min read
Robinhood has been leaning into crypto recently. The addition of GBTC and ETHE continues the trend.
For years, trading app Robinhood listed just a handful of cryptocurrencies. Over the past month, it's brought that number to 11, and it's now also making available two equities assets tied to the price of crypto.
As of today, Robinhood users can buy and sell Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) and Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE) via the app.
GBTC and ETHE are investment products that trade like a stock and allow investors to get exposure to the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively, without actually having to buy them. Investment firm Grayscale takes care of the custody in exchange for a management fee, and buyers get a "share" of Bitcoin or Ethereum—or something like it.
But while both GBTC and ETHE are ostensibly tied to the price of the underlying cryptocurrencies, they rarely trade on a 1:1 basis. Part of the reason for the difference in price is long lockup periods; when large holders eventually sell, it can affect the price on the open market.
That discrepancy may help explain why Robinhood traders—who don't have to worry about custody issues as it is—may be interested in the assets: They can get them for cheap and hope the gap closes.
According to data from Ycharts, ETHE is selling at a discount of 26.18% as of Friday, meaning it's 26% cheaper to buy ETHE than it is to buy Ethereum. GBTC, meanwhile, is trading at a 25.5% discount.
If the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accepts Grayscale's proposal to transition the Bitcoin trust into a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund—that heavy discount would likely disappear as ETFs' structure allows them to trade much closer to the underlying asset's price. The SEC, however, has yet to approve any Bitcoin-backed ETFs not based on BTC futures, which are investment contracts based on the anticipated future price of Bitcoin.
Since Robinhood Crypto COO Christine Brown's departure from the company at the end of March, the brokerage has rolled out several major additions to its digital asset offerings.
In April, it added Compound, Polygon, Shiba Inu, and Solana to its available listings of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Litecoin. A week before, at the Bitcoin 2022 Conference, it announced its intention to use the Lightning Network for sending quicker, cheaper BTC transactions. It simultaneously revealed that users would be able to transfer their crypto assets off of Robinhood—something the company's executive had been promising since early 2021.
Cryptocurrency has been one of the few bright spots for the brokerage company, which reported an 18% drop in revenue for Q1 and recently laid off 9% of its staff. Cryptocurrency revenue, though, was up from $48 million to $54 million for the quarter (but still down 39% from a year-to-year comparison).
https://decrypt.co/99651/robinhood-adds-grayscale-bitcoin-ethereum-trusts
Vitalik: L2 transaction fees need to be under 5c to be 'truly acceptable'
BRIAN QUARMBY
1 HOUR AGO
Despite Layer-2s offering relatively cheap transactions, Vitalik Buterin said that all transactions need to be under $0.05 to be truly acceptable.
Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that Layer-2 transaction fees need to be under $0.05 to be “truly acceptable.”
Buterin made the latest comments in response to a Twitter post from the Bankless podcast host Ryan Sean Adams, who shared a screenshot of the average transaction fees for eight Ethereum Layer-2 platforms.
The data is from L2fees.info, a website that compares the cost of Ether’s Layer-1 network in comparison to Layer-2s built on top of it.
The only Layer-2 to meet Buterin’s desired transaction fee under $0.05 is the Metis Network at $0.02, however a token swap on the platform still costs $0.14. Fees sharply increase from there, at $0.12 per transaction on Loopring and going all the way to $1.98 per transaction on the Aztec Network.
Ethereum’s Layer-1 is relatively affordable at present at $3.26 per transaction and a whopping $16.31 per token swap, however that only lasts until Yuga Lab’s releases another collection of NFTs where fees can skyrocket to $14,000 per mint.
Adams emphasized the importance of Layer-2s for keeping Ethereum affordable, noting that “this is Ethereum and it's not expensive,” but Buterin suggested it wasn’t there yet:
“Needs to get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable imo. But we're definitely making great progress, and even proto-danksharding may be enough to get us there for a while!”
Needs to get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable imo. But we're definitely making great progress, and even proto-danksharding may be enough to get us there for a while!
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 3, 2022
Buterin’s affordable transaction goal is a long held one that he first stated during an interview in 2017 that “the internet of money should not cost more than 5 cents per transaction."
In January, Buterin said he still stood by this goal “100%” as part of a lengthy Twitter thread going over some of the key things he’s said or written over the past 10 years.
“That was the goal in 2017, and it's still the goal now. It's precisely why we're spending so much time working on scalability” Buterin said.
Short term gas fee reduction
The proto-danksharding or EIP-4844 that Buterin referred to as putting downward pressure on fees in his response to Adams, is a recently proposed upgrade to Ethereum that will see key elements of danksharding — a new and simplified design of previous sharding designs — implemented onto the network without any sharding upgrades being initiated.
Proto-danksharding will enable a new type of transaction dubbed the “blob-carrying transaction” that carries an extra 125KB worth of data (blob) that cannot be accessed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The general idea is that this will help the network scale significantly in the short term while reducing congestion and competition for gas usage, thus lowering gas fees.
“Because validators and clients still have to download full blob contents, data bandwidth in proto-danksharding is targeted to 1 MB per slot instead of the full 16 MB. However, there are nevertheless large scalability gains because this data is not competing with the gas usage of existing Ethereum transactions,” Buterin wrote in a blog post last month.
While Ethereum’s roadmap is notoriously flexible the shard chains upgrade is slated for sometime in 2023 well after the merge of the Mainnet with the Beacon Chain.
Shard chains provide avenues to horizontally and cheaply store data across the network, which in turn spreads the load, reduces congestion and increases transaction speeds. Both Ethereum and its Layer-2s are expected to benefit from this dramatically.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-l2-transaction-fees-need-to-be-under-5c-to-be-truly-acceptable
Ethereum burning spikes to new high on Yuga Labs’ NFT hype
BRIAN QUARMBY
20 HOURS AGO
Otherdeed NFTs top the “burn leaderboard” over the past seven days at roughly 55,816 ETH, or 56% of all burns during that period.
The burning rate of Ethereum has spiked to new all-time high (ATH) levels following the heavily anticipated sale of tokenized land plots in Yuga Labs’ upcoming Metaverse project the “Otherside.”
Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), sold 55,000 virtual land nonfungible tokens (NFTs) dubbed “Otherdeeds” on Sunday. The overwhelming demand for the tokens saw Ethereum gas fees shoot up so high that a handful of users paid as high as 2.6 Ether (ETH), or $7,400 at the time of writing, to 5 ETH, or $14,270, just to get their transactions through.
A base fee of ETH is burned during each transaction on the network following the implementation of the London hard fork, or EIP-1559 upgrade, last year.
According to data compiled from Glassnode and Data Always, nearly 70,000 ETH was burned on Sunday, which is more than triple the previous ATH of around 20,000 in mid-January.
Data from Ultrasound.Money shows that since the integration of EIP-1559 on August 5, 2021, the average burn rate has been 5.81 ETH per minute.
Amid the Otherdeed NFT sale, however, that figure jumped to 9.83 ETH per minute for a total of 99,084.65 ETH over the past seven days. Since then, the burn rate has dropped back down to around 3.9 ETH per minute.
While other platforms and projects accounted for this figure, it’s notable that Otherdeed NFTs top the “burn leaderboard” over the past seven days at roughly 55,817 ETH, or 56% of all burns during that period. This figure is significantly ahead of second-placed OpenSea at 7,152 ETH.
This may be the last time Yuga Labs clogs Ethereum
With the demand for the sale temporarily overwhelming the Ethereum network and many users losing funds on gas fees for failed ETH transactions, Yuga Labs has outlined intentions to build a blockchain and port its BAYC-affiliated ApeCoin over.
In a Sunday Twitter post, Yuga Labs stated that it will be refunding user’s gas fees, and noted that:
“We’re sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while. It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We’d like to encourage the DAO to start thinking in this direction.”
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-burning-spikes-to-new-high-on-yuga-labs-nft-hype
FIFA announces partnership with blockchain innovator Algorand
https://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/president/media-releases/fifa-announces-partnership-with-blockchain-innovator-algorand
Sunday, 1 May 2022, 20:00 (local time)
-- World football’s governing body confirms collaboration with green blockchain technology company Algorand
-- Algorand will become the official blockchain platform of FIFA
-- Partnership announced by FIFA President Gianni Infantino and Algorand founder Silvio Micali in Los Angeles, USA
...exciting announcement for the blockchain community members who follow soccer worldwide imo...way to go Silvio !!
Algorand is getting a bridge to Ethereum
Algorand is about to get a huge liquidity injection.
https://cryptoslate.com/algorand-is-getting-a-bridge-to-ethereum/
'Predatory' Cryptos: Wikipedia Stops Taking Bitcoin, Ethereum Donations
https://www.benzinga.com/news/22/05/26922495/wikipedia-will-stop-accepting-bitcoin-ethereum-after-community-approves-proposal-decrying-digital-as
interesting...
Sweet! PPP $ETH $ETHE
Long since $1900 ETH after the merge is going to revolutionize blockchain and the crypto space more so then BTC ever could or would
Ethereum scaling solution Optimism upgrades governance structure
SAM BOURGI
7 HOURS AGO
Optimism Foundation will launch a governance token called OP to govern protocol and network parameters, and incentivize adoption.
The Optimism Foundation has unveiled a new governance structure and token as part of its ongoing efforts to bring scalability and cost efficiency to Ethereum (ETH), the world’s largest smart contract platform.
The “Optimism Collective” was introduced Tuesday afternoon in a lengthy post that outlined its mission and governance mandate. Described as a “large-scale experiment in digital democratic governance,” the Optimism Collective essentially comprises a band of communities and stakeholders committed to improving Ethereum’s technical capabilities.
According to the details, the Optimism Collective will be governed by two components: the Citizens’ House and the Token House. The Citizens’ House will “facilitate and govern a process to distribute retroactive public goods funding” via revenues collected by the network. The Token House, which will be established through forthcoming airdrops, is tasked with voting on protocol upgrades and project incentives.
The Token House, to be powered by Optimism’s new governance token OP, will be responsible for overseeing protocol and network parameters as well as creating incentives for users to enter the ecosystem.
The Optimism Foundation said in its post that the blockchain community’s “calls for scalability are deafening,” referring to the growing demand for fast and efficient smart contract functionalities. This demand is being answered by several layer-1 competitors, all of which succumb to centralization flaws while abandoning “Ethereum’s security and values,” the foundation said, adding:
“Scaling the technology alone is not enough. We have a duty to scale our values along with our networks.”
While Ethereum continues to dominate the developer scene, its competitors are growing at a faster clip, according to a January report by crypto research firm Electric Capital. The report found that developer activity is growing for projects such as Polkadot (DOT), Solana (SOL) and BNB Smart Chain (BNB), which could potentially eat away at Ethereum's dominance. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s share of the decentralized finance (DeFi) market, as measured by total value locked, has also declined considerably over the past 12 months, according to DeFi Llama.
As Cointelegraph reported, progress toward Ethereum’s proof-of-stake upgrade is underway, though delays have pushed out the implementation timeline by several months. On April 11, Ethereum developers implemented the network’s first-ever “shadow fork” to stress test their assumptions surrounding the upcoming merge.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-scaling-solution-optimism-upgrades-governance-structure
Ethereum Foundation treasury expands non-crypto assets to 19%
BRIAN NEWAR
APR 19, 2022
The foundation that oversees and funds developments on the Ethereum network has disclosed its total holdings, including a sizable fifth in non-crypto assets.
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has released a report detailing how its $1.6 billion treasury consists mostly of Ether (ETH), but with a surprising 18.8% in non-crypto assets.
In total, the EF nonprofit organization which manages the funds for Ethereum developments holds about 0.3% of the current total ETH supply, amounting to roughly $1.3 billion, verifiable on Etherscan. However, its non-crypto holdings account for a sizable $302 million share.
The April 2022 report is the first issued by the Foundation to outline what it holds in the treasury and how it is allocating expenditures, including grant funding for various Ethereum-based projects. In all, the EF appears to have a very strong financial footing having spent just $48 million in 2021.
The report stated that it has increased its non-crypto holdings to $302 million from a previously undisclosed amount. That amount is meant to provide “a greater safety margin” in an effort to protect it against a downturn in the crypto market.
The Foundation did not immediately respond to a request to disclose the details regarding those non-crypto holdings. However, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake suggested that the non-crypto holdings are just fiat reserves in a Monday tweet.
The Foundation spent $21.8 million on layer-1 (L1) research and development, the largest share of its expenditures last year. This total does not include the Client Incentive Program (CIP) which is an ongoing program that rewards nine particular node operators with a share of 39,168 ETH, or $132 million at the time of writing, on a fixed schedule.
It spent a further $9.7 million on community development, $5.9 million on Ethereum as a developer platform, $5.1 million on international operations, $3.6 million on zero-knowledge (zk) research and development and $1.9 million on layer-2 (L2) research and development.
The EF’s financial report comes just a few months before The Merge is scheduled to take place, where the Ethereum mainnet transitions to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. This is expected to vastly reduce the network’s energy requirements and carbon footprint.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-foundation-treasury-expands-non-crypto-assets-to-19
Cryptos That Could Exceed 500% Growth – Ethereum (ETH), Algorand (ALGO) & Parody Coin (PARO)
https://cryptoslate.com/press-releases/cryptos-that-could-exceed-500-growth-ethereum-eth-algorand-algo-parody-coin-paro/
"...Cryptocurrency may have started out as the maverick-dominated Wild West of investing, but it’s now firmly entrenched in the financial mainstream. Despite recent volatility and regulatory crackdowns in China and elsewhere, institutional investors and big banks are beginning to regard it as a serious asset..."
Ethereum Merge Looks Toward Q3 Rollout After Another Delay
https://investorplace.com/2022/04/ethereum-merge-looks-toward-q3-rollout-after-another-delay
North Korea-obsessed Ethereum dev gets 5 years for breaking sanctions
April 13 2022 - 01:51AM
Cointelegraph
JESSE COGHLAN
13 HOURS AGO
Former Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith has been sentenced to 63 months in prison and a $100,000 fine for violating sanctions on North Korea.
Virgil Griffith, a former Ethereum developer, has been sentenced to 63 months in prison and will pay a fine of $100,000 for attending a conference and assisting North Korea to use blockchain technology in contravention of economic sanctions imposed by the United States.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York handed down the decision. Judge Castel stated that “what you see here is intentionality, a deliberate, willful intent to violate the sanctions’ regime,” adding that the crime was made worse because Griffith had a “desire to educate people on how to evade sanctions.”
In September 2021, Griffith pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a law banning U.S. citizens from exporting any “goods, services or technology to the DPRK (North Korea) without a license from the Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).”
In early 2019, Griffith was unsuccessful in gaining permission from U.S. authorities to travel to North Korea. But, in April, he went anyway and visited the capital of Pyongyang for the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference.
At the conference, he gave presentations dressed in a North Korean suit about how the country could use cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions and launder money. He also presented methods on how smart contracts could be used to benefit the country in nuclear weapons negotiations with the U.S.
In an attempt to lower his sentence, Griffith’s defense team provided evidence of factors that may have caused him to act irrationally. They presented a psychological assessment of Griffith which showed him suffering from both obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) and narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).
His defense team said that diagnosis of OCPD and NPD explained the “obsession” Griffiths had for North Korea and is potentially what caused him to brush off warnings from his friends, family and the government on unsanctioned travel to the country.
At the hearing, Griffith was given the opportunity to speak, stating he was remorseful of his actions, adding the sanctions on Russia due to the invasion of Ukraine had “shown their value” and that he had been “cured” of his “obsession with North Korea.”
The court did not appear convinced that Griffith was regretful, with Judge Castel saying:
“The fact of the matter is Virgil Griffith hoped to come home as a crypto hero, to be admired and praised for standing up to government sanctions, for his fearlessness and nobility.”
Griffith was arrested in November 2019 by the FBI, a few months after his return from the conference. He had several meetings with the Bureau regarding his trip prior to his arrest, even providing them with photographs of himself giving presentations at the conference.
North Korea has become increasingly sophisticated with its use of cryptocurrency both in evading sanctions and in using hacks and exploits to steal millions of dollars.
In January, a report by Chainalysis revealed that nearly $400 million was stolen by North Korean hackers in 2021 through exchange hacks and ransomware, employing a meticulous laundering system involving decentralized exchange swaps and multiple crypto tumblers.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/north-korea-obsessed-ethereum-dev-gets-5-years-for-breaking-sanctions
Eth a must own with the "merge" in May of ETH 2.0.Etc Etherium classic will be the 2nd best beneficiary with miners flocking there
EXPLAINING CRYPTO’S BILLION-DOLLAR BRIDGE PROBLEM
By Corin Faife@corintxt Apr 11, 2022, 8:00am EDT
What are blockchain bridges, why do they keep getting hacked, and can we ever stop it from happening?
nOn March 23rd, the Ronin blockchain network underlying the popular NFT-driven game Axie Infinity was hit with a hack that saw the attackers walk away with an eye-popping $625 million in cryptocurrency.
The Ronin hack was the largest amount of money that had ever been stolen from the type of service called a “bridge,” which connects one blockchain to another so that value can be sent between them. Unfortunately, it was far from the only hack to hit a bridge: less than two months previously, another bridge platform called Wormhole was exploited for close to $325 million, and about six months before that, more than $600 million was stolen from another cross-chain bridge called Poly. (In a surprising twist, the hacker later returned Poly’s stolen funds.)
In short, bridges are the weak point in a lot of cryptocurrency systems, and hackers are targeting them for more than $1 billion in little over a year. So it’s worth laying out exactly what they are, why they’re important, and how crypto companies can try to plug the billion-dollar hole in their pockets.
If you don’t have time to read further, the short answer to the first part is “yes, they’re vulnerable but maybe less so over time.” For the second part, the story is more complex.
(We’re assuming you know what a blockchain is already; if not, you can start here.)
SO WHAT IS A “BLOCKCHAIN BRIDGE”?
Essentially, it’s a system for connecting different blockchains, allowing users to exchange one kind of coin or token for another. Every cryptocurrency runs on its own blockchain: there’s Bitcoin, Ethereum, and newer currencies like Tether, Ripple, Solana, and so on. There’s no simple way for these different blockchains to interact — they might all use the concept of “addresses” to send and receive currency transactions, but you can’t send ETH directly to a Solana address.
A blockchain bridge is what developers have built to make that crossover a little smoother. If you’re holding ETH and you need Solana’s SOL to sign up for a game, you can send your ETH into a bridge, get SOL in return, and use the same method to convert back when you’re done playing.
WHY ARE BRIDGES PARTICULARLY VULNERABLE TO HACKS?
The short answer is that they’re handling a lot of complex requests and holding a lot of currency — and unlike the blockchains themselves, there’s no standard for how they’re supposed to keep everything secure.
Picture a blockchain bridge as an actual bridge between two islands. Each island has different rules about the type of car you can drive (maybe there’s an EV island and a regular gas island), so they won’t let you drive your car from one side to the other directly. In fact, you drive up to one side of the bridge, leave your vehicle in a parking garage, walk across, and pick up a rental car on the other side. Then, when you’re done driving around the other island, you bring your rental back to the bridge, walk across, and they hand you the keys to your car.
That means for every rental car driving around the island, there’s another car parked in the garage. Some are stored for hours, others for days, others for months, but they’re all just sitting there, and the company that operates the bridge has to keep them all safe. Meanwhile, other unscrupulous people know exactly how many cars are in the garage and are looking for ways to steal them.
Functionally, this means bridges are receiving incoming transactions in one type of cryptocurrency, locking it up as a deposit, and releasing an equivalent amount of cryptocurrency on another blockchain. When bridges get hacked, the attacker is able to withdraw money from one side of the bridge without putting anything in the other side.
Bridges are particularly tempting targets because of all the complex code, creating lots of opportunities for exploitable bugs. As CertiK founder Ronghui Gu explains: “If you’re trying to create a bridge between N different cryptocurrencies, the complexity of that is N squared,” — which means N more chances for bugs to creep in.
Crucially, these different cryptocurrencies aren’t just different units of money: they’re written in different programming languages and deployed in different virtual environments. Figuring out how these things should interact is very hard, especially for on-chain bridges that convert between multiple different coins.
HAVE BRIDGES MADE CRYPTOCURRENCY LESS SECURE OVERALL?
Probably not. Attackers are targeting bridges right now because they’re the weakest point in the system — but that’s partially because the industry has done a good job securing the rest of it. Kim Grauer, director of research at Chainalysis — a company that has produced research on DeFi thefts — told The Verge that bridge hacks are taking the place of the previous generation of damaging hacks against exchanges like Coincheck, BitMart or Mt Gox.
“IF YOU LOOKED AT OUR ECOSYSTEM JUST A FEW YEARS AGO, CENTRALIZED EXCHANGES WERE THE MAIN TARGET OF HACKS.”
“If you looked at our ecosystem just a few years ago, centralized exchanges were the main target of hacks. Every hack it was, ‘Centralized exchange goes down again,’ and the industry worked hard to have solutions that allowed us to overcome these hacking problems,” she says. “We’re seeing a lot of DeFi hacking, but I think the pace of it is actually slowing down. Definitely the rate at which this hacking is going on can’t continue for the industry to grow.”
ISN’T THE WHOLE POINT OF THE BLOCKCHAIN TO PREVENT THIS KIND OF ATTACK?
The problem is that many bridges aren’t on the blockchain at all. The Ronin bridge was set up to work “off-chain,” running as a system that interfaces with the blockchain but exists on servers that are not part of it. These systems are fast, flexible, and relatively lightweight — reducing some of the “N squared” complexity challenges — but can be hit with the same type of hacks that affect web services anywhere on the internet. (“This is not really blockchain,” Gu says. “These are ‘Web2’ servers.”)
Without the blockchain to settle transactions, the Ronin bridge relied on nine validator nodes, which were compromised through a combination of code hacks and unspecified social engineering.
There are other bridge systems that operate as smart contracts — basically, the “on-chain” alternative. It’s less likely that an attacker could subvert the code of an on-chain system through social engineering, and getting majority power over the network is extremely unlikely. The drawback is that the smart contracts themselves are highly complex, and if bugs do exist, it can be hard to update the system in a timely way. (Wormhole used an on-chain system, and the big theft occurred after hackers spotted security updates that were uploaded to GitHub but had not been deployed to the live smart contract.)
HOW DO WE STOP BRIDGES FROM GETTING HACKED?
It’s hard. The answer that came up time and time again was “code auditing.” In the type of case described above, where a project’s development team might be working across different programming languages and computing environments, bringing in outside expertise can cover blind spots that in-house talent might miss. But right now, a surprisingly large number of projects don’t have any auditor listed.
“I WOULDN’T CALL IT NECESSARILY A BUBBLE, BUT IT’S CERTAINLY A GOLD RUSH.”
Nick Selby, director of assurance practice at specialist security auditing company Trail of Bits, said that this is partly because of how fast the market has sprung up. Most companies are under huge pressure to grow, scale, and build new features to fend off competitors — which can sometimes come at the expense of diligent security work.
“We’re in, I wouldn’t call it necessarily a bubble, but it’s certainly a gold rush,” says Selby. “I think a lot of times, executives who are trying to innovate in the space will look at the desired feature outcome and say, ‘Well, this [product] does have the features I want. Therefore, it’s good.’ And there’s a lot of things they’re not looking at, so they’re not seeing them, which is where the code audit comes in.”
https://www.theverge.com/23017107/crypto-billion-dollar-bridge-hack-decentralized-finance
Thank you for the reply. Good luck to you and enjoy the weekend.
Proof of work — using computers to complete transactions using electric grid
Im a small fish. What is POW? Thanks. Nice grabs by the way.
4400 ethereum destroyed in one hour
https://thedefiant.io/ethereum-record-burn-nft-drop/
I have 10 coins at 120$ average bought another 60 today just because POW is going away and I can see this at 20k+ in 5 years
Also bought 250 QNT because CBDCS are coming and we should be in a position to
Make money off them
Also a nice bag of WTK nice small cap with x100 potential ex ripple/swift executives
Why would you wait until now to load?
ETH goes past $4000 in less than 2 weeks. The future is clear.
The race for semiconductors: Are crypto miners taking the lion's share?
ELENA PEREZ
8 HOURS AGO
Semiconductors are making headlines again this year but to what extent can the shortage be attributed to crypto miners?
Over the last couple of years, the world has been grappling with the lack of semiconductors, which are the substances that conduct electricity between metals and isolates. The most famous semiconductor is silicon.
If correlating this concept to electronic devices, then the key semiconductors are processors and other microcircuits that are present in almost all devices that people use every day, from smartphones to cars.
In 2021, semiconductors hit a world record in terms of sales. Electronics production also boomed, with hundreds of millions of complex semiconductors being devoured by gaming consoles. The number of GPUs produced grew to unseen levels, with major manufacturers like Nvidia seeing all-time highs in terms of production.
Despite all this, electronics prices skyrocketed and manufacturers of related goods were struggling to find semiconductors.
Crypto miners: Guilty or innocent?
It has become customary to not only mention but to blame cryptocurrency miners for the global shortage of GPU cards and semiconductors. To their credit, miners would buy up huge swaths of graphics processing units, sometimes emptying whole stores at once.
Some countries that are feeling the shortage of cards acutely are already fighting against cryptocurrency mining.
At the same time, the manufacturers, themselves, do not take such a definite position. AMD CEO Lisa Su said in June 2021 that miners are far from guilty for the lack and even complete absence of certain GPU cards. She said that their influence on the market is generally minimal and does not exceed 5%–10% of the total demand.
Andy Long, CEO of White Rock Management, a digital asset technology company situated in Switzerland, agreed with Su that mining isn't entirely to blame:
“GPUs are still in high demand to power Ethereum and other altcoin mining. Nvidia's published estimate for the percentage of traditional GPUs going to miners is in the single digits, but the true figure is likely higher than that — somewhere around 20%.”
Another important factor behind the shortage of GPU cards is the COVID-19 pandemic. The supply chain showed that due to the many employees who began to work at home, the number of buyers increased so much that graphics processors — a crucial component in home computers — simply disappeared from sale.
However, the situation with miners’ appetite for GPU cards began to change noticeably at the beginning of this year.
Firstly, the change is due to Ethereum (ETH) switching to the proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol, which is slated to take place in the summer of 2022.
Currently, the Ethereum blockchain is maintained by miners solving cryptographic puzzles and subsequently receiving a reward, the value of which is calculated according to the hash rate of each individual GPU.
This is called proof-of-work (PoW). As soon as Ethereum switches to the new protocol, miners will no longer be needed as crypto holders will validate block transactions based on the number of tokens they stake.
Since GPU cards will no longer be needed for Ether mining, once Ethereum 2.0 goes into effect, the demand for them will reduce drastically.
This shift in demand is already very noticeable. In the first two months of 2022, Nvidia’s GPU card sales are down by 75% compared to 2021 as large mining companies that used to purchase such cards have stopped buying. This also means that Nvidia will be forced to redirect GPU cards to the gaming sector and cut prices.
There are other reasons for the price decrease. Since April of this year, the United States has reduced import tariffs on the supply of goods from China by 25%. America is one of the main players in the GPU market, where companies such as Nvidia, AMD and Intel operate, so the tariff cuts have led to lower prices for GPU cards.
Buyers’ interest in the cards is also declining against the backdrop of a gradual return of people to offices after two years of remote work and the need to have a modern computer at home to comfortably perform work duties.
“Dedicated mining cards are also a larger part of the picture now,” said Long, “These are cards without video output that are solely for data processing. We first saw these in 2017 with the launch of dedicated Pascal architecture cards such as the P106 and P104. Now the Nvidia CMP range explicitly targets the miners — with some dedicated high-end SKUs only available to those willing to place orders in the tens of millions of dollars. The shortage in dedicated gaming cards is as much to do with simple supply and demand for the core purpose of gaming — and also “HPC” type applications where people use gaming cards for rendering and AI tasks.”
The deficit is not over
The solution to the problem of the shortage of GPU cards sounds simple: Producers need to make more cards to meet the demand. However, in practice, this is not the case. One of the problems is the supply of silicon wafers, which are used to produce the chips. In 2019, the demand for wafers was rather low, but in 2020, after the whole world went into quarantine, the demand for computers, tablets, TVs and other equipment that requires chips rose sharply. The demand for wafers has increased so much that Sumco Corp, the second-largest manufacturer of wafers, said that its production is booked until 2026.
However, the production of processors, GPU cards and memory cards requires more than just silicon wafers. After the start of war actions in Ukraine, world manufacturers of semiconductors faced a shortage of neon, which is necessary for the operation of the laser systems used to create the chips. The problem is that the two Russian companies, Ingas and Krion, produce 45%–54% of the world’s supply of neon-containing gas mixtures. How global manufacturers will look for a way out of this situation is not yet clear.
In March 2022, some experts believed that the semiconductor shortage could end in 2023. In particular, the head of Micron Technology, one of the biggest producers of computer memory and computer data storage, believes that starting this year, manufacturers will be able to build up a significant stock of chips as well as arrange supplies. In 2023, there will be no such problems and global companies will largely be able to reach the level of production that they had before the pandemic.
But the situation in Ukraine can stop this recovery and redouble the deficit of chips, forcing the price to rise with renewed vigor. Recently, Intel has claimed that it has stockpiled and continues to monitor supply disruptions while trying to find alternative sources of neon. Samsung stated that some factories may face shortages, the Dutch ASML, which produces scanners for printing chips that are used by TSMC and Samsung, didn’t hide their concerns and said that over the next two years, producers could face a shortage of major machinery equipment.
So what will happen to semiconductors in the nearest future, and therefore to equipment? The GPU market could likely recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and the declining demand from miners, but global events are once again putting manufacturers to the test with the lack of components for the production of equipment. Of course, it is worth believing that the business will find the raw materials and build new supply chains, but no one can predict how soon this can happen. In any case, the shortage of semiconductors seems to continue, and GPU card prices will go up again, but in this case, the miners will have had nothing to do with it.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-race-for-semiconductors-are-crypto-miners-taking-the-lion-s-share
Agreed!! I'm in that one too. Plus a couple of meme's running on the xrp ledger one is @ 8 zeros.
Wire transfered 85k two days ago still not in my account we need better system … $XRP
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