x
Image Source: Pixabay
Web3 Is Supposed to Be Secure. What About All These Hacks?
Web3 promised us a new era of privacy and security, but a series of recent major hacks make all that look like a lie.
The promise of Web3 is that we'll get all the stuff we like about the internet, but with more privacy and a blockchain-based architecture to keep our data more secure than before.
Well, that's the theory. In reality, Web3 is becoming a security nightmare as a slew of recent hacks has left some wondering if they should just turn our money and data over to Mark Zuckerberg and call it day.
The latest security disaster involves the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, which is supposed to be the poster child for what Web3 can be. If you missed it, hackers broke into the Ronin "bridge" between Axie and the Ethereum blockchain and robbed it to the tune of $552 million at the time (now worth $630 million, since ETH is up)—a staggering amount even in this crypto gilded age.
Even more shocking is how the attack took place. As engineer Molly White explains, the crew behind Axie set up the bridge in such a way that it required only nine trusted validators—meaning that a hacker only needed to compromise five accounts to get the keys to the kingdom. And that's what happened. Even worse, it took six days for the Axie team to notice that $630 million worth of Ethereum had been looted and to tell users, whose money is now gone. Read More
CME Group 'Looking At' Offering Solana, Cardano Futures
CME Group has been "looking at" offering Solana and Cardano futures contracts, an executive said at a conference in London.
Solana (SOL) and Cardano (ADA) might soon have futures contracts available on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a CME Group executive said earlier this week.
Payal Shah, the director of equity and cryptocurrency products at CME, spoke at CryptoCompare’s Digital Asset Summit in London.
“We’re looking at it,” she said when asked if CME was considering offering futures and other derivative products for altcoins. “We get a number of client requests for anything outside the top two—Solana, Cardano.”
Although they’re still categorized as “altcoins” simply because they’re not Bitcoin or Ether (the latter of which is itself sometimes mentioned as an altcoin), SOL and ADA have solidified their places in the top 10 by market cap. As of Friday afternoon, SOL was the sixth-largest coin with a $44.3 billion market cap and ADA was the eighth largest with a $39.5 billion market cap. Read More
ArtMeta - The Artist's Lead Towards Striving In The NFT Marketplace
ArtMeta is a visionary, photo-realistic metaverse and society created by the world's leading artists. The company provides digital display solutions for top galleries to showcase their collections, free from the physical world's limitations. This is achieved by inviting collectors and visitors to participate in an immersive fine art experience.
ArtMeta launched its first IDO in December 2021, the digital development of the island began in 2019, but the island itself is a work of art that has been 11 years in the making. Each element within the island has a purpose, meaning, and story, visually, it’s a perfect mix of Soho, Art Basel, and the Venice Biennale.
ArtMeta connects premier galleries and their artists with collectors in a visionary, beautifully rendered digital universe, providing a new paradigm for displaying and selling verified and authenticated fine art. Read More
Is Ethereum really the best blockchain to form a DAO?
Ethereum’s dominance as the blockchain of choice for DAOs remains strong, but there is a case being made for other chains which may be better suited.
The crypto community and industry have chosen Ethereum as the chain of choice for most blockchain-based decentralized applications (DApps), but other chains may be better suited to handle the workload for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).
Technical advantages and cheaper transactions have yet to become a major pull factor from Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains. EVM compatibility enables a network to use Ethereum’s security features.
Ethereum and its compatible chains have a clear advantage in the number of DAOs compared to any other. They house more than 4,200 DAOs and protocols requiring governance participants according to data from blockchain voting platform Snapshot.
Comparatively, the Solana ecosystem has only 140, Cardano has 10 DAOs, according to ecosystem tracker Cardano Cube and Polkadot Substrate says it has just eight. This is not to discount the fact that among the top 10 DAOs by the number of decisions made over the past seven days, DAO tracker DeepDAO shows that three are based on Solana. Read More
What Does The Wallet Do? What Does It Mean For You?
The launch of the Markethive wallet is approaching, so it’s time to start beating the proverbial drum. It is the start of an exciting time with the advent of many integrations to follow the release of the wallet that will bring Markethive into prominence as an unprecedented platform. The combination of inbound marketing, social media, digital broadcasting, video, conference rooms, e-commerce, gamification, etc.
Markethive is a blockchain-driven crypto economy, all-inclusive, with a distributed database system required for this decentralized, monolithic global project. We’re almost there with the release of the wallet that will initiate entrepreneurial sovereignty and open the floodgates of this divine enterprise with its plethora of systems and services, including the new interface and dashboard.
We now have a complete working wallet with the Solana Network, and we also have a fully functional crypto merchant account. The Markethive wallet is being polished with the finishing touches, keeping mindful that it’s not just a simple wallet but a comprehensive, dynamic engine centralized for you that powers your platform and business.
Markethive is fundamentally a sophisticated inbound marketing and storefront platform, integrated with a social network, and not just another social media platform you see popping up to counter the media tech giants we’ve come to know as oppressive, censoring you and using your personal data for their own gain. Read More
More Than 90% of All Bitcoin Is Now in Circulation. What's Next?
It took 13 years to mine the 19 millionth Bitcoin. Just don’t expect the remainder anytime soon.
The 19 millionth Bitcoin was mined on Friday—a significant milestone considering there will never be more than 21 million.
And it means that 13 years into its existence, over 90% of all Bitcoin is now in circulation.
But if you're looking forward to the historic moment when the last Bitcoin is mined, hoping it's just around the corner, we hate to break it to you: Neither you nor the current Decrypt team will see it because in all probability miners won’t accomplish that until 2140.
This is because of a process called halving. To understand halving, you need to understand the Bitcoin mining process. Read More
The evolution of blockchain: Transactions, contracts, and applications
Blockchain technology is a cryptographic chain of peer-to-peer transactions. Blockchain transactions are stored in a trustless manner, thanks to decentralized nodes that validate and commit them.
Bitcoin, the first-ever cryptocurrency, introduced blockchain technology and the concept of a blockchain ecosystem to the world. When examining the history of blockchain, we’ve got to look back to 2009. Revealed in 2009 by the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin white paper detailed a solution to the double-spend problem surrounding digital peer-to-peer payments.
Nakamoto evolved transactions into trustless entities, removing the need for an intermediary.
Nakamoto’s white paper presented their problems with traditional finance, stating that e-commerce had come to rely almost entirely on third-party intermediaries to process digital transactions. These intermediaries must spend time and money on mediating transactions, increasing costs for the transacting parties, and limiting the potential for smaller, everyday transactions, among other problems.
This solution entailed immutably timestamping transactions via computational proofs and hashing those transactions into an “ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work.” Read More
The concept and future of decentralized Web3 domain names
Web3 domains differ from standard domain name system (DNS) addresses such as Cointelegraph.com or thenewslack.io. A DNS is similar to a telephone directory, only it indexes public websites and their accompanying internet protocol (IP) addresses to enable the directory.
Thenewslack.crypto is the result of a 42-character hex string. However, in the case of Web3 blockchain domain name systems, one can simply remember a shorter phrase. Web3 refers to the next generation of the web's legal, technical and monetary architecture, including smart contracts, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies. Web3 projects fit into various categories like digital services, decentralized finance (DeFi), and collectibles.
A decentralized crypto domain is a human-readable address that serves as a stand-in for your crypto wallet, rather than offering a human-readable collection of characters as an IP address. These Web3 domain names are nonfungible tokens (NFTs) or digital certificates of validity that may be traded on platforms like Solana's Solsea or OpenSea. Moreover, Web3 domains have Web3 domain extensions like .crypto, .dao and .eth.
The attractiveness of a Web3 domain name, which symbolizes a blockchain address, is straightforward. For instance, "Send the salary to bob.eth," rather than reciting some impossible-to-remember 42-character crypto wallet address, is considerably easier for the sender to remember and do. Read More
Caitlin Long: Crypto Will Split Into Three Camps Due to Regulation
Long's company plans to offer banking services to crypto startups that have been snubbed by the big banks.
For years, every person working in the crypto industry in the U.S. has known that more regulation of the industry is coming down the road. But in the past year, that inevitability became more obvious and overt.
Gary Gensler was sworn in as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2021 and soon began making comments that put crypto advocates on high alert; his SEC in October approved a Bitcoin futures ETF but has steadfastly refused to allow any spot ETF; and last month President Joe Biden issued an executive order on crypto that amounted to a call to action for multiple agencies to get on the same page for regulating crypto.
And yet, as Wall Street banking veteran turned crypto startup founder Caitlin Long puts it, "There are a number of folks in the crypto industry who don't want regulation at all."
Whether they want it or not, it's coming. And the new regulatory rules will result in a "split into three camps" in the crypto industry, Long predicted on the latest episode of Decrypt's gm podcast. Here are the three camps as Long described them: Read More
Disclaimer: These articles are provided for informational purposes only. They are not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or any other advice.
