Cryptocurrency exchange Binance claims that a dusting attack occurred against fourth-biggest altcoin, Litecoin (LTC). A large scale attack against privacy The official Twitter exchange of cryptocurrency exchange Binance claimed that a major attack against users of altcoin Litecoin took place yesterday. The firm made this claim in a tweet on Aug. 9: “Approximately 5 hours ago there was a large-scale dusting attack on $LTC @Litecoin users.” The tweet also links to a transaction — which according to Binance is part of the attack — sending a fraction (0.00000546 LTC) of a coin to 50 addresses. Furthermore, the exchange also links …

The official Samourai Wallet Telegram account raised concerns over the alleged lack of privacy ensured by the CoinJoin implementation of competing wallet Wasabi on July 18. According to Samourai Wallet, Wasabi wallet CoinJoin transactions are often not as private as they are purported to be. The company pointed out: “With Wasabi if you are mixing 10 BTC, I can trivially track that 10 BTC as it is peeled down into smaller UTXOS (unspent funds). [...] Additionally Wasabi outputs are in the order in which they are registered, allowing you to make educated guesses that cluster outputs that you can later …

Privacy-focused digital currency Zcash (ZEC) has forked into a new blockchain network dubbed Ycash, whose total supply amounts to 21 million coins. According to a tweet by the Ycash Foundation, the first block of Ycash was mined today, July 19, at 7:36:51 PM PDT. Ycash forked off Zcash blockchain at block height 570,000 and is independent from both the Electric Coin Company, the firm behind Zcash, and the Zcash Foundation. The Ycash project was initially announced in April, when the Ycash team member Howard Loo revealed in a forum post that they are launching the first friendly fork of the …

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the authority will be preventing Bitcoin (BTC) from becoming an “equivalent of Swiss-numbered bank accounts.” U.S. secretary of the treasury to closely monitor Bitcoin regardless of price In a press briefing reported by CNBC on July 18, Mnuchin criticized Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as they can be used for illicit purposes such as money laundering, adding that the department intends to enforce strong regulations on the space. The official emphasized his own intent to closely monitor Bitcoin to prevent illegal activity regardless of its price, claiming that there are billions of dollars in Bitcoin …

Tor Project’s new Bitcoin (BTC)-based crowdfunding campaign has reached the softcap of $10,000 in 25 hours after the launch. The new crowdfunding program, known as BitcoinForTor, was launched on July 15 in collaboration with open-source payment processor BTCPay Server. By July 16, the project has raised the minimum amount expected to be secured, BTCPay announced. Having reached the softcap, Tor Project has not halted the fundraising campaign. It is inviting cryptocurrency users to continue donating with Bitcoin within the next 13 days, claiming that protecting privacy online “requires financial support beyond 10k.” At press time, the amount raised within BitcoinForTor …

Central bank digital currencies (CBDC) will not hold much interest for the general public unless they provide full anonymity, the deputy governor of Mexico's central bank has argued. The executive’s remarks were published by the Bank for International Settlements on July 11. Javier Calafell, deputy governor of the Bank of Mexico (Banxico), delivered a speech on potential strengths and weaknesses of CBDC during an event held by the United States Federal Reserve Bank and the OMFIF Foundation on July 9. While outlining CBDCs’ advantages such as security of payments and cost effectiveness, Calafell believes that there are a number of …

Co-founder and CEO of major U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Brian Armstrong attracted criticism after praising private crypto transactions in a tweet published on June 22. In the aforementioned tweet, Armstrong notes that “a scalable, sufficiently decentralized, chain that supported private transactions by default (privacy coins) would be a game changer.” He then compares anonymous cryptocurrency transactions to cryptography on the web, pointing out that it is increasingly predominant. He also used messaging as an example: “Same with messaging, end to end encryption started out fringe and is now the expected default.” Armstrong also cited the recent news about the Electric …

The Electric Coin Company (ECC), the firm behind second-biggest anoncoin zcash (ZEC), intends to build a new scalable zcash blockchain, cryptocurrency news outlet Forklog reports on June 22. Per the report, chief engineer at ECC Nathan Wilcox said that the firm should “make Zcash usable by 10 billion people by 2050” if it can. Still, Decrypt notes that achieving this would require zcash’s blockchain to be able to manage thousands — or millions — of transactions per second. Forklog states that ECC is considering implementing sharding, a scalability solution that Ethereum devs also plan to integrate into that network in …

The head of Russia’s central bank, the Bank of Russia, has said that while the launch of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) is being explored, it is not a matter for the near future. The news was reported by Russia government-backed media agency TASS on June 15. A CBDC is a digital currency issued by a central bank that has the status of legal tender and other properties of centralized, fiat money. TASS reports that Bank of Russia’s head Elvira Nabiullina told an audience at a student conference in the Russian city of Skolkovo that a CBDC cannot be …

This article has been updated to correct that GreatPoint Ventures, not General Motors, led the funding round. United States-based blockchain startup Spring Labs has raised $23 million in a Seed A funding round, according to a press release on June 12. Among the investors for this seed A funding round — led by GreatPoint Ventures — were Galaxy Digital, the cryptocurrency investment bank founded by crypto enthusiast Michael Novogratz, and automotive giant General Motors (GM). Spring Labs will purportedly use the funds to improve its blockchain-based platform Spring Protocol and develop three new fraud protection products that are designed to …

The testnet of private smart contract network Enigma has been launched, the developers announced in a Medium post published on June 11. Per the announcement, the test network, dubbed Discovery, allows developers to start developing their decentralized applications (DApps). Furthermore, contracts hosted on the Discovery testnet will reportedly be immediately deployed on the Ethereum (ETH) network once Enigma has been implemented on the mainnet. The newly launched network reportedly enables privacy for general computations, which enables DApp developers to create secure applications, according to the post. The author of the post further notes that the developers have been using and …

Big four auditing firm Ernst & Young (EY) open sourced the code of its Nightfall Ethereum (ETH) private transactions solution and released it on GitHub on May 31. The readme information file featured on the GitHub repository explains the function of the software in question: “Nightfall integrates a set of smart contracts and microservices, and the ZoKrates zk-snark toolkit, to enable standard ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens to be transacted on the Ethereum blockchain with complete privacy.” In the same file, EY claims that it decided to release its research in the hope of speeding up the adoption of public blockchains. …