The cryptocurrency community has a tendency to fixate on a new issue every few weeks and then promptly forget about it. The limited attention span of this community misses the ultimate resolution of important issues. Over the Thanksgiving holiday in November 2022, ConsenSys released a disclosure about a privacy policy affecting MetaMask users that sent “Crypto Twitter” into a firestorm. My first reaction was also negative. That’s what a sly fox would say isn’t it? pic.twitter.com/PfKMTiNHoR — J.W. Verret, JD, CPA/CVA (@JWVerret) November 25, 2022 The MetaMask browser extension wallet uses a node called Infura. That node is owned by …

The crypto and blockchain space has had a turbulent past year, but that is not stopping users and enterprises from looking into the industry. A new survey from CasperLabs and Zogby Analytics revealed that the sentiment around blockchain adoption is especially positive among enterprises. The poll was conducted via 603 business enterprise “decision makers” in the United States, the United Kingdom and China. Nearly 90% of the businesses surveyed reported deploying blockchain technology in some capacity, with 87% saying they plan to invest in blockchain in the next year. This is particularly pronounced in China, where over half of the …

As trading becomes increasingly difficult during the bear market, a nonfungible token (NFT) platform aims to lighten the load on traders and help them get a closer look at the strategies of successful collectors. In an announcement sent to Cointelegraph, NFT platform Upshot said that it launched Upshot GMI, a tool that scores and classifies wallets based on their NFT trading performance. Taking inspiration from the crypto slang WAGMI, GMI stands for “gonna make it,” as it analyzes which wallets are, in essence, going to make it based on data available on the blockchain. According to Upshot CEO Nick Emmons, …

While the United States holds the biggest share in Bitcoin (BTC) hash rate contribution and ATM network, the city hosting the most number of reachable Bitcoin nodes — the biggest pillar of the Bitcoin system — is Frankfurt, Germany. A Bitcoin node represents a computer system that works with other decentralized computers to help validate and relay Bitcoin blocks and transactions. Out of the total 43706 nodes hosted across 134 countries, the U.S. hosts 9999 or 30.53%, while Germany ranks second with 4529 (13.83%) nodes, confirms data from Bitnodes. However, when it comes to the contribution of individual cities, Frankfurt …

The cryptocurrency ecosystem underwent a turbulent year in 2022. Criticism inside and outside of the crypto industry was fueled following the collapse of FTX, Celsius, Three Arrows Capital and the Terra ecosystem. A number of losses have been recorded from these events. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis released a report in December of last year, which noted that the depegging of Terra’s stablecoin, Terra USD Classic (USTC), saw weekly-realized losses peak at $20.5 billion. Findings further show that the subsequent collapse of Three Arrows Capital and Celsius in June 2022 saw weekly-realized losses reach $33 billion. While these events may have …

200 million Twitter users’ private information, including their email addresses, was put for sale after a breach exposed 400M users’ private information in the last week of December 2022. The hacker behind the December breach has earlier demanded $200,000 from Twitter in a bid to return the stolen data and warned if the demand is not fulfilled, the data will be released for free. The latest set of data posted on the hacker forum has been traced back to the same breach from December 2022. I went to change my email address and Twitter isn't working. This hack puts activists …

A class action lawsuit has been filed against password management service LastPass following a data breach from Aug. 2022. The class action was filed with the U.S. district court of Massachusetts on Jan. 3, by an unnamed plaintiff known only as “John Doe” and on behalf of others similarly situated. It alleges that the data breach of LastPass has resulted in the theft of around $53,000 worth of Bitcoin. The plaintiff claimed he began accruing BTC in Jul. 2022 and updated his master password to more than 12 characters using a password generator, as recommended by the LastPass “best practices.” …

Social media has infiltrated the everyday lives of a huge chunk of the global population. With media giants like Facebook and Twitter taking up a significant percentage of people’s time and attention, issues are not scarce. The main pain point stems from the exclusively centralized character of all these mega companies. With the rise of blockchain technology and the advancement Web3 offers in the digital era, social media platforms are also bound to change. The times of centralized entities hogging all control over this sector of the online world are gone. As users seek more transparency and control over their …

As a millennial, it’s hard to say this, but boomers are doing crypto better. They are taking research methods used in the traditional markets and applying them to crypto projects, according to a new report from Bybit and consumer research company Toluna. The report says that 34% of boomers spend “a few days” doing due diligence on a project before investing — 50% more than other generations. More concerning still, “64% of North American investors spend less than two hours or don’t DYOR at all.” Boomers are also more likely to focus their research on technical factors such as tokenomics, …

Data transparency has been a focal point for the crypto industry, but the FTX fiasco has shown that centralized exchanges (CEX) are not transparent enough. So far, crypto analytics firms are apparently not capable of tracking transactions to prevent collapses like FTX. All Bitcoin (BTC) transactions are available publicly on-chain, which enables tracking such transactions when sending crypto from one address to another. However, this is not the case when it comes to interacting with a centralized crypto exchange. Cointelegraph spoke with executives at blockchain intelligence firms, including Chainalysis, Nansen and Whale Alert, to learn more insights about tracking illicit …

With exchanges becoming a focus as the FTX fiasco continues, a new research paper suggested that almost three out of four transactions in unregulated exchanges are fake. A working paper titled “Crypto Wash Trading” was recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Using statistical and behavioral patterns to determine which transactions were legitimate or not, the paper studied 29 unregulated exchanges and came to a conclusion that, on average, more than 70% of the volume within the platforms are wash trades. The researchers found that some exchanges’ wash trading volume goes as high as 80% of the …

400 million Twitter users’ data containing private emails and linked phone numbers have reportedly been up for sale on the black market. Cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock highlighted a “credible threat” via Twitter on Dec. 24 in which someone is supposedly selling a private database containing contact information of 400 million Twitter user accounts. “The private database contains devastating amounts of information including emails and phone numbers of high profile users such as AOC, Kevin O'Leary, Vitalik Buterin & more,” Hudson Rock stated, before adding that: “In the post, the threat actor claims the data was obtained in early 2022 …