Wirecard chief operating officer Jan Marsalek reportedly used Bitcoin (BTC) to move funds from Dubai to Russia. Russian media outlet Kommersant reported on July 20 that Marsalek is hiding in Russia with funds that he was able to transfer there with the cryptocurrency. Per the report, Marsalek is currently in a private house near Moscow under the supervision of Russian special services. Documents leaked earlier this month also suggest that Marsalek indeed had links with Russian government operators. According to a recent report, he allegedly held secret documents and bragged of his intelligence service ties in an effort to further …

A new version of Russia’s major draft bill on cryptocurrency regulation does not include criminal offense codes as lawmakers are expected to hold the bill's second reading tomorrow. According to official records of the State Duma, Russia’s legislative body, the Duma’s Committee on Financial Market has proposed the second reading of the bill “On Digital Financial Assets,” or DFA, on Tuesday. In the Russian legislative system, each bill is subject to three readings as it passes the development from draft to adoption. While the second reading is designed to sum up amendments and proposals to the draft bill, the third …

Jan Marsalek, the former chief operations officer of Wirecard who went missing after his supposed trip to the Philippines last month to chase the missing 2 billion Euro in the company’s books, has been located in Belarus. Marsalek reportedly entered the Philippines via Manila before flying to Cebu City and then to China in June. Philippine authorities said there was no footage of Marsalek arriving in the city nor were there records of a flight leaving Cebu for China. Forged traveling tracks According to investigative reporting website Bellingcat, the former Wirecard executive’s trip to the Philippines was forged. Investigations have …

Igor Krasnov, Russia’s new Attorney General, says that cybercrime in Russia has surged 25 times over the past five years. Krasnov made the statement during a recent meeting devoted to fighting cybercrime in Russia, according to an official statement on July 17. Only 25% of cybercrime in Russia gets solved At the event, Krasnov outlined that there have already been 225,000 cases in the first half of 2020, a 92% increase in the same timeframe from 2019. The total number of Russian cases for all of last year was just 294,000, Krasnov said. He cited a number of crimes, like …

From June 25 to July 1, the Russian government held a public vote with the goal of finding out whether the country’s constitution should be amended. Part of the vote was held on blockchain to “ensure security and transparency,” according to the government, making it the country’s most extensive DLT project to date. But this didn’t stop independent researchers from registering over 20 million “abnormal” votes and arguing that it was one of the most falsified voting events in the modern history of Russia. So what was blockchain’s role in all of this, exactly? What was the referendum all about? …

Cryptocurrencies have been around for more than 10 years, but the legal status of Bitcoin (BTC) and most other cryptocurrencies remains unclear and has different definitions in various jurisdictions. Are they money, an asset, a product, property or something else? Should they trade freely or must be tightly regulated? In the absence of a clear answer, governments in the United States and Europe are still issuing legal acts to regulate the cryptocurrency market and trying to determine their attitude toward cryptos. In the first several months of 2020 alone in France, Germany and Australia, authorities issued decisions with three different …

The COVID-19 crisis has brought many new users to the world of cryptocurrencies. One of the main concerns for users, however, is whether their bank cards may be blocked due to the purchase of a cryptocurrency, or when withdrawing funds from a crypto account. Can this risk be prevented? Since the COVID-19 outbreak and people’s subsequent desire to protect their savings, interest in cryptocurrency has continued to grow. A June 2020 survey conducted by The Tokenist found that 45% of respondents from 17 countries now prefer to invest in Bitcoin (BTC) rather than stocks, real estate or gold. For comparison’s …

Recently, the venture arms of corporate giants Volvo and Total invested in blockchain traceability startup Circulor that helps reduce child labor in Africa and aspires to work with Tesla, GM and Ford. Prior to an investment by its venture arm, Volvo was testing Circulor’s platform for over a year. The startup was helping the carmaker to verify the origins of cobalt used in its batteries. Cobalt, as is with many other raw materials, is not always ethically sourced. Circulor is also tracking the origins of another important raw material for car manufacturing, mica, which is used for insulation. Buy mica …

Personal data for over a million Russian nationals has reportedly been leaked. The data allegedly belongs to some of the citizens who participated in the recent blockchain-based e-vote on Constitutional amendments. The archive was reportedly available for everyone to download According to an investigation published by Russian language media outlet Meduza, an archive titled “degvoter.zip”, which contains said data, was publicly available for download for at least several hours on July 1 via a government website. The file has since been distributed through various Telegram groups and channels. The archive was password protected. According to the publication, however, it could …

Maybe it’s time to start talking about boring Bitcoin. The dollar price has moved barely half a percentage point over the last week, remaining around the $9,200 mark. Bitcoin’s holders, though, don’t expect the coin to remain a boring store of value forever. A survey by Bitcoin IRA found that 42 percent of the crypto custodian’s customers expect the price to reach $15,000 by the end of the year. Even that might not prompt sales though. Some 57 percent said they were holding for the long term. Those optimists might be wrong, though. SteveCrypt0, a popular trader, has suggested that …

Shortly after lifting the country’s Telegram ban, Russian authorities began investigating potentially fraudulent offerings involving the company’s unlaunched token, Gram. The token was at one time meant to serve a new blockchain ecosystem known as the Telegram Open Network, or TON. Reports indicate that Russian prosecutors are set to investigate a British firm that allegedly sold fraudulent tokens related to Telegram’s terminated blockchain project. The news was reported on July 3 by the local news agency, Baza.io. According to the report, the action was brought to a local investigative committee by “several Russian entrepreneurs” that claimed to have purchased $11.7 …

Russia’s blockchain-based voting system for the constitutional amendments had a vulnerability that reportedly made it possible to decipher votes before the official count. Constituents could decipher their own private keys According to research by Russia-language news outlet Meduza, when the constituents casted their vote via a special website, the results would get encrypted by a JavaScript library called TweetNaCl.js. This is an implementation of the "Networking and Cryptography," or NaCi, cryptography library created by the mathematician Daniel J. Bernstein and cryptographers Tanja Lange and Peter Schwabe. Per Meduza, the voting system relied on the so-called deterministic encryption, meaning that using …