Altcoins

60 Hong Kong-Based Vending Machines Support McAfee’s Ghost Token for Payments

30/06/2020 by Idelto Editor

On June 28, 2020, the team behind Ghost Coin revealed a partnership with the digital currency payment processor Ivendpay. Ghost is a project led by the notorious John McAfee and according to the recent announcement, 60 vending machines in Hong Kong will support the privacy-centric coin for payments.

It’s surely never a dull day in John McAfee’s world and this week his Ghost Coin team revealed a collaboration with the crypto payment startup Ivendpay. The startup is a multi-currency payment system that allows people to accept cryptocurrency and other types of electronic fiat payments.

Ivendpay supports bitcoin (BTC), ethereum (ETH), bitcoin cash (BCH), binance coin (BNB), and more crypto coins at numerous vending machines and points of sale. The company also offers a payment device called the mPOS terminal which enables crypto payments leveraging NFC technology, a dual-screen, and a printer for receipts.

On Sunday, the official Twitter account for the Ghost Coin project led by McAfee revealed a collaboration with Ivendpay. “When we first launched Ghost our vision was not only to focus on privacy, but also on real user adoption,” the Ghost account tweeted. The tweet continued:

We are happy to announce that we have partnered with Ivendpay to deploy Ghost as a form of payment in over 60 vending machines across HK including Hong Kong Disneyland.

Sergey Danilov, the founder of Ivendpay, believes that cryptocurrency support will benefit existing payment systems for automatic and retail trade. “Tens of thousands of small transactions worldwide will drum up cryptocurrencies’ capitalization,” said Danilov. News.Bitcoin.com reported on the Ghost project in mid-April, back when McAfee announced the launch and stressed that “governments will be unable to shut [ghost] down.”

Ghost also went live last week on McAfee’s new distributed exchange, and the Bitcoin.com exchange listed the ESH token at the end of May, in preparation for McAfee’s Ghost Airdrop. The Ghost network’s mainnet is live today and the coin’s creators claim the tokens are privacy-centric.

According to the white paper or “litepaper”, the proof-of-stake (PoS) ghost token’s “transactions use a state of the art escrow pool to shield and erase the history of transactions.”

“[Ghost] transactions will be verified using zero-knowledge proofs and ZcashSapling, Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs), ‘The Sapling Protocol,’” the paper highlights. Just recently the Ghost project released the Ghost Wallet 2.0.6 and another concept called ghostfundme.com.

Now with the partnership with Ivendpay, it will allow for ghost tokens to pay for a number of products in 60 vending machines across Hong Kong. The news follows the recent reports of a number of vending machines throughout Hong Kong that accept bitcoin cash (BCH) and ethereum (ETH).

For years now the concept of leveraging cryptocurrencies with vending machines has been a popular trend, this is natural because the two ideas go hand in hand. With coins that leverage low transaction fees, it seems the popular trend with vending machines will continue, at least on certain networks.

What do you think about the 60 vending machines in Hong Kong that will accept ghost token via Ivendpay? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments below.

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‘Sophisticated’ Hacker Plunders $450,000 From Defi Protocol Balancer

29/06/2020 by Idelto Editor

Decentralized finance (Defi) protocol Balancer was on Sunday hacked for more than $450,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

In two separate transactions, an attacker targeted two pools containing Ethereum-based tokens with transfer fees – or so-called deflationary tokens.

Pools with Sta and Stonk tokens were affected by this exploit, Balancer, an automated market marker protocol, said on June 29.

The hacker made off with around 601 ether, 11 wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), 22,600 chainlink (LINK), and 61,000 synthetix (SNX) – altogether totaling more than $451,000.

According to an analysis by Dex aggregator 1inch.exchange, the attacker used a smart contract to automate multiple actions in a single transaction. First, the hacker obtained a flash loan of $23 million worth of ethereum from the crypto-lending platform Dydx.

The money was used to swap Weth to Statera (Sta), a so-called deflationary token, back and forth 24 times until the Sta balance was totally drained. With Sta, at least one percent of the token is programmed to burn with every transaction.

However, the Balancer pool apparently failed to account for this mechanism. So, the Sta balance declined by one percent every time the attacker made their 24 swaps. After this, the hacker exchanged 1 weiSta, or the equivalent of a billionth of a token, to Weth several times.

Due to Sta token transfer fee implementation, the pool never received statera, but still proceeded to release the wrapped ether regardless, said 1inch. The same step was repeated to drain WBTC, SNX, and link token balances from the pool, it added.

Finally, the attacker repaid the $23 million Dydx loan. Later, they converted the Sta tokens to Balancer pool tokens and eventually into ethereum via Uniswap, which was then cashed out.

1inch noted that the attack was carried out by a “sophisticated smart contract engineer” who is deeply knowledgeable about decentralized finance and its protocols.

Balancer claimed that “we were not aware this specific type of attack was possible, [but] we have consistently…warned about the unintended effects ERC20s with transfer fees could have in the protocol.”

To prevent future attacks, the platform said that it will start to add ‘transfer fee tokens to the UI blacklist similarly to what we have done for no bool transfer tokens.”

“We will be adding more documentation around the risks of how these pools work and how broken or maliciously designed tokens can potentially drain assets from a pool,” it added.

A number of Defi platforms have been hacked this year. In February, Bzx protocol was attacked twice while Maker lost around $8.3 million in March. Uniswap and Dforce were drained of $300,000 and $25 million, respectively, although this later amount was returned by the hacker in April.

What do you think about the Balancer pool hack? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Skeptics Concerned Plustoken Scammers Plan to Dump $187M Worth of Ethereum

28/06/2020 by Idelto Editor

Crypto market skeptics and speculators are concerned about 789,000 ETH that started moving four days ago last Wednesday. The transaction was recorded by Whale Alert, and the $187 million worth of ether stems from the Plustoken scammers.

On Wednesday, June 24, 2020, at approximately 9:46 a.m. (ET) the Plustoken scammers who have yet to be arrested, moved 789,534 ETH worth $187,847,550 USD at today’s exchange rates.

Cryptocurrency traders are concerned that this stash of ETH will be dumped on numerous digital currency spot markets. Additionally, the Plustoken scammers moved $67 million worth of EOS tokens two days before the 789,000 ETH transaction.

A number of crypto traders and organizations like Chainalysis and Cyphertrace have reported on the Plustoken scammers’ transactions.

Speculators have assumed that Plustoken coins that were dumped on spot markets caused the price of BTC to slide at the end of 2019. Plustoken scammers have been accused of fueling the March 12, 2020 dump often referred to as ‘Black Thursday.’

On March 9, 2020, crypto market observers witnessed 13,000 BTC sent to bitcoin mixers and crypto speculators assume the scammers are selling. Chainalysis said after March 12, that the organization didn’t believe the sell-off stemmed from Plustoken coins sold.

“In this case, we don’t believe Plustoken liquidations are responsible for bitcoin’s price drop. While Bitcoin did move from Plustoken addresses over the weekend, very little has gone to exchanges,” Chainalysis wrote.

The recent 789,000 ETH transaction may have been shuffled or obfuscated through a number of hops. The $187 million was split into 50 different addresses on the Ethereum network.

Findings stemming from Cyphertrace and Chainalysis have noted that the Plustoken scammers still own large amounts of ETH, BTC, EOS, and a few other types of digital assets. To this day, the scammers who are still at large, hold large swathes of these coins and no one is sure how they will be sold, but many suspect over-the-counter (OTC) operations.

The ETH address where the $187 million in ether was stored, still has $139.70 worth of ETH in the wallet today. 192 days ago, the wallet started with 10 ETH deposited, but 789,524.6 ETH was deposited immediately after.

What do you think about the Plustoken ether on the move? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

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Yield Farming Pool Concept May Solidify Ethereum’s Role as BTC’s Main Sidechain

26/06/2020 by Idelto Editor

Decentralized finance (defi) applications on the Ethereum chain have been growing wildly during the last two years. Now a number of synthetic versions of bitcoin, that leverage the Ethereum chain, has outpaced offchain solutions like Blockstream’s Liquid and the Lightning Network.

Just recently, the platform Synthetix revealed a partnership with Bitgo and the Ren Project in order to create incentivized bitcoin liquidity. Now with a massive yield farming pool, tokens like sBTC, renBTC, and WBTC could easily eclipse the alternative offchain competitors.

At the end of May, news.Bitcoin.com reported on the fact that despite a number of ‘trust model’ debates on Twitter, Ethereum is the Bitcoin (BTC) network’s largest sidechain by total value locked (TVL) by a long shot. Stats stemming from the Lightning Network (LN) shows that the LN TVL on June 26, 2020, is $8.9 million. The data from Liquid.net indicates that there is 2,160 BTC or $19.7M for Blockstream’s Liquid TVL.

Now stats from the Ethereum chain blows those two statistics away, as there is over 28,000 BTC locked into the Synthetix. There is a total of $263 million TVL locked into Synthetix at press time. Additionally, data from Curve.fi shows that renBTC has been picking up significant trade volume since it’s inception.

The project WBTC, backed by Bitgo has a massive $66.9 million TVL, with 7,600 BTC locked into the defi project’s contract. Statistics from sBTC markets also show exponential growth over time. Then on June 18, 2020, the Ren Project’s Taiyang Zhang announced the yield farming pool partnership.

“This pool consists of three BTC ERC20 variants; renBTC, WBTC, sBTC. Our goal is to create the most liquid Ethereum based BTC pool available to offer traders access to the lowest slippage for trades between sBTC, renBTC, and WBTC,” Zhang wrote. The Ren Project representative also stated:

In addition to the normal yield produced by Curve Pool’s trading fees, this pool includes an attractive basket of tokens for liquidity providers: SNX, REN, CRV, and BAL. To capture all of the incentives available, liquidity providers will need to contribute sBTC, renBTC, and/or WBTC to the BTC Curve liquidity pool.

Zhang also said that behind the scenes, “Synthetix and Ren have created a Balancer pool for SNX and REN where LP Rewards are distributed in the form of BPT (wrapped SNX and REN).” The Ren Project rep said that the team is “thrilled” with the latest partnership and the team “looks forward to partaking in the early stages of defi yield farming with Curve and Synthetix.”

Despite the massive shift to the Ethereum chain with three very popular synthetic BTC tokens, both networks have been suffering from higher network fees. Not only are defi projects that offer synthetic BTC tokens being used far more often, but stablecoins on Ethereum are getting a large share of use as well.

News.Bitcoin.com just reported on Ehereum fees rising above BTC fees for a short period and with the combined recent use of defi and stablecoin tokens, ETH fees have surged to a two-year high. According to Billfodl fee stats, the BTC “fee to have your transaction mined on the next block (10 minutes)” is $0.78 at press time. Data from Bitinfocharts.com indicates that ETH fees on June 25, 2020, were $0.66 per transaction.

If the yield farming pool offering from Synthetix, Bitgo, and the Ren Project grows popular it will affect network fees going forward. But also pose a threat to BTC offchain competitors.

What do you think about the pool being offered by Synthetix, Bitgo, and the Ren Project? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Speculation Rife as User Pays a Second $2.6 Million Fee in Ether Transaction

11/06/2020 by Idelto Editor

History repeated itself on Thursday, after the Ethereum blockchain processed another transfer with fees of $2.6 million – the second such unusual, record-fee transaction in 24 hours.

A user sent 350 ether (ETH), worth about $86,400 and paid 10,668 ETH, or $2.6 million, in transaction fees. The latest transaction was mined on block 10241999 by the Ethermine pool, a unit of Bitfly.

Notably, this is a transaction that originates from the same address, of the same customer who paid the same amount of fees yesterday to send just $134 worth of ethereum. Sparkpool mined the first transaction.

Data shows the same account is holding roughly $9 million worth of ether, meaning it could repeat the mistake three more times.

“We believe that this was an accident and in order to resolve this issue the tx sender should contact us…immediately,” tweeted Bitfly, on June 11.

Both Sparkpool and Ethermine have frozen the funds as investigations into the suspicious transactions continue.

But that has not prevented the crypto community from going into overdrive, with rampant speculation surrounding the mysterious successive deals.

One theory attributed the first transaction to an innocent mistake. Yet, others suspected underhand dealings, pointing to attempts at tax avoidance or money laundering.

But the fact that two different miners processed the two transactions pours cold water on this later assumption.

Alex Manuskin, researcher at digital asset wallet Zengo, seems to offer a more plausible explanation. Manuskin posits that the transactions may be the result of a bug.

“A possible explanation could be a mix in the bot code between the sent value and the gas price,” Manuskin was quoted as saying by industry publication The Block.

“This sender used to send a transaction every 1 minute or so, so this did not look like a human operator. Might be some sort of a trading bot, for some exchange, repeating the same operation,” he added.

In a tweet, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin appears to back Manuskin’s theory, suggesting that a protocol upgrade will improve the network and eliminate the need for users to set fees manually.

“Definitely a mistake. I’m expecting EIP 1559 to greatly reduce the rate of things like this happening by reducing the need for users to try to set fees manually,” he said.

What do you think about this repeat Ethereum record-fee transaction? Let us know in the comments section below.

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