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US Sanctions Russian Crypto Broker Suex for Laundering Millions in Illicit Funds

22/09/2021 by Idelto Editor

US Sanctions Russian Crypto Broker Suex for Laundering Millions of Illicit Funds

The U.S. Treasury Department has blacklisted Suex, a cryptocurrency broker based in Russia, for its money laundering activities. The platform is suspected of processing hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto transactions related to scams, ransomware attacks, darknet markets, and the infamous BTC-e exchange.

OFAC Adds Russian Crypto OTC Exchange Suex to Blacklist

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury has added Suex to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) List. The move, announced Tuesday, effectively prohibits U.S. citizens from engaging with the platform. OFAC also published a list of cryptocurrency addresses linked to Suex.

The company behind the crypto broker, Suex OTC s.r.o., is an entity registered in the Czech Republic. However, it operates mainly from branches in the Russian Federation, including its offices in the capital Moscow and the country’s second-largest city, Saint Petersburg. It’s believed that Suex maintains presence elsewhere in Russia, the surrounding region, and possibly the Middle East as well.

According to a report by blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis, which supported the U.S. government-led investigation, Suex (“Successful Exchange”) offers users conversion of their cryptocurrency into cash and other assets at its physical locations. It’s these services that have attracted ransomware actors, scammers, and darknet market operators that have allegedly sent over $160 million in bitcoin (BTC) to the over-the counter (OTC) crypto broker.

Since launching in early 2018, Suex has received a total of more than $481 million in BTC alone, according to exchange rates at the time of transfer, and it also accepts ether (ETH) and tether (USDT) among other coins. Of that amount, almost $13 million came from ransomware operators such as Ryuk, Conti, and Maze. Over $24 million was sent by crypto scams including the Finiko Ponzi scheme, more than $20 million originated from darknet markets like the Russian Hydra Market, and another $20 million came from mixers, Chainalysis detailed.

The OTC broker also got more than $82 million from “high-risk” digital asset trading platforms. According to the investigation, Suex received over $50 million worth of cryptocurrency from addresses associated with the now defunct BTC-e. Although the exchange was shut down four years ago for facilitating large-scale money laundering on behalf of cybercriminals, the funds were sent to the crypto broker after that, likely by former administrators, associates, or users.

One of the alleged operators of BTC-e, Russian IT specialist Alexander Vinnik who was arrested in Greece in the summer of 2017, was sentenced by a French court last December to five years in prison for money laundering. Another Russian national, Dmitry Vasiliev, who managed BTC-e’s successor platform, Wex, was recently arrested in Poland. Earlier this week someone moved over $30 million worth of ether from a Wex wallet.

What are your thoughts on the blacklisting of Russian crypto OTC broker Suex? Tell us in the comments section below.

Avalanche Defi Platform Vee Finance Attacked — $35 Million in ETH, BTC Siphoned

21/09/2021 by Idelto Editor

On September 21, 2021, an Avalanche-based decentralized finance (defi) platform Vee Finance announced that it suffered from an incident that siphoned 8,804 ether and 213 bitcoin out of the system. The team has suspended the defi platform contracts and stressed that the stablecoins have not been “affected by the attack.”

Defi Project Vee Finance Suffers a Loss of $35 Million From Hack

The Avalanche (AVAX) blockchain has been a popular network in recent times and it has attracted a number of defi applications like Benqi.fi, Trader Joe, Lydia Finance, Shroom Finance, and Osiris. The Vee Finance platform is another defi platform that has gathered a number of users and coins which added to the platform’s total value locked (TVL).

However, on September 21, the team explained that the project was “attacked” and updated the Vee Finance community via Twitter and an incident report. “Vee.Finance Incident Announcement,” the tweet details. “The Vee Finance team has suspended the platform contracts to ensure the safety of more users’ assets, and has suspended the deposit and borrow function. The Stablecoin section is not affected by the attack,” the disclosure further noted.

Vee Finance Project Insists Stablecoins Are Safe

In the incident report, the Vee Finance team disclosed that “8,804.7 ETH and 213.93 BTC were attacked.” At the time of writing, the loss equates to around $35.49 million using current bitcoin and ether exchange rates. “After investigation, the suspected attacker has launched the attack through the above address (etherscan address) and has collected the stolen assets in this address,” the Vee Finance team said. The defi project operators further insisted:

The Stablecoin section is not affected by the attack. Currently, according to address monitoring, the attacker has not yet transferred or processed the stolen assets further. The Vee team is actively working to further clarify the incident and will continue to try to contact the attacker to recover the assets.

The Vee Finance network attack follows an attack against the Pnetwork protocol on September 20, that saw the loss of 277 bitcoin (BTC) via the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). The Avalanche network saw its first major defi attack six days ago when Zabu Finance lost $3.2 million in a hack. The Zabu Finance hacker exploited the platform’s Spore Token protocol and minted 4.5 billion zabu and withdrew the coins to a secret wallet.

What do you think about the Avalanche defi platform Vee Finance getting hacked for $35 million? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Ethereum After 1559: Network Participants Burn Over 300,000 Ether Worth More Than $1 Billion

16/09/2021 by Idelto Editor

On August 5, 2021, the Ethereum network and its participants successfully completed the highly anticipated London upgrade, which saw the implementation of the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-1559. Since then, 303,681 ether worth more than a billion U.S. dollars have been burned.

More Than 300K Ether Burned Following EIP-1559

More than a billion dollars worth of ethereum (ETH) has been burned to date, after the London upgrade was implemented 42 days ago. The biggest changes added to the Ethereum blockchain included EIP-1559 and EIP-3554. While EIP-3554 changed the difficulty bomb, EIP-1559 changed Ethereum’s fee rate to a new scheme that makes the crypto asset ether deflationary.

Essentially, fees are standardized and calculated based on network demand, as a transaction pricing mechanism introduces a base fee for every block found on the network. The remainder of the fees will be burned and ether proponents assume this will significantly reduce the overall supply of ethereum. As of today, September 16, 2021, the Ethereum network has burned 303,681 ether worth over $1 billion using Thursday’s ether exchange rates.

Opensea Still Largest Burner, Stablecoin Transfers Add to the Burn Pile

The biggest burners in the network are people transferring ether from one address to another and decentralized applications (dapps) and decentralized finance (defi) platforms as well. The largest ether burner today is the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Opensea as Dune Analytics stats show the market has burned 42,991 ether worth $146.1 million today. Opensea is followed by traditional ether transfers which have added 25,514 ether to the burn pile.

Uniswap V2 and the stablecoin project Tether (USDT) command the third and fourth positions in terms of the top ether burners. To date, the second version of the Uniswap decentralized exchange (dex) has burned 16,665 ether worth $55.8K. Tether’s stablecoin USDT has added 15,015 ether to the burn pile as it is responsible for burning $51 million. Other top burners include Axie Infinity, Uniswap V3, Metamask, the stablecoin project USDC, and Opensea’s registry.

What do you think about the 303,681 ether worth over $1 billion burned? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Solana Restarts Mainnet, SOL Users Complain, Dev Says Network Stall Not Similar to ETH in 2016

15/09/2021 by Idelto Editor

The blockchain network Solana had issues processing blocks on September 14 and according to a status report on September 15 at 2:01 a.m. (EST), the Solana validator community “successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta.”

Solana Validators Restart Mainnet Beta

Solana is now a member of the club of blockchains that have stalled for several hours stopping people from sending SOL transactions, using decentralized apps (dapps), and troubling block explorers and wallets with significant issues. During the early morning hours on Wednesday, following Solana’s block production stall on Tuesday, the “Solana Status” Twitter account gave the community an update. The official Solana Twitter page also retweeted the Solana Status tweet.

“The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25,” Solana Status explained. “Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored.” Despite the restart people still complained about errors stemming from two different block explorers. The individual said:

Why [do] Solscan and Explorer have different block heights? Solscan doesn’t show new blocks for an hour already. Explorer’s clock is wrong as well. Did Solana fork again?

Solana Users Ask for Compensation, Solana’s Use of Blockchain Questioned, Software Developer Explains Solana’s Bug Differences From Ethereum’s Issue in 2016

In response to the Solana Status report at 2:01 a.m. this morning, a few individuals asked for compensation. “Please compensate us solana holders who have been sh***ing our pants since the crash,” one individual replied on Twitter to the Solana Status update. The Solana blockchain community caught a lot of flak for the outage and some wondered why the network uses a blockchain in the first place.

“Why does Solana even use a blockchain?” the Twitter account ‘Mike in Space’ tweeted on Tuesday. “If you can just shut it down all day for “maintenance” it doesn’t sound very censorship-resistant to me,” he added. An individual responded to the tweet from Mike in Space and said: “It doesn’t matter that it isn’t censorship resistant because its main use case is something else.” But this did not satisfy the cryptocurrency supporter and he replied:

Why not a database then? Seems like a lot of unnecessary overhead.

Ethereum developer Hudson Jameson wrote about how he believes what happened to Solana “is not the same thing that happened during the Ethereum Shanghai attacks in 2016, but I understand why people think so.”

“Both attacks were DoS attacks meant to halt block production, so that is similar. The big difference is that in Ethereum blocks never stopped producing during the attacks because of our multi-client design decisions. Solana is literally having to do a network restart,” Hudson stressed. The software developer added:

I don’t like the rhetoric and comparisons to Ethereum [Anatoly Yakovenko] and others have made throughout the day on Twitter because it feels disingenuous and feels like it minimizes the issues Solana faced. I also don’t like that some people in the Ethereum community are bashing Solana for having to manually restart. Ethereum could just as easily be in a similar position if the merge has a bug. All that being said, I hold no ill will towards Solana and wish them the best.

At press time, solana (SOL) is down 7.5% over the last seven days and remains a top seven crypto asset in terms of market valuation. The incident did very little damage to people’s perspective of the market and in the past four hours, SOL prices have seen gains.

What do you think about the issues the Solana network has seen in recent times? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

ETH 2.0 Contract Exceeds 7.4 Million Ether, Close to $30 Billion Locked, Liquid Staking Pools Grow

06/09/2021 by Idelto Editor

The Ethereum 2.0 contract now has more than 7.4 million ether worth over $29.3 billion using today’s ether exchange rates. According to statistics, the smart contract address is the largest holder of ethereum out of all the wallets in existence.

Ethereum 2.0 Contract Nears $30 Billion

In the early days, the Ethereum (ETH) protocol was a 100% proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain but in more recent times, Ethereum is now a mix of proof-of-stake (PoS) and PoW. In time, the digital currency and smart contract network will be 100% PoS and this will be the main consensus algorithm that keeps Ethereum chugging along.

On November 6, 2020, Bitcoin.com News reported on the co-creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, adding $1.4 million worth of ether into the Phase 0 smart contract. Since then, the ETH 2.0 contract has swelled significantly. In July 2021, Bitcoin.com News reported on the Ethereum 2.0 contract exceeding six million ether. At the time on July 2, the six million ether was worth $12.4 billion using exchange rates from that day.

Today, according to Etherscan statistics, the Eth2 Deposit Contract holds 7,489,474 ether worth $29,366,901,606. The smart contract address is the largest wallet among the Ethereum rich list of wallets. The Wrapped Ether smart contract address is fairly close, however, with 6.9 million ether.

Ever since Buterin deposited the massive amount of ether he held into the ETH 2.0 contract address, deposits of 32 ETH are continuously deposited to this very day. In order to be a validator, 32 ether is required to join the ETH 2.0 staking community.

Behind the ETH 2.0 contract and Wrapped Ether wallet, includes wallets owned by Binance, Kraken, Gemini, Huobi, FTX exchange, and a few unknown ether billionaires. The ETH 2.0 smart contract has seen 150,980 transactions to date and the 7.4 million ether equals 6.37% of the entire circulating supply of ether.

1.3 Million Ether Is Locked in Liquid Staking Pools

A lot of the ETH 2.0 money locked in to the contract is being staked in prominent staking pools like Lido, Stkr, SharedStake, Stafi, Stakewise, Cream and Stakehound. These pool services have approximately 1,361,463 ether locked and Lido has the lion’s share of ether.

The Lido liquid staking pool has around 1,167,007 ether staking today, according to Dune Analytics stats. $5.35 billion of the overall $29.3 billion locked is being staked by large pools and that’s about 18.09% of the 7.4 million ether today.

In addition to the 7.4 million ether locked, to date, 216,229 ether has been burned after EIP-1559 was implemented. Using today’s exchange rates, that’s $729 million worth of the second-leading crypto asset by market capitalization.

What do you think about the 7.4 million in ether worth more than $29 billion locked into the Ethereum 2.0 contract? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.