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The official Twitter account for India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, was briefly taken over by hackers and used to promote a bitcoin giveaway scam. 

The fraudulent message in question said that India had declared bitcoin legal tender and was conducting a giveaway to celebrate the move.

Hacked Indian PM Modi’s Twitter account promotes bitcoin scam: pic.twitter.com/27LCdaW4Zi

— Ben Schaack (@BuyingStrength) December 12, 2021

The prime minister’s office later said via its own Twitter account that Modi’s account was “briefly compromised” and was later secured. “In the brief period that the account was compromised, any Tweet shared must be ignored,” the office said. 

This is not the first incident that an official Twitter account has been compromised to promote a crypto giveaway scam, though the scale of 2020’s site-wide account takeovers was much more significant. As noted by reports, Modi’s account was briefly taken over in September 2020 to solicit funds for a fake cryptocurrency donation drive. 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Crypto exchange AscendEX — formerly known as BitMax — has been hacked for an estimated $77.7 million. That’s according to the exchange, which acknowledged the hack, and security researchers PeckShield who have estimated its losses.

“We have detected a number of ERC-20, BSC, and Polygon tokens transferred from our hot wallet. Cold Wallet is NOT affected. Investigation underway. If any user’s funds are affected by the incident, they will be covered completely by AscendEX,” tweeted the exchange.

According to PeckShield, the assets were taken across three blockchains. The exchange lost $60 million on Ethereum, $9.2 million on Binance Smart Chain and $8.5 million on Polygon (formerly Matic).

Tokens taken included large chunks of stablecoins — both tether (USDT) and USD coin (USDC) — along with larger sums of less well-known tokens like taraxa (TARA) and smaller sums of more well-known tokens like shiba inu (SHIB), aave (AAVE) and compound (COMP).

The exchange has frozen deposits and withdrawals and is working to reopen them, according to Jay Kubert, director of sales and business development at AscendEX.

This comes just one week after crypto exchange BitMart was hacked for $200 million. It lost assets on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, which were sent on to Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash.

For more breaking stories like this, make sure to follow The Block on Twitter.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Brazilian fintech unicorn Nubank listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Brazil’s B3 this week, starting its journey as a public company.

Nubank listed on the NYSE (NU) and Brazil’s B3 exchange (NUBR33) on Dec. 9, after announcing tentative dates last month.

According to Reuters, Nubank is now the most valuable listed bank in Latin America. The neobank finished its first day of trading on the NYSE with shares up by close to 15%, CNBC reported. This valued the company at $45 billion, according to Forbes.

Bloomberg reported that Nubank priced shares at the top of its marketed $8-9 range, with shares closing at $10.33 on its first day of trading on the NYSE. The company raised $2.6 billion, according to the news outlet.

Nubank, backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway among others, calculates that about 815,000 people invested in the company via Brazilian Depositary Receipts (BDRs). Also, about 7.5 million claimed their free, small piece of Nubank as part of its NuSócios program. 

Forty-year-old Nubank founder and CEO David Vélez is now the richest Colombian in the world, according to a Spanish-language article from Forbes.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The International Monetary Fund issued a call for a “comprehensive, consistent and coordinated” global policy front on cryptocurrency this week.

In a blog post, IMF officials Tobias Adrian, Dong He, and Aditya Narain advocated for such a policy framework amid rapid growth in the industry for digital assets. The three contend that amid such growth, growing risks require a corresponding policy response.

“Such risks underscore why we now need comprehensive international standards that more fully address risks to the financial system from crypto assets, their associated ecosystem, and their related transactions, while allowing for an enabling environment for useful crypto asset products and applications,” they wrote.

As the blog post later noted:

“There is an urgent need for cross-border collaboration and cooperation to address the technological, legal, regulatory, and supervisory challenges. Setting up a comprehensive, consistent, and coordinated regulatory approach to crypto is a daunting task. But if we start now, we can achieve the policy goal of maintaining financial stability while benefiting from the benefits that the underlying technological innovations bring.”

Such a perspective is to be expected, and mirrors calls from other international organizations, including the Bank of International Settlements. This year, officials such as ECB leader Christine Lagarde — herself a former managing director of the IMF — have called for coordinated policy moves on crypto. On a practical level, such calls are reflected in frameworks such has the Financial Action Task Force’s “travel rule,” for example. 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Blockchain data platform Chainalysis will start supporting the Lightning Network in February, the company announced Friday. 

The Lightning compatibility will be available for customers of Chainalysis’ cryptocurrency compliance software, KYT (Know Your Transaction). KYT helps virtual asset service providers (VASPs) like exchanges detect risk patterns and illegal activity.

Now, these VASPs will be able to “compliantly allow deposits and withdrawals of Bitcoin from a Lightning node,” Chainalysis said in a press release. KYT will be able to provide alerts for Lightning transactions and pre-screening for withdrawals, it added. 

“By enabling our customers to compliantly support Lightning transactions, we hope to grow the network’s popularity and help it scale,” Chainalysis chief product officer Pratima Arora said in a statement.

The Lightning Network is a decentralized, Layer-2 protocol for sending instant Bitcoin payments. Its capacity has been growing rapidly this year.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Blockchain infrastructure company Alchemy is launching an investment arm for the development of Web3.

The newly-announced Alchemy Ventures is partnered with a number of Alchemy’s investors. Projects the fund invests in will also have access to A16z, Pantera Capital, Coatue, Addition Ventures, CB Insights, and The Chainsmokers among others. 

The fund plans to invest more than capital. It will also provide upstart Web3 builders with access to the fund’s strategic partners and Alchemy itself, founders dinners for networking, Alchemy’s recruiting network, access to Alchemy’s suite of products and personal access to its team. 

Alchemy announced the venture arm today in a blog post, but it’s already been building in the background. It’s already working with crypto exchange FTX, zk roll-ups solution Matter Labs, scaling solution Arbitrum among others and avatar tech company Genies, among others. 

“We’ve been there from day one, helping companies like OpenSea, Dapper Labs, and 0x turn into some of the most used applications in the space,” said the blog post. “As a result, we have unique insight into the things that are most helpful for early-stage companies building on blockchain.”

Alchemy launched publicly in August of 2020, three years after its founding. It provides development and infrastructure tools for billions-worth of on-chain transactions and considerable assets locked in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and applications. It’s placed great focus on the non-fungible token (NFT) space as it’s grown, especially considering the explosion of NFT use in the late summer of 2021.

Amid the explosion of the NFT space, it added a roster of angel investors to guide expansion efforts, culminating in a Series C round led by a16z that valued the firm at $3.5 billion.

At the time, Alchemy said it planned to take that investment and invest it back into the blockchain community. In today’s blog post, the firm said Alchemy Ventures aims to fulfill that promise.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Soft drink manufacturer Pepsi, under its parent company PepsiCo, announced on Thursday that it is releasing a collection of 1,893 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on December 14. 

As Pepsi wrote on Twitter, the NFT collection is only available for individuals on their waiting list, which opens on December 10th. The first 1,893 people who made it on the list will then have the opportunity to mint a Pepsi NFT on December 14th.

Pepsi follows the popular American beer company Budweiser in launching an NFT collection. However, unlike Budweiser’s NFTs which cost at least $499 to purchase, Pepsi’s are free — buyers only need to pay for gas fees. 

Pepsi’s generative collection involves the randomized traits of 10 microphones inspired by Pepsi flavors as a “nod to the strong connection Pepsi has to music,” the brand wrote on the Mic Drop web page. The mics will have randomized features with certain rarities, making it resemble other popular NFT collectible projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks. 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

South Africa’s financial regulatory watchdog plans to introduce crypto regulations in 2022, according to Bloomberg.

The country’s Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FCSA) says it wants to establish a set of rules that will provide adequate investor protection, especially amid growing cryptocurrency-related fraud in South Africa.

These crypto-related scams have led to the loss of billions of dollars from victims and have triggered investigations from law enforcement across the globe. In one instance, two brothers who ran the now-defunct Africrypt investment scheme allegedly stole $3.6 billion worth of bitcoin from investors.

According to Unathi Kamlana — South Africa’s top financial regulator — the crypto regulations will include provisions to govern cryptocurrency trading as well as matters relating to the interaction between digital currency and the country’s financial markets.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Kamlana stated that the FCSA was keen to maintain robust crypto oversight as a means of protecting investors from potentially risky schemes.

The FCSA commissioner did state that the agency did not see crypto posing significant risks to South Africa’s financial stability. Kamlana also stated that the FCSA views crypto as assets and not currencies.

In December 2019, South Africa’s central bank announced plans to introduce designed to prevent the use of crypto in evading currency control measures.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Quick Take

• This weekly series explores the most interesting insights in NFTs, blockchain gaming, and virtual worlds
• Based on a clash of approaches, virtual land ownership can be conceptualized from two different angles and framed in terms of the varying phenomena it constitutes, leading to the formulation of two distinct models
• As the play-to-earn ethos continues to ignite interest, blockchain games, which promise players the opportunity to earn, branch out to other chains and start to get a foothold

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A lot has changed since the sluggish days of the crypto bear market in 2019, according to notable Twitter personality “Loomdart.”

The investor at Egirl Capital — an anonymous group of crypto traders — joined host Frank Chaparro for a discussion about how the market has matured since 2019’s doldrums and why he believes it will only continue to mature in the years ahead. In Loomdart’s view, cryptocurrencies are no longer as correlated with one other as they once were. However, he also acknowledged that today the recent Metaverse and NFT headlines have temporarily “hijacked” momentum in the $2 trillion market.

“Ever since this kind of metaverse narrative started and Facebook did the whole ‘Meta’ brand takeover, there has been this gigantic influx of capital,” he said.

To be sure, Loomdart is also talking his own book as the founder of MetaDrop, which recently helped Alien-themed shooting game VAIL raise money through an NFT drop. But the anonymous UK-native has data to back up his investment thesis. Over the past month, NFT gaming firm Sandbox raised $93 million, while Solana Ventures, FTX, and Lightspeed Venture Partners has raised $100 million for a blockchain gaming fund.

Loomdart told Chaparro that this VC interest in the metaverse and NFTs will ultimately feed back into the broader crypto market, thereby making it more dynamic.

“This isn’t 2017, 2018’s crypto anymore,” Said Loomdart. “Everything was just one market, but like crypto has evolved so far beyond that.”

In this episode, Chaparro and Loomdart discuss:

• How bitcoin’s “flippening” of ether could open up a Pandora’s box.
• Why Loomdart believes crypto prices will likely “slowly go up forever.”
• The impact of the macro backdrop on crypto prices.
• Why the metaverse will only take off if crypto is in the background.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.