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A report released this week by Google indicates that a majority of recently attacked accounts on its Google Cloud Platform service were used to mine cryptocurrency.

The Threat Horizons report for November stated that “[m]alicious actors were observed performing cryptocurrency mining within compromised Cloud instances.”

“Of 50 recently compromised GCP instances, 86% of the compromised Google Cloud instances were used to perform cryptocurrency mining, a cloud resource-intensive for-profit activity, which typically consumed CPU/GPU resources, or in cases of Chia mining, storage space,” the report went on to say.

As for the modes of attack, Google contended that the majority of cases involved “poor” practices on the part of Cloud users or third-party applications that introduced vulnerabilities.

“As shown in Table 2, 48% of compromised instances were attributed to actors gaining access to the Internet-facing Cloud instance, which had either no password or a weak password for user accounts or API connections,” Google said. “As a result, these Google Cloud instances could be easily scanned and brute forced. 26% of compromised instances were attributed to vulnerabilities in third-party software, which was installed by the owner.”

The report doesn’t indicate over what timeline those Google Cloud instances were attacked; however, the report does provide a window into the extent that digital workspaces continue to be a target for would-be malicious miners. 

© 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.

A trio of political parties in Germany struck an agreement this week that will see them assemble a national governing coalition. Part of that agreement, according to the German-language text, includes a call for European countries to work together to monitor activities in the crypto sector.

The call is a minor but notable aspect of the 177-page document, made public this week after the agreement was made public. The coalition includes the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Free Democrats.

Per a rough translation of the text, the three parties pledged to make Germany a hub for companies in the technology sector, particularly those focused on fintech. Specific policy pledges include a framework for fintechs and an examination of a legal approach to issuing digital stocks. 

The agreement calls for “a level playing field” within Europe for new, digital-centric business models, including those that feature crypto or digital assets at the heart. “We need a new dynamic towards the opportunities and risks from new financial innovations, cryptoassets and business models. We advocate for a level playing field with equal level playing field within the EU, between traditional and innovative business models and vis-à-vis large digital companies.”

At the same time, the parties call for “joint European supervision for the crypto sector.” 

“We oblige crypto asset service providers to consistently identify the beneficial owners,” the agreement goes on to say, per a translation.

The parties also gave a nod to the long-term project of introducing a digital euro.

“We will continue the process of introducing a digital euro as a complement to cash, which will be a legal tender in Europe that is accessible to all and can be used universally,” the document states. “Europe also needs an independent payment transaction infrastructure and open interfaces for barrier-free access to digital financial services for all consumers and merchants.”

© 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
• The metaverse frenzy, which Facebook helped unleash, started to spill over to virtual world projects
• Investigating the current trends in blockchain gaming unearthed different types of games, which range from rudimentary experiments to premium AAA productions

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Crypto lending firm Celsius Network said Friday that it has suspended an “employee” amid rumors of its CFO Yaron Shalem’s arrest in Israel.

“We were recently made aware of a police investigation in Israel involving an employee,” Celsius tweeted. “While this is in no way related to the employee’s time or work at @CelsiusNetwork, the employee was immediately suspended. We have also verified that no assets were misplaced or mishandled.”

The tweet came after The Block reached out to Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, confirming the arrest of Shalem. While the tweet doesn’t mention the employee was Shalem, the suspension clearly involves him. CoinDesk confirmed in a report citing anonymous sources that Shalem was arrested in the Hogeg case.

Hogeg, the Israeli crypto entrepreneur behind the blockchain smartphone startup Sirin Labs and a host of other crypto startups, was arrested last week on charges including fraud, money laundering, and sexual offenses. Seven others along with Hogeg were arrested on fraud charges related to cryptocurrency projects.

Soon after the arrests, rumors began circulating that Shalem is two of the eight people, as both he and Hogeg worked together in the past at Hogeg’s Singulariteam company. Shalem has also worked at Hogeg’s Mobil company in the past, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Celsius’s tweet comes two days after a Celsius staffer was asked in an “ask-me-anything” session on Twitter late Tuesday about Shalem’s arrest. The staffer could not confirm or deny the arrest. CEO Mashinsky was also asked about the arrest, and he said he doesn’t have any information about the case.

Shalem joined Celsius in March of this year. It remains unclear what charges Shalem has been arrested on. Notably, Mashinsky was an advisor to Hogeg’s Sirin Labs as recently as 2019, according to an archived version of the startup’s website.

The suspension comes a day after Celsius said its Series B funding round was expanded to $750 million, up from $400 million at a $3.25 billion valuation announced in October. Celsius has been recently targeted by several state regulators in the U.S. over alleged securities laws violations.

© 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 US Department of Veterans Affairs has laid out some specific areas that blockchain tech could be applied to its services. 

According to a presolicitation notice published on November 26, the VA identified several areas in which the technology could be applied to its services. A presolicitation typically means that a government agency is probing contractor interest and viability in a particular project.

“Specific task will focus on: (1) secure data sharing across institutions; (2) supply chain optimization; (3) quality management and product tracking; and (4) optimization of clinically required administrative task[s] such and provider credentialling and privileging,” the notice explained.

The notice further stated:

“Solution development must follow a human centered design methodology and include objective methods to measure the impact of use of the blockchain solution on Veteran-centered outcomes, including clinical, financial, and operational impact. Deliverables shall take the form of monthly progress reports, which shall serve as documentation to capture both progress in implementation as well as lessons learned, and a design file of the blockchain solution. The government reserves the right to determine feasibility, scalability, and value assessment of the specific solution every three months to determine whether such a product should continue to be utilized or pursued.”

Responses to the presolicitation are due on January 7. 

The VA has been public about its interest in distributed technologies for several years. In 2018, the department’s chief technology officer Charles Worthington said the VA would consider potential use cases that might help enhance its services, but Worthington’s approach was characterized by some as a cautious one at the time. 

Image Credit: Mark Van Scyoc / Shutterstock.com

© 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.

Bank of Tanzania, the country’s central bank, has begun the process of launching its own digital currency.

Governor Florens Luoga reportedly revealed the news at the central bank-organized 20th Conference of Financial Institutions (COFI) on Thursday. He said, “the Bank of Tanzania has already begun preparations to have its own CBDC” to ensure that the country is not left behind the adoption of CBDCs.

To that end, the central bank is also looking to expand its CBDC research and development team capacity, said Luoga.

Last month, Nigeria became the first African nation to launch its own CBDC called eNaira. eNaira complements the country’s physical currency and does not replace it. It was developed by the fintech firm Bitt, which is also working with the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank for its digital currency.

The Bank of Tanzania remains cautious of cryptocurrencies and continues to advise the public to be wary of investing in them as they are not legally authorized in the country.

As for Nigeria, earlier this year, the country’s central bank banned financial institutions from providing services to crypto exchanges. Following the ban, peer-to-peer transactions reportedly account for the bulk of Nigeria’s crypto trading activity.

© 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.

DappRadar, a crypto startup that provides data to analyze decentralized applications (dapps), is set to launch its own native token called radar.

Announcing the news on Thursday, Lithuania-based DappRadar said the token will help it decentralize its business in the future. The firm also announced that it is repositioning to a full-scale dapp store, similar to a centralized app store but for dapps. 

Founded in 2018 by Skirmantas Januškas, DappRadar provides data for dapps such as transaction activity, token volume, and active users. The platform currently supports over 8,000 dapps across 25 blockchains, including Ethereum and Solana, as part of its dapp store offering. It plans to support more blockchain networks.

Besides data analysis, DappRadar also provides users with a portfolio management tool that helps them track the performance of their holdings. The platform claims to have 4 million unique users annually.

Dapp stores are beneficial to both users and developers, according to DappRadar. “App stores are centralized, hosted and curated, the gatekeeper demands a commission of up to 30% of the revenue,”said DappRadar.

“A dapp store on the other side doesn’t usually take a commission for referring a user. These different cost structures (30% vs 0% store tax) are fundamental changes to the way dapps are marketed and distributed from the developer to the user,” it added.

The token launch plans come a few months after DappRadar raised $5 million in a Series A funding round. Its backers included Prosus Ventures, Blockchain.com Ventures, and Naspers Ventures, among others. In 2019, DappRadar raised $2.3 million in a seed funding round.

© 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

• The play-to-earn (P2E) model reshapes the gaming industry by transforming the conventional one-way interaction between players and the game into a two-way relationship.
  
• The proliferation of P2E guilds is paving the way for the eSports industry’s future landscape. Also known as GameFi DAO, they increasingly serve as entry points for players to the metaverse, including the DeFi industry.
• As P2E games and guilds grow, we will see a greater emphasis on examining governance models. As a result, a faster iteration loop is possible within the gaming realm. Building a game is similar to building a nation where the economic setting is imperative to ensure the sustainability of a game’s ecosystem. 

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China’s internet censorship machine has expanded to include crypto media outlets and mining pools in a continued attempt to minimize Chinese users’ exposure to the crypto market ecosystem.

Chainnews, one of the major Chinese crypto media outlets established since 2017, is now shutting down all channels of content production and distribution.

Meanwhile, Chinese internet service providers have taken further steps to detect and block domestic miner IPs from connecting to major mining pool services, based on a China Telecom document seen by The Block. 

These moves are signs that China is not loosening its grip over the crypto industry even if its most severe crackdown efforts ever since the summer has already dampened retail interests and forced businesses and executives to either cut ties with the Chinese market or physically move overseas.

Earlier this month, the mobile apps and web domains of at least three major Chinese language crypto media outlets — Chainnews, ODaily and BlockBeats — all became inaccessible almost at the same time. Since then they have switched to their official Telegram channels to distribute newsflashes to subscribers and changed to new web domains.

Yet still, after much thought, Chainnews editor-in-chief said in his WeChat news feed on Friday that the platform is shutting down entirely and expressed his genuine gratitude toward everyone in the community that has been with it over the years. Other outlets like ODaily and BlockBeats are still operating on new web domains but their mobile apps are inactive, which has limited their readership reach on the mobile front.

This comes months after popular market information sites such as CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko and TradingView were blocked by China’s Great Firewall.

Mining pools blocked

According to a recent document made by China Telecom and seen by The Block, the top Chinese internet service provider has come up with a detailed solution to detect domestic miner IPs that have communicated with mining pools’ URLs.

Based on its ongoing detection, it can either cut off the internet service to specific IPs or manually blacklist the URLs that mining pools use to connect with individual equipment.

As of writing, the domains of almost all the 10 biggest mining pools by real-time hash rate for both Bitcoin and Ethereum are not accessible from IPs inside China, based on The Block’s verification.

Among them, F2Pool, ViaBTC, BinancePool and BTC.com have seen sharp real-time hash rate declines by around 10% for either Bitcoin or Ethereum over the past 24 hours. 

© 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

• Francesco Simoneschi’s TrueLayer is an open banking infrastructure startup used by the likes of Monzo, Revolut and Starling.
• In the wake of its funding round, Simoneschi is now toying with how open banking can iron out the crypto onboarding process.

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