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DeFi platforms PancakeSwap and Cream Finance warned users on Monday that they were hit by domain name system (DNS) hijackings.

The strong warnings were issued on social media in a bid to keep users from falling victim to dual schemes to collect private keys or seed phrases from would-be victims. Such information obtained by this kind of phishing scheme would then allow a hacker to then steal funds from affected users.

Your funds are only at risk if you enter your private key or seed phrase into the hijacked site.

Regaining access is only a matter of time, our main priority is keeping inexperienced users safe.

DO NOT go to the site for now.

NEVER enter your private key or seed phrase.

— PancakeSwap 🥞 #BSC (@PancakeSwap) March 15, 2021

As of press time, PancakeSwap has said that it has regained access to its DNS. Cream Finance appeared to be in the process of seeking DNS access, pointing users toward an alternative address in the meantime.

📍Please use our app at https://t.co/BqbK4lkSNm

Thank you for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience.

We will update soon. Please retweet for more exposure.

— Cream Finance 🍦 (@CreamdotFinance) March 15, 2021

A DNS hijacking allows an attacker to present a fraudulent web portal to visiting users, often aimed at collecting personal information — in this case, the private keys needed to steal their funds. The U.S. government and private security firms have issued warnings in recent years about such attacks, as noted in a 2019 report by Krebs On Security. 

This is a developing story and will be updated as new information becomes available.

© 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.

© 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.

Institutional and retail bitcoin flows balanced out in the first quarter of 2021, according to an analysis by JPMorgan. 

The investment bank, which tracks retail bitcoin flows via proxies Square and PayPal and institutional flows via CME Group’s bitcoin futures market, said that retail “saw a big acceleration in the current quarter relative to the previous quarter while the institutional flow was flattish.”

“In other words, in bitcoin terms, while the bitcoin flow picture was dominated by institutional investors during Q4 2020, the flow picture has been more equally balanced between retail and institutional investors in the current quarter echoing Q3 2020,” the bank explained. 

JPMorgan defines the “flow” as purchases from these sources, reflecting activity from services that cater to the institutional and retail investor bases. This data provides a measure of activity from these two channels.

According to the data, itBit daily volumes (which the bank uses as a proxy for PayPal) nearly doubled between Q4 2020 and Q1 2021. Meanwhile, bitcoin payments facilitated by Square also doubled. Its indicator for CME Group only inched up slightly from 1,284 to 1,449.

Still, institutional purchases surged between Q4’20 and Q1’21, as illustrated in the below chart. 

© 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.

Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk and its CFO Zach Kirkhorn have changed their titles to “Technoking of Tesla” and “Master of Coin,” respectively.

The change was announced in Tesla’s latest 8-K filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. Musk and Kirkhorn will maintain their respective positions as CEO and CFO.

It is not clear whether the Master of Coin title is about bitcoin, but it appears to be a character in the popular series “Game of Thrones,” where the Master of Coin is in charge of the royal treasury and advises the monarch on financial matters.

Kirkhorn, being the CFO, would have been advising Tesla on investments and financial matters. Earlier this year, Tesla invested $1.5 billion of its spare cash into bitcoin as part of the company’s corporate treasury management.

The company’s bitcoin bet appears to have paid off well so far since the cryptocurrency has surged from around $35,000 levels in January to about $56,000 at the time of writing.

© 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.

CryptoUK, the trade association representing more than 50 crypto firms, has called on chancellor Rishi Sunak to intervene over a delayed anti-money laundering registration process that has trapped hundreds of crypto startups in limbo.

In a letter dated March 15 and seen by The Block, CryptoUK chair Ian Taylor wrote that the Financial Conduct Authority’s lack of responsiveness and sector expertise risked a raft of businesses either leaving the country or shutting up shop.

“In both cases, this is a negative result for the UK economy and its fintech community. This goes against the government’s mandate to promote and encourage competition and enabling innovation to thrive,” wrote Taylor.

The letter outlines the difficulties faced by crypto firms that have attempted to register in the past year. Some have waited more than eight months for a response from the regulator; one firm applied in the summer of last year and still doesn’t have a case officer; while others have been reassigned new case officers almost a year on from applying, creating “a complete lack of continuity”, Taylor wrote.

CryptoUK’s plea to the chancellor also suggests that the FCA disbanded its crypto-asset team last year. The team had, according to the letter, formed part of the Cryptoasset Taskforce – a unit set up in March 2018 to spearhead the combined crypto policy work of HM Treasury, the Bank of England and the FCA.

“It is understood that FCA staff with years of experience gained working within the UK’s Cryptoasset Taskforce have been reassigned to various other departments, and that the Cryptoasset Authorisation Team is generally understaffed,” wrote Taylor. He added that “the few staff assigned” to handling the crypto register lack the experience of their predecessors.

The so-called crypto-assets register was set up when the FCA took over as the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing watchdog for UK crypto companies in early 2020. Firms were initially told they had until January 10, 2021 to sign up to the FCA’s register or cease trading.

But with more than 150 outstanding applications late last year, and just four firms registered, the FCA announced a “temporary registration regime” in mid-December – giving applicants until July 9 to continue operating. That gave the regulator some leeway, but as of today there are still only four entities on the crypto-assets register.

“The clock is again ticking as we approach the new July deadline, whereby existing firms legally have to cease trading,” wrote Taylor.

“Additionally, hundreds of new businesses have been waiting for months to progress their applications, with staff and overhead costs mounting, as they cannot start trading and earning revenues until their application has been approved,” he continued.

CryptoUK also flagged a lack of access to banking services as a “critical impediment” to the industry’s growth. The trade body represents some of the biggest names in crypto, including Binance’s UK entity, eToro and Ripple. 

The FCA did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. 

© 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

• Liquidations are essential for the successful existence of DeFi lending protocols.
• Liquidation volume reached the peak for all protocols except Aave last month.
• Currently, keepers execute many liquidations with minimal profit, which increases the incentives for bribing miners.

This research piece is available to
members of The Block Genesis.
You can continue reading
this Genesis research on The Block.

The price of bitcoin has fallen near $55,000 level from around $61,000 on Saturday as derivatives positions worth over $1 billion get force liquidated by crypto exchanges.

In the last 24 hours, around $1.15 billion worth of open interest was liquidated by crypto exchanges, according to tracker Bybt.com. That means crypto exchanges liquidated traders’ overleveraged positions.

Traders overleverage, or trade on margin, thinking that bitcoin’s price would go up and they would benefit more. But when bitcoin’s price goes below the liquidation price of their positions, exchanges force liquidate or close their positions because traders cannot fulfill margin requirements of their leveraged positions.

More than 190,000 traders were liquidated in the last 24 hours, and the largest single liquidation occurred on Huobi for bitcoin, valued at around $19 million, according to Bybt.

In terms of total liquidations across exchanges, Binance had the largest share (around $435 million), followed by Bybit (around $328 million) and Huobi (around $192 million). In terms of crypto assets, bitcoin positions formed most liquidations, followed by ether (ETH) and Polkadot (DOT) at the time of writing.

Bitcoin is currently trading at around $55,500, according to TradingView.

© 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.

Ioana Surpateanu, formerly co-head of European government affairs at Citi, has joined DIA, the decentralized finance project focused on crowd-verified financial data.

Surpateanu, whose last day at Citi was March 12 after four years with the bank, joins DIA as chief strategy officer. Part of her remit will be running DIA Labs, a grants program run aimed at financing project developers on the network.

She will also work closely with the executive team to position DIA at the center of regulatory discussions in Europe.

“Some concepts need demystifying and some misconceptions addressed. A reliable and regulatory compliant data layer is a central element in creating a link between DeFi and institutional investors,” Surpateanu told The Block.

“I also strongly believe progressive legislation on crypto will become an important geopolitical tool and one that the EU can very easily leverage to its advantage,” she added.

DIA, which stands for Decentralized Information Asset, describes itself as an “open-source, data and oracle platform” for the DeFi ecosystem. The Swiss non-profit raised $15 million through a sale of its governance token last August.

Besides running DIA Labs, Surpateanu’s initial focus will be to launch a DeFi education and promotional campaign with policymakers and regulators. She will also start a platform for empowering women in the emerging tech sector.

“DeFi has considerably and swiftly unlocked access for both users and creators of financial products and instruments. To ensure it evolves in the right direction, this new paradigm is contingent on a few prerequisites – transparency and impeccable data sets are amongst the most important ones,” she said.

© 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 Indian government is reportedly planning to ban cryptocurrencies after all.

New reports of the ban have re-emerged after the country’s finance minister recently said a “calibrated” position will be taken on cryptocurrencies.

On Monday, Reuters, citing a “senior government official,” who has “direct knowledge of the plan,” reported that India will propose a law banning cryptocurrencies in almost all forms, including trading, holding, and mining.

The report comes shortly after recent comments made by India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who said: “We are not closing our minds. We are certainly looking at ways in which experimentations can happen in the digital world, in cryptocurrency, and so on.”

These comments gave hope to India’s crypto businesses at the time, although the finance minister did not detail what kind of experiments will be allowed.

In a new interview with India Today on Sunday, Sitharaman provided further details. She said experiments around blockchain technology would be allowed.

“We will allow a certain amount of a window for people to use so that experiments in blockchain, bitcoin or whatever you may want to call it the cryptocurrency experiments, and fintech which depend on such experiments will have that window available for them,” said Sitharaman. “We are not going to shut it off all.”

The government official quoted in the Reuters report also said: “We don’t have a problem with technology. There’s no harm in harnessing the technology.”

As for cryptocurrencies, Sitharaman in the India Today interview said, “a cabinet note is getting prepared. It’s almost nearing completion, and then it will be taken to the cabinet.”

It remains to be seen what will the note or the proposed law contain.

The Reuters report further said that penalties would be levied if investors won’t liquidate their investments within a grace period of up to six months. Previous ban reports also said three-to-six months of grace period would be given to crypto investors for exiting their investments.

If the ban is enacted, Indian crypto businesses will have no other option but to shut down. But executives of Indian crypto exchanges recently told The Block that they are hopeful the government will not take such a harsh decision.

Yet, they are preparing for the worst-case scenario. Some executives said they would relocate, while others said they would fight with the government in India’s Supreme Court if the ban takes place.

© 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.

Velo Labs, a cross-border settlement protocol backed by Thai conglomerate CP Group, has merged with Interstellar, a payment startup that runs on the Stellar network.

The firms announced on Monday that following the merge, Interstellar’s CEO Mike Kennedy and CTO James Wu will become the new CEO and CTO of Velo Labs, respectively.

Interstellar was formed in 2018 as Visa and Citi-Backed Chain was acquired by Stellar startup Lightyear.io, which teamed up two crypto entrepreneurs Adam Ludwin and Jed McCaleb. The latter now serves as the founder of Interstellar.

The firms did not disclose the nature and terms of the merger but people familiar with the deal told The Block that Velo Labs effectively acquired Interstellar in a nine-figure deal in USD in its bet to accelerate its blockchain remittance network development that runs on Stellar.

Chatchaval Jiaravanon, the owner of the Fortune Magazine and a son of the Thai billionaire Chearavanont family that controls one of the world’s largest conglomerates Charoen Pokphand Group, will remain as the chairman of Velo Labs and Lightnet.

“This announcement is a pivotal point in our long relationship with Interstellar,” Jiaravanon said in the statement. “Working together as one company will enable us to quickly expand Velo’s ecosystem and continue innovation on the protocol to meet our growing list of partners’ needs.”

Founded in 2019, Velo Labs was initially incubated by the CP Group in an effort to build a cross-border blockchain settlement network that is similar to the idea of Facebook’s Libra but with a focus on the Southeast Asia market. 

Ligthnet, the commercial entity behind the Velo protocol, raised $31 million in a Series A round in early 2020 backed by notable Asian institutions including UOB Venture Management, Seven Bank, HashKey Capital, Signum Capital, Du Capital and Hanwha Investment and Securities.

Founded in the 1920s, CP Group now owns a variety of businesses including foods processing, retail shops such as all 7-11 convenient stores in Thailand as well as telecommunication.

“This is a significant step for the Stellar ecosystem, with potential to drive more anchors to the network, creating new on/off ramps in Asia and business opportunities for both Velo and Stellar communities,” said McCaleb.

© 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.