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Crypto exchange Binance has launched an Ethereum mining pool, seven months after launching a Bitcoin mining pool.

The expansion means Binance Pool users can now also mine ether (ETH), in addition to bitcoin (BTC). Binance will charge a 0.5% pool fee for ETH mining, half of what its competitors are charging. Ethermine and SparkPool, for instance, levy a 1% fee for ETH mining rewards.

For the first month, however, i.e., up to December 12, Binance would charge no fee for ETH mining. That means users can connect their Ethereum hash power to Binance Pool and earn rewards without sharing any commission with the exchange.

Binance’s Ethereum mining pool uses the full pay-per-share (FPPS) method for reward payouts, similar to its Bitcoin mining pool. This method distributes block rewards, as well as transaction fees to miners.

It remains to be seen whether Binance’s Ethereum mining pool gains similar traction as its Bitcoin mining pool, especially when Ethereum is set to move from a proof-of-work mining system to a proof-of-stake system in the near future. Binance’s Bitcoin mining pool had about 7% of the network’s hashrate in October, according to tracker BTC.com. 

© 2020 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.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Akropolis lost $2 million in DAI in an exploit on Thursday morning. According to an update from the Akropolis team, a post-mortem analysis is forthcoming, and the team is exploring ways to reimburse those affected.

Akropolis is a DeFi lending and savings service provider that enables users to take out loans and generate yield on cryptocurrency deposits. The savings portion of the service, which utilizes Curve protocol, was exploited in the hack earlier in the day.

The contract address 0xe2307837524Db8961C4541f943598654240bd62f, which appears to the exploiter, executed a series of dYdX flash loan attacks on Akropolis’ YCurve and sUSD savings pools before sending the resulting $2 million DAI to a different address: 0x9f26ae5cd245bfeeb5926d61497550f79d9c6c1c. The funds do not appear to have left that address as of the time of this writing.

Flash loans allow users to borrow funds instantly, given they are returned within one transaction block, meaning users can take advantage of uncollateralized loans. In the case of the Akropolis attack, a combination of a re-entrancy attack and dYdX flash loan origination exploited the savings pools. The pools had been audited by two firms, according to Akropolis, but the attack vectors used by the hacker were not identified in either audit.

The majority of the funds on the protocol are safe, according to Akropolis. Compound DAI< Compound USDC, AAVE sUSD, AAVE bUSD, Curve bUSD and Curve sBTC were unaffected. Native AKRO and ADEL staking pools were also untouched. 

In the meantime, all stablecoin pools have been paused and exchanges have been informed of the hack. The Akropolis team is in discussions with security specialists as it reviews its development and security processes for the coming analysis.

© 2020 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

• Crypto trading firm B2C2 is looking to spur the adoption of bitcoin by some of the largest conglomerates in Japan.
• The firm thinks it can convince the country’s trading houses to allocate a portion of their balance sheets to bitcoin.

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Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis has launched a new service aimed at governments and law enforcement agencies looking to handle, monitor and dispose of seized crypto assets. 

The new service is being offered in partnership with Asset Reality, a consulting firm that specializes in asset realization services for public and private sector clients.

“Chainalysis is dedicated to building trust in digital assets, and that means helping to detect and investigate illicit activity. As our government partners become more successful in rooting out bad actors, assisting them with asset recovery and realization is a natural next step,” Jason Bonds, Chainalysis’s chief revenue officer, said in a statement.

As previously reported, agencies such as the U.S. Marshals Service have expressed interest in such a product, given its role in auctioning seized crypto funds. The last such auction by the USMS took place in February, when it sold just over 4,000 BTC. The USMS said in June that it was moving ahead with plans to hire a third-party contractor to work with it on crypto disposal. 

What’s more, the topic of crypto-asset seizure is perhaps particularly germane given that the U.S. government just seized more than $1 billion in bitcoin said to have been stolen from the Silk Road, the defunct dark marketplace  shuttered in 2013.

© 2020 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

• Disclaimer: The Block Research team has, is, and will be experimenting with the various protocols, projects, and applications mentioned in this series. The projects mentioned in our reports are not recommendations from our team and should not be misconstrued as investment advice. Many projects that appear in this series are highly experimental and, as such, will come with risks. Readers should evaluate their own risk tolerance before experimenting with these projects.
• At the request of various The Block Research members, we are experimenting with a weekly digest that summarizes recently launched projects and applications that our research team found interesting.
• This week’s digest looks at hedge contracts from yEarn and Whiteheart

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© 2020 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.