Crypto Briefs is your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptocurrency and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
Crypto adoption news
- Samsung and South Korean software firm Uppsala are set to launch a crypto losses tracking system for the Samsung Blockchain Wallet – a feature on a number of flagship Galaxy smartphones. Per Hanguk Kyungjae, the firms said the system can track suspected crypto hacks and fraud, and could help report cases of misplaced crypto. Smartphone users would also be able to hand over details of suspected fraud to the police or courts, if they wish to track down and punish criminals who have stolen their funds.
- New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG) revealed in a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing that it closed a USD 190 million Bitcoin (BTC) fund, said Forbes. The NYDIG Institutional Bitcoin Fund LP, reports that it has 24 unnamed investors. Last month, NYDIG announced it had closed a different similarly named fund for USD 140 million – the NYDIG Bitcoin Yield Enhancement Fund LP. If these two are different financial instruments, then NYDIG “has quietly become one of the largest institutional investors in bitcoin in the United States, with a total of USD 330 million in bitcoin between the two funds,” the article said.
- Lawyers in the US capital Washington D.C. can accept cryptocurrency as payment for legal services, the District of Columbia Bar said in an ethics opinion, as reported by Bloomberg Law. The conditions are that the fee agreement is fair and reasonable and the lawyer can safeguard the virtual property. The opinion added that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) treats cryptocurrency as property, not currency, for tax purposes, and it agreed that “payment of fees in cryptocurrency is more akin to payment in property than payment in fiat currency.”
- Pundi X (NPXS) has announced the integration of PayPal support for its blockchain-based point-of-solution device, the Xpos. According to the press release, PayPal’s basic features, like accepting payments via email or mobile phone number, will be functional on Xpos, but users can also purchase cryptoassets such as BTC, ETH, BNB, etc., at any Xpos merchant who has activated the device’s Crypto Sale feature.
- Latin American crypto exchange Bitso says there has been no slowdown in crypto remittances between Mexico and the USA during the coronavirus pandemic, per an interview with Criptonoticias. The exchange has also talked up Ripple’s new liquidity solution, which it says it is keen to implement in its operations.
DeFi news
- Decentralized lending and savings platform Compound saw the Compound governance proposal 11 passed on June 30, changing the daily distribution of COMP tokens. The proposal will go into effect tomorrow, changing how COMP gets distributed to liquidity providers and borrowers on the protocol and removing the borrowing interest rate as a weighting mechanism. Each market is allocated COMP relative to borrowing demand, while the allocation is then split equally between suppliers and borrowers, the proposal said.
Blockchain news
- Japanese crypto exchange bitFlyer has released a free trial version of its cloud-based miyabi blockchain platform. The company said that companies can access a “playground” or “sandbox” version of the miyabi interface free of charge to see if they are interested in moving their operations onto its network.
- China’s National Health and Safety Commission has announced plans to strengthen its IT support network for future health pandemics by using a blockchain-powered data-sharing system. Per an official government release, the new platform could help medics access patients’ medical records at times of crisis.
- Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s Alipay e-pay platform has registered 212 blockchain patents, per a report from Techweb. The media outlet quotes data from the China Patent Protection Association, which says that IBM has filed 136 blockchain patents, while Coinplug, a South Korean firm dealing with blockchain-powered payments innovation, has filed a total of 107 blockchain-related patents.
- Chinese tech and entertainment giant Tencent has launched a blockchain accelerator, per the Securities Times. Tencent is hopeful of nurturing a number of domestic startups at its Shenzhen-based headquarters.
- Bison Trails, a blockchain infrastructure-as-a-service company, has announced support for Ethereum 2.0. Per the announcement, Bison Trails has therefore started offering a suite of enterprise products that will make it easier for customers to interact with the Beacon Chain, stake ETH, and automatically manage validators, validator clients, and beacon nodes.
Legal news
- The US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that there is no Fourth Amendment protection that precludes the use of analytics to trace BTC transactions or protects transaction records on an exchange. This decision is related to the case of a former Homeland Security Investigations agent, Richard Nikolai Gratkowski, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 70 months in prison on child pornography charges back in May 2019. Gratowski was purchasing pornographic videos involving minors with crypto, using Coinbase.
Crime news
- Binance Sentry, an internal risk intelligence unit structured within Binance’s security team in 2018, published the first report on the prevalence of online investment schemes. They found that schemes sometimes operate under the facade of different brands; some use false consumer organizations to trick their victims into giving them more money; and since many of these organizations move around, the victims often live in jurisdictions that are different from the ones the schemes that conned them operate in.
