The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day |
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Circle to Launch Payments Network |
Ian Allison:
Circle, the firm behind the $60 billion USDC stablecoin, is launching a new payments and cross border remittance network on Tuesday — the company’s “next product move” — from its plush New York City headquarters, high on the 87th Floor of One World Trade Center.
The launch event is aimed at banks, fintechs, payment service providers, remittance providers and USDC strategic partners. It will feature Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire sharing his vision for the stablecoin giant’s next move within the payments space, according to an invite seen by CoinDesk. New and incipient regulations around the globe are opening up the stablecoin space, where Circle has shared the limelight with larger rival Tether. It makes sense then that Circle — a firm that has successfully pivoted during its years in the crypto space — should look to consolidate its position and return to its roots as a payments company. “Circle is launching a payments network that is initially targeting remittances but is ultimately aiming to rival Mastercard and Visa," said a person familiar with the plans. |
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Vitalik Proposes EVM Change |
Margaux Nijkerk:
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a new proposal over the weekend that would radically overhaul the system that powers its smart contracts. Buterin's suggestion, which he posted on Ethereum's primary developer forum, involves replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the software engine that powers programs on the network, with RISC-V, a popular open-source framework that offers built-in encryption and other benefits. . The EVM is a key piece of Ethereum's underlying design and has been seen as one of the main elements that helped the network succeed in a crowded field of other blockchains. Many non-Ethereum networks have used the EVM to build their own chains, as has a growing ecosystem of layer-2 networks built atop Ethereum, including Coinbase's Base chain. The EVM has long played an essential role in Ethereum's development. Other chains that use it can seamlessly connect with apps on Ethereum, and developers on EVM-based networks can transition more smoothly to building applications directly within the Ethereum ecosystem. Buterin argued that transitioning Ethereum to a RISC-V architecture will “greatly improve the efficiency of the Ethereum execution layer, resolving one of the primary scaling bottlenecks, and can also greatly improve the execution layer’s simplicity.” (The execution layer is the part of the network that reads smart contracts.) The RISC-V architecture, which has seen limited adoption in other blockchain ecosystems, like Polkadot, could offer "efficiency gains over 100x" for certain kinds of applications, according to Buterin. These improvements could reduce the network's costs — long seen as a major barrier to adoption. Among the primary benefits of RISC-V is its native support for certain kinds of encryption. Transitioning to the new architecture could, in Buterin's view, be a simpler alternative to the community's current plan, which involves rebuilding the EVM around zero-knowledge cryptography. |
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$380M of Bybit Hack Losses Have Gone Dark |
Omkar Godbole:
Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit's CEO Ben Zhou said that 27.95% of the funds lost in the $1.4 billion exploit engineered by the North Korean Lazarus Group have gone dark or become untraceable.
"Total hacked funds of USD 1.4bn around 500k ETH. 68.57% remain traceable, 27.59% have gone dark, 3.84% have been frozen. The untraceable funds primarily flowed into mixers then through bridges to P2P and OTC platforms," Zhou said in an executive summary published on X on Monday. The untraceable funds were moved into mixers before being transferred through bridges to P2P (peer-to-peer) and OTC (over-the-counter) platforms, the post explained, mentioning the use of Wasabi, a crypto mixer, to wash off a certain amount of BTC, following which a portion of these funds entered into other mixers, including Railgun, Tornado Cash and CryptoMixer. The malicious entity then executed multiple cross-chain swaps through Thorchain, eXch, Lombard, LiFi, Stargate and SunSwap, with the final stage involving the conversion of these illicit funds into more liquid assets.
The North Korea-linked Lazarus Group hacked Bybit in February, draining 500,000 ether (ETH) by taking "control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferring all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address."
Forensics reveal that of the hacked funds, a total of 432,748 ETH, representing 84.45%, has been transferred from ether to bitcoin via Thorchain. Notably, 67.25% of these funds, amounting to 342,975 ETH (around $960.33 million), has been converted into 10,003 BTC and distributed across 35,772 wallets with an average of 0.28 BTC per wallet.
Further, 1.17% of the funds, or 5,991 ETH (approximately $16.77 million), remains on the Ethereum blockchain, stashed across 12,490 wallets. |
Francisco Rodrigues:
Strategy (MSTR) has added 6,556 bitcoin (BTC) to its balance sheet, spending $555.8 million in the process, according to a regulatory filing published on Monday.
The purchase was funded using proceeds from the company's two at-the-market (ATM) stock offering programs, the filings notes. The firm, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, sold 1.76 million shares of its Class A common stock and over 91,000 shares of a preferred stock series — STRK - between April 14 and April 20.
The common stock sale brought in $547.7 million, while the preferred shares added another $7.8 million. The latest acquisition boosts Strategy’s total holdings to 538,200 BTC, purchased at an average price of $67,766 per coin.
The Michael Saylor-led company has spent $36.47 billion on bitcoin to date. Shares of MSTR are up 2.77% in pre-market trading as BTC rose to $87,300. |
Opinion: Is ETH Still Special? |
By Andy Baehr, head of product at CoinDesk Indices: We are never shy about holding ETH to account as crypto's second largest asset and the DeFi intuition gateway for traditional investors. But mainstream adoption requires a growth story, and so far this year ETH is (put kindly) failing to lead.
ETH sits in 16th place in the CoinDesk 20 YTD performance leaderboard, down 53%. Going back a year, the numbers look similar: 15th place and down 50%. Its market cap has dwindled so much relative to XRP that both are expected to be capped in the upcoming CoinDesk 20 reconstitution, a first. ETH's woes are news to few in the industry, but for us as index and product builders for "5%-ers," it begs the question: is ETH still special? A distinguished provenance can only take you so far. ETH continues to dominate its on-chain categories (even before adding in L2s) and is arguably the second best brand name in crypto. There are even thoughtful ideas about ETH's end-state as an essential supporting component of our blockchain future; we hear expressions like, "Ethereum will be the clearinghouse of DeFi." But mainstream adoption requires a growth story.
We have observed over the last few weeks that bitcoin has shown impressive resilience to fragile global markets. This past week was no exception, and as we pointed out last week, expectations for higher inflation – now echoed by Fed Chair Powell – could help support movement into bitcoin.
But the crypto market's dependency on bitcoin to lead prices higher is one we hope the digital asset class outgrows. ETH can reassert a leadership position, as it briefly did in the weeks following the U.S. election. If not, CoinDesk 20 investors have exposure to much of ETH's competition. |
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