Author: Cointelegraph

An individual Ether (ETH) miner struck it big by mining a block on their own and receiving a reward valued at about $540,000. The miner was operating through the 2miners Ethereum SOLO pool on Jan. 17 when they mined an entire block and received 168 ETH. That reward vastly outstrips the per-block average reward of about 4 ETH according to BitInfoCharts. Adding to the remarkable nature of the reward is the size and hash power of the SOLO pool. It is relatively small with 854 miners online and 1.5 Tera hashes per second at time of writing, meaning that the average miner contributes 1.85…

Secret Network is offering $400 million in funding to grow its privacy-oriented ecosystem and expand user adoption. Secret Network is a decentralized ecosystem that utilizes trusted execution environments to enable private, secure computation over encrypted data. The ecosystem has four components: Secret Tokens, Secret Bridges, Secret Finance and Secret NFTs. According to a Jan. 19 announcement, the privacy-oriented platform is offering a $225 million ecosystem fund and a $175 million accelerator fund with support from 25 existing investors and partners, including BlockTower Capital, Arrington Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Outlier, Spartan Group, and Figment. The Founder of Secret Foundation Tor Bair told Cointelegraph the funding…

The Tarjih Council and the Central Executive Tajdid of Muhammadiyah, one of the largest non-government Islamic organizations in Indonesia, issued a new fatwa against cryptocurrency use, deeming it haram, or unlawful, for Muslims. The fatwa, a ruling on the point of Islamic law, was issued on Tuesday and pointed towards two critical issues with cryptocurrencies that make them illegal as an investment tool and a medium of exchange under Islamic laws: The speculative nature of cryptocurrencies makes them imperfect as an investment tool. The crypto tokens are believed to contain “gharar” (obscurity) which means they are not backed by anything…

Cryptojacking accounted for 73% of the total value received by malware related addresses between 2017 and 2021, according to a new malware report from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. Malware is used to conduct nefarious activity on a victim’s device such as a smartphone or PC after being downloaded without the victim’s knowledge. Malware-powered crime can be anything from information-stealing to denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or ad fraud on a grand scale. The report excluded ransomware, which involves an initial use of hacks and malware to leverage ransom payments from vicitms in order to halt the attacks. Chainalysis stated: “While most tend to focus on…

A holy oath was taken to try to ensure the region’s power grid would work at its most efficient level, as crypto miners are blamed for drawing off too much juice. Residents of Svaneti, Georgia, have reportedly been made to pledge a holy oath they will not mine cryptocurrency in order to deal with energy shortages blamed on Bitcoin mining. The economy of the northwest Svaneti region of Georgia depends on tourism spending, which rose every year from 2000 to 2019 according to Macrotrends. As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, however, tourism plummeted in 2020 and has only recently begun…

The United Kingdom is actively looking to regulate the crypto market and has proposed many new policies to bring various crypto markets under the rule of law. However, among the various newly proposed suggestions, what turned many heads is the request to remove blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) references from the definition of crypto assets. A new crypto report titled “Cryptoasset promotions: Consultation response” from the Her Majesty’s (HM) Treasury noted that, while most crypto assets use DLT or blockchain as an underlying technology, it might change over time the industry evolves. Thus, crypto assets must be exempt from…

In a ruling that is “almost identical to the El Salvador bill,” Tongan bigwig Lord Fusitu’a anticipates that his country could adopt Bitcoin by November. Another domino is lined up to fall down the route to Bitcoinization. On Wednesday, a former lawmaker of the Pacific island nation of Tonga shared a play-by-play approach to adopting Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender. In a series of tweets, Lord Fusitu’a, a former member of parliament for Tonga, released an ETA for Bitcoin becoming legal tender in Tonga. Copying El Salvador’s playbook, the move could onboard more than 100,000 Tongans onto the Bitcoin network. In his five-point plan,…

Bahrain is the latest nation to explore blockchain technology by American investment bank JPMorgan, with the country’s central bank trialing JPMorgan’s proprietary digital currency. The Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) has successfully completed a digital payments test in collaboration with JPMorgan’s blockchain and cryptocurrency unit Onyx, according to an official announcement published on Thursday. The trial involved two other major institutions, Manama-based international bank Bank ABC and Bahrain national aluminum smelter Aluminium Bahrain, also known as Alba. T he test enabled Bank ABC to settle real-time payments to Alba’s counterparts in the United States using JPM Coin, a blockchain-based payments system and…

The hot wallet compromise was followed by an unauthorized transfer of eight types of ERC-20 tokens including ETH, USDC, LINK and MKR. Liechtenstein-based crypto exchange LCX has confirmed the compromise of one of its hot wallets after temporarily suspending all deposits and withdrawals on the platform. The hack was first identified by PeckShield, a blockchain security company, based on the suspicious transfer of ERC-20 tokens from LXC to an unknown Ethereum wallet. The probable hot wallet compromise was soon confirmed by the exchange as it announced the loss of numerous tokens including Ether (ETH), USD Coin (USDC) and other tokens including its…

Here are three reasons why PlanB’s prediction isn’t accurate and why we can’t expect Bitcoin’s price to increase 10x after each halving. In the last couple of years, the stock-to-flow model proposed by PlanB has become very famous. A quantitative study published on the site planbtc.com shows the model and the prediction that Bitcoin (BTC) could reach the capitalization of $100 trillion. Obviously, the crypto industry, including myself, was fascinated by the logic of the model and even more so by the idea that it could reach and exceed $100,000 as early as 2021. In fact, the stock-to-flow model assumes that there is a…