Review of the latest news of the crypto-space

Review of the latest news of the crypto-spaceOne week of January 2021 has ended in the crypto sector where something is constantly happening. Is it the fluctuation in the price of BTC, which last Monday experienced a good correction, falling by 30%, or incidents related to other crypto assets.

Past week news digest

The price of BTC, which has stabilized at around $ 35,000, as you can find out at Coinmarketrate resource, seems to leave some room for altcoins. Their prices are starting to rise, and many traders and holders are waiting for the long-awaited altcoin season.

This can be seen from the way the LINK price broke a new record, DeFi tokens such as Aave or Uniswap also showed good price growth. Many cryptocurrencies are still very far from their highest prices of 2018, but there are signs of growth, so the crypto market is frozen in anticipation.

So, let’s take a look at the important crypto news of the week.

• Bitcoin Rollback: Is it time to log in?

On Sunday and Monday, there was a sharp correction in the price of Bitcoin, which has long been expected. Is it time for new investors to enter the market?

The price of Bitcoin has been rising inexorably since it surpassed the historical high of 2017. Every time there was a failure, it was just sold out again in a serious manner. But everything was different now – it was not traders who bought up, but institutions.

Leading the way were payment companies such as Greyscale and PayPal, which buys with its Bitcoin Trust, and PayPal on behalf of 346 million users. Other big buyers, such as Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy, have rocked the market with their recent huge purchases of Bitcoin. Other notable buyers were Galaxy Digital Holdings and Square.

After passing the all-time high of $ 20,000, Bitcoin did not stop. There are hardly any sideways price movements contributing to accumulation. In just 4 weeks, Bitcoin doubled its value to $ 40,000 and continued to grow.

40K $ is a round number, and the markets respect them. The profit takers must have seen their opportunities, and the pressure from the sellers became enormous. The weekly RSI (Relative Strength Indicator) shown in the mid-90s gave many warnings that Bitcoin is now heavily overbought.

Before the fall, the price reached almost $ 42K.

A sharp and rapid drop in the price caused Bitcoin to drop to almost $ 30,000. Two days of intense sales, and the number one cryptocurrency has finally corrected itself.

More than $ 150 billion has been wiped off the entire cryptocurrency market cap amid frenzied sales – such a stark contrast to the buyer pressure that preceded them.

A fantastic buying opportunity? Possibly…

When such disturbing adjustments occur, it is very difficult to remain calm and focused. Those who bought probably smiled when the price went up. For those new investors who were waiting in the wings, the $ 30k price may have been too high, or maybe it was the buy of the year?

It was necessary to act quickly, as bitcoin at these levels sold out like hot cakes.

It remains to be seen whether Bitcoin will continue to drift sideways and downwards to continue its correction and allow more investors to enter. However, there is no denying that we are in a bull market and the trend is still definitely upward.

There will always be adjustments, and some of them will be as sharp as in the previous ones – time for investors to accumulate more, or for new speculators to join them. However, history tells us that once Bitcoin really starts its bull run, the upward trajectory will become strong and there will be fewer downturns.

Was this an opportunity to get into the game? Time will tell.

• A programmer lost the password to his large fortune in BTC

We all forget passwords from time to time, and it certainly causes heartache and anxiety if they hide important information or significant amounts of money. However, what Stefan Thomas is going through can only be imagined as he desperately tries to remember the password that could change his life forever.

The story began about 10 years ago when he made a video explaining cryptocurrency. The fee for a video made up 7002 BTC. Thomas says they were worth between $ 2 and $ 6 at the time. He transferred them to a small hard drive called IronKey and forgot about them over the years.

Fast forward to 2021, and now Thomas somehow remembered about the Bits, but it turned out that he completely forgot the password to log in. He has already used 8 out of 10 attempts to guess the password. After the tenth password is selected and it turns out to be inaccurate, the IronKey device will encrypt all the content, which will make it irrevocable.

Thomas told the New York Times about how he would lie in bed trying to remember the password, then go to his computer and try something new, but fail and become even more desperate.

Stefan Thomas, CEO of the cryptocurrency payment protocol, is no stranger to security, and that should make it even more frustrating that he can’t recover the password on his own hard drive. As his Twitter feed fills up with all sorts of comments and suggestions, he will weigh his options.

“I hope that others can learn from my mistakes. Check your backups regularly to make sure they still work. A gram of foresight could have prevented a decade of regret”.

One such option is an Internet security expert at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Alex Stamos wrote to Thomas on Twitter, offering to crack the password in 6 months. However, there will be a price to pay for this, as Stamos is asking for 10% of the bitcoin fortune as a fee.

With the price of bitcoin hitting nearly $ 42,000 just a few days ago, Thomas may well be thinking seriously about this proposal. For now, he has placed his hard drive in a “secure vault”, hoping that the technology will evolve enough for experts to finally crack that password and unlock his treasures inside.

Chainanalysis, a respected Blockchain analytics company, said that 3.7% million of BTC are now lost forever. The figure is obtained from wallets that have not been touched for more than 5 years. A more recent New York Times report puts the figure at 20%, which is about $ 140 billion.

• USDT worth $ 400 Million, issued by Tron’s Tether

Whale Alert, a popular Twitter page that tracks the movements of various cryptocurrencies, noted that about $ 400 million worth of USDT was recently issued to the Tether Tron Treasury. This post was retweeted by Justin Sun, himself the CEO of Tron, and users speculated why such a large number of coins were issued in the first place.

Many believe that this means that there will be a significant jump in the price of cryptocurrency very soon.

• Last year, blockchain hacks reached a total loss of $ 3.8 billion

As Bitcoin reaches record highs, triggering new investor flows into the cryptocurrency space, the number of blockchain hacks is growing proportionately.

Slowmist, a blockchain security company, reported a total of 122 hacker attacks in 2020. These attacks caused losses of almost 3.8 billion rubles. $ , and caused huge damage to the cryptocurrency space as a whole. First of all, three different sectors of the blockchain were affected:

1. Dapps (decentralized applications) running on the Ethereum blockchain have suffered 47 attacks and total losses of $ 437 million. Here, the promising decentralized insurance company Cover faced a breach of contract and lost a total of $ 30 million. Warp Finance was another DeFi loan project affected by the attack, which caused $ 7.7 million in damage.
2. Cryptocurrency exchanges have been 28 attacks for a total amount of 300 million dollars. There was a huge attack on the Kucoin exchange. After hacking the private keys of the hot wallet, a large withdrawal of Bitcoins and various altcoins was made. In addition, a serious security breach occurred on the British EXMO exchange. $ 4 million was transferred and then withdrawn from Poloniex. A total of $10.5 million was stolen from EXMO’s hot wallet.
3. Wallets on the blockchain suffered the most – about $ 3 billion. Even Ledger, which is considered one of the most secure hardware wallets, was hacked with a phishing attack. Phishing emails directed users to a fake Ledger website, where they were tricked into downloading malware that looked like a security update. 1,150. 00 XRP tokens were lost. Their cost at that time was about $280,000. Wirecard lost $ 2.13 billion as a result of an unknown hack, which accounts for 25% of the company’s total balance sheet.

The blockchains themselves were also hit by the hack: Aeternity lost 39 million of its tokens in a 51% attack, Chainlink received a 700 ETH hit due to spam attacks, and Ethereum Classic lost $ 1,680,000 due to another 51% attack.

While the combined blockchain hacks in 2020 were very significant, the actual number of attacks decreased from the 133 attempts reported in 2019, when 31 attacks occurred in January alone.

Slowmist is a blockchain security company that monitors the blockchain for any deviations. It collects threat intelligence from many partners in its ecosystem, which provides much-needed and valuable services. Many of their partners provide rewards for detecting bugs, which encourages the Slowmist community to explore these platforms in search of vulnerabilities. The Slowmist community, made up of “zone partners,” is among the largest cryptocurrency and blockchain companies, including Binance, Okex, AWS, Bybit, and EOSIO.