It took less than three weeks before we had the first major crypto exchange hack of 2019. Meanwhile, the Ethereum Constantinople upgrade was postponed and the market reacted with a bit of a wobble. There was some good news though, as USDC passed an audit with flying colors.
Cryptopia suffers security breach
New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia was reportedly hacked last week. On January 14 the exchange experienced a security breach, ultimately resulting in "significant losses".
After the discovery of the hack, the exchange was put into maintenance mode to assess damages. The New Zealand police are on the case and taking this incident very seriously.
Trading has been suspended until further notice. Local news reported that the police have the exchange’s offices on lockdown at the moment.
The case serves as a timely reminder of why we use 100% cold wallet storage for customer assets.
Ethereum Constantinople fork delayed
The Ethereum Constantinople Hard Fork includes improvement proposals that will be implemented to ultimately contribute to smoothing the transition when Ethereum moves from a Proof-of-Work consensus to a Proof-of-Stake mechanism.
The Hard Fork was scheduled to happen at block 7,080,000, which was expected on January 16. However, on January 15, Ethereum issued a security alert after ChainSecurity informed the Ethereum developers of a potential security flaw, meaning the upgrade had to be pushed back.
As a result, anyone running a node was asked to upgrade to a new version of Geth or Parity before block 7,080,000.
USDC gets green flag
Stablecoins backed by fiat should be able to show that have the appropriate amount of currency in their reserves somewhere.
Last week a report on Circle’s stablecoin, USDC, was released by auditors Grant Thornton, confirming that Circle has enough funds in custody to cover the entire circulating supply of USDC.
This was also the case during audits in November and October of 2018.
- USD Coin (“USDC”) tokens issued and outstanding = 251,211,148 USDC
- US Dollars held in custody accounts = $251,211,209
You can trade USDC on Liquid.
