Hackers ‘Using Crypto Wallet Address-switching Malware’ + More News

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.

Security news

• South Korea’s market-leading security software provider AhnLabs has warned of a new malware threat that alters crypto wallet addresses, per Money Today. AhnLabs states that the malware, once installed, interferes with the process whereby addresses are copied from wallets and exchange dashboards and interfaces. When users who are inadvertently running the malware press Control + V to paste their wallet addresses into a field, their PCs will instead enter the wallet addresses of accounts run by a ring of hackers.

Exchanges news

• Bithumb has announced the appointment of a new CEO, per Digital Today, the exchange, one of South Korea’s biggest, has appointed Huh Baek-young, its former head of compliance, to lead the company. Huh has been at the company since 2017, and has previously worked for conventional finance firms such as Citibank and ING.
• BitMEX has been hit with a money laundering and market manipulation lawsuit. Per the details of the case, revealed in legal documentation uploaded to the web, the suit was lodged by BMA, a company that has also attempted to sue Ripple this year. BMA filed the suit at a Californian District Court over the weekend, and claims that HDR Global Trading, BitMEX’s operator, has committed wire fraud, violated racketeering laws and conducted actions designed to drive crypto prices up and down. The suit said that the “sheer magnitude of the unlawful activities” committed by Arthur Hayes, BitMEX’s Co-founder and CEO, was “truly staggering.”

Crypto adoption news

• Payments company Square, co-founded and led by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has unveiled a new Cash App feature that allows users to automatically buy bitcoin (BTC) on a daily, weekly, or bi-weekly basis, as Dorsey’s tweet announced. Furthermore, users can now change the display from BTC to satoshis (sats).
• Polish-British fintech Billon and Austrian Raiffeisen Bank International said they have successfully tested an end-to-end digitized national currency transfers proof-of-concept as part of the development of the initial phases of an RBI Tokenization Platform. According to the press release, the two will pilot this platform for selected use cases, like real-time tokenized money transfers, or improving the cut-off time for custody customers, the goal being to demonstrate how companies can improve their liquidity management, speed and availability of cross-country fund transfers and facilitate new business processes.

Blockchain news

• Chainlink is set to partner with chat app operator Kakao’s Klaytn blockchain platform, and will provide its decentralized oracle solution for Klaytn dapps (decentralized apps), per a press release. The parties claim that integrating the Chainlink network will allow Klaytn’s smart contracts to “connect with resources outside the blockchain, enabling the creation of applications that are connected with real-world data and systems.”
• Co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), Vitalik Buterin, and Thibault Schrepel, an antitrust academic and Harvard University associate, stated that blockchain and antitrust agencies share a common goal of decentralization. Per their latest paper, blockchain can help lawmakers reach the goals of antitrust law in situations where the rule of law does not apply, detailing how this may be accomplished from a technical and legal standpoint. Therefore, the authors argue that antitrust agencies should support the technology and initiatives like sandboxes.

Legal news

• A second class action against Block.one, the publisher of EOSIO software, was filed yesterday, according to which, EOS was an unregistered security offering by Block.one. Now, more investors in the initial coin offering for EOS, which raised USD 4 billion in crypto, are seeking their funds back, alleging that over USD 200 million was illegally raised.