PayPal CEO Sees ‘The Entire World’ Going ‘Digital First’ + More News
Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
Crypto adoption news
- PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said the use of digital currencies is set to go mainstream as more merchants take a “digital first” approach to payments, Bloomberg reported. “The entire world is going to come into digital first,” the CEO said, adding that he sees his biggest competitor as Ant Financial, China’s largest mobile-payment company. (Learn more: PayPal CEO: Financial System ‘Not Working,’ Users ‘Very Eager’ For Crypto)
- Nearly a fifth of the surveyed PayPal users have already traded bitcoin (BTC) using the PayPal app, said a report published by Mizuho Securities, the investment branch of Mizuho Financial Group, as a number of media sites reported. Of the 380 users surveyed, 17% said they’d already used PayPal to trade bitcoin, while 65% said they would use the cryptocurrency to pay for goods and services.
- GoodDollar, a social impact project delivering a digital universal basic income (UBI), announced that it has “received great demand since it was launched on September 8,” stating that in a bit more than eight weeks, over 40,000 people from 180 countries have signed up and started to claim and use the G$ digital currency. According to the press release, more than 20,000 users now use GoodDollar regularly, while more than 14 million G$s have been distributed among users to date.
Security news
- The software giant Microsoft said the “nation-state” hacker group Bismuth has begun deploying crypto mining malware as part of a renewed cyber-spying effort. In a blog post, the software firm wrote, “In campaigns from July to August 2020, the group deployed monero (XMR) coin miners in attacks that targeted both the private sector and government institutions in France and Vietnam.” The American company believes Bismuth thinks crypto mining malware attacks have provided it with a way to monetize the networks it successfully compromises.
- The South Korean chat app giant Kakao’s Ground X blockchain subsidiary has suffered data breech. Per media outlet Bloter, the firm, which operates the klay token and the Klaytn blockchain network, has admitted that the incident took place on November 8, whereby data including the names, email addresses and phone numbers of about 2,000 people were leaked to an individual who appears to have used spear-phishing methods to dupe a Ground X employee into allowing them to access the data. The victims of the leak are said to have been business partners who had attended a Ground X-run event.
Blockchain news
- Russia’s Alfa-Bank has launched a blockchain-powered solution for self-employed businesspeople, reported Forklog. The bank is one of the largest private commercial lenders in the country, and the new platform, said Alfa-Bank, will make use of the Waves (WAVES) enterprise-grade hybrid blockchain network. The bank said that the solution will let the self-employed reduce their dependence on in-person visits to banks for processes such as business registration, payment-related matters, contractor status checks, income registration and tax-related issues.
Mining news
- HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd. has announced its results for the second quarter ended September 30, 2020, stating that the revenue from digital currency mining was USD 13m, an 8% increase from the same quarter last year. Gross mining margin expanded to USD 9.2m, from a loss of more than USD 560,000 last year. Net income per share grew to USD 0.03 from a loss of USD 0.04 during the period ended September 30, said the press release.
NFTs news
- Animoca Brands, Hong Kong-headquartered publisher of mobile games, has announced that F1® Delta Time’s first Apex race track segment “Formula 1 Grand Prix de Monaco 2020 1A” has sold at auction for the record-setting price of REVV 9,081,752, equivalent to some USD 223,000 at the time of sale. The track segment is a non-fungible token (NFT) representing a fractional ownership of 5% in the Circuit de Monaco track inside the blockchain game F1® Delta Time, said the emailed press release, adding that the auction for F1® Delta Time’s “Bahrain Edition 2020” Apex car NFT is currently in progress.
Exchanges news
- Binance has launched an Ethereum 2.0 (ETH 2.0) Staking service. Per the announcement, the users that participate in ETH 2.0 staking will receive BETH at a ratio of 1 ETH = 1 BETH, and staking rewards will be distributed daily in the form of BETH. BETH tokenizes a user’s stake in the ETH 2.0 pool at a 1:1 ratio, and will allow users to redeem ETH at a 1:1 ratio when ETH 2.0 Phase 1 goes live, they said.
- OKEx said that that the 10th round of Buy-back & Burn of OKB, OKEx’s global utility token issued by OK Blockchain Foundation, has been successfully completed. According to the announcement, an additional 10% of OKB was added to the burn, making the total number of OKB bought back and burned from the secondary market OKB 4m (USD 21m), which has been transferred to a dedicated black-hole address.
- Australian crypto exchange BTC Markets has issued an apology after accidentally exposing the names and emails of 270,000 customers earlier this week, reported Business Insider Australia. The company sent emails to batches of its members which included their names and email addresses, which made users more vulnerable to phishing and other cyberattacks attempting to gain access to their cryptoasset. The company stated that the breach did not affect their exchange and that no passwords were exposed.
Investments news
- Decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator 1inch said it raised USD 12m from institutional investors, including Pantera Capital, ParaFi Capital, and Nima Capital. These funds will be used to further develop a variety of 1inch products, hire additional team members, fuel the project’s expansion into new markets, and to amplify marketing activities, they added.
- Grayscale Investments, a US-based major digital currency asset manager and sponsor of Grayscale Ethereum Trust, said it has declared a 9-for-1 split of the Trust’s issued and outstanding common units of fractional undivided beneficial interest. With the Share Split, shareholders of record on December 14, 2020 will receive 8 additional Shares of the Trust for each Share held.
