Today in Crypto: Cryptocurrency is ‘Inevitable’, Two Hacks, OKCoin Pauses USD Deposits, Beatport & Polkadot’s Music Platform, Alchemy Notify’s Custom Webhooks
Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
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Payments news
- A survey conducted by global payments network Mercuryo found that 40% of consumers in the UK and US own crypto; 65% are male, 35% women; 68% want to be able to use crypto in the same way they use other currencies in their everyday life; and 55% of businesses think that crypto payments could significantly improve the payment experience and decrease costs. “Crypto payments adoption will keep increasing in the next few years, even though people lost trust in the industry because of last year’s unexpected events. The majority perceive cryptocurrency as inevitable. With 40% of millennials and 65% of people over 65 years indicating this, we can already see that crypto’s audience is expanding as it becomes more attractive to older generations. Women also represent 35% of the crypto holders, a significant increase from the 22% share in 2019,” Petr Kozyakov, Co-founder and CEO of Mercuryo, stated.
- The Payments Association, a community for all companies in payments, has set out seven clear conclusions in a new report to help steer the debate in the UK’s future for digital currencies. Per an announcement, the association reports “increasing of regulation measures, explosion of business use cases, the closing of the gap between conventional and new payments systems, and how payments is at the core of this new paradigm shift for the UK.”
Security news
- PeopleDAO, a group formed to buy a copy of the US Constitution, lost ETH 76.5 to a social engineering hack on March 6. Per the team, “PeopleDAO collects monthly contributor reward information via Google Form. The accounting lead mistakenly shared a link with edit access in a public channel in discord. The hacker gained edit role via the link.” The exploited funds were deposited into HitBTC and Binance, they added.
- Lending protocol Euler Finance suffered a flash-loan attack, resulting in a loss of $197 million, according to security firms BlockSec and PeckShield. The attacker drained $136 million of staked ether (stETH), $34 million of USDC, $19 million of wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), and $8.7 million of DAI, BlockSec said. “The hack is made possible due to the flawed logic its donation and liquidation. Specifically, the donateToReserves needs to ensure the donator is still over-collateralized. And liquidation needs to ensure the *correct* conversion rate from borrow to collateral asset,” PeckShield wrote.
Exchange news
- OKCoin temporarily paused deposits of USD following the failure of Signature Bank. “USD deposit by wire and ACH has been immediately paused. We don’t want your deposit to get stuck. Over-the-counter services will be temporarily paused too (aka quick-buy and recurring-buy),” tweeted OKCoin CEO and OKX President Hong Fang.
Web3 news
- Beatport is partnering with Polkadot to launch Beatport.io, a digital collectible marketplace “bringing electronic music culture to Web3,” said a press release. Developed and designed in partnership with Define Creative, Beatport.io will launch on Aventus, a Web3 solutions provider for enterprises and parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem. The platform will enable record labels and artists to create and sell unique digital assets. Beatport and Polkadot will also collaborate on 10 major music and Web3 events over the next 18 months, celebrating the launch of a new NFT collection accessible via Polkadot-integrated wallets, it added.
- Web3 development platform Alchemy announced Alchemy Notify’s Custom Webhooks, giving users access to real-time notifications for any on-chain event. A shortlist of “the infinite data” users can get instantly updated on include Uniswap token pair deployments, OpenSea NFT swap completions, Ethereum high gas fees detected, Aave tokens staked, a CryptoPunk is approved to be transferred, etc.
