Vale Makes Blockchain-powered Iron Deal with Chinese Firm + More News

Sead Fadilpašić
Last updated: | 2 min read

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.

Iron ore. Source: Adobe/Kings Access

Blockchain news

  • Brazilian mining giant Vale has completed its first blockchain-powered iron ore sale to Chinese steel giant Nanjing Iron and Steel, per a press release and a report from media outlet NetEase. The steel producer is based in Jiangsu Province and is part-owned by the Chinese state. Vale said that the deal saw it ship 176,000 tons of raw materials from a Malaysian port to China using the Contour blockchain network. The firm said it worked in conjunction with Standard Chartered Malaysia and Singapore’s DBS Bank on the deal.
  • South Korean commercial bank Shinhan said it has launched the financial sector’s first blockchain-powered digital document wallet service, per Chosun. The wallet will be compatible with a range of government-issued documentation and the bank said that it will also use cloud-based technology to ensure data leaks do not occur, even if users’ smartphones or other devices are lost or stolen. The bank added that blockchain technology would make documents “impossible to forge or alter.”

Exchanges news

  • BitMEX announced the listing of new futures markets. According to the announcement, included in this quarterly listing are futures contracts for EOS, chainlink (LINK), tezos (XTZ), and cardano (ADA), with chainlink being the first decentralized finance (DeFi)-linked contract available on the BitMEX platform. Meanwhile, the platform announced BitMex Mobile on September 1, as well as new index weights and indices coming on September 25.

Crypto adoption news

  • The Venezuelan crypto regulator, the National Superintendency of Crypto Assets and Related Activities (Sunacrip) has increased the amount of crypto that can be sent as remittances via the government-run Patria platform, reported Descifrado. Sunacrip also said it will increase the limit on the state-issued petro (PTR) remittances from PRT 10 to PTR 14 and allow citizens to create bitcoin (BTC) and litecoin (LTC) wallets – as well as enabling crypto-to-crypto exchanges.
  • Stellar (XLM) “has made a complete overhaul of their community fund,” said an emailed announcement. Stellar’s Community Fund (SCF), which has given XLM 3m (USD 242,000) each quarter to projects and businesses built on Stellar, has a new structure, being split into two separate funds: the Stellar Community Seed Fund and the Stellar Community Lab Fund. These two funds will begin accepting applications from projects for their first round of grants.
  • Major US-based crypto lending startup BlockFi has added support for PAX gold (PAXG) and tether (USDT) in certain jurisdictions. Per the announcement, PAXG is supported across the company’s product portfolio, enabling their clients to earn interest on gold-backed tokens, trade, and provide collateral for loans with this digital asset, while USDT will be available for interest-earning accounts and trading among non-US clients.

Security news

  • Open-source, non-custodial Bitcoin privacy wallet Wasabi stated that a possible CoinJoin denial of service vulnerability, reported by Ondřej Vejpustek from Trezor team, “has been fixed and can no longer be exploited by a potential attacker.” Before the v4 Hard Fork which fixed the vulnerability, an attacker could have exploited it to perform a DoS (denial-of-service) attack, while making it difficult to identify the attacker. They could have neither steal users’ funds nor deanonymize anyone, claimed the announcement, but could have prevented the completion of the CoinJoin process. As no DoS attempts were observed thus far, Wasabi assumes that no user has been affected by the vulnerability.