Jesse Coghlan
Cryptocurrency exchange FTX will provide around $6 million in compensation to victims of a phishing scam that allowed hackers to conduct unauthorized trades on certain FTX users’ accounts.
FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried posted in a Twitter thread on Oct. 23 that the exchange generally doesn’t award compensation to its users “phished by fake versions of other companies in the space,” but in this case, it would compensate users.
Bankman-Fried said that this was a “one-time thing” and FTX would “not do this going forward.”
“THIS IS NOT A PRECEDENT,” he wrote, clarifying it was only the accounts of FTX users that would be reimbursed.
The recent phishing attack saw attackers gaining user account application programming interface (API) keys which allowed them to conduct unauthorized trades with their crypto exchange accounts.
The attack came to light on Oct. 21 after 3Commas said it was alerted that some of its users had unauthorized trading activity.
After an initial investigation, FTX and 3Commas then suspended the suspicious accounts to avoid further losses and disabled all compromised API keys.
On Oct.19 Bankman-Fried published a blog post detailing his thoughts on crypto regulation that included a proposal he dubbed the “5-5 standard” where hackers keep either $5 million or 5% of the amount they’ve stolen, whatever is smaller.
In his most recent tweet thread, he thought it time to try his newly thought-up standard, imploring the hacker to send back 95%, around $5.7 million, of the stolen funds within 24 hours, saying “we’ll absolve them.”
October has been dubbed “hacktober” by the crypto community as Chainalysis revealed on Oct. 13 that October 2022 has been the “biggest month” ever for hacking activity, despite the report coming out not even halfway through the month.
At the time of the report around $3 billion had been exploited through over 125 separate incidents since the start of the month.
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David Attlee
Japan Credit Bureau (JCB), a Japanese analog to international payments systems like Visa or Mastercard, announced the start of its central bank digital currency (CBDC) infrastructure testing. The project will assumably prepare the payments platform for a national CBDC, which is currently being tested by the Bank of Japan (BoJ).
The infrastructure project, announced by the company in local media, will come under the title JCBDC and aims at adjusting the JCB’s existing credit card infrastructure for CBDC payments. The France-based provider of facial recognition technology IDEMIA and Malaysian Softspace will collaborate with JCB in the platform’s development.
The platform will consist of three major directions — a touch payment solution, an issuance and provision of plastic cards for CBDC and a simulation of the working CBDC environment. JCB also plans to adjust the mobile payment tools and QR codes, but in the later stages of testing.
JCB plans to develop a payment solution by the end of 2022 and start the demonstration experiments at actual stores by the end of March 2023.
The BOJ shared a three-phase trial outline for its CBDC back in Oct. 2020. The second phase of the trials, which would test the technical aspects of the issuance of the digital yen, should start this year. According to the BoJ governor, the digital yen could launch by 2026, and the decision won’t be made by the central bank alone.
There is still no certainty about the project launch or the possible scope of its implementation. In January, the former head of the BOJ’s financial settlement department advised against using the digital yen as a part of the country’s monetary policy.
JCB is not a newcomer to digital innovations — it started a pilot of a digital identity interoperability system based on blockchain technology in collaboration with Fujitsu Laboratories in 2020.
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Prashant Jha
CZ first came across Bitcoin in 2013 and was a bit hard by the BTC bug, which led him to sell his house in Shanghai and go all-in.
Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the founder and CEO of global cryptocurrency exchange Binance, is one of the most influential crypto personalities today, but his story is a true rags-to-riches one.
CZ was born in a village in Jiangsu, Shanghai, and his family migrated to Vancouver, Canada, in the 1980s when he was 12. He studied computer science engineering in college and spent the next few years building trading systems for popular exchanges such as the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Bloomberg Tradebook.
CZ left his lucrative job in 2005 to start his own venture and moved back to Shanghai. In 2013, after eight years of building his company, CZ finally came across Bitcoin— which changed everything for him.
The Bitcoin bug bit CZ hard, and he went all-in on the nascent digital currency in 2014, selling his house and buying BTC at an average price of $600 per coin. Bitcoin’s price fell soon after and crashed to $200, but CZ’s belief in the tech helped him hodl through the bear market. After two years, the price jumped back up.
CZ started his own crypto venture nearly four years after coming across Bitcoin, launching Binance in July 2017 at the peak of the initial coin offering era. Five years later, Binance is one of the leading global crypto exchanges in terms of daily trading volume.
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