Author: Anna Galvez

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Crypto News

Cryptocurrency Scams On Twitter Tackled By Two Recently Rolled Out Apps

In order to address cryptocurrency scams on Twitter, two tools have been launched this month. These tools, the MetaCert Protocol Cryptocurrency and Scam Clerk, prevent scammers that deceive Twitter users by requesting cryptocurrency payments.

By using the tools is possible to detect fake accounts on Twitter and verify whether the published tweets come from the person being followed or from a forger seeking to defraud followers.

According to MetaCert CEO Paul Wash, MetaCert Protocol is an extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera that has been updated to be useful in the world of cryptocurrencies to identify cryptocurrency scams on Twitter. Currently, this app is in its beta version.

With a similar goal in mind, Scam Clerk does a kind of virus scan on the Twitter accounts, generating a dashboard pointing out the imitators that have been blocked. The app also lists all the scam accounts identified on the network. Through its bot, the application also scans the lists of friends and followers, providing additional data and statistics.

Hacking account to deploy cryptocurrency scams on Twitter

Hacking Twitter accounts for crypto scams is a trend that increased over the last few years as the use of cryptocurrency has become more popular. Despite being warned, many people still fall into the traps of cybercriminals.

After hacking into the accounts of people linked to the world of cryptocurrencies, cybercriminals often make promotions and offers in their name, asking for a deposit, or for crypto payments for entering false drawings or lotteries.

Usually, the cybercriminals ask Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH).

Twitter has been a breeding ground for scams despite the blue check mark that the network places to differentiate verified accounts. In spite of this, last February the TRON Foundation Twitter account was imitated entirely, with all profile pics, biography, and location. Faced with this situation, some users have expressed their complaints to the Twitter platform, demanding greater security measures.

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Crypto News

Alipay Payment Service Of The Alibaba Group To Adopt Blockchain Technology

Ant Financial’s online payment processor Alipay announced the future launch of a remittance service based on its own blockchain. The cross-border payments platform is primarily intended to process transactions from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to the Philippines.

According to Ant Financial’s official website, this Alibaba subsidiary company bets on Distributed Accounting Technology (DAT) to allow Alipay users to send and receive transactions in real time.

At the moment there are no details on the characteristics of the blockchain that will be developed to support the transactions, as no technical details were disclosed in the press release published today by the company. However, it was announced that the initiative has Standard Chartered Bank as its banking business partner and the GCash digital wallet as its Philippine partner.

Alipay, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, to launch a cross-border payments platform based in blockchain technology

It is important to note that Alipay is led by Jack Ma, the founder and CEO of the Alibaba Group, who stated during the announcement that the position of the three mentioned companies with respect to DLT is favorable, even considering that “it could change the world more than people think”, according to Bloomberg.

However, the story is different when mentioning cryptocurrencies, as for Jack Ma “Bitcoin (BTC) may be a bubble.”

The blockchain is common among the significant figures of the global financial ecosystem, and both Ma and some influential Wall Street figures have been researching and testing distributed accounting technologies for a couple of years now. This position has been criticised by members of the Bitcoin (BTC) ecosystem, as sometimes these appear to be maneuvers to conduct market manipulation.

In the particular case of Alibaba Group, this was one of the first Asian companies to adopt blockchain technology to ensure the origin of the food offered on the Alibaba website. Also, other subsidiaries linked to Alibaba and Ant Financial, such as TMall, an electronic payment platform such as Alipay, have adopted blockchain to optimize their operations.

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Crypto News

EOS (EOS) Ranked The #1 Blockchain In China – Bitcoin (BTC) Is Not Even In Top 10

China Electronic Information Industry Development (CCID) updated its rankings regarding cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. Previously, the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain was considered the best, but this week Chinese think that EOS (EOS) is the #1 blockchain in China. What’s interesting is that Bitcoin (BTC) is not even in top 10.

However, the decision to list EOS blockchain as the best in the cryptocurrencies market is somewhat bizarre, given the recent events surrounding EOS (EOS).

First, some critical bugs forced EOS team to pause the network and 27 accounts were frozen without notice during the process. Then, Professor Emin Gun Sirer from the Cornell University, as well as the famous smart contracts engineer Nick Szabo, vehemently criticized the EOS blockchain.

But these events and negative critics couldn’t stop the Chinese government’s body to list EOS (EOS) as the best blockchain in the world.

EOS (EOS) ranked the #1 blockchain in China, while Bitcoin (BTC) didn’t make it in the top 10

We know that there is no such thing as perfect rankings when it comes to blockchains. It’s not like listing cryptocurrencies by market cap or trading volumes which are calculable things, that’s known and accepted. The primary reason why blockchains can’t be adequately ranked is that they can be cataloged in at least a dozens of categories, including smart contracts, crypto payments, apps blockchains, bank protocols, PoS, utility blockchains, and so on.

But the CCID ranking is very off-track because it lacks some elementary knowledge about blockchains. Under the hood, the index could be based on general criteria such as proof-of-stake (PoS), consensus algorithm, or the ability to process transactions, among others, but what they show is that they categorize blockchains by technology, applicability, and innovation.

Thus, this ranking is a mistake only because EOS (EOS) network relies on Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, so, if Ethereum shuts off, EOS blockchain dies, too. Also, the high score EOS blockchain received under “innovation” criterium is also wrong because that is thanks to Ethereum blockchain, once again.

Don’t get me wrong here, EOS is a great project and its PoS is one of the best in the cryptocurrencies market, and, in other news, EOS (EOS) has recorded the most significant increase today between the top 10 cryptos, surging by about 13%, at the moment of this writing, trading at $8.46.

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Crypto Markets News

UTRUST And Pundi X, The Largest Crypto Payment Platforms, Teamed Up To Increase Cryptocurrency Adoption

UTRUST and Pundi X, the world’ s largest crypto payment platforms, are teaming up to develop the offline XPOS crypto payment platform for widespread cryptocurrency adoption. The two companies, Pundi X and UTRUST, have concluded an arrangement to encourage cryptocurrency payments in shops and to safeguard them with customer protection measures.

In the first stage, the world’ s leading point-of-sale (POS) provider, Pundi X, is presently in the production phase of the platform, but on a trial scale, and in the next few weeks it will begin dispatching the product to Singapore, Japan, and Switzerland markets where the platform will support retailers to receive offline cryptocurrency payments.

UTRUST, on the other hand, is the world’s leading cryptocurrency payments platform and the first one to deploy customer-centered cryptocurrency payment services, covering the buying and selling of cryptos.

UTRUST and Pundi X deal benefits both parties to the maximum

Following the terms of the deal the two companies concluded today in Singapore, UTRUST is pledging to purchase 1,000 units of Pundi’s XPOS technology, a point-of-sale device that allows merchants to conduct transactions, buy, and sell in multiple cryptocurrencies. Pundi X, for its part, will be deploying UTRUST as a liquidity supplier for the purchases on its terminals and will be using its technology to validate accounts.

Besides, the deal signed today with UTRUST takes the quantity of Pundi X technology devices ordered for use by its worldwide retail clients to over 25,000, out of the 100,000 devices the company targeted to sell in three years.

UTRUST, based in Switzerland, will handle the transactions’ protection mechanisms to guarantee that the crypto coins are safely transacted within a protected context and also to ensure a trustful buyer-seller experience.

Partnering with UTRUST as our commercial payment settlement portal is a substantial addition to Pundi’s XPOS and gives us a trusted provider of liquidity, but also for customer security.

Zac Cheah, CEO and co-founder of Pundi X

From the other party, Nuno Correia, UTRUST CEO, declared the that the UTRUST and Pundi X partnership is “a partnership of two leading blockchain cryptocurrency payment projects with benefits that flow into the entire cryptocurrencies ecosystem.”

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Crypto News

Zcash (ZEC) Will Get The Overwinter Update Tonight, But It Was A Tense Journey

The Zcash Foundation went through a tense journey before the Overwinter update which will take place today, June 25th, at 9:08 PM EDT, at the block 347,500 of the Zcash (ZEC) main network. This update is not a bifurcation and will not create a new currency. In order to avoid problems in the update process, the Zcash team has extended the invitation to external developers to review the code versions.

This Overwinter update of the Zcash (ZEC) protocol is expected to protect against repeating transactions and will prepare the system for future code releases. Overwinter will serve as a stable base for the activation of Zcash Sapling, the essential software upgrade of the year that will take place by the end of 2018.

Third parties have already provided support for this update, including AirTM, Binance, Bitfinex, Huobi Pro, Gemini, and Exodus Wallet.

However, in the days leading up to the update, a debate arose on the economic status of those who contribute to the development of the network, following a release from D. Jane Mercer, who programmed codes to implement them in the Zcash wallets.

Zcash (ZEC) protocol is now ready to get the Overwinter update

Mercer threatened managers with halting development of Zcash’s Windows client for the upcoming updates planned on the network, according to the publication of the client in the Zcash forum. Also, there was the possibility of creating a hard fork and freeing a competitor “marked with another name,” in the so-called “Bitcoin Cash style,” from not receiving payment for his work.

Although, as Gareth Davies says in the same thread, the secure activation mode will by default include the older nodes that still use Zcash4win, who will be forced to upgrade to the legacy string before they can process transactions, so the Overwinter implementation will not bifurcate those nodes that run the software prior to WinZec version 1.1.0.

Mercer received funding from the Zcash community in the hours following its announcement. Accumulating the demanded 80 Zcash (ZEC), valued at $13,200, he later stated that he was satisfied while adding that he spoke with executives from the Zcash Foundation and solved the issues.

Yesterday, June 24th, Mercer announced on Twitter that it has already updated the codes for the Zcash Windows client, so it is ready for the Overwinter update implementation.

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