Category: Crypto

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Six Brazilian Banks Are Under Scrutiny For Illegally Closing Bank Accounts Of Several Crypto Trading Companies

The Brazilian Administrative Council of Economic Defense opened an investigation against six Brazilian banks for allegedly using their market position to restrict crypto trading operations, putting cryptocurrency exchange platforms at a disadvantage. This inquiry comes following a request filed by the Brazilian Association of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain.

Six Brazilian banks under scrutiny from the Administrative Council of Economic Defense

The Brazilian regulatory agency began investigations on Tuesday, September 18th, alleging that monopolistic practices are being carried out at Banco do Brasil, Bradesco, Itau Unibanco, Santander Brasil, Banco Inter, and Sicredi, according to Reuters.

The association accused the six Brazilian banks of closing accounts related to cryptocurrency trading without offering explanations, which was considered by the authorities as one of the critical elements to initiate the investigation.

In the Administrative Council of Economic Defense’s report, according to Reuters, the institution questions the right of the six Brazilian banks to close accounts for crypto-related operations

“It does not seem reasonable for banks to apply a priori restrictive measures in a linear manner to all cryptocurrency companies, without analyzing the level of compliance and the anti-fraud measures adopted by each crypto exchange individually, which gives a treatment of illegality per se to the activity of crypto trading,” stated the Brazilian Administrative Council of Economic Defence in their report.

The war between banks and crypto trading companies continues in Brazil

The report also cites sources linked to banks that alleged that, in Brazil, there is currently no established cryptocurrency regulatory framework, nor guarantees for cryptocurrency exchanges to apply specific rules to prevent money laundering, for example. The banks point out in their defense that there are “illicit activities that should be avoided” and that “banks should take restrictive measures when there are indications of illegal practices.”

The conflict between Brazilian banks and crypto trading companies continues as, in the most recent case, Bradesco illegally closed the bank accounts of Braziliex cryptocurrency exchange.

With this new investigation, the war between the Brazilian banks and the crypto trading companies across Brazil could settle down.

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Crypto News

Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 Launched Yesterday To Address A DoS Vulnerability in the Previous Version

A new version of the Bitcoin Core client, the software that identifies valid blocks of the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain, went live yesterday night, as the Bitcoin Operations Technology Group (Optech) reported on Twitter.

The version of Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 corrects a denial of service (DoS) vulnerability, introduced in version 0.14.0, which had remained undetected until now, and which caused the fall of the Bitcoin Core client by trying to validate a block containing a transaction that attempted to use the same currencies for two different payments, known as a double-spending attack.

In a newsletter addressed to the Bitcoin (BTC) community, Optech explains that after submitting the update yesterday to be reviewed by prominent members of the community, the binary programs of version 0.16.3 were made available yesterday night. Optech recommends that the update should be done immediately.

The newly launched Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 addresses the DoS vulnerability of the previous version

A block containing a double-spending is not allowed by Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain, but the software error blocked the miner or the group of miners trying to validate the malicious block, instead of discarding the block. This progressive blocking effect would have disabled an essential section of the network, leading to a significant decrease in the Bitcoin (BTC) mining hashrate with all the consequent security risks that this entails.

Although a subdirectory of the Bitcoin section in Github describes in detail the procedure for upgrading to Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 and credits the developers Matt Corallo and Suhas Daftuar as responsible for introducing the code to remove the vulnerability, it is not clear who detected the error that could potentially have led to a few issues on Bitcoin (BTC) network.

Optech also reported this Tuesday that the previous version of Bitcoin Core 0.17 is also being updated to include the correction of the DoS vulnerability described above. The availability of Release Candidate 4 of Bitcoin Core 0.17, 0.17RC4, which contains the respective fixes, will soon be announced, says the Optech newsletter.

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Crypto News Tech

LBRY, The Decentralized Multimedia Content Marketplace, Launched LBRY Mobile for Android

The decentralized platform for content exchange LBRY launched its new application for Android, LBRY Mobile, in an “open beta” version. The announcement was made public through the LBRY website where it was also reported that the application is now available for download. LBRY explained in its statement that, as it is an “open beta” version, it is not a full product. In this first stage, the Android application will be able to synchronize only with the email notifications registered by the user, as well as with the status of their rewards on the platform.

Subsequently, they will implement synchronization with other features available in the desktop version, such as the cryptocurrency wallet, integration to ShapeShift, history, subscriptions, and publishing content among others.

Akinwale Ariwodola, LBRY’s lead mobile developer, said it was challenging to develop an application capable of leveraging the LBRY protocol without taxing the device’s resources. However, they managed to stay within the limits of storage and mobile processing speed. According to the release note, users participating in this test phase will be able to access the resources loaded on the platform and collaborate with developers in perfecting the LBRY Mobile application.

LBRY Mobile for Android launched in its “open beta” version

LBRY is an open source platform for the exchange of multimedia content, based on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. It has the dual purpose of offering access to music, electronic books, videos, among others, and at the same time enable content creators to market their digital pieces without intermediaries.

For some, this platform is in the group of decentralized projects for the publication and distribution of multimedia content, which competes with Youtube, such is the case of DTube or Props Project. However, most of these projects function as a social network that rewards creators according to the popularity of their content.

The LBRY website explains that they decided to launch the mobile application initially on the Android platform because it is a system of a more open nature. “We took every opportunity to support the development of open source, a greater user experience,” says the report.

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Crypto News

MyEtherWallet Launched MEW Connect Beta Version for iOS

MyEtherWallet, the most commonly used Ethereum (ETH) wallet, released a beta version of its MEW Connect application for iOS smartphones to increase the security of its customers when logging in. The new app, called MEW Connect, works similarly to a crypto portfolio but eliminates the need for MyEtherWallet (MEW) users to enter their private key to access their holdings.

To do this, the software is designed to function as a cold wallet, which stores the private keys of users and connects to MEW central servers through the reading of a QR code.

The MEW Connect proposal consists of offering MyEtherWallet users with a service to store their keys, in a similar way to the one that cold wallets such as Ledger and Trezor use. However, MEW Connect is free of charge, while the before-mentioned cold wallet solutions cost more than $100.

MEW Connect requires users to create a password for the application and then create an Ethereum (ETH) wallet and copy their private keys. Subsequently, it will be possible to connect MEW Connect to MyEtherWallet by reading the QR code to carry out transactions, which will have to be verified on the mobile device.

MEW Connect by MyEtherWallet launched as a Beta version for iOS

The application is already available for testing on devices running the iOS operating system and is expected to be available soon for Android. As the source codes for both applications will be released, developers hope to receive extensive reports and comments on the flaws and vulnerabilities that MEW Connect may present.

“I hope that users of the beta version are developers who can use our code. I really believe in open source, and we are not planning to hide anything,” stated Kosala Hemachandra, the founder of MyEtherWallet.

To ensure meaningful feedback, MyEtherWallet is implementing a reward program for bugs finding in cooperation with the HackerOne organization which is made up of white hat hackers and security researchers. However, interested independent programmers may also agree to test the application on their own.

In February of this year, the MyEtherWallet team suddenly split when its co-founder, Taylor Monahan, decided to undertake a separate project he called MyCrypto. That is an Ethereum (ETH) client, similar to MEW, but with variations on its roadmap that Monahan considered vitally important.

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Crypto News Tech

Cloudflare Launched A Protocol For Decentralized Websites on InterPlanetary File System

The Internet security company Cloudflare launched a new product to facilitate file storage and navigation on a distributed network. It is a “gateway” to the content of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized storage protocol created in 2014 that aims to change the way we relate to Internet content.

The launch was announced as part of “Crypto Week,” prepared by Cloudflare to underpin a series of new “technologies that use cryptography to improve the Internet.” According to a blog post on the company’s website, Cloudflare will make a new announcement on every day of this week, starting with this Monday, September 17th.

The new “gateway” will not require installing or running specialized software for its use, as is usually necessary to access IPFS. Since many companies that develop smart contracts store their external data in this network, Cloudflare aspires that this tool becomes a platform for the creation of reliable web applications whose contents cannot be censored by governments, companies or other organizations.

Cloudflare launched a ‘gateway’ protocol to decentralized websites on IPFS

The InterPlanetary File System, IPFS, is an open-source project that is built as a distributed architecture, allowing file sharing through a peer-to-peer method, where files are distributed to thousands of computers or nodes across the global network. That makes it difficult for content to be accidentally deleted or lost because it is not centralized in one place. It also eliminates reliance on third-party servers to host content.

As for the functionality of the “gateway” the firm pointed out that accessing the billions of files stored in IPFS, is not the only thing that can be done with this tool.

“With the Cloudflare ‘gateway,’ you can also create a website hosted entirely on IPFS, but still available to your users with a custom domain name. Also, we will issue a free SSL certificate for any site connected to our gateway, ensuring that every website linked to the Cloudflare ‘gateway’ is safe from intrusion and tampering,” said Cloudflare team.

The company pointed out that it is evaluating other distributed ledger technologies as interesting as IPFS, which could benefit from Cloudflare’s new linking tool.

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