With a market capitalization of $660 billion as of this writing, bitcoin is not only the first and oldest cryptocurrency, it’s the largest store of value – fully 53% of the total value of all cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. And bitcoin true believers are notorious for holding onto their BTC for the long term. In April the percentage of BTC that had not moved in 2 years hit an all-time high of 53%, and almost 29% of all bitcoin in circulation hadn’t moved in 5 years ($150 billion of market cap at the time). In fact, it’s a notable event when a very old BTC address sends funds for the…
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On Eve of SBF Trial, Stolen FTX Funds On the Move
FTX hacker transfers funds for first time since weeks after the November 2022 exploit
As Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced founder of crypto exchange FTX, sits in a jail cell in Brooklyn’s notorious Metropolitan Detention Center awaiting the start of his trial on Tuesday for seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, funds that were stolen from FTX in a hack hours after the firm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last November have moved for the first time in more than 9 months. Not only was the FTX collapse already one of the most stunning debacles in the long history of financial disasters, the siphoning of $600 million in funds from the company’s crypto wallets added insult to injury and led to speculation that company insiders were absconding…
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Could Quantum Computing Mean the Death of Crypto?
Interest is growing in cryptography resilient to quantum attacks
Contained in the bizarre world of quantum mechanics—where physical matter has properties of both particles and waves, and subatomic particles exist in multiple states at one time until observed—may lie the key to unparalleled computational speed. While still highly experimental, governments have been investing in research into “quantum computing” for years, and a recent article in Wired notes that last year venture capitalists “plowed a record $1.8 billion into companies working on quantum computing hardware or software worldwide…nearly five times the amount invested in 2019.” Whereas the basic unit of information in traditional digital electronics is the bit (a logical state with two possible values, typically expressed as 0 and…
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Multi-year effort to improve Bitcoin-to-DeFi bridging crosses Threshold
Network announces redemptions for tBTC
Threshold Network announced this week that it has completed a multi-year effort to upgrade its Bitcoin-to-DeFi bridge tBTC from its original structure and security model launched in 2020. Specifically, the protocol added redemption capability – that is, the ability for customers to not only put their bitcoin in escrow and mint tBTC (an ERC-20 token) but also reverse the process and “unmint” back to BTC. This is the latest in a string of Threshold announcements beginning in January with tBTC minting, an integration with interoperability protocol Wormhole in May and four subsequent partner launch announcements, three involving Ethereum “Layer 2” (L2) scaling juggernauts Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism. The reason given…
