Cryptocurrency
Listen to the latest financial news, audio updates, rates and market movements for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Binance and other crypto and digital coin virtual currencies and exchanges, aired on leading talk radio shows and premium podcasts.
Ethereum Daily
The Study On Deactivating SELFDESTRUCT Opcode
"Security firm the dub shared findings from a study on the impact of EIP four 7 5 8 and EAP 6 7 8 zero, which are proposals to remove the self destruct opcode from Ethereum, both proposals seek to remove self destruct, however EAP 6 7 8 zero makes an exception for contracts that are created and destroyed in the same transaction. The study found that EAP four 7 5 8 would break contracts for seller network gelato network and axillary network among other protocols. The dev found that compared to EAP four 7 5 8 EIP 6 7 8 zero greatly reduces the impact of self destruct changes, developers agreed to move forward with EAP 6 7 8 zero for the dancu upgrade, developers seek to remove the self destruct opcode in preparation for future compatibility with vocal trees. The opcode was first introduced in the 2019 Constantinople hard fork.
Bitcoin Audible
The Basics of Key Management
"We haven't done a Basics episode in a while. I've had a couple of people ask me some questions that made me realize something that I was a little... that we haven't come back to with the Basics is just kind of the really simple, really practical, what the hell do I do with my keys? So we went into an entire episode on what our keys are and hardware, wallets, and all of that good stuff. And I will tell you straight off the bat, you need a hardware wallet if you have any meaningful savings. If you're just tinkering, that's fine. Don't give yourself a homework assignment and, you know, have to invest all this money and stuff into it if you're just playing around. But it's very easy to get sucked in and it's very easy for playing around to become a meaningful amount of money in Bitcoin. In fact, a good example actually was I was playing around with the Bitkit wallet, which is one that I'm a big fan of and I'm really looking forward to its future. And Synonym and John Carvalho and their team over there have built a really amazing and really intuitive product. But I was just testing a bunch of stuff out. So when I moved some Bitcoin to it, it was always intended to just be kind of a throwaway wallet. And I actually at some point took a screenshot of my backup seed and put it in the Discord chat with everyone in Synonym because we were we were trying to work something out. I can't remember what it was, some weird little quirk with the interface or whether it was showing addresses or something like that. I don't remember. It wasn't that big of a deal. But because I was thinking of the wallet so cheaply as just like throwaway, I did that. But what's funny is I, you know, was testing all out. So I added a bunch of contacts and, you know, I started making messages with people and, you know, all these things. And I started trying out a bunch of different widgets. And it got to the point where I'd kind of forgotten that I had done that. And then I just moved a little bit of Bitcoin to move a little bit more Bitcoin to it and eventually ended up with like eight hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin on it. And my seed is sitting in a screenshot in a Discord room that I don't know if 30 people or I have no idea how many people are in that Discord chat could see and just and so many multiple people may have just out of trying to help me put it in their wallets. So I was just totally exposed. I was just like putting cash in other people's pockets. Nobody stole it from me or anything. And I just woke up one morning and it hit me and I was like, oh my God, I'm an idiot. And I withdrew it back to my nunchuck. But just a easy little story to explain that you need to be careful with your keys and you need to have basic practice on how you're going to back things up. You need to know how you're going to be treating your wallet going
CoinDesk Podcast Network
Sam Altman's Crypto Project Worldcoin Raises $115M
"We love talking about WorldCoin. It's really surging into the headlines in recent weeks, largely around the hype and interest relating to artificial intelligence, AI. Now, word of this raise had been leaked a little bit. According to sources, this is going to be in the works and enough. Today, they announced that they've raised $115 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital and involving A16Z, Bain, Capital Crypto and others. Let's talk about WorldCoin. I think this is less a bet on the value of another coin and more a bet on the importance of systems that may counteract the rise of AI. That's very much a big part of what is being announced here by Blockchain Capital in a post written by Spencer Bogart. He talks about this proof of personhood concept as being the real secret sauce behind this project as the AI rises up. I'm going to toss this one straight to Jen for her initial thoughts. WorldCoin certainly been in the news quite a bit of late. What do you make of its most recent back end? $115 million. This is crazy. I feel like we haven't spoken about a raise this big. In at least a year, maybe we have all the days just kind of blend together for me. But Zach, you're right. I think about two weeks ago, we spoke about this new product that they launched that offered up a solution for authenticating humans in the age of AI through this biometric retina scanning orb. I think it's really interesting how they've been able to pull their narrative together. Now they're offering a solution to an issue that we've been discussing as AI accelerates faster and faster. They also have this crypto wallet that's part of their product that's supposed to be this really stripped down, much simpler way to hold your coins and store your assets. I think that they've developed a really interesting narrative, especially given what's going on in the news right now with wallets and AI. They have some big backers here. They have A16Z. I think I saw Bank Capital there. I think that they probably were able to craft a really compelling story, get that in front of VCs and raise this money. I think it's a strong and good bet for VCs who are waiting out the bear
Unchained
Why Everyone Is Talking About EigenLayer
"Sriram, it's great to have you. For those of you who don't know, Sriram is a longtime professor at UW, at the University of Washington. And he's also a crypto founder, founder of one of the hottest new projects called Eigenlayer. Full disclosure, I think Robot Ventures, you guys are investors in Eigenlayer, Dragonfly is not, but Eigenlayer right now is kind of the talk of the town. Everybody is talking about Eigenlayer to the point where you even got shouted out by Vitalik yesterday. So first question, moving from academia into being now like a full -on crypto founder, center of attention, in the center of the maelstrom, how has that been for you transitioning from the academic world to the crypto world? It's been out of craziness. I think nothing I could have done would have prepared me for this. It is, I think, one thing to be a startup founder, where you're basically off in your quiet startup trying to go build your thing. It's a completely different thing to be a founder of a crypto project, which is much more community -driven. Start to interact with a lot more people much early on. In fact, so much so that that is critical or essential to the success of the project even before you build anything. So I learned these lessons through doing a project where it was only technology -focused four years back when Haseeb knows the story with a couple of other professors. And when the feeling was exactly the opposite, it was pretty much similar to my professor life where we were just inventing new protocols, algorithms, and making them work. And I think this is a very different experience.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
Josh and Jesse Berger Talk All Things PKT
"These two gentlemen that are here today have been fighting to get on there and get some visibility for a year now. I met you both gentlemen last year walking around. And I have with me Josh Berger and Jesse Berger. The Berger Brothers. The Berger Brothers. Is there another one? There is a third Berger. There's a third Berger. I saw him on the emails. Who's that one? He's the younger Berger Brother. You don't take him with you? He's got a kid, so we got to, you know, he needs a babysit, you know. Got to babysit. That's funny. We need someone to keep the train on the tracks while we're out here in the trenches hustling and spreading the gospel of packet. That's it. That's what we're here for today is talk about packet and it's spelled PKT. That's correct. But it was interesting is last year I ran into you. We were talking over at a lounge and it was so exciting because at Consensus of 2022 had like 20 ,000 people. It was just amazing to be able to run into everyone. And there's so many people here today. We have more room here to mingle and walk around, but you've come such a long way in a year with this product, with this amazing, what would you call it? A portal Wi -Fi. How are you packaging packet? Yeah, so it's a mesh Wi -Fi technology and there's really two key parts to this. There's the baseline protocol, the blockchain, which is called packet and it's an ecosystem fully decentralized. There's no foundation. There's no company. There's no investors. It's like the true decentralized type protocol, similar to Bitcoin. It's code on GitHub. Anybody could download it for free and make essentially money off of your internet. And then within that ecosystem, a company that Josh and I and Jeremy founded, as well as our other co -founder, Caleb James Delisle, who's one of the original protocol creators and lead dev, started PacketPal. And PacketPal, the whole premise was building software and hardware to make it really easy for people to participate in the packet ecosystem.
Bitcoin Audible
Paying With Bitcoin Just Got Easier With Ark
"Arc. I'm excited to publicly announce Arc, a second layer protocol for making cheap, anonymous, off -chain Bitcoin payments by Burak. Arc allows recipients to receive payments without acquiring inbound liquidity while preserving their receiver privacy. The protocol is as private as Wobby Sobby, as convenient as on -chain and as cheap as Lightning. Before getting into details, let's talk a bit about my story. As someone who initially started on the big blockers side of the camp, you can imagine I've been a big critic of Lightning myself. I have always had severe objections toward Lightning centered around inbound liquidity, async receiving and on -chain footprint. Over time, the more I dig deeper into Lightning, the more I realize some of my objections are kind of addressable in the long term. For example, PTLCs solve the async receiving and proof of payment at the same time, and the shared UTXO model partially addresses the footprint issue. However, unfortunately, I couldn't find a cure for the inbound liquidity issue. Inbound liquidity also felt like a bug to me. It always felt like it simply should not exist. The entirety of it just doesn't feel right. Imagine doing a simple market survey before designing a Lightning. Hey, would you use a payment system that requires you to run a server 24 hours that works only if you acquire liquidity in the first place? Do you realize what kind of user experience assumption this is? The ideal end user experience just has to be frictionless. If something works 95 % of the time, it's not considered working. Users should be able to simply push a magic button to receive SATs and another button to send
The Breakdown
Binance Accused of Co-Mingling Customer Funds With Company Revenue
"Hello friends. Well, this morning as I was prepping the show, news broke from Reuters. Walter Bloomberg on Twitter said, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance co -mingled customer funds with company revenue in 2020 and 2021. In breach of U .S. financial rules that require customer money to be keep separate, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. So let's go through this, let's try to get a sense of how serious this is, let's see if there is another Sam -type situation on our hands. First, let's talk the accusation. Well, it's pretty much right there in the headline, Binance co -mingling customer funds with company revenue in 2020 and 2021, the sourcing, three sources familiar with the matter and Reuters, but let's try to get a few more details. From the Reuters piece, quote, one of the sources, a person with direct knowledge of Binance Group's finances, said the sums ran into billions of dollars and co -mingling happened almost daily in accounts the exchange held at U .S. lender Silvergate Bank. Reuters couldn't independently verify the figures or the frequency, but the news agency reviewed a bank record showing that on February 10th, 2021, Binance mixed $20 million from a corporate account with $15 million from an account that received customer money. Reuters found no evidence that Binance client monies were lost or taken. So there's a bunch that's important here. One is that Reuters couldn't verify the figures in total and that they really only had this one particular bank record showing a mixing. Now, what did Binance say? Well, in a statement to Reuters, they obviously denied this. Spokesperson Brad Jaff said, these accounts were not used to accept user deposits. They were used to facilitate user purchases. There was no co -mingling at any time because these are 100 % corporate accounts. Reuters goes on.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
FTX CEO's Legal Billings Hint at Comeback for the Exchange
"It wouldn't be a Taco Tuesday without referencing some insanity regarding FTX. FTX's CEO's legal billings continue to hint at 2 .0 and now we've got something from the New York Times and I've actually got a hot take about this. Oh, I get to do the hot take first? Okay. So my hot take is that I actually think, and again, you guys are not financial guys, I think that the reboot of FTX is going to actually be a good thing. FTX really had a lot of great products and services that were available. However, they had absolute trash management. And I think if a mature responsible adult can actually take the money and be transparent, not use customer funds for weird things, then I think that the platform does have some sort of chance to do well. That sounds like creditor talk. It does not sound like it. No, I'm actually, I am an FTX US creditor, but I'm being serious. They really had great products and services. And one thing that Sam did well was he was able to communicate to his audience and pull or integrate things that they wanted, which was good. However, they just were scammers behind the scenes. So it sucks. So I don't know, maybe there will be some sort of good that comes out of this. Either way, I'm probably not going to touch it. And I'm not going to tell my audience about it. Did the things work though, Wendy? I mean, we don't have FTX here in Canada, but I heard they didn't really work all that well. They did. They did. Okay. A lot of users really like the interface. Like the UI on FTX was like pretty slick, et cetera. I don't think it's really going to happen. I mean, I think he's exploring all avenues, right? Because JJ Ray, the third, his mandate is to give as much money back to creditors as possible. And if this is a possibility for doing so, then sure, put some billable hours on there and indicate that you're at least thinking about it. Whether or not this will actually happen, I guess I'm a little bit less optimistic on this ever coming to pass, but this is the man's job. He's out there to make sure that people can get their money back to the best of his ability. And I think the fact that he's considering this is interesting. Maybe it's a bit little outside the box thinking, but bringing this back in some form may ultimately bring revenue in the door that could make creditors whole. So credit's in for thinking it, but I don't, I don't see it happening.
Bitcoin Audible
Mint the Future With Taproot Assets by Ryan Gentry
"Let's get into today's read. And it's titled. Mint the Future with Taproot Assets version 0 .2 by Ryan Gentry. Today we are excited to announce the latest release of the Taproot Assets protocol daemon, formally Taro. Taproot Assets version 0 .2 provides the core set of features for developers looking to issue, send, receive and discover assets on the bitcoin blockchain, currently on testnet with mainnet support coming soon. We first released the Taproot Assets draft specification a year ago and continue to be grateful for the reception from the amazing bitcoin developer community. Bitcoin developers, we appreciate your continued support as we bitcoinize the dollar and bring multi -asset support to the lightning network. This core set of developer features consist of these flagship items. Sending and receiving with novel virtual partially signed bitcoin transactions or VPSBTs. Discovering and publishing assets with the initial universe APIs. Maximum chain space efficiency with multi -asset mints, sends and receives. Stability and scalability improvements. Now that the release is available for download, we will propose the finalized Taproot Assets spec to the community as a formal series of VIPs. Merge Taproot channels, publish a blip describing added interaction for lightning functionality and finally launch the first testnet Taproot Assets payment channels on lightning. We are incredibly excited to release these new lightning capabilities to the developer community as a new tool to bring bitcoin to the
HASHR8
Making Sense of Texas Bitcoin Bills With Lee Bratcher
"Let's start off with the proof of reserve thing since that was today. You had a great video that just came out on Twitter. Texas, this House bill 1666, for those who are listening, essentially sets up a standard for how proof of reserve should work for exchanges in Texas. That's right. Yeah, it is a bill that would require exchanges to provide these attestations to the Texas Department of Banking in order to maintain their money transmission license. It's not a perfect solution. Anybody that's deep in the weeds on proof of reserves and liabilities will tell you that it is a tool in the tool belt of regulators and for added transparency. But we still need other frameworks to prevent widespread fraud. But this is sort of an industry -derived best practice to get that kind of transparency that we need to prevent those kinds of collapses like we saw nine months ago. I'm going to spit some questions at you that are completely ignorant and uneducated, but you have to deal with that because you're here. Tell me a little bit about why it matters for just a state to do this because these exchanges are international. We can't even get them to abide by U .S. law, so how can we expect them to abide by Texas law? Is this only for Texas -based companies, like an unchained capital, or is this going to be for even a Binance that has to integrate into this if they want to operate in Texas? That is a great question. So it does apply to all exchanges that do business in Texas. So what we think, Texas is such a large market, we think will happen is these exchanges are going to have to comply because they can't leave the Texas market, right? It's a huge digital asset market. They all want to be here. They all want money transmission licenses. So if they are, if that is true, then they're complying for the state of Texas and therefore their compliance costs for the other states goes to negligible. So if they're already spending the money to comply for Texas, then why would they not comply for the other 49
Ethereum Daily
Tornado Cash Suffers Governance Attack
"A medium urgency client update. All this and more from eth daily starts right now. Tornado cash suffered a catastrophic governance attack over the weekend, allowing an attacker to take full control of the tornado cash Dell as a result locked votes the tornado treasury tornado cash eth and tornado cash nova are compromised. Users of tornado cache nova, which is an implementation of tornado cash on noses chain are urged to withdraw funds as soon as possible. Tornado cash classic pools are currently unaffected, according to block sack and attacker convinced tornado governance into approving a seemingly ordinary proposal contract and used a trick and create and create two to create a contract with the same address, but with different bytecode, the attacker then self destructed the initial proposal and deployed a new malicious contract using the same address. The tornado cache attacker later submitted a new governance proposal seeking to restore the state of tornado cash governance when the tornado cash attacker deployed the malicious contract they granted themselves 1.2 million tornado tokens effectively gaining full control over the Dell. The new proposal seeks to burn the 1.2 million tokens. Tornado token
CoinDesk Podcast Network
Tornado Cash Attacker Submits Proposal to Undo Attack
"Kind of got an odd one to start the day off with Wendy O, what's going on with tornado cash? This one's kind of crazy. So apparently, yesterday, there was an attacker that took over tornado cashed out with vote fraud. The token apparently dumped 40%, but the attacker offered to undo the attack, which is all very interesting considering what's happened with tornado cash. So the latest update, the attacker submitted a proposal that would undo the changes to the Dow if the proposal passes the malicious code that the attacker integrated into the protocol will be removed and the governance of tornado caches down will go back to token holders, voting closes May 26th and apparently torn was up 10% on this news. It was really bizarre that this happened on a Sunday, but I feel like a lot of the crypto news is starting to come out on Sundays from what we've seen this last year. Will you're a little bit more technical than I am. Do you want to talk about this a bit? I mean, it kind of seems like I should put my tinfoil crown on. I don't know though. Anything with tornado cash, you definitely should. An interesting problem for tornado cash started going back two or three years to their torn token, which they launched to kind of be like all the other products out there to have a Dow to be a DeFi protocol that has some sort of governance scheme, it was a very hot topic. Also give some liquidity for early people who invested in tournament cash protocol and wanted to get some money for what they built. Unfortunately, for a product for their cash, a token really didn't make sense because of the privacy implications. And now we're seeing even further issues where it seems the governance wasn't set up correctly. There were some bugs involved with it. And someone was able to exploit the underlying code to mint themselves a bunch of new tokens and then take over the entire governance scheme. They essentially meant to themselves so many tokens that the only vote that mattered was their votes. Now we're seeing something that I don't think many people thought would occur and that is that the person now in control of governance might undo everything they did. And just sort of show that this was a white hack or maybe a gray hack, a torn token has been down on the news, but it has been back up since by about 10% since the news about the possible reconfiguration and governance has been going through.
The Breakdown
Biden Defaulting on the Debt to Own the Crypto Bros?
"Well Friends the president has gone and again made the debt ceiling political for the crypto crowd. And so today we are diverting temporarily from our normal Bitcoin and crypto industry coverage to move into the most significant market issue right now, which is the debt ceiling debate. This will serve as a bit of a primer. I will avoid the temptation to get political with it, as always, and we'll just try to understand exactly where we are going into this critical week. Right now, the debt ceiling is currently at nearly $31.4 trillion, with around 24.6 trillion held as bonds by investors, private institutions, and other market actors. The U.S. debt is the largest of any nation state, exceeding the amount currently outstanding for the next four countries combined. In mid January, the limit of borrowing was reached, leading the US Treasury to begin what's known as extraordinary measures to stretch the remaining cash a little further. These measures trim budget expenditure around the edges by deferring time and sensitive spending, such as making contributions into government worker savings plans, and topping up the assets held in the exchange stabilization fund. Earlier this month, treasury secretary Janet Yellen announced that despite these measures, the treasury looked set to run out of cash by the beginning of next month, leaving officials precious little time to sort out a deal. The negotiations had been ongoing for the better part of the last few weeks, although heading into the weekend the tone had soured. Earlier last week, both President Biden and House Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy, who is heading up negotiations for the GOP, expressed optimism that a deal could be close. And yet as the weekend rolled around, no deal was there to be had. Now part of the reason is that the two parties are very far apart in terms of what they want. The GOP are asking for significant budget cuts. In particular, they're looking for cuts across social spending by ramping up work requirements for government aid, as well as kneecapping flagship democratic policies like clean energy incentives with the inflation reduction act, and additional funding for the IRS. Last month, Republicans passed a House bill which would suspend the debt ceiling until March of next year, but the bill contains such deep spending cuts that it was viewed as a nonstarter for Senate Democrats to consider.