Binance froze 137 ETH stolen from the Upbit exchange
Binance stopped an attempt by hackers who hacked the Upbit exchange to launder the stolen ETH and froze them. Changpeng Zhao announced that 137 ETH will be returned to Upbit.
On Wednesday, May 13, around 7 p.m. Moscow time, Whale Alert tweeted that 137 ETH, equivalent to $ 27,000 at the current rate, had been transferred to Binance from an address linked to hackers who hacked Upbit last year.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao soon tweeted that the coins transferred by the hackers were frozen and would soon be returned to Upbit. A little over half an hour passed between the transfer of ETH to the exchange and their freezing.
Wallet addresses associated with hacking of cryptocurrency exchanges and other sites receive a special mark, and exchanges usually freeze any assets coming from these addresses. In January 2019, Binance froze funds related to the Cryptopia exchange hack.
Over the past 24 hours, the criminals who hacked Upbit have moved 3,650 ETH between wallets in order to cover their tracks and prepare coins for withdrawal through exchanges. A report from Uppsala earlier this year noted that hackers may have already laundered the equivalent of $ 3.2 million in ETH by withdrawing small amounts from exchanges to avoid raising suspicion.
It's unclear what the hackers' motive was for sending the last batch of ETH to Binance. This is a small amount, considering that in November last year, attackers managed to steal $ 49 million worth of cryptocurrencies. It can be assumed that the hackers checked the exchange's response time to see if large amounts could be withdrawn on the spot.
Last week, the Whale Alert service reported that the ethers stolen from the Upbit exchange were back in motion - hackers moved 1,897 ETH to an unknown address. In total, 342,000 ETH were stolen from the Upbit exchange, while 55,000 ETH were moved to an unknown address a week after the hack.
Asian traders are actively investing in Tether
In the expert environment, many analysts have already paid attention to the sharp increase in the capitalization of stablecoins.
According to the latest data, this figure is more than $ 10 billion, with the lion's share of the market value of such assets accounted for by the Tether coin (USDT).
Researchers from the CoinMetrics team linked the growth in capitalization of digital currencies backed by fiat money to the activation of Asian traders. Players mainly use USDT to penetrate the crypto sphere. First of all, this concerns Chinese investors.
Now the most popular in Asia is the USDT-ETH pair, the scale of trading of which is also increasing in Europe.
Analysts found that at the end of April, Ethereum and Tether trade peaked during the Asian and European markets. A flurry of activity was marked by the close of Asian markets.
The second largest investment in Asia after Tether is another stablecoin, USDC (also backed by fiat money). However, in comparison with the largest stablecoin, the scale of use of this asset is much lower, and they are unlikely to be able to exceed the volume of investments in Tether, experts say.
MakerDAO Stops DAI Stablecoin Based on Unified Collateral
The MakerDAO community has stopped the Single-Collateral DAI (Sai) algorithmic stablecoin system as part of a full transition to Multi-collateral DAI (MCD or Dai), writes The Block.
MCD was launched in November 2019 as an update to the Dai protocol. Sai was backed by Ethereum (ETH) only, while MCD is backed by several types of assets - currently ETH, Basic Attention Token (BAT) and USDC. In addition, along with MCD, the Dai Savings Rate system was launched, which allows users to earn interest on their stablecoin assets.
The closure of Sai was one of the planned milestones for the MakerDAO protocol. The mid-March market crash highlighted Sai's severe liquidity problems and pushed community members to speed up the transition.
On March 30, the Maker Foundation launched a vote to initiate the Sai shutdown. Following approval, a transition period was organized from April 24 to May 12, during which users could transfer their secured debt positions (CDP) to MCD. The conversion could also have been done by transferring Sai to third-party platforms such as Uniswap.
The Sai system was officially shut down on Monday and all remaining tokens were converted to ETH at the market rate. Users who have not completed the Sai transfer on time can use the migration portal to retrieve their assets.
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