Crypto firms are cooking up ways to become “Travel Rule” compliant, Satoshi’s stash got a little bigger and one of Ethereum Classic’s top supporters is walking away from the project.
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Top shelf
Travel Rule
BitGo, Coinbase and other top exchanges are expected to release a white paper next month detailing a type of “bulletin board” meant to help exchanges comply with the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) “Travel Rule.” Participants would share addresses on the board and, if another member claims an address, the two entities could then share data P2P to keep personal information out of the reach of hackers. Gemini, Kraken, and Bittrex may also be participating in the Travel Rule working group, according to The Block. Separately, blockchain security firm CoolBitX and on-chain analytics company Elliptic are working together on another “Travel Rule” solution.
Satoshi’s Billions
Whale Alert found on-chain evidence that Bitcoin’s creator mined approximately 1,125,150 BTC (~$10.9 billion) as the network was getting off the ground. This is up from the 1 million BTC Sergio Demian Lerner initially attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto in 2013, by examining the “extra nonce” patterns thought to be caused by Nakamoto’s mining rig. In a Medium post, researchers describe how Satoshi continued mining with the same rig until at least May 2010, capturing 22,503 of the first 54,316 block rewards.
FYI
YFI, the governance token for Yearn.Finance, is the latest DeFi project to capture the attention of yield farmers. The token’s creator Andre Cronje hasn’t set aside any of the tokens for himself and called it “a completely valueless 0 supply token,” in a Medium post. That all tokens are set aside for liquidity providers may have influenced a price run up to $2,374, though the project’s name (an unflattering acronym) and what appears to be a backdoor that could allow Cronje to print an infinite amount of YFI, have raised eyebrows. As of 13:00 UTC today, the price has collapsed to $821.07.
Hard Fork Away
One of Ethereum Classic’s largest power providers has voted to abandon the project after an upcoming hard fork. OpenEthereum is the latest client to walk, citing concerns with the blockchain’s immutability, according to a GitHub vote Thursday. Of the 615 current Ethereum Classic nodes listed by ETC Nodes, 425 won’t update in the future as developers make changes via hard forks. OpenEthereum has chosen to shut down support for the original Ethereum mainnet to conserve developer energy for its Ethereum client, formerly known as Parity-Ethereum.
Real-Time Alerts
CipherTrace, a blockchain analytics software firm, has deployed a predictive risk-scoring system that the company says provides real-time alerts…
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