Blockchain & Cryptocurrency Security Blog

Regulatory and Legislative Analysis – NAM (United States & Canada) SEC freezes assets and charges 18 Utah defendants in $50M fraud On August 3, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) secured a temporary asset freeze and restraining order against Digital Licensing Inc. (also known as “DEBT Box”) and its principals. The agency’s complaint alleges…

Technology Recap: Bitcoin: Arkham Intelligence notes that an unknown address that accumulated more than ~$3B worth of Bitcoin in the last 3 months, making them the 3rd largest Bitcoin wallet, belongs to Robinhood Markets Inc..  Matt Morehouse posted to the Lightning Dev mailing list the summary of a vulnerability that was recently disclosed and is now addressed. The…

Technology Recap: Bitcoin: Peter Todd posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list a recommendation to add a user-chosen expiration date to addresses for silent payments.  Dan Gould posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list a draft BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) for serverless payjoin.  Wasabi Wallet v2.0.4 was released which adds features for fee bumping via RBF (Replace-by-Fee) or CPFP (Child-pays-for-Parent). In addition, they have also…

In the summer of 2023, the 13th District Texas Court of Appeals made its final ruling on a case (Ahlgren III v. Ahlgren Jr.), wherein Pamela Clegg, an expert witness from Ciphertrace, a Mastercard company, set another precedent demonstrating the role of blockchain analytics in the North American legal system. By assisting the court in…

Regulatory and Legislative Analysis – GLOBAL BIS claims there could be over 20 active CBDCs by 2030 A July 2023 paper published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), reveals that 93% of central banks worldwide are actively researching central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The survey conducted by BIS predicts that by 2030, there could…

Technology Recap: Bitcoin: The LDK team announced LDK Node v0.1.0. This is a Lightning node Rust library that uses the LDK and BDK libraries to enable developers to quickly setup a self-custodial Lightning node and wallet.  Payjoin Dev Kit (PDK) was announced as a Rust library that implements BIP-78 for use in wallets and services that aim to…

Technology Recap: Bitcoin: Updates have been made to the BIP-329 specification which highlights a wallet label export format with a new optional spendable tag. This aims to indicate to the wallet and user whether the associated output should be spendable. This builds off of existing coin control features that are inherent in many wallet software implementations.  Ethereum: This…

Regulatory and Legislative Analysis – GLOBAL Basel Committee on Banking Supervision publishes guidelines for cryptoassets treatment The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published its guidelines for the prudential treatment of cryptoassets exposures.  The standard outlines minimum regulatory, supervisory review and disclosure requirements of banks’ cryptoasset exposures under Pillars 1, 2 and 3 of the Basel…

Technology Recap: Bitcoin: Greg Sanders posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list a description for how the proposed v3 transaction relay rules could potentially allow one to create a coinjoin-style multi-party transaction that would not be vulnerable to transaction pinning. Lightning Labs shares a detailed post on how Lightning channels work and how nodes interact with Hash Time Locked…

Technology Recap: Bitcoin: Binance is working to integrate the Lightning Network for deposits and withdrawals.  Thomas Voegtlin posted to the Lightning Dev mailing list suggesting BOLT11 invoices be extended to optionally allow a receiver to request two separate payments from a spender. Each payment would have a separate secret and amount. BTC Warp is introduced which uses zk-SNARKs to…