Blockchain & CryptoCurrency Security Blog by CipherTrace

As of November 10 2022, 1.9 million FTT (FTX’s token) was put back into FTX. Reports in the market last week suggested that that a large portion of the balance sheet of Alameda – sister company of FTX – had a high concentration of FTT, which it may have decided to address, although Alameda disputed…

Dave Jevans, Executive Vice President, CipherTrace, a Mastercard company, speaks to FinextraTV at Sibos 2022 to recognize how financial institutions can identify their crypto exposure with on- and off-chain data, the importance of a crypto network and how financial institutions can instil trust in the crypto ecosystem for their businesses and customers.

Regulatory and Legislative Analysis – Global The Bank for International Settlement (BIS) publishes a report on project mBridge, which experiments with cross-border payments using a common platform based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) upon which multiple central banks can issue and exchange their respective central bank digital currencies (multi-CBDCs).  The report was developed by BIS,…

Criminals go where the money is, so it’s no surprise that with the rise of bitcoin and other virtual assets, crypto scams are on the rise too. And because crypto is so new to so many users, it may be even more difficult for people to identify and avoid potential fraud. This dynamic resulted in reported…

Technology Recap: Bitcoin: A fix for btcd’s wire parsing library was pushed to help fix the issue affecting a large number of Lightning network nodes. The fix was packaged into a hotfix release for LND.  River Financial announces RLS: River Lightning Services. RLS is a Lightning gateway for developers to enable Lightning network deposits and withdrawals utilizing a simple API without running any…

Technology Recap: Bitcoin: Lightning Labs announces the initial code for Taro, a new protocol to issue and transfer assets on the Bitcoin and Lightning network.  Core developer, Gloria Zhao, posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list a proposal to allow transactions to opt-in to a modified set of transaction relay policies. This would aid both layer-2 and contract-based protocols.  Bitcoin…

The cryptocurrency world endured a turbulent spring in 2022. Markets were highly unpredictable, and by July the market capitalization had shed over 50 percent of its value since the start of 2021. Virtual asset prices also took a substantial hit. In CipherTrace’s latest Cryptocurrency Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Report, we look back at those volatile…

Regulatory and Legislative Analysis – United States Various reports issued in response to the March 2022 Executive Order of responsible development of digital assets on September 16th (various links within text) US Department of Treasury issued Action plan to address illicit financing risks of digital assets. This report discussed threats (i.e., money laundering and terrorist…

Technology Recap: Bitcoin: Suhas Daftuar releases a PR that aims to reduce the bandwidth needed during initial header syncs when a block is found. This will improve synchronization of the blockchain with peers during the Initial Block Download (IBD) and more.  Lightning Dev Kit, LDK, has published v0.0.111 which includes support for relaying onion messages! Onion messages are messages…

Most people that have at least some exposure to the crypto ecosystem know that something is happening with Ethereum. That something is called the Merge, and it will fundamentally shift the way this blockchain and network operates. Today, a participant in the Ethereum network that processes, validates, and confirms transactions is called a miner. As…