In advanced economies, cryptocurrencies are viewed by many in the financial world with suspicion -- the domain of zealous "crypto bros" and a speculative and highly volatile fad that can only end badly. Regulators in Europe and the US have issued stark warnings about the dangers of trading crypto. But in the developing world, there are signs that crypto is quietly building deeper roots. Especially in countries which have a history of financial instability or where the barriers to accessing traditional financial products such as bank accounts are high, cryptocurrency use is fast becoming a fact of daily life. Financial Times: "While everyone was paying attention to [Tesla chief executive] Elon Musk's tweets, and which institutional investor or CEO was saying what they thought about bitcoin, there was this entire story unravelling in emerging markets around the world that's really powerful," says Kim Grauer, director of research at Chainalysis, a leading data company in the sector. "There's a massive crypto footprint in many of these countries ... [and] a massive amount of entrepreneurial opportunity." Chainalysis ranks Vietnam first for crypto adoption worldwide -- one of 19 emerging and frontier markets in its top 20, with only the US among advanced economies making an appearance at number eight in 2021. "It's very striking this year, [adoption] is a story of emerging and frontier markets," adds Grauer. Separate data from UsefulTulips.org, tracking bitcoin transactions on the world's two biggest peer-to-peer crypto trading platforms, show that in the past few weeks, sub-Saharan Africa has overtaken North America to become the geographical region with the highest volume of this kind of crypto activity.

[...] Emerging markets are fertile ground for cryptocurrencies, often because their own are failing to do their job. As a store of value, as a means of exchange and as a unit of account, national currencies in some developing countries too often fall short. Unpredictable inflation and fast-moving exchange rates, clunky and expensive banking systems, financial restrictions and regulatory uncertainty, especially the existence or threat of capital controls, all undermine their appeal. Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, is a case in point. Its impatient, youthful population has to contend daily with high unemployment, the vagaries of black market currency exchanges and capital controls. As the price of oil, the country's main export, dropped during the pandemic and further squeezed dollar supply, many businesses were unable to pay foreign suppliers and lenders, almost leading to the default of a World Bank-backed power plant that provides a tenth of Nigeria's electricity. For individuals sending or receiving remittances or billing customers, the lack of dollars is a constant headache.

El Salvador bought roughly $20.9 million worth of bitcoin, one day before it formally adopts the world's most popular cryptocurrency as legal tender. From a report: In a series of tweets Monday, President Nayib Bukele revealed that the country had purchased a total of 400 bitcoin, the first step in a larger push to add the digital currency to its balance sheet. The tweets were posted a few hours apart. Based on the bitcoin price at the time of the tweets, the amount of the digital coin purchased totaled roughly $20.9 million. "Our brokers will be buying a lot more as the deadline approaches," he wrote. The price of bitcoin rose following the tweets and was trading at around $52,681.85 at 12:16 a.m. ET Tuesday. The posts came hours before El Salvador's bitcoin law, which was passed in June, took effect Tuesday. El Salvador is the first country to accept bitcoin as legal currency, which will work alongside the U.S. dollar. Proponents and critics around the world will be watching to see how this unprecedented experiment plays out.

This week the Guardian reported that a "tumultuous few weeks" awaits El Salvador as it prepares to become the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender on Tuesday. In August a research note by Bank of America enthused about the new law's ability to reduce the cost of cross-border transactions (remittances account for 20% of El Salvador's GDP), increase digital penetration in a country where 70% of people still do not use banks, and attract foreign investment as a first mover in cryptocurrency adoption. Since then, however, the verdict from international financial organisations — and El Salvadorans themselves — has turned decidedly pessimistic. "The law was adopted extremely quickly, without a technical study or a public debate," says Ricardo Castañeda, a local economist. "I don't think the president has fully understood the implications of the law, its potential to cause serious macroeconomic problems and convert the country into a haven for money laundering."

The regulatory framework for adoption has yet to be published and there are rumours of delays to the Chivo app. Bankers in the capital say they have received calls from anxious clients threatening to withdraw their deposits rather than risk exposure to the volatile cryptocurrency markets. The ratings agency Moody's downgraded El Salvadoran debt over fears of "weakened governance" evidenced by the new law, and the IMF — with which the government is negotiating a $1bn loan — published a blogpost highlighting the risks of adopting crypto as national currency. "The shift from euphoria to scepticism has been very fast," says Castañeda.

The potential benefits identified by the Bank of America are probably overstated. A paper by Johns Hopkins University says the cost of remittances via Bitcoin will be higher than traditional methods, and a July survey found that nearly two-thirds of El Salvadorans would not be open to accepting payment in Bitcoin. Eric Grill, CEO of Chainbytes, which produces Bitcoin ATMs, told the Guardian that his plan to relocate manufacturing to El Salvador had faced serious challenges in sourcing parts. Local geothermal energy experts say Bukele's plan to power energy-intensive Bitcoin mining activities from the country's volcanoes are wildly optimistic.
Reuters offered an update on Thursday. "In the main handicraft market of El Salvador's capital, traders complain that with a week to go before bitcoin becomes legal tender, no officials have come to explain how it will work or what benefits it may bring."

Twitter's latest beta update introduces support for providing content creators with Bitcoin tips using the "Tip Jar" feature that Twitter introduced earlier this year. MacRumors reports: Bitcoin isn't yet available to select as a tip option for beta users, but code in the beta suggests that Twitter is in the process of rolling it out. When the Tip Jar was first introduced, Twitter allowed users to add Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo links to their Twitter profile, but soon, there will be a Bitcoin option.

Details in the latest Twitter beta indicate that users will be directed through a Bitcoin tutorial that includes details on the Bitcoin Lightning Network and custodial and non-custodial Bitcoin wallets. Twitter gives Strike, Blue Wallet and Wallet of Satoshi as examples of custodial wallets and Muun, Breez, Phoenix and Zap as examples of non-custodial wallets. Twitter also informs users that a Strike account is required. "We use Strike to generate Bitcoin Lightning invoices so you'll need to connect your account to accept Bitcoin tips" reads the text.

An anonymous reader shares a report from Fast Company, written by Michael Grothaus: One of the biggest movers on the cryptocurrency market in the past 24 hours is Solana. As of the time of this writing, Solana is up almost 20% over the past day, according to Coinbase. In the past week, it's up over 58%, and in the past month, it's up 275%. As for the past year, Solana has surged over 2,348%.

What is Solana? Solana is a decentralized blockchain platform. It facilitates the transactions of the SOL coin as well as digital assets like non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Is Solana a bitcoin competitor? Sure, because it's another cryptocurrency. But it's more apt to liken Solana to Ethereum since both are blockchain platforms that handle smart contracts.

Why is Solana surging? This is always a hard question to answer. Though Solana is holding some kind of mysterious "Ignition" event today. Nasdaq speculates that Solana might announce that it will "burn" tokens. That's when a certain number of coins are removed from supply, making the remaining ones more scarce and thus more valuable. Alternately, Solana could be set to announce new smart contract features.

Business Insider reports: Jack Dorsey, one of bitcoin's biggest advocates, is planning to build an open platform to create a decentralized exchange for bitcoin through TBD, his new business venture, according to his tweet Friday.

A decentralized exchange is a type of cryptocurrency exchange that allows peer-to-peer transactions without the need for an intermediary. Dorsey retweeted an original tweet by TBD project leader Mike Brock, who offered some direction on where the unit is headed... First, Brock said his team believes that bitcoin will be the native currency of the internet. But the problem, he noted, is how trading bitcoin often involves exchanging fiat at a centralized and custodial service... "While there are many projects to help make the internet more decentralized, our focus is solely on a sound global monetary system for all...."

His team wants to make it easy to fund non-custodial wallets globally through a platform that builds on- and off-ramps into bitcoin. Think of it as a decentralized exchange for fiat, he added, one that is "bitcoin-native, top to bottom.... this platform will be entirely developed in public, open-source, open-protocol, and any wallet will be able to use," Brock said. "No foundation or governance model that TBD controls. Permissionless or bust."

"When residents of an affluent estate community in Alberta started hearing noise from a nearby power plant, they didn't expect their complaints of sleepless nights would lead to a months-long investigation that would find a bitcoin mining operation had set up shop without approval," reports the CBC: Now, Link Global, the company behind the site, is being ordered by the province's utility commission to shut down two plants until it can prove it's allowed to operate — a move the company says will cost jobs and cause the oil and gas infrastructure in which it operates to sit dormant....

Vancouver-based Link Global had set up four 1.25 MW gas generators at the site, pulling power from a dormant natural gas well owned by Calgary-based company MAGA Energy. The natural gas powers thousands of computer servers that run programs to "mine" digital currency... Work on the plant began in August 2020, and by fall — when neighbours started to get annoyed — it was operating at full capacity. There was just one problem: The company hadn't notified neighbours of its plans. Or the county. Or the provincial utilities commission — which allows power plants to be set up without approval if they meet several conditions, including only generating power for the company's own use and proving the plant has no adverse effects on people or the environment...

Alberta is littered with nearly 200,000 dormant or abandoned oil and gas wells, often because they're no longer economically viable. It has raised the spectre that landowners and taxpayers could be on the hook for the cleanup costs, which the province estimates could be up to $30 billion, as well as prompted a push to find other uses for the facilities, such as powering cryptocurrency operations. Stephen Jenkins, Link Global's CEO, said some of that abandoned energy infrastructure, is at risk of leaking methane — a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. "We look at, OK, what can we do to use this in a beneficial way ... I don't want to say we're in the business of methane destruction, but we're in the business of beneficial use of that potential methane-generating source. You combust it properly. You don't flare it, and you control those emissions," Jenkins said...

And though the facility employs only four people, Jenkins said it's important to him to employ locally and give former oil and gas workers a path into other careers. The Sturgeon County plant's supervisor is a former pipefitter; he's now a bitcoin pro and an expert at keeping the plant online, Jenkins said. "It's a perfect use of people's skills," he said.

Of course, it's not all altruism. The company has said for every 10 MW of power, it can generate about 1.2 bitcoins per day.
Last Friday the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) ruled that the plant had indeed been violating their regulatory requirements, and would now also have to suffer a financial penalty which the CBC reported as "a $50,000 to $75,000 fine, reduced by up to 50% because Link Global admitted to breaking the rules..."

"More penalties could be on the way. The AUC will now review whether specific sanctions should be imposed against Link Global for operating without approval — a decision on that is expected this fall."

The CBC adds that another Link Global plant was also found to be "set up without the AUC's prior approval."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Charlie Osborne: The parents of two teenagers allegedly responsible for stealing $1 million in Bitcoin are being sued. According to court documents obtained by Brian Krebs, Andrew Schober lost 16.4552 in Bitcoin (BTC) in 2018 after his computer was infected with malware, allegedly the creation of two teenagers in the United Kingdom. The complaint (.PDF), filed in Colorado, accuses Benedict Thompson and Oliver Read, who were minors at the time, of creating clipboard malware. The malicious software, designed to monitor cryptocurrency wallet addresses, was downloaded and unwittingly executed by Schober after he clicked on a link, posted to Reddit, to install the Electrum Atom cryptocurrency application.

During a transfer of Bitcoin from one account to another, the malware triggered a Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attack, apparently replacing the address with one controlled by the teenagers and thereby diverting the coins into their wallets. According to court documents, this amount represented 95% of the victim's net wealth at the time of the theft. At today's price, the stolen Bitcoin is worth approximately $777,000. "Mr. Schober was planning to use the proceeds from his eventual sale of the cryptocurrency to help finance a home and support his family," the complaint reads. The pair, tracked down during an investigation paid for by Schober, are now adults and are studying computer science at UK universities. The mothers and fathers of Thompson and Read are named in the complaint. Emails were sent to the parents prior to the complaint requesting that the teenagers return the stolen cryptocurrency to prevent legal action from being taken. However, the requests, sent in 2018 and 2019, were met with silence.

Schober's complaint claims that the parents "knew or reasonably should have known" what their children were up to, and that they also failed to take "reasonable steps" in preventing further harm. In response (.PDF), the defendants do not argue the charge, but rather have requested a motion to dismiss based on two- and three-year statutes of limitation. "Despite his knowledge of his injury and the general cause thereof, Plaintiff waited to file his lawsuit beyond the two and three years required of him by the applicable statutes of limitations," court documents say. "For this reason, Plaintiff's claims against Defendants should be dismissed." However, Schober's legal team has argued (.PDF) that the teenagers were not immediately traced, and roughly a year passed between separately identifying Read and Thompson. Schober's lawyers have requested that the motion to dismiss is denied.

Digital currency company Circle says it's changing the makeup of its dollar-pegged stablecoin's reserves to just cash and U.S. Treasury bonds. CNBC reports: Digital currency company Circle had claimed its stablecoin, USD Coin, was backed 1:1 by actual dollars in a bank account. In July, it was revealed this was no longer the case, with Circle disclosing in an "attestation" from auditors Grant Thornton that cash made up just over 60% of USD Coin's reserves. The other 40% was backed by various forms of debt securities and bonds. Now, Circle says it's changing the makeup of USD Coin's reserves once again, with just cash and U.S. Treasury bonds underpinning the stablecoin.

Centre, a consortium founded by Circle and crypto exchange Coinbase which developed the stablecoin, unveiled the change on Sunday. "Mindful of community sentiment, our commitment to trust and transparency, and an evolving regulatory landscape, Circle, with the support of Centre and Coinbase, has announced that it will now hold the USDC reserve entirely in cash and short duration US Treasuries," Centre said in a blog post. "These changes are being implemented expeditiously and will be reflected in future attestations by Grant Thornton."

Payments technology company Visa announced Monday that it has bought a CryptoPunk as it enters into the world of non-fungible token (NFT) commerce. The Block reports: Visa bought CryptoPunk 7610, one of 3,840 female punks, for around $150,000 last week. CryptoPunks are considered the original NFTs, launched in 2017 by Larva Labs. These are a collection of 10,000 pixel art images of misfits and eccentrics. Each CryptoPunk has its own personality and unique combination of features. "We felt that CryptoPunks would be a great addition to our collection of artifacts that can chart and celebrate the past, present, and future of commerce," Visa's head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, told The Block in an interview.

When asked why Visa added a CryptoPunk to the collection, Sheffield said CryptoPunks "pioneered the NFT technology and wave of NFT commerce," so Visa wanted to own a punk. He said the decision was less about the individual punk but more about CryptoPunks in general, given that it is a historical NFT project. Visa worked with Anchorage Digital to buy the CryptoPunk, meaning Anchorage facilitated the transaction and is custodying the NFT for Visa, said Sheffield. "We purchased it from Anchorage using fiat," he said. Visa first partnered with Anchorage earlier this year to settle payments in the USDC stablecoin on Ethereum.

Visa believes NFTs will play an important role in the future of commerce. NFTs can help individual content creators and small and medium-sized businesses in new ways, said Sheffield. "NFTs are an intersection of culture and commerce," he added. Sheffield compared NFTs with the early days of e-commerce, saying that e-commerce made it possible for a small business to sell online and reach customers worldwide. But they still have to produce and ship physical goods, which can have high upfront costs. So NFTs allow a small business to harness a public blockchain to create digital goods, which can be delivered instantly to a crypto wallet anywhere in the world, said Sheffield. "We can envision a future where a crypto address becomes as important as your mailing address," he said.

PayPal is launching its cryptocurrency service in the U.K. From a report: The U.S. online payments giant said Monday it would let British customers buy, hold and sell digital currencies, starting this week. It marks the the first international expansion of PayPal's crypto product, which first launched in the U.S. in October last year. "It has been doing really well in the U.S.," Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal's general manager for blockchain, crypto and digital currencies, told CNBC. "We expect it's going to do well in the U.K." PayPal's crypto feature lets customers buy or sell bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum or litecoin with as little as 1 pound. Users can also track crypto prices in real-time, and find educational content on the market. Like the U.S. version of the product, PayPal is relying on Paxos, a New York-regulated digital currency company, to enable crypto buying and selling in the U.K. PayPal said it has engaged with relevant U.K. regulators to launch the service.

"Hackers have drained Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid of $97 million worth of Ethereum and other digital coins," reports Forbes: The company, in a tweet posted late Thursday, announced the compromise and said it is moving assets that were not affected into more secure "cold wallet" storage. The company has also suspended deposits and withdrawals... Liquid did not put a dollar figure on the amount, but blockchain analytics company Elliptic said its analysis estimates the losses at about $97 million...

Of that, $45 million were in Ethereum tokens, which are being converted into Ether, preventing the hacker from having those assets frozen. Other cryptos taken in the heist include Bitcoin, XRP, and stablecoins.

According to a tweet from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, the brokerage firm is planning to purchase more than $500 million worth of cryptocurrency on its balance sheet. It's also going to be investing 10% of all future profits in crypto. The Block reports: "I expect this percentage to keep growing over time as this crypto economy matures," Armstrong said. A blog penned by Coinbase's chief financial officer Alesia Haas indicated that the purchase would include Ethereum as well as other assets tied to the decentralized financial world.

"We have committed to invest $500M of our cash and cash equivalents," Haas wrote. "We will become the first publicly traded company to hold Ethereum, Proof of Stake assets, DeFi tokens, and many other crypto assets supported for trading on our platform, in addition to Bitcoin, on our balance sheet," she added.

EtherRock, an early NFT project consisting of 100 discrete images of the same cartoon rock, each tinted a slightly different color, is seeing the price of its NFTs soar after crypto-savvy media personality Gary Vaynerchuk tweeted about them a couple of weeks ago. According to Motherboard, "the lowest listed price for a single EtherRock is now 95.2 ETH, or about $300,000. And of the 761 total EtherRock transactions, 581 have happened within the last two weeks. The current highest price paid for an EtherRock is 96 ETH." From the report: The anonymous developer behind EtherRock is still actively maintaining the project. "I was a complete amateur when I built it," they said in an interview with Motherboard. "It was originally intended as a) a joke and b) an exercise for me to learn [the Ethereum coding language] Solidity." They said they would've "spent a lot more effort" on the NFTs had they known they were going to get this expensive.

You could be forgiven for thinking it's "stupid" to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on tokens tied to royalty-free clip art, but EtherRock owners figure they'll get the last laugh. Prominent token-holders include Bitcoin advocate Meltem Demirors and former BitMEX executive Arthur Hayes (the latter of whom is still facing federal prosecution for allegedly violating the Bank Secrecy Act). "Rocks are about flexing," she said. "There are only 100 rocks, and people who try to pretend they own one get called out quickly. Because the data is all public domain, you can see when a rock is moved to a new wallet address."

On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. would no longer exchange dollars held by foreign governments for gold. "Shock waves from Washington's decision to break the link with gold have rippled down the decades," reports The Guardian. "The creation of the euro, the hollowing out of US manufacturing, the arrival of cryptocurrencies and the ability of central banks to print seemingly unlimited quantities of money can all be traced back to August 1971." From the report: In 2019, when he was the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney floated the idea of a global digital currency -- backed by a number of central banks -- as a replacement for the dollar. Carney said his plan would help stabilize financial markets unsettled by trade and currency disputes. Were Carney's plan ever to come to fruition it would mark the final stage in the shift from a system where currencies were backed by something tangible -- gold -- to one where they are virtual. It is not hard to see why there are those who feel uneasy about this.

Why? Well, for a start, events of half a century ago led to a rapid increase in currency trading. Foreign exchange markets can be wild and unpredictable places. Governments, as Carney pointed out, try to secure competitive advantage by manipulating their currencies and by protectionist trade policies. One way of doing this is through quantitative easing, the process by which central banks create money though the purchase of bonds. Trillions of dollars, euros, pounds and yen pumped into the global economy over the past decade.

Classical economic theory would suggest that an increase in the money supply of this magnitude should lead to a sharp rise in inflation but that has not happened. At least not yet. Before they became the ultimate speculative play for financial investors, the rationale for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin was that they represented a hedge against the profligacy of central banks. Tricky Dicky didn't know it in 1971 but 50 years on his decision has led to a world of volatile financial markets, geopolitical tension, inflated asset prices underwritten by low interest rates and QE, and where trust in central banks is starting to wear a bit thin. In the circumstances, it is perhaps easy to understand why governments have decided to hold on to their remaining gold stocks.

Walmart is looking to hire a cryptocurrency expert to develop a blockchain strategy, joining a growing number of major corporations exploring the viability of digital currencies such as Bitcoin. From a report: The position will be responsible for "developing the digital currency strategy and product roadmap" and identifying "crypto-related investment and partnerships," according to a job posting Sunday on the retail giant's website. The senior director will be based in Walmart's corporate offices in Bentonville, Arkansas.

While Walmart's specific intentions weren't immediately clear, the job description refers to the "broad set of payment options for its customers" in stores and online. The company didn't immediately respond to a request for additional information. The recruitment effort by Walmart comes several weeks after a similar job posting by rival Amazon.com, indicating that the biggest retailers in the U.S. may soon let customers use cryptocurrencies to pay for their purchases. PayPal Holdings began letting select customers of its Venmo app buy, sell and hold digital currencies earlier this year and expanded the effort last week.

TorrentFreak reports: A new paper published by Microsoft's research department proposes to tackle piracy with a blockchain-based bounty system titled "Argus." The system allows volunteers to report piracy in exchange for a reward. It uses the Ethereum blockchain and is transparent, practical, and secure, while limiting abusive reports and errors...

Pirated content is traced back to the source through a unique watermark that corresponds with a secret code. When a pirated copy is reported, the status of the source (licensee) is changed to "accused." The system provides an appeal option, but if that fails, the accused status changes to "guilty...." Whether Microsoft has any plans to test the system in the wild is unknown. It theoretically works with various media types including images, audio and software...

This idea isn't completely new, however, as the South African company Custos came up with a similar idea years ago. Microsoft's research notes that Argus is superior to Custos' solution as it can assess the severity of piracy and the strength of accusations.
TorrentFreak points out that the paper also received input from researchers at Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University.

I like how the paper referenced the appropriately-named functions for parts of the process, including Report(), Appeal(), and SetGuilty().

"Ethereum is making big changes," writes Bloomberg. "Perhaps the most important is the jettisoning of the 'miners' who track and validate transactions on the the world's most-used blockchain network. Miners are the heart of a system known as proof of work. It was pioneered by Bitcoin and adopted by Ethereum, and has come under increasing criticism for its environmental impact: Bitcoin miners now use as much electricity as some small nations. Along with being greener and faster, proponents say the switch, now planned to be phased in by early 2022, will illustrate another difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin: A willingness to change, and to see the network as a product of community as much as code...

The idea behind proof of stake is that the blockchain can be secured more simply if you give a group of people carrot-and-stick incentives to collaborate in checking and crosschecking transactions... It's thought that switching to proof of stake would cuts Ethereum's energy use, estimated at 45,000 gigawatt hours by 99.9%. Like any other venture depending on cloud computing, its carbon footprint would then be only be that of its servers. It also is expected to increase the network speed. That's important for Ethereum, which has ambitions of becoming a platform for a vast range of financial and commercial transactions. Currently, Ethereum handles about 30 transactions per second. With sharding, Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum, thinks that could go to 100,000 per second.

In a proof of stake system, it would be harder than in a proof of work system for a group to gain control of the process, but it would still be possible: The more Ether a person or group stakes, the better the chance of being chosen as a validator or attestor. Economic disincentives have been put in place to dissuade behavior that is bad for the network.
The article also argues that Bitcoin's "growing dominance by huge, centralized mining farms" is "antithetical to a system that was designed to be decentralized."

Ezra Klein, writing at The New York Times: Think about it this way: The internet we have allows for the easy transfer of information. We costlessly swap copies of news articles, music files, video games, pornography, GIFs, tweets and much more. The internet is, famously, good at making information nearly free. But for precisely that reason, it is terrible at making information expensive, which it sometimes needs to be. What the internet is missing, in particular, are ways to verify identity, ownership and authenticity -- the exact things that make it possible for creators to get paid for their work (for more on this, I highly recommend Steven Johnson's article "Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble").

That's one reason the riches of the web haven't been more widely shared: You get rich selling access to the internet or by building companies that add convenience and features to the internet. So Facebook got rich by building a proprietary infrastructure for identity, and Spotify created a service in which artists could eke out payment from works that were otherwise just being pirated. The actual creators who make the internet worth visiting are forced to accept the exploitative, ever-changing terms of digital middlemen.

This is the problem that the technology behind crypto solves, at least in theory: If the original internet let you easily copy information, the next internet will let you easily trade ownership of digital goods. Crypto lets you make digital goods scarce, which increases their value; it lets you prove ownership, which allows you to buy and sell them; and it makes digital identities verifiable, as that's merely information you own. Together, they unlock the potential for a true economy for digital goods, where creators actually get rewarded for what they make. I will admit to some skepticism that this is how it'll play out, because many of the financiers funding crypto also founded and sit on the boards of the companies that set the terms of today's internet, but we'll see.

Cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Poly Network was attacked on Tuesday, with the alleged hacker draining roughly $600 million in crypto. From a report: Poly Network, a protocol launched by the founder of Chinese blockchain project Neo, operates on the Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. Tuesday's attack struck each chain consecutively, with the Poly team identifying three addresses where stolen assets were transferred. At the time that Poly tweeted news of the attack, the three addresses collectively held more than $600 million in different cryptocurrencies, including USDC, wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), wrapped ether (WETH) and shiba inu (SHIB), blockchain scanning platforms show.

"We call on miners of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the above addresses," the Poly team tweeted. The $600 million figure would place the Poly Network hack among the largest in crypto history. Tether froze approximately $33 million in relation to the hack, Tether CTO Paul Adroino tweeted. About one hour after Poly announced the hack on Twitter, the hacker tried to move assets including USDT through the Ethereum address into liquidity pool Curve.fi, records show. The transaction was rejected.