Malware called “Crackonosh” has been found in 222,000 compromised computers that were used to download illegal, torrented versions of popular video games, including “NBA 2K19” and “Grand Theft Auto V,” according to a report from security company Avast published Thursday.
The virus, which has been circulating since at least June 2018, installs crypto-mining software that has yielded its authors over $2 million worth of monero.
Monero is a privacy coin that is often used by cybercriminals because it is much more difficult to trace than other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Monero-focused crypto-mining attacks are relatively common: The Pirate Bay, a website where users can download movies, music, software and games, announced in 2018 it would be “cryptojacking” visitors’ processing power to mine for monero, and in 2020, a botnet called “Vollgar” was found to be targeting Microsoft’s SQL servers to mine for monero, as well.
Related: Market Wrap: Bitcoin Nudges Up as Regulatory Risks Linger
According to Avast’s analysis, Crackonosh successfully operated for years because it had built-in mechanisms to disable security software and updates, which made it difficult for users to detect and remove the program.
The malware is thought to have originated in the Czech Republic, but it has a global reach. Cases in the United States make up only 5% of the total.
Avast’s blog post addresses the spread of the malware and teaches affected users how to uninstall the program.
The blog’s author, Daniel Benes, also shares some words of wisdom:
“The key take-away from this is that you really can’t get something for nothing and when you try to steal software, odds are someone is trying to steal from you.”
Related StoriesCitigroup’s wealth management division has formed a Digital Assets Group, according to an internal memo shared with CoinDesk.
“Focusing on all aspects of this fast-growing space of blockchain enabled finance,” the unit will be helmed by Alex Kriete and Greg Girasole of the bank’s Citi Global Wealth Investments (CGWI) arm. The Block first reported the news.
Girasole’s LinkedIn profile describes him as a “Blockchain enthusiast and Crypto Asset investor” with a certificate from 2018 to prove it.
Related: Market Wrap: Bitcoin in Recovery Mode Ahead of Options Expiry
“Alex and Greg will be responsible for advancing the efforts of CGWI to become a market leading partner for our clients interested in all aspects of the digital asset space” such as cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFT), stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDC), according to the memo signed by Citi’s Iain Armitage, global head of capital markets, and Rob Jasminski, global head, Citi Investment Management.
In a May interview with the Financial Times, Citi’s global head of foreign exchange, Itay Tuchman, said the bank had seen a “very rapid” uptick in client interest in bitcoin since last August.
According to Thursday’s memo, the CGWI Digital Assets Group will liaise with “other business groups at Citi [that] are expanding into this rapidly emerging space also.”
Danny Nelson contributed reporting.
Related StoriesInstitutional bitcoin shop NYDIG has partnered with Texas fintech firm Q2 to provide bitcoin access to Q2’s 18.3 million users.
Q2 is a behind-the-scenes player providing online banking software to over 450 small and medium-sized banks and credit unions, including Texas Security Bank, Mercantile Bank and Scotiabank. The partnership with NYDIG will allow Q2’s institutional partners to provide their customers with access to buy, sell and hold bitcoin through their bank accounts.
According to Jean Kondo, Q2’s vice president of communications, Q2’s decision to partner with NYDIG was based on client demand.
Related: Market Wrap: Bitcoin in Recovery Mode Ahead of Options Expiry
“We are excited to work with NYDIG to enable financial institutions to take advantage of this market opportunity and meet the demands of their account holders,” said Q2 executive Jonathan Price in a press statement.
NYDIG’s collaboration with Q2 is one of many recent partnerships for the institutional asset manager. The bitcoin heavyweight has hired Wall Street veterans and even made the foray into bitcoin insurance products. In May, NYDIG was tapped by Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge to custody its pending bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).
NYDIG CEO Robert Gutmann said the ultimate goal of the partnership is to increase bitcoin adoption.
“The work we will do together will be key to making bitcoin as easily accessible as possible through the incumbent financial institutions, enabling the continued growth of the Bitcoin network,” Gutmann said in a statement.
Related: ‘Bitcoin Is the Revolution’: An Interview With Alex Gladstein
Correction: An earlier version of this story had an incorrect title for Jean Kondo.
Related StoriesTwo of South Korea’s four largest exchanges, Upbit and Bithumb, have been delisting altcoins as they prepare for an upcoming regulatory overhaul. Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone and Korbit are collectively referred to as Korea’s “Big 4.”
On June 11, Upbit announced it would be removing the fiat on-ramps for five tokens. The exchange also posted a “watch list” of 25 tokens. On June 18, it delisted 24 of them.
On June 17, Bithumb announced it will terminate trading for four tokens on July 5.
Related: Market Wrap: Bitcoin Nudges Up as Regulatory Risks Linger
Tokens that have been delisted so far generally fall into one of the following categories: tokens that are listed on less than five exchanges, dark coins (privacy coins like monero), tokens directly issued by exchanges and tokens whose protocols are no longer being developed.
Impending reviewOn June 4, the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of the Financial Services Commission (FSC) held a meeting with leaders of domestic crypto exchanges. During this meeting they conveyed a set of “recommended guidelines” for exchanges to maximize their chances of having their registration approved.
These guidelines included instructions to submit operation plans that detail protocols for evaluating and listing tokens as well as identifying and dealing with scams, fraud and illegal trades.
Read more: South Korean Banks to ‘Review’ Partnerships With Crypto Exchanges
Related: South African Banks Block Crypto Trading on International Exchanges: Report
All crypto exchanges are required to register with the FIU by Sept. 24, but the FIU has the authority to reject applications by exchanges that fail to meet certain conditions or are perceived as too risky (in terms of potential money laundering or fraud). Exchanges seem to have interpreted the FIU’s “guidelines” as a set of de facto orders, which could explain the mass delisting throughout this past month. Given the current trend, delistings are likely to continue up until Sept. 24.
In addition to the FIU, exchanges also have to worry about their partnerships with domestic commercial banks. Exchanges must secure a bank partnership in order to qualify for FIU registration, and banks have the authority to choose which exchanges they’ll work with. The Big 4 currently have bank partnerships but these are currently under review as banks deliberate whether they’ll extend their contracts with crypto exchanges beyond Sept. 24.
Lots of listingsAs of June 21, Upbit had 178 tokens available for trading. Bithumb had 178 and Coinone had 180. This is up to six times the number of tokens listed by smaller competitors. Korbit has fewer than 40.
By comparison, Coinbase currently supports fewer than 100 tokens.
Until now, exchanges have had a big incentive to list as many tokens as possible: transaction fees. The more coins traded, the higher the trading volume; the higher the trading volume, the more transaction fees earned. Because there’s no legal procedure for listing coins, exchanges have been able to list as many as they want.
The FSC estimates the Big 4 registered an average daily trading volume of 22 trillion won (US$19.4 billion) during April 2021.
Koreans also tend to trade altcoins a lot more than some of their overseas counterparts. Last month CoinMarketCap estimated that bitcoin accounts for around 40% of transactions globally but only 7% of transactions among Korean traders.
A former employee at a crypto exchange (who asked to remain anonymous) told CoinDesk Korea that “over 90% of Korea’s crypto trade volume is in altcoins,” which “gives domestic exchanges an incentive to list as many as possible.”
Read more: South Korea Seizes $47M Worth of Crypto for Back Taxes: Report
Bithumb has listed 52 coins within 2021; Coinone listed 39. That means that for Bithumb to list 50 tokens in around 200 days, it would have had to list one every four days. That doesn’t provide much time to review each project.
Noh Woong-rae, a lawmaker with South Korea’s Democratic Party, has criticized exchanges for this kind of “indiscriminate token listing.”
“They listed a massive amount of questionable tokens only to suddenly delist them without providing any clear explanation, leaving investors in the dust,” Noh said.
“If authorities discover any evidence that exchanges listed shady tokens despite knowing they would likely be delisted later on to gain a short-term profit, I think that’s grounds for rejecting their FIU registration,” Noh added.
Delisting announcements have caused prices for many altcoins to plummet by 50% or more, causing considerable losses among retail investors.
So far, Upbit has delisted 36 tokens in 2021. Bithumb has delisted 10. Coinone and Korbit have respectively delisted three each.
Related StoriesDecentralized finance (DeFi) insurance platform Risk Harbor is emerging from stealth, armed with a $3.25 million seed round co-led by Framework Ventures and Pantera Capital.
Also included in the round were Bain Capital Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Nima Capital and Digital Currency Group (parent company of CoinDesk).
Insurance is thin on the ground in crypto, even among large, well-established exchanges and custodians. In the experimental DeFi arena, where bugs and hacks are relatively frequent, cover is limited to a handful of insurance alternatives such as Nexus Mutual.
Related: Andreessen Horowitz Rakes In $2.2B for Third Crypto Venture Fund
Risk Harbor replaces the decentralized governance process invoked when deciding to pay out on claims, opting instead for a pre-programmed set of criteria which, when met, trigger an automated payout, sometimes called “parametric insurance.”
“When a governance process decides whether a claim is legitimate or not, they tend to lean towards the claim not being legitimate because they don’t want to pay their money,” Risk Harbor co-founder Drew Patel said in an interview. “Why can’t we have the rules on-chain, stating that if certain events occur, there’s a payout?”
It’s the latest in a nascent crop of experiments around DeFi-inspired insurance projects.
Risk Harbor operates as a two-sided marketplace in which DeFi depositors are able to purchase protection for their capital in DeFi projects, while others are able to underwrite that protection in return for premiums. Previously in private beta, the platform currently has $2 million in liquidity locked in its claims pool.
Related: Huobi’s Tighter Derivatives Rules Leave Chinese Traders Scrambling for Alternatives
“On one side of the marketplace are protection buyers, and on the other are underwriters that are basically saying, ‘Hey, I’m willing to bet that this event doesn’t occur’,” said Patel, adding:
“Underwriters choose from a range of protocols and will have to pay out if a legitimate claim happens. But they don’t decide whether the claim is legitimate or not, the smart contracts do.”
The seed funding will be used to scale the platform and to revamp the user interface. The underwriters looking to profit from risks associated with these platforms will typically be DeFi pros and DeFi whales, according to Patel.
Risk Harbor has also attracted a sizable roster of angel investors, including Anthony Pompliano of Pomp Investments, Noah Jessop of Proof Group, Ashleigh Schap of Uniswap, Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau of Alchemy, Do Kwon of Terra Money, Seb Audet of Zapper, Tyler Ward of BarnBridge and former Polygon engineer Ashish Rajpurohit.
“What makes Risk Harbor exciting is not only the fact that it offers protection for DeFi protocols without requiring an oracle, but that it also should be more capital efficient than any other model due to its Berkshire-like structure that enables cover providers to earn a yield on top of their premiums,” Pantera Capital’s Joey Krug said in a statement.
Related StoriesChainalysis has added another $100 million in venture capital as crypto’s role in ransomware becomes a mainstream concern.
The firm announced Thursday that the Series E round of funding was led by Coatue Management and brings it valuation to $4.2 billion. Chainalysis also raised $100 million in a Series D funding round that was announced in March.
March’s round, led by Fred Ehrsam’s Paradigm, valued the blockchain tracking firm at $2 billion.
Related: NFT Site Rarible to Launch Marketplace on Flow Blockchain Following $14.2M Funding Round
The Chainalysis’ new funding round is the latest in a trio of funding announcements in what’s suddenly a high-profile corner of the crypto world.
Firms like Chainalysis, CipherTrace, Elliptic, TRM Labs and Blocktrace help banks and law enforcement track illicit funds moving across public blockchains. Thanks to this so-called blockchain analysis, U.S. authorities were able to seize much of the bitcoin paid by Colonial Pipeline as ransom to the DarkSide hacking group.
Such headlines have been a boon for recent fundraising efforts.
CipherTrace raised $27 million, CoinDesk reported Tuesday, and TRM Labs brought in $14 million last week.
Related: Daniel Loeb’s Third Point Leads $27M Investment in Crypto Compliance Startup CipherTrace
Chainalysis may be the leader of the pack in terms of stature, and certainly it is in terms of capital raised: The firm said the latest round brings its total funding to $365 million.
“The future of finance and national security will be based on blockchain data-driven decisions,” Chainalysis CEO and co-founder Michael Gronager said in the press release. “We’ve harnessed the transparency of blockchains to provide actionable insights into markets, threats and business opportunities.”
Chainalysis is hiring for “hundreds of new positions,” according to Thursday’s announcement.
Related StoriesCrypto exchange FTX is following Binance’s lead in offering tokenized stocks. The stocks will run on the Solana blockchain.
Roll, an Ethereum-based protocol that lets content creators mint their own personal crypto tokens, is trying to bounce back after a March security breach in which a hacker stole $5.7 million from its hot wallet and which sent the social tokens plunging.
As part of revamping of its private key infrastructure in response to the incident, Roll is integrating with crypto custody firm Fireblocks to secure the platform.
Roll co-founder Sid Kalla said in an email that Fireblocks’ multiparty computation (MPC) wallet infrastructure will let Roll securely sign transactions without storing the private keys in a single place.
Related: Wirex Eyes Mainstream DeFi With Fireblocks Integration
“This greatly improves our operational security as we move forward,” he said, adding:
“It also helps prevent private key theft and compromised credentials. We will also have cybersecurity insurance of up to $30 million for Roll creators and users via Fireblocks. This appears to be a first in crypto-creator insurance, especially in a creator’s own token.”
MPC allows for large pools of data to stay encrypted while permitting information to be extracted from those data pools using encrypted computations. Fireblocks emphasizes its ability to handle a high level of transactions on Ethereum with low fees.
Fireblocks’s wallet infrastructure already supports large retail-facing platforms, such as Celsius, Revolut, BlockFi and Salt Lending. The company closed a $133 million funding round in March, four days after Roll’s security incident, and has handled over half a trillion dollars in assets.
Related: Fireblocks Being Sued for Allegedly Losing Over $70M of Ether: Report
Roll CEO and co-founder Bradley Miles said Roll is working hard to revamp its security infrastructure. He also said Roll is releasing a new version of Roll smart contracts that are currently under audit from two separate firms.
“The vision of these new contracts is to blend DeFi [decentralized finance] and the creator economy through social money,” he said. “We feel what we call the ‘DeFi Creator Economy’ can eventually eclipse the traditional creator economy in market size.”
Related StoriesCrypto bank Anchorage Digital said it is adding custody for the Celo Euro (cEUR) stablecoin.
Huobi is readying launch of its new U.S. affiliate, which will offer custodian services for Huobi’s own U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin, HUSD.
Nevada-based Huobi Trust Co., a subsidiary of Huobi Tech, will go live by the end of July. Huobi Tech is a Hong Kong-based public company acquired by Huobi founder Leon Lin through a reverse takeover in 2018.
The latest move comes six months after Huobi Trust won a trust license from the Nevada Financial Institutions Division, according to a filing by Huobi Tech with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December.
Related: Bitmain Stops Sales of Mining Machines in Bid to Buoy Prices Facing China’s Crackdown
The new trust company will provide custodial and compliance services for crypto firms that have businesses in the U.S. market.
Stable Universe, a U.S.-based stablecoin issuer, teamed up with Paxos to launch HUSD on the Huobi Global trading platform in July 2019.
Read more: Huobi’s Tighter Derivatives Rules Leave Chinese Traders Scrambling for Alternatives
“We are going to be live in the second week of July and doing a phased transition from Paxos” to Huobi Tech,” Rebecca Hirst, chief financial officer at the trust company, told CoinDesk.
Related: Ant Group Says NFTs Are Not Cryptocurrencies After Digital Artwork Sells Out
Eide Bailly, an independent U.S audit firm, will conduct monthly attestations of the HUSD token, Hirst said.
The company claimed HUSD surpassed $1 billion in market value on May 20 and has increased by 560% since January. The stablecoin is supported by decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms such as Uniswap, Curve.fi, Cream protocol and the Heco blockchain.
The comebackHuobi Trust is part of the exchange’s efforts to expand in the U.S. after HBUS, another legal entity affiliated with Huobi Group, ceased operations in December 2019 because of regulatory concerns.
The exchange, which is based in the African island nation of Seychelles, has since been evaluating different ways to reenter the U.S. market, including working with a licensed U.S.-based brokerage firm. The parent group said at the time that upon returning it would make its businesses in the country more compliant with regulations.
The launch of the U.S. trust company also comes at a time when Chinese financial regulators are cracking down on crypto exchanges for trading and mining.
Read more: Huobi Investment Arm Backs Beyond Finance With Strategic Investment
Huobi has suspended some of its trading services for new investors and adjusted its over-the-counter (OTC) trading businesses in the interest of compliance and growth, the exchange said.
Related StoriesCrypto bank Anchorage Digital said it is adding custody for the Celo Euro (cEUR) stablecoin.
Mode Global Holdings has won approval from the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to join the regulator’s crypto-asset business register.
Venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced Thursday a whopping $2.2 billion for its much anticipated Crypto Fund III.
The fund was initially rumored to be $1 billion. Later reports put it at $2 billion. The announced amount would suggest now’s a good time to be raising money for crypto investments.
“This fund allows us to find the next generation of visionary crypto founders, and invest in the most exciting areas of crypto,” a16z’s Chris Dixon and Katie Haun wrote in a blog post. “We invest in all stages, from early seed-stage projects to fully developed later-stage networks.”
Related: DeFi Insurance Upstart Risk Harbor Goes Live With $3.25M in Seed Funding
The firm’s last fund, announced in April 2020, started with $515 million in dry powder.
A16z has been among the most active investors in the crypto industry in recent years. As an early investor in Coinbase, it reaped enormous profits for its limited partners when the crypto exchange went public in April.
The a16z announcement also included some hiring news for the Silicon Valley firm, led most notably by the addition of former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) official Bill Hinman as an advisory partner. Hinman is best known in crypto circles as the first SEC honcho to classify ether, the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain, as a commodity, not a security.
“As with any new computing movement, crypto has endured a variety of challenges and misconceptions,” a16z wrote. “That’s why we are also bringing together heavy-hitters across several functions to help translate crypto to the mainstream.”
Related StoriesCryptology Asset Group, a European investment company backed by Galaxy Digital founder Mike Novogratz, made an additional $49 million investment in Block.one.
Bitcoin’s (BTC) price gave up some of its gains after rising nearly 20% after the shakeout low of close to $29,000 on Tuesday. The cryptocurrency is holding support above $32,000, although initial resistance is seen around $36,000.
Bitcoin is down about 12% over the past seven days and was trading around $33,000 at press time.
Six of the world’s biggest banks endorsed a new platform for international payments set for launch in November 2022 by SWIFT, the global interbank messaging network.
While some observers say the bitcoin price has bottomed out, analysts at JPMorgan remain bearish, identifying the impending unlocking of shares in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) purchased in January as a source of downside risk to the cryptocurrency.
“Despite some improvement, our signals remain overall bearish,” JPMorgan strategists led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote in a note Wednesday. “Selling of GBTC shares exiting the six-month lockup period during June and July has emerged as an additional headwind for bitcoin.”
Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, the world’s largest digital-assets fund manager, allows institutional investors to gain exposure to bitcoin through shares in the trust, which currently holds 654,600 BTC. That’s more than 3% of the cryptocurrency’s supply. Grayscale is a unit of Digital Currency Group, which also owns CoinDesk.
Related: Bitcoin News Roundup for June 24, 2021
Accredited investors can buy GBTC shares directly at the net asset value (NAV) in daily private placements by depositing bitcoin or U.S. dollars. The shares can be sold in the secondary market only after a six-month lock-in period.
The trust’s popularity exploded at the end of the last year when the premium on GBTC shares rose to a record-high 40% on Dec. 17. As such, investors rushed to carry trade or buy shares at NAV in a bid to sell them at a premium six months later. According to JPMorgan, the trust saw record inflows of $2 billion in December, followed by $1.7 billion in January.
The January tranche is scheduled for unlocking next month and is likely to release 140,000 bitcoin worth of shares, CoinShares’ chief strategy officer, Meltem Demirors, pointed out on Twitter.
After unlocking, investors have the option of liquidating their shareholdings in the secondary market. Analysts at JPMorgan foresee investors selling at least some of their shares, leading to “downward pressure on GBTC prices and on bitcoin markets more generally.”
Related: Article 7 and Bitcoin’s Latin American Coup
What’s not clear is whether investors will reinvest proceeds back into Grayscale by rebuying bitcoin and transferring it over to the trust. If that happens, bitcoin will likely pick up a strong bid.
Until February, the shares consistently traded at a premium. That kept overall demand strong, with investors rotating money back into the trust after unlockings. “Most of the capital was likely from investors doing a “rinse-in repeat,” Ben Lilly, a crypto economist at Jarvis Labs, noted in a SubStack post dated April 22.
Now, however, the incentive to reinvest is relatively low. The so-called Grayscale carry trade has lost its shine ever since GBTC began trading at a discount in February. As of Wednesday, the shares traded at a discount of 12.17% to the net asset value, according to data source Skew.
Nevertheless, some analysts say the discount offers retail investors an opportunity to buy bitcoin on the cheap. “Investors looking for long-term passive bitcoin exposure are probably better off buying GBTC over spot bitcoin since you get paid to wait more via the discount than you pay in excess fees,” David Grider, a strategist at investment research firm FundStrat, wrote in an email in May.
Also read: Record ‘Grayscale Discount’ Might Mean Bargain Bitcoin for Retail Traders
Bitcoin is currently trading near $33,200, representing a 1.2% drop on the day. Prices dipped below $29,000 earlier this week only to make a quick recovery back to the multi-week trading range of $30,000 to $40,000.
Related StoriesThe head of the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has thrown down the gauntlent to the cryptocurrency’s $1.3 trillion market during a virtual technology summit.
According to a report by the Australian Financial Review on Thursday, Dominic Stevens said his exchange’s distributed ledger technology-based (DLT) settlement system was set to handle more value than all public blockchains housing crypto.
“We are moving two to three trillion dollars of securities onto this system, and that is larger than the whole global crypto world is sitting on the blockchain,” said Stevens in relation to his exchange’s intended private and permission chain.
Related: Examine Blockchain for Ways to Stop Forced-Labor Goods, Australian Committee Says
The total market value of all cryptos peaked at around $2.6 trillion on May 14 this year and was hovering just above $1.35 trillion at press time.
Stevens, who was speaking on the third day at the Macquarie Technology Summit, said the ASX’s strategy around handling data was less to do with customer-facing tasks and more about how the “ecosystem interacts with itself.”
“We want to make that a more collaborative ecosystem of data,” said Stevens, according to the report.
The outdated Clearing House Electronic Subregister System, or CHESS will be replaced by the exchange’s DLT iteration in a bid to speed up clearing and settlement to reduce counterparty risk. In 2019, ASX signed a three-party memorandum of understanding with VMWare and Digital Asset to develop the platform that would eventually replace CHESS.
Related: Crypto Adoption in Australia Grows Along With Concern Over Volatility
The new system, which is expected in the coming years, has faced multiple delays to its rollout including in September 2018 and last year, where it cited the COVID-19 crisis for a second time as a major reason.
See also: Australian Securities Exchange May Launch First Crypto ETF This Year: Report
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