Crypto News Roundup: Nakamoto, PancakeSwap and Cream Finance, India, Ethereum 2.0

Welcome to the weekly news roundup here at Netcoins.

Top stories this week include Satoshi rising up the ranks of the world’s richest, DNS attacks becoming the new hack of the day among decentralized platforms, India threatening to ban cryptocurrency once again, and traditional financial institutions continuing to make bigger moves to get a piece of the cryptocurrency pie.

Pay special attention to the part about the Ethereum upgrade. Something special might be happening sooner than most of us expected!

Satoshi’s Got Bags

Satoshi Nakamoto, the author of the original Bitcoin whitepaper, is now one of the richest people in the world. He is in the top 20 to be exact. It’s estimated that Nakamoto’s personal stash of bitcoins is now worth $61 billion USD. The wallet address tied to the genesis block holds a million bitcoin. That’s 4.8% of all of the bitcoins in circulation right now.

You might think that if you were sitting on that kind of pile, you’d be spending it or cashing it in to invest in big businesses and live your dreams. Nakamoto hasn’t moved those coins at all. It will be interesting to see if the coins ever move.

The bottom line is, Satoshi’s got a bag big enough that even the Walton family (the founders of Walmart) is now in the rear-view mirror.

PancakeSwap and Cream Finance Get Hacked

Hackers are using DNS attacks to go after DeFi projects and decentralized exchanges. PancakeSwap and Cream Finance are the latest victims.

PancakeSwap posted a tweet earlier this week addressing the issue encouraging users not to share private keys or seeds on a website.

A DNS attack is when a hijacker reroutes traffic to a new server that is malicious. The new server asks users for information that is usually sensitive and gives the hacker access to a user’s wallet.

Cream posted a lengthy post-mortem report on its Medium page detailing the latest phishing scam.

Bitcoin Plunges as India Threatens Ban

Bitcoin’s price is dropping and a potential ban of the cryptocurrency in India is part of the reason why. While it has bounced back over the last day or so, it started the week down more than 5%.

The Indian government famously eliminated the use of specific denominations of banknotes and sent citizens scrambling to ATM machines back in 2016.

India is Asia’s third largest economy. The government doesn’t want that economic activity moving to decentralized platforms. The bill follows the government’s January agenda to talk about possibly banning private digital currencies in favour of a government issued digital currency.

More of these kinds of stories will definitely be coming out of the woodwork as cryptocurrency adoption continues to accelerate.

The Ethereum 2.0 Upgrade Might Be Coming Faster Than Expected

Vitalik Buterin released a note last week detailing the fact that Ethereum might be able to release its Beacon Chain onto the network in a lighter format. The whole goal is to implement that Beacon Chain and avoid any further agitation among miners as it’ll make the transition to a proof-of-stake ecosystem a lot easier for the developer community.

It makes sense for Buterin to try and get things moving faster as other altcoins like Cardano and Polkadot are making significant progress. The last thing any Ethereum bull wants is for the project to lose its first mover advantage.

Check out the note for more details.

Other Big Crypto News This Week

Visa is joining the crypto party. In a podcast this week, CEO Al Kelly stated that the company plans to work directly with crypto wallets. MasterCard laid out its own crypto plan in a blog post on the company’s website last month.

Not all big financial institutions getting involved in crypto are credit card companies of course. Investment bank Morgan Stanley plans to offer Bitcoin to its wealthiest clients. Clients will have to have at least $2 million USD in order to gain access to Bitcoin funds offered by the financial institution. Two of those funds are going to be hosted by Galaxy Digital, a blockchain investment firm run by its Canadian CEO Michael Novogratz.

That’s it for your weekly news roundup!

If you want to learn more about all things crypto, read more here.

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