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Welcome to The Node! This is Marc Hochstein to take you through the latest crypto news. In today's news: Indian exchangeWazirX hacked for $230M, largely in SHIB; the theft sends SHIB and WazirX's WRX tumbling; Biden dropout chances rise again on Polymarket after Covid diagnosis; and Dave Portnoy wouldn't buy at BTC's current prices, but he's "always" willing to take it as payment. The Takeaway: DePIN and machine RWAs will give humans a stake in the robots coming after our jobs, argue Mauricio Zolliker, co-founder of XMAQUINA, and Leroy Hofer, CEO and co-founder of Teneo Protocol. Read an excerpt from their op-ed below. 👇 |
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Indian crypto exchange WazirX saw over $230 million in withdrawals in early European hours on Thursday as a security breach affected one of its wallets, causing the loss of user funds. "We're aware that one of our multisig wallets has experienced a security breach. Our team is actively investigating the incident," the exchange confirmed in an X (formerly Twitter) post. "To ensure the safety of your assets, INR and crypto withdrawals will be temporarily paused." Blockchain sleuthing firm Elliptic said that North Korea-linked hackers appear to have perpetrated the attack. The stolen funds account for over 45% of the exchange's $500 million holdings, which it disclosed in a June report. Blockchain data tracked by Lookonchain shows over $100 million worth of shiba inu (SHIB) tokens were withdrawn, the most among lost funds, followed by $52 million in ether (ETH), $11 million in Matic's MATIC, and $6 million in pepe (PEPE). Read more. |
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Theft Sends SHIB, WRX Tumbling |
Cryptocurrencies stolen in the malicious attack on Indian exchange WazirX early Thursday, as well as the platform's native token, suffered significant losses in their market values. The exchange temporarily paused withdrawals. Blockchain data suggested the attacker was offloading stolen SHIB, putting downward pressure on its market value. Other crypto assets have held relatively steady in U.S. dollar terms while suffering significant losses in WazirX's Indian rupee pairs. Notably, the bitcoin-rupee (BTC/INR) pair has declined by 11% to 5.1 million rupees ($60,945), trading at a massive discount to prices on rival exchange CoinDCX, where the cryptocurrency changed hands at 5.7 million rupees. The discounts in BTC, USDT and other cryptocurrencies on WazirX likely reflect panic selling by investors and the rush for fiat/cash in the wake of the hack. Read more |
Biden Drop-Out Odds Hit 80% on Polymarket |
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The chances of President Joe Biden withdrawing from the race for U.S. president hit set a new all-time high of 80% midday New York time Thursday, after he said he had been diagnosed with Covid-19, according to bets placed on the crypto-based prediction market platform Polymarket. In an interview with BET News that aired Wednesday, Biden said that he would consider dropping out should he be diagnosed with a medical condition. “Is there anything that you would look to you, personally and to say, ‘If I see that, I will reevaluate?’” BET's Ed Gordon asked Biden. “If I had some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, ‘You got this problem, that problem,’” Biden said. The odds of Biden dropping out first surged following a debate last month with Republican candidate Donald Trump, jumping to 70% from 36% beforehand as the incumbent's performance was widely criticized by stakeholders and the press. After a PR campaign stressing his commitment to staying in the race and denials from possible replacements, the "Yes" side of the drop-out contract slid 34 percentage points back to 36%. And then the cycle repeated. Read more. |
Dave Portnoy isn't buying bitcoin (BTC) at these prices. Accepting it as payment? That's another story. The Barstool Sports chief took "a big portion" of his sponsorship deal with the crypto exchange Kraken in BTC, Portnoy told CoinDesk. Kraken paid him directly in the cryptocurrency along with dollars, the pair said. Neither party wanted to discuss how much money changed hands. Bitcoin's current price above $60,000 is too high for him. "If I buy it right now – a ton of it – and it goes down, we'll have a problem in my brain." Still, Portnoy said he's "always" willing to take bitcoin as payment: "I believe in it that much." He did so in February when Kraken began sponsoring his "Davey Day Trader Global" (DDTG) livestream. Read more. |
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The Takeaway: Don't Fear the Robots |
By Mauricio Zolliker and Leroy Hofer People fear automation because it appears to render them helpless in the face of a bigger-than-life process changing the world at their detriment. The only cure to this is transforming the very foundation of this process by making everyone a stakeholder in it, not its victim, and that’s where Web3 comes into play. Let’s start with an anecdote. People don’t tend to be too nice to car sharing and rental vehicles. However, after tokenizing a number of vehicles managed by a Viennese car-sharing operator, we noticed something completely different. People with a stake in the car’s revenues treated the Teslas like their own cars. Not a week went by without someone taking the car out for a wash, or cleaning its interior, or doing something equally helpful, even though they didn’t have to. There were no rewards for that, even though the provider did appreciate it a lot. Still, the tangible sense of stake was the game-changer which made people view these Teslas as assets, not threats. Here’s where Web3 has a role to play, specifically the notion of real-world assets (RWAs). By tokenizing a machine — in other words, representing certain rights to it, such as a cut in its revenues — as on-chain tokens, you get the perfect instrument for making everyone a stakeholder in the automation, a trustless mechanism that will never depend on the goodwill of a centralized entity. Imagine that automated smartphone factory distributing a portion of its revenues between its token holders — Web3 can make that happen. Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) have the same potential to defuse the ticking socio-economic time bomb as they provide a framework for automated devices of any complexity to create value on behalf of their owners. From smartphones and drones to vehicles, DePINs enable people to do more with their everyday devices, earning tokens for providing real-world services. As our devices grow smarter, they will be able to do more, and by doing more, they will enable new DePIN use cases and more opportunities to earn rewards. And with that, once again, we will be stakeholders, not victims, as the world moves from centralized infrastructures to community-owned ones. Read the rest here. |
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