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Binance Futures Takes Down LUNA Perpetual Contracts

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Binance continues to deactivate connected trading services as the Terra network’s coins Luna (LUNA) and TerraUSD (UST) collapse.

Binance Futures, the firm’s derivatives arm, has delisted coin-margined LUNA perpetual contracts, the company revealed on Thursday. “To avoid automatic settlement, users are encouraged to cancel any open positions prior to the delisting time,” the site said in a statement.

Binance Futures has also begun to settle contracts automatically, lowering leverage tiers and updating margin tiers for coin-margined LUNA perpetual contracts.

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Binance Futures Takes Down LUNA Perpetual Contracts 2

Binance halting LUNA

As a result, the 8x leverage tier has replaced the 21-25x leverage tier as the largest leverage tier accessible on Binance for LUNA perpetual contracts. According to the new statistics, 11-20x leverage is lowered to 7x, and 6-10x leverage is replaced by a 6x leverage tier.

Existing roles that were created before the change would not be impacted, according to the notice.

Binance also stated that it “reserves the right to adjust the maximum leverage and margin tiers for USDT-margined LUNA perpetual contracts at any time without warning.”

The new Binance Futures trading updates come after Binance stopped LUNA and UST withdrawals on Tuesday due to a huge selloff of tokens on the Terra network, with the UST stablecoin losing its dollar peg and plummeting below $0.67.

The UST stablecoin, which was supposed to maintain its 1:1 peg with the US dollar, fell as low as $0.30 on May 11, while its sister token LUNA lost more than 99 percent of its value at the time of writing.

The events sent shockwaves across the cryptocurrency industry, with the overall market capitalization plunging by nearly $600 billion.

To preserve the stablecoin’s 1:1 ratio, UST is an algorithmic stablecoin based on a system of swaps between LUNA and UST as well as LUNA token burning.

Unlike the UST stablecoin, significant stablecoins like as Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) are fiat-backed stablecoins, meaning that their value is maintained by equal currency reserves.


Polygon Emerges As A Preferred Destination For Crypto Initiatives

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The Polygon ecosystem is teeming with a lot of activities. Originally marketed as Ethereum’s scaling solution, or the so-called Layer 2 blockchain, has rapidly evolved to become what co-founder Mihailo Bjelic claims, a “one-stop-shop for anything that a developer would need to spin up a node or application.”

Last year its $250 million acquisition with the ZK rollup Hermez network was merged as Polygon Hermez, which has boosted its privacy-enhancing functionality by hiding transacting addresses and amounts from prying eyes.

Polygon also pledged $100 Million to bootstrap growth. Just a couple of months after its February launch, Paper, a crypto-focused payments processing firm has closed a $7.3 million seed round after a $2 million angel investment, for a total of $9.3 million in fresh capital, James Sun, co-founder and CEO of the firm said.

The round was co-led by Electric Capital and Initialized Capital with participation from Polygon, FalconX, and Long Journey Ventures among others.

“Paper enables users to create wallets through their email addresses and purchase NFTs with credit cards [or crypto wallets] across the MATIC blockchain to provide non-crypto consumers a “frictionless” bridge for entry into the marketplace,” the announcement read.

Meta Chooses Polygon Blockchain to fuel its Web 3 Ambitions

Another significant development was when Meta announced that they will use the blockchain to expand their reach into the Web3 space. 

Ryan Wyatt, CEO of Polygon, tweeted, “We’re excited to share that Meta is partnering with 0xPolygon as they push into web3. Facebook is choosing it due to our carbon neutral footprint, the scale we can offer, and the developer ecosystem choosing to build on the blockchain.”

Last month, the layer-2 protocol unveiled a new plan, “The Green Manifesto,” to transform into a more sustainable era and aims to be ultimately carbon negative by the end of 2022.

It has allocated a $20 million fund to help realize its goal. As per the team behind the project, the fund will be directed at community initiatives and projects that use technology to combat climate change.

Wyatt who is also the former Head of Gaming on YouTube declared, “The most reputable companies in the world are choosing Polygon after due diligence.”

Solana Pay now offers merchants customized transaction requests

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Solana Pay carries on to change the payments landscape. The first totally decentralised payments rail has caught the hearts and minds of retailers and developers seeking a modern solution to bring commerce activity on chain only three months after its inception. Solana Pay was used by many of the 130+ competitors in the inaugural payments track of the just finished SOL Riptide hackathon.

Solana Pay has taken another step ahead by making transaction requests available to developers and merchants. The SOL pay had previously relied on one-way SOL, USDC, NFTs, and other token transfers. These were excellent starting points for completely decentralised payment systems.

However, thanks to transaction requests, any SOL transaction can now be brought into the real world by a participatory request between a checkout app and a mobile wallet, enabling NFT minting, dynamic discounts, tokenized loyalty programs, and much more. It works like this:

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Solana Pay now offers merchants customized transaction requests 4
  • The customer scans a merchant QR code, which is translated into a Solana Pay transaction request URL by their wallet app.
  • The wallet makes an HTTP request to the merchant API.
  • The merchant receives the customer’s wallet address in the request and can respond with a bespoke transaction.
  • The wallet, like any other transaction, displays the transaction data to the customer, as well as a merchant URL and icon.
  • The customer signs the transaction with their private key and sends it to the network, approving (or declining) it.

Initial use cases for Solana developers to explore

Transaction requests increase the power of a simple purchase by permitting any SOL transaction.

  • Customers can communicate with merchants in a truly bi-directional manner. At the moment of sale, they can atomically mint an NFT or transfer loyalty tokens.
  • Refunds, chargebacks, insurance, buy-now-pay-later, discounts, rewards, and yield creation are all possible with composable DeFi transactions incorporating borrowing, swaps, escrow, and more.
  • Merchants can pay for transaction fees, token account setup, and NFT minting on behalf of their consumers, removing the need for them to keep SOL in their wallet and lowering the friction of interacting with the Solana ecosystem.
  • Merchants can refuse to reply to a transaction request, which could be employed to allow permissioned transactions, such as when compliance requires authentication.
  • Consider alternatives to payments. Customers can receive tokens, invitations, and prizes from merchants and brands who offer dynamic experiences. Check out mtnPay’s Booth app, which uses transaction requests to mint 1:1 NFTs for consumers.

However, at the time of writing, SOL was priced at $82.86 and had plunged by 5.22% over the last 24 hours.

Argentina’s Banking Giant Welcomes Crypto Trading

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Argentina’s largest private bank Banco Galicia with a market cap of nearly $1.3 billion, has finally added the option to trade cryptocurrencies on its platform. As per a Monday announcement, the financial firm will allow users to buy and sell Bitcoin [BTC], Ether [ETH], USDC, and XRP.

Banco Galicia has collaborated with Lirium, a Liechtenstein-based crypto product for digital wallets and mobile banking apps.

Sources also revealed that for the time being it is offering users the ability to buy and sell crypto, but not allowing them to withdraw or send crypto, Lirium COO Martin Kopacz said, adding that the bank also offers a custody feature.

Banco Galicia plans to launch the service to all of its customers by mid-May, Kopacz noted.

Stakeholders lending support to Argentina’s biggest crypto development

In order to facilitate crypto trading and custody service, Lirium has partnered with OSL, a Hong Kong-based digital asset trading platform that began operating in Latin America last October.

Lirium is also working with four Argentinian financial institutions that plan to unveil a crypto trading service, Kopacz said, without disclosing dates. Apart from that, Lirium is working on similar integrations in Brazil and Mexico, according to Kopacz.

Reasons behind Argentina’s exponential crypto growth

In frontier markets like Argentina, cryptocurrency has skyrocketed. The nation marred by an unstable financial system and strong government intervention in the country’s economy has driven Argentines to seek solace in digital assets, according to a new report from the BBC.

The highly volatile Argentine peso, the country’s national currency, has been subjected to a range of financial controls that make the everyday citizens’ basic life essentials like buying and investing with the currency, increasingly difficult.

Amid this chaos and uncertainty, cryptocurrency has enjoyed a steady boon. Data from Chainalysis showed that Argentines earned $1.86 billion in cryptocurrency in 2021.

So far, the government has taken a relaxed attitude to the cryptocurrency boom. Recently it rolled out a so-called “innovation hub” to bolster fintech and cryptocurrency startups in a regulated manner.

The latest addition by the country’s largest bank to allow crypto is certainly a good start towards encouraging user adoption.

Rhode Island Is Offering Crypto Rewards to Green Home Builders

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In Rhode Island’s House of Representatives, legislation was introduced that would reward a home builder with a “green coin” cryptocurrency for lowering the project’s carbon impact.

According to the Green Housing Public-Private Partnership Act, the builders are required to submit the housing project’s utility costs and carbon emissions. It should be reported annually to the state’s public utility commission. If the project is able to lower its utility expenses, the state will give the property owner a crypto credit.

Crypto rewards to Rhode Island builders

“Any reduction 24 amount of utility costs attributable to any housing construction project pursuant to this chapter shall 25 be assigned a credit amount which credit shall be eligible for redemption in a byway of cryptocurrency in the form of a green coin.”

The plan would be funded by $500 million in private bank donations and $125 million from the state, which would be known as the “Green Housing Fund.”

The Green Coin’s blockchain network is unknown. However, it is likely to be a less expensive proof-of-stake (PoS) network, which is popular with mainstream environmentalists these days.

The law is intended to address both the unexpected increase in housing demand in the Ocean State and to incentivize home builders to adhere to environmental regulations. The suggestion reads as follows:

According to a report from local news outlet The Providence Journal, the newly proposed policy is intended to boost new housing developments in the state, which is experiencing a housing crisis aggravated by rising costs year after year.

Redfin, a home data tracker, reveals that Rhode Island’s housing supply has steadily declined over the previous five years, with a five-year low in February 2022.

While the Rhode Island legislature’s intention to award environmentally conscious builders with cryptocurrency is unique, cryptocurrency in the real estate market is not. Taking out crypto mortgages to help pay for a home is becoming more frequent.

Late this month, the USDC.homes program provided a loan in USD Coin (USDC) on the Polygon network to a new homeowner in Austin, Texas.

The uncollateralized loan works similarly to regular loans, except that the down payment, which is also made in crypto, is staked to earn the borrower interest, which may be used to reduce the principal.

Deus Finance Affected by Back to Back Hacks Worth $13.4 Million

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Hackers have recently targeted Deus Finance DAO, a decentralized finance (DeFi) network. This is the second time the platform has been targeted in the previous 60 days.

PeckShield, a blockchain security business, announced on April 28 that hackers had compromised Deus Finance, a DeFi project based on the Fantom blockchain.

According to the security firm, the incident resulted in a loss of up to $13.4 million, with Ethereum accounting for the majority of the stolen assets (ETH).

The PeckShield release stated, “The hack is made feasible because of the flash loan-assisted manipulation of the price oracle that reads from the StableVW AMM – USDC/DEI pair.” “The pool is then drained by borrowing and draining the falsified price of collateral DEI.”

Deus Finance is not new to hacks

After being employed in some of the most high-profile assaults of 2022, flash loans have gained the reputation of being one of the most popular ways to target DeFi platforms.

According to PeckShield’s early investigation, the hackers’ primary attack mode was a flash loan.

The breach was triggered with a total of 800 ETH ($2.2 million) taken from Tornado Cash and transmitted to Fantom via the MultiChain. The stolen assets were converted to ETH and put in the hacker’s account after the conclusion of the assault.

“This address is alleged to be implicated in a flash loan exploit on DeusDao,” says a warning attached to the hackers’ wallet address. “There will be more.”

PeckShield announced in the middle of March that Deus Finance had been the victim of an exploit that resulted in a $3 million loss.

“The protocol may be bigger,” PeckShield speculated, “with 200 DAI and 1101.8 ETH.”

The March attack was very similar to the previous attack in that it employed the same flash loan-assisted pricing manipulation. The assets were moved from Tornado Cash initially, then tunneled in the same fashion as the April attack.

The community was disappointed that the protocol had been hacked again in the same way. While the community waits for an official reaction, calls have been made to Circle to freeze the $USDC implicated in the incident.

Post the $600M Ronin Hack the Team Is Sprucing up its Security Measures

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Following the $600 million Ronin attack late last month, the Ronin Network and Sky Mavis have promised to improve their smart contracts, pay large bug bounties, and tighten up security.

An exploit for 173,600 Ether (ETH) and 25.5 million USD Coin (USDC), valued at more than $612 million at the time, was discovered on the Ethereum sidechain designed for the popular NFT game Axie Infinity.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) blamed the attack on Lazarus, a North Korean-based and state-sponsored hacking gang. It issued a warning to other crypto and blockchain companies earlier this month.

History of the Ronin attack

Sky Mavis’ Ronin validator nodes and Axie DAO validator nodes were hacked on March 23rd, causing a loss of 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5 million USDC from the Ronin bridge.

The hack happened on March 23rd, 2022, and the Sky Mavis team detected it on March 29th. The team didn’t have a robust tracking system in place to monitor massive discharges from the bridge; the rupture didn’t go unnoticed for long.  

In order to fabricate bogus withdrawals, the attacker gained possession of five of the nine validator private keys – four Sky Mavis validators and one Axie DAO.

The Security upgrades under the sleeve

The Ronin Network intends to reopen its bridge by mid-to-late May, with Binance providing withdrawal and deposit infrastructure for Axie users until then.

The team is around 80% done with the Ronin bridge smart contracts upgrade; they’ll be redesigning the backend, transferring all outstanding withdrawals, and providing a validator dashboard that “allows for approving huge transactions and adding/removing new validators,” according to the team.

Sky Mavis will beef up its security measures by enlisting the support of “top tier security specialists,” undertaking contract audits, and putting in place more robust internal processes, including training classes to “fight external attacks.”

It will also significantly increase its node count in order to assist in decentralizing the project. Sky Mavis plans to expand the number from nine to eleven in the next three months. The initiative hopes to have more than 100 nodes in the long run.

Sky Mavis will also provide up to $1 million in bug bounties to any white hat hackers who can uncover new vulnerabilities.

Crypto Is Now Accepted at a Singapore Luxury Car Company

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EuroSports Global, a Singaporean luxury automobile dealer, has begun taking crypto payments for Lamborghini and Alfa Romeo vehicles.

EuroSports has collaborated with Fomo Pay, a digital payments startup, to take payments in BTC, ETH, USDT, and USDC for its cars. The startup sees a need to meet “the rising need for flexible and easy-to-use crypto payments” while also lowering transaction fees and simplifying international transactions utilizing crypto.

According to Fomo Pay CEO Louis Liu, the MAS granted the company a digital token payment license in September 2021. 2Tone Antique, a merchant, specializing in vintage high-end timepieces, and Luxehouze, a renowned marketplace for luxury commodities in Asia, use the firm’s intermediary services.

2Tone Vintage intends to attract new customers using Fomo Pay, while Luxehouze wants to prevent currency swings.

Despite the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s warnings that bitcoin trading is dangerous, several establishments in the region are already taking cryptocurrencies as payment.

“Singapore is one of Luno’s main markets, given its position as a worldwide financial center with a progressive business climate,” Sherry Goh, country manager for Singapore at London-based crypto exchange Luno, said.

“Between March 2021 and February 2022, our client base increased by more than 40% year over year,” he added.

Porsche Towson now accepts crypto

Porsche now accepts digital assets payments in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Shiba Inu, and other cryptocurrencies.

On Twitter, Bitpay announced cooperation with Porsche Towson. Users may pay for a Porsche automobile using digital assets, thanks to Bitpay’s integration.

Porsche Towson is a Porsche dealership located in Twoson, Maryland. The store sells both new and used Porsche vehicles. BitPay was founded in 2011 with the goal of making bitcoin payments easier for companies. BitPay now has over 10,000 businesses that utilize it to make bitcoin transactions easier.

Companies like BitPay, which allow retailers and even real estate brokers to accept payments in numerous digital assets, are poised to pull business away from traditional banks.

According to Deloitte, firms may handle crypto payments without keeping bitcoin on their balance sheet by using an intermediary that converts back and forth between cryptocurrencies and fiat.

This helps to attract new clients in the near term, with the third party considering most of the risk and regulatory requirements.

North Korean Hacker Group Lazarus Behind Ronin Bridge Hack

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According to the US Treasury and blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, North Korea’s Lazarus hacker cell is tied to the crypto industry’s largest-ever attack.

The US Treasury and FBI have been collaborating to figure out who was behind the Ronin bridge hack in late March, which resulted in the theft of more than $615 million in bitcoin.

The FBI revealed that the crime was carried out by the Lazarus Group and APT38 hacking groups after an investigation. According to Bloomberg, the agency noted that these crimes provide valuable cash for the North Korean leadership.

Lazarus – the largest hacking group

The attackers employed the Tornado Cash Ethereum transaction anonymizing service to conceal their traces, transferring as much as 28,000 ETH via the mixer.

In 2014, the Lazarus Group made headlines when it was accused of hacking Sony Pictures Entertainment. The invasion was retaliation to the release of “The Interview,” a satirical film mocking North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control amended its Specially Designated Nationals. It Blocked Persons’ List with an Ethereum address ascribed to the Lazarus Gang, a North Korean cybercrime group, according to the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis in a Twitter thread.

The address 0x098B716B8Aaf21512996dC57EB0615e2383E2f96 has also been linked to the hack. This proves that the gang was behind the Ronin Bridge breach on March 23, which resulted in the theft of 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5 million USDC.

The importance of understanding how North Korean actors use crypto for criminal reasons was underlined by Chainalysis. Furthermore, the blockchain security firm warned of the necessity for enhanced security on decentralized banking protocols.

Furthermore, the blockchain security firm warned of the necessity for enhanced security on decentralized banking protocols. The company finished by stating that its products have been updated to reflect the Lazarus Group’s ETH address in the Sanctions category.

Sky Mavis built the Ronin Network as a sidechain for Axie Infinity, the most popular play-to-earn blockchain game.

The Ronin Bridge was hacked on March 23, but it took the Ronin team six days to find the vulnerability, worth over half a billion dollars.

Following the hack, the Ronin team stated that it was collaborating with numerous federal agencies as well as Chainalysis to figure out who was behind the assault.

Terra’s Luna Foundation Adds 4,130 Bitcoin to Its Stash

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Terra (LUNA) and Luna Foundation Gaurd (LFG) has purchased 4,130 bitcoin valued at $176.1 million. LFG currently possesses a total of 39,897.98 bitcoin worth $1.7 billion, based on today’s bitcoin exchange rates.

The Singapore non-profits Gnosis safe address withdrew 183,515,000 tethers (USDT) from the address before the LFG bitcoin wallet noticed those deposits. The LFG Ethereum address has just 164.17 million tethers left, according to on-chain measurements.

However, the address does contain a significant amount of USDC, as it now owns 398.95 million USDC on April 10. The Terra (LUNA) project now has 563.12 million stablecoins in its possession.

Using today’s BTC exchange rates, the LFG bitcoin wallet currently has 39,897.98 bitcoin worth $1.7 billion after depositing 4,130 bitcoin. Since its creation, the wallet has seen a total of 66 transactions or deposits, but 0 bitcoin has been paid out.

Terra’s bitcoin dream of $10 billion

At the current price of $42,752, the most recent Bitcoin buy amounts to roughly $1.7 billion.

Consequently, the Luna Foundation will need to purchase an additional $8.3 billion in BTC to accomplish its aim of possessing $10 billion in BTC and overtaking Satoshi Nakamoto as the second-largest Bitcoin holder.

The purchase of 4,130 Bitcoin by the Luna Foundation did not cause a knee-jerk reaction in the crypto markets. At the time of writing, the King of Crypto is settling above the critical $42,000 support level.

The Luna Foundation Gaurd (LFG) has announced a collaboration with the Avalanche Foundation, revealing that it would purchase $100 million worth of avalanche (AVAX) on an over-the-counter (OTC) market.

The $100 million in AVAX will be used to diversify the project’s UST Decentralized Forex Reserve holdings. Terrausd, or UST, is Terra’s (LUNA) algorithmic stablecoin, and LFG has backed the FX reserve with bitcoin as well (BTC).

The Luna Foundation Gaurd (LFG) has announced a collaboration with the Avalanche Foundation, revealing that it would purchase $100 million worth of avalanche (AVAX) on an over-the-counter (OTC) market.

The $100 million in AVAX will be used to diversify the project’s UST Decentralized Forex Reserve holdings. Terrausd, or UST, is Terra’s (LUNA) algorithmic stablecoin, and LFG has backed the FX reserve with bitcoin as well (BTC).