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Barack Obama was one of dozens of Twitter users whose account was hacked by bitcoin scammers. (Photo … [+]
SCAMMERS TARGET CELEBRITIES
Bitcoin took over a national news cycle Wednesday evening as scammers hacked the accounts of dozens of high-profile figures, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. They posted scam bitcoin giveaways and enticed users to send more than $100,000 to their addresses.
“We are lucky the attackers are going after bitcoin (money motivated) and not motivated by chaos and destruction,” cybersecurity executive Rachel Tobac said to CNBC.
With Twitter reeling from the unprecedented hack, blockchain-based platform Revolution Populi is gearing up to launch soon to challenge the existing social media giants. It plans to use blockchain to give users control of their data and will use chainlink’s smart contracts to reward users for activity—chainlink’s link token is surging again, up 100% in the last month and up 1,000% since May 2019.
CRYPTO MARKETS
Institutional demand for bitcoin is growing, as crypto-asset manager Grayscale reported record inflows of $906 million in the second quarter, but the price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency still isn’t making any significant moves. There may be more buzz around ether, which has nearly doubled since the start of the year and seen its active address count grow by 118%, compared to a 49% increase for bitcoin.
Driven by a decentralized finance (DeFi) boom, the Ethereum blockchain serves as a key component of applications for stablecoins and the new decentralized lending market Compound. DeFi may even be helping to prop up bitcoin to a lesser extent, with $241 million of bitcoin currently locked in DeFi applications.
Source: Messari. Prices as of 4:00 p.m. on July 17, 2020.
BITCOIN AND BIBLES ON THE BEACH
A beach community in El Salvador, fueled by a donation worth six figures from an anonymous early investor in bitcoin on the condition that it wouldn’t be cashed out, is trying a grand experiment. Residents use bitcoin to pay for anything from groceries to hardware supplies to utilities. Michael Peterson, the director of the Bitcoin Beach initiative, also manages and fundraises for a missionary organization in El Salvador called Missionsake, though he maintains that Bitcoin Beach is nonreligious.
BITCOIN CORE PIONEER
Amiti Uttarwar, the daughter of Indian immigrants and a native of San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley, is the first confirmed woman developer of the Bitcoin Core. Uttarwar graduated from Carnegie Mellon and eventually made her way to Coinbase, where she developed a passion for crypto. Last year, she was accepted to her new pioneering role that gets her as close as possible to the atomic level of the protocol underpinning bitcoin.
ENTERPRISE
Before bitcoin payments startup Zap announced a partnership with Visa
“I think tens of millions of people will be using this stuff in the next few years, and that just takes a little bit of capital,” says Jack Mallers, Zap’s 26-year-old founder.
ELSEWHERE
After the Twitter Hack, We Need a User-Owned Internet More Than Ever [CoinDesk]
Twitter Hackers Leave Trail With Bitcoin Wallet Money Shifts [Bloomberg]
As Money Printer Goes Brrrrr, Wall St Loses Its Fear of Bitcoin [Cointelegraph]