Weekly Highlights: Crypto News

Published in

WhiteBIT

4 min readJul 3, 2020

What’s new in the world of crypto this week? Let’s find out together (and win some cool rewards)!

What’s new on WhiteBIT?

We are glad to welcome XLA to our exchange;
Ripple Alpha is a centralized digital currency with transactions managed and certified by the Ripple Alpha Association;
XLA is released to the market every year;
XLA is paired against USDT. Another pair and two SMART Staking plans are coming soon;
moreover, you can enjoy two weeks of 0% trading fee right now!

DEMO Token is a free token that allows users to practice in crypto trading without wasting real money;
this feature helps to get used to our exchange’s design and find out all the important things about trading;
on the 13th of July, we will be launching the DEMO Token Trading Tournament;
the prize is 1 BTC, which can be a great ticket to the world of trading or a very nice bonus for a pro trader;
join right now and secure a pre-registration bonus!

WhiteBIT is going to support the ecological development of Atis;
The team is willing to reach an ecological strategic cooperation with the anonymous team of Atlantis to jointly promote the DeFi pledge of Atis, games, decentralized exchanges, initiatives, etc;
WhiteBIT will serve as the first batch of trading platforms for the launch of Atis. Stay tuned!

What’s new in the world of crypto?

Fraudulent websites successfully have stolen the personal records of a number of individuals from the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, Spain and more;
the attack was executed as a targeted multistage Bitcoin (BTC) scam propagated by a number of fraudulent websites;
victim’s phone numbers, which in most cases came with names and emails, were contained in personalized URLs used to redirect people to websites;
the report details that victims commonly received a text message, or SMS, which mentioned the name of the recipient;
researchers spotted six active domains featuring the same Bitcoin investment platform.

The U.K. High Court of Justice has ordered crypto exchange GPay to be “wound up in the public interest’;
in a statement Tuesday, the U.K. government said 108 clients had lost a total of just under £1.5 million ($1.9 million) using GPay;
although clients could deposit without completing know-your-customer (KYC) processes, GPay requested various identification documents to prevent clients from withdrawing funds;
GPay also sold clients insurance to protect them against trading losses, but the exchange did not always pay out;
GPay advertised itself extensively on social media and claimed, falsely, to be backed by Martin Lewis, the founder of MoneySavingExpert, a popular consumer finance website in the U.K.

The Swiss government is encouraging blockchain startups to set up shop with new laws that lower legal barriers to such businesses while leaving favorable tax laws untouched;
the National Council, Switzerland’s equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives, unanimously passed a legislative package changing about a dozen financial laws on June 17;
on June 19, the Federal Council acknowledged a report prepared by the Federal Department of Finance that concluded there was no need to make special amendments to existing tax laws with regard to blockchain;
Switzerland has long been a blockchain startup magnet. The city of Zug, in particular, was a popular location for token-funded projects during the initial coin offering (ICO) boom of 2017, earning it the nickname Crypto Valley;
through communications specialist Joel Weibel, the Swiss Federal Tax Administration said Swiss laws must guarantee legal certainty and the openness of authorities to new technologies.

A standard way to transact Bitcoin could be vulnerable to double-spending, new research has found;
blockchain sleuths at ZenGo, a wallet startup, have found a vulnerability that affected at least three major crypto wallets — Ledger Live, Edge, and Breadwallet (BRD) — and potentially more;
the bug, which the Tel Aviv-based firm calls BigSpender, allows a hacker to double-spend a user’s funds and possibly prevent them from ever using their wallet again;
it works by exploiting a flaw in Bitcoin’s replace-by-fee (RBF) function, a failsafe that enables users to swap an unconfirmed transaction with one that has a higher fee;
like other vulnerabilities found in Bitcoin’s core codebase, such as time-locked transactions, the RBF function has become a standard way for users to send a value back and forth.

Stay tuned for more news!

WhiteBIT Team

Written by Anna Ratieva