Friday, July 28th. As the week comes to an end we can focus on the highlights of the crypto industry over the past few days.
OKX ramps up reserves by $3.8b
The well-known exchange released its ninth monthly Proof-of-Reserves report, revealing $11.3 billion in BTC, ETH and USDT.
The figure is up $1.3 billion over the past two months and $3.8 billion since the turn of year.
The report covers 22 digital assets, including USD Coin, Dogecoin, Ripple’s XRP, Solana, and others. According to the exchange, customer funds held on the platform are more than 100% secured.
What the exchange refers to as reserve assets are cryptocurrencies that “offer strong liquidity and market acceptance.”
These assets are mostly held in cold wallets.
As per the press release, the company has captured hundreds of thousands of hits generated by visitors to the Proof-of-Reserves page and self-verification tool since the services launched in late 2022.
For balance auditing, the platform takes a snapshot and employs Merkle’s tree-based encryption system to protect against unauthorized access.
After OKX implemented the zk-STARK proof-of-stake technology into the Proof-of-Reserves mechanism in April 2023, users gained the ability to independently verify the capacity of an exchange.
As you may remember, in May 2023, the company applied to become a registered digital asset service provider in France.
Elon Musk pumps DOGE by 9%
Dogecoin (DOGE) memecoin jumped 9% to $0.083 on July 24 after Twitter owner Elon Musk put the “D” symbol in his profile description.
Currently, the asset has rebounded to $0.08. The coin ranked eighth in terms of market cap, overtaking Cardano, CoinGecko says. The value reached $1.63 billion.
Next to the DOGE symbol, the billionaire placed the social network’s new logo – “X”. Musk previously discontinued the iconic bluebird as part of a broad rebranding effort. The steps he proposes would kick-start the transformation of Twitter into a large-scale ecosystem akin to WeChat.
Musk also retweeted a video made by DogeDesigner featuring the new logo.
In fact, the owner of Tesla and SpaceX has been promoting the meme token for quite some time now. Back in April 2022, he suggested cutting Twitter Blue’s subscription fees and giving users the option to pay for the premium service in DOGE.
Later in February 2023, due to a series of tweets by Musk, the memecoin responded with a rise in value. The entrepreneur introduced his dog named Floki as Twitter’s CEO and a new member of the company’s board of directors.
As of April 3, the DOGE exchange rate spiked 25%, surpassing the $0.1 mark. This came amid the social network’s logo change to a Shiba Inu, which is the coin’s mascot.
Musk later brought back the blue bird – the memecoin plummeted by 8%.
Recall that in May, Changpeng Zhao, head of Binance, said that the Twitter owner had “prolonged the life” of Dogecoin, which could have “long ago disappeared”.
Generative art platform Highlight launches on Ethereum
On July 26 at 19:00 MSK, Highlight, an AI-based generative art NFT platform, will be launched on the Ethereum network.
Highlight allows computer-generated images to be issued and sold as non-fungible tokens.
The platform doesn’t charge any fees from authors, so they get 100% royalties from the deals. The customers are the ones who bear all the transaction costs.
That said, artists fully own the token contract and can dispose of it as they see fit. The marketplace protocol supports Layer-2 Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon or Zora networks.
The platform partners with many generative artists including Melissa Wiederrecht, James Merrill, Holger Lippmann, Leander Herzog.
“Over the next year, we’ll continue to make Highlight the most accessible and inclusive platform for on-chain generative art. This includes providing support for credit card payments, email sign in, physical print orders and other convenient features that grow the overall size of the crypto art community,” CEO Nathaniel Emodi stated.
In May 2022, the startup raised $11 million in a funding round led by Katie Haun of Haun Ventures. Among the list of other investors are 1kx, Polygon Studios, Coinbase Ventures, SciFi VC and Thirty Five Ventures.
To recap, in June, Sotheby announced the auction of works by generative artists as part of the Gen Art Program campaign using blockchain technology.
Previously, Amazon Corporation’s cloud division set up a $100 million fund to finance its own AI-focused art projects.
New study reveals the number of cryptojacking attacks tripled
Between January and June, the number of stealth mining attacks increased by 399%, to 332.3 million, compared to 2022 results. Such figures were cited by SonicWall experts.
As opposed to Latin America and Asia, where the trend was weakly positive (+32% and +1%, respectively), the metrics showed triple-digit growth in Europe and North America.
Regarding the UK, the figure soared by 479%, from 1.8 million to 6.8 million. There have been reported 214.7 million attacks in the U.S. (+340% YoY). Businesses, cities, airlines, and even schools fell victim.
“The seemingly endless digital assault on the enterprise, governments and global citizens is intensifying and the threat landscape continues to expand,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bob VanKirk.
The company stated that cybercriminals have stepped up their efforts to remotely hack servers and devices, forcing them to mine crypto without the owners’ knowledge.
“This practice has become a new modus operandi for attackers as organizations increasingly refuse to pay ransom,” said Spencer Starkey, vice president of EMEA at SonicWall.
To maximize the odds of success, crooks constantly shift their tools, tactics and procedures, the report said.
As a consequence of the growing number of such offenses were the accumulation of digital assets by attackers and nation-states following investigations, the top manager added.