Here comes Friday, November 3rd. As the week comes to an end we can focus on the highlights of the crypto industry over the past few days.
MetaMask rolls out security alerts to its browser extension
In partnership with Blockaid, the MetaMask team has introduced security notifications into its Web3 browser extension.
The feature is designed to ensure proactive mitigation of malicious transactions, thus protecting users from scams, phishing and hacks.
Officials from both companies anticipate that the such alerts would help protect users’ crypto assets against theft.
You can already activate the solution through experimental settings tab in the desktop version of the app, though the official launch of the hot new feature is scheduled for November.
MetaMask boasts over 20 million MAU (monthly active users), making it the most popular crypto wallet in the whole world.
Founded by former members of the Israeli army’s cyber intelligence unit, Blockaid closed a $33 million Series A funding round a month earlier.
Let us remind you that back in April MetaMask vebs added an option to buy cryptocurrencies via fiat.
Later on, in September, they added the option to “cash out” digital assets by withdrawing them to a bank card or PayPal account.
That same month, open beta testing of the Snaps crosschain protocol kicked off, aiming to extend the application way beyond EVM networks.
RWA tokenization boom to spark in a couple of years, Coinbase says
We are just one or two years away from achieving the full potential of real-world assets (RWA) tokenization, Coinbase Research analysts concluded.
At the moment, the rising interest in the technology is being fueled by climbing yields in the debt markets.
Compared to 2017, when opportunity costs hovered around 1-1.5%, today’s environment with interest rates above 5% emphasizes capital efficiency through instantaneous settlements versus the now typical T+2 [trade date plus two days indicating when securities transactions must be settled – TN].
Being able to operate 24/7 and maintain audit-transparent records broadens the scope of on-chain payments and settlements, experts explained.
They believe sovereign bonds, bank deposits, money market funds and repo (repurchase agreements) transactions will now fall into focus.
Increasing interoperability and industry consolidation are expected to drive the growth of the crypto segment.
The latter will be carried out in three following ways:
- financial verticals;
- jurisdictional boundaries;
- technology stacks.
The surging demand is materializing in various protocols to access the tokenized U.S. Treasury bond market, now quite different from 2017. In 2023, the market size grew sixfold.
Over the past six years, a multitude of inaccurate perceptions about tokenization have been dispelled. What’s more, counterparty risk has been dramatically reduced due to the ability to atomically settle in delivery-versus-payment (DvP) and delivery-versus-delivery (DvD) scenarios, the analysts pointed out.
Infrastructure challenges and the lack of clear legal frameworks in a number of key countries were cited by experts as obstacles.
Because of regulatory ambiguity, several platforms are often required to process tokenized assets in different jurisdictions. Projects like OpenEden, Backed, Matrixdock and Ondo confine the user base to accredited investors and oftentimes only non-US residents.
An increasing number of token issuers based on U.S. Treasury securities are registering in jurisdictions outside of this country.
The latter vary from strictly regulated ones like Switzerland, to places like the British Virgin Islands. This supplements the level of counterparty risk on top of the existing smart contract risk.
October losses in hacks and scams shrank to $51M
The crypto industry’s losses caused by 23 security incidents for October totaled $51.61 million. That’s 85.6 percent less than a month earlier, Beosin experts indicated.
Hacker attacks inflicted the most damage for the month – roughly $28.33 million. Among the major ones out of a total of 15 hacks were the following projects:
- the Fantom Foundation wallet – $7m;
- Philippine exchange Coins.ph – $6m;
- LastPass password manager service – $4.4m (the incident stemmed from an earlier data breach).
Beosin highlighted that all three cases are related to compromise of private keys. According to their data, such incidents still account for up to 67% of total losses from cyber attacks.
The experts also drew attention to two Telegram bot hacks over the past month. Maestro (~$510,000 in losses) suffered first, and then Unibot (~$640,000) followed.
TON sets world record for lightning-fast transactions
On October 31, The Open Network’s blockchain hit a world record with 104,715 transactions per second (TPS) during a public test.
The project team rented 256 node-validator servers from Alibaba Cloud to run the test and launched a separate TON Blockchain network. It created a so-called “bomb” – a special smart contract that clones itself and transmits transactions non-stop.
“We detonated the “bomb” for 10 minutes, resulting in intense load growth, and the network split into shardchains. Finally, the network split into 512 shards and processed 90-110K transactions per second. The network maintained this load for a while until we manually shut it down,” the project representatives shared.
In just 22 minutes, the network managed to process more than 107 million transactions, with a peak TPS of 111,498.
This figure outperforms all previously documented results of other blockchains, as well as the top speed of centralized payment systems such as Visa and Mastercard.
As per TON devs themselves, the network is potentially capable of processing millions of transactions per second given a sufficient number of validators.
In fact, the previous holder of the fastest blockchain title was Solana.
As a reminder, in September, the price of the The Open Network’s native token TON jumped 15% amid the integration of the full-fledged Web3 crypto wallet into Telegram.