Daily Archives: August 3, 2022

Fintech Firm Galoy Raises $4 Million, Startup Introduces Bitcoin-Backed Synthetic Dollar Product – Bitcoin News

Fintech Firm Galoy Raises $4 Million, Startup Introduces Bitcoin-Backed Synthetic Dollar Product – Bitcoin News

On Wednesday, Galoy, the firm behind El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach Wallet, announced that the company raised $4 million in funding in an investment round led by Hivemind Ventures. On the same day, the startup launched a new product called Stablesats, a stablecoin concept that leverages derivatives contracts to create a bitcoin-backed synthetic dollar pegged to the U.S. dollar. The Stablesats product allows people to transact via the Lightning Network and hedge against crypto market volatility at the same time.

Fintech Startup Galoy Raises $4 Million in a Funding Round Led by Hivemind Ventures

Galoy, the startup behind the Bitcoin Beach Wallet, has made two announcements on August 3. The first announcement details that the company has raised $4 million from strategic investors in order to “advance bitcoin-native banking infrastructure.” The funding round was led by Hivemind Ventures, but the recent financing stemmed from Alphapoint, Valor Equity Partners, Timechain, El Zonte Capital, Kingsway Capital, and Trammell Venture Partners. Galoy also stated that “other leading bitcoin investors” joined in on the funding round.

The founder of Hivemind Ventures, Max Webster, believes open source bitcoin banking is very important in order to bolster the global adoption of technologies like the Lightning Network. “Galoy dramatically lowers the barrier for any community or organization to become their own bank and plug into the world’s first open monetary and payments standard,” Webster explained in a press statement.

The Lightning Network (LN) is a layer two (L2) protocol built on top of Bitcoin that aims to scale the payments network and allow for peer-to-peer transactions with lower fees than onchain transactions. The founder of Galoy, Nicolas Burtey, wholeheartedly believes LN is the future of BTC payments. “It’s no secret that bitcoin and Lightning are disrupting traditional finance,” Burtey remarked during the fund raise announcement. “We see the Galoy team, contributors and clients as a community working together to build a bridge towards a more open and inclusive global financial system.”

Galoy Reveals Stablesats, a Lightning Network-Powered Bitcoin-Backed Synthetic Dollar

Presently, the value locked in the LN system is roughly $79.60 million, or around ​​3,418.14 BTC. In addition to the fundraising announcement, Galoy also revealed a new product called Stablesats. Galoy detailed in a blog post that the Stablesats product is one of the latest features to be added to the crypto payment platform. “An alternative to stablecoins or fiat bank integration, Stablesats uses derivatives contracts to create a bitcoin-backed synthetic dollar pegged to USD,” Galoy’s blog post says. Galoy’s announcement adds:

This enables dollar-equivalent USD accounts inside of Lightning wallets, solving one of the biggest problems for people using bitcoin for everyday transactions: short-term exchange rate volatility.

Burtey thinks that technologies like the Lightning Network and Stablesats will help digital transactions flourish in regions all around the world. “Bitcoin has brought digital transactions to previously unbanked communities across Latin America, Africa and beyond,” Burtey remarked on Wednesday. “However, its volatility makes managing financial obligations difficult. With Stablesats-enabled Lightning wallets, users are able to send from, receive to and hold money in a USD account in addition to their default BTC account. While the dollar value of their [bitcoin] account fluctuates, $1 in their USD account remains $1 regardless of the bitcoin exchange rate.”

The Stablesats product has its own website which gives a detailed summary of what it is and how to use the technology. Galoy’s open-source codebase for Stablesats and its other products can be seen on Github. Stablesats, specifically, uses “an instrument called perpetual inverse swap to create synthetic USD” and the team notes there are “other interesting avenues to explore.”

Tags in this story
$4 Million, Bitcoin, Bitcoin (BTC), BTC-backed, derivatives contracts, El Zonte Capital, Fundraise, Galoy, Galoy Founder, Hivemind Ventures, Kingsway Capital, lightning network, ln, Nicolas Burtey, Product Launch, Stablecoin, Stablesats, Stablesats Product, synthetic dollar, Timechain, Trammell Venture Partners, Valor Equity Partners

What do you think about Galoy raising $4 million from strategic investors? What do you think about Galoy’s Stablesats product? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Jamie Redman

Jamie Redman is the News Lead at Bitcoin.com News and a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open-source code, and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 5,700 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, Galoy,

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src=”
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));



Source link

Solana Hot Wallets Suffer Ongoing Attack, Roughly $5M Stolen Thus Far

Solana Hot Wallets Suffer Ongoing Attack, Roughly $5M Stolen Thus Far

We’re on the heels of cross-chain bridge Nomad suffering a demolishing hack earlier in the week, and now hackers are doubling down with an attack on Solana hot wallets mid-way through the week. On Tuesday afternoon, reports emerged of some sort of vulnerability that was taking advantage of Solana-based wallets. Approaching 24 hours later, there are still quite a bit of unknowns, and we’re approaching nearly $5M of hacked funds.

Let’s take a look at what we do know so far.

A Solana Scare

Nearly 10,000 wallets across mobile users utilizing both Slope and Phantom (two of the leading Solana wallets) fell victim to this week’s hack in what is seemingly a result of poor user privacy management. While reputable users in crypto Twitter are still working on a post-mortem, a Dune Analytics dashboard created by @tristan0x shows a visual of how quickly things developed; while activity on Wednesday has been at a standstill, there is still cloudy forecasts around whether or not this vulnerability is still active.

General crypto Twitter consensus thus far has pointed towards Slope as being the domino to fall here; the platform’s latest correspondence on Twitter, from Tuesday, states that they are “actively working to sort out the issue as rapidly as possible and rectify best we can.” On Wednesday, Slope released a message to users that was reposted by reputable crypto Twitter user foobar:

 

Despite abundant question marks around Solana security, the price of the SOL token has remained surprisingly strong. | Source: SOL-USD on TradingView.com

Related Reading | Why The Crypto Fear & Greed Index Points To Sustainable Recovery

Crypto Vulnerabilities Run Rampant

So how did it all happen? Post-mortems from independent sleuths and other reputable sources in the space have yet to be released, but speculation has largely landed on some variation of a ‘software supply chain attack’ being the likely downfall here. This is where attackers search far and wide for security vulnerabilities across network protocols, server infrastructure, and platform coding practices to take advantage of potential holes.

In this case, the root issue seems to lie within Slope and some have even speculated that it could be a malicious insider at Slope taking advantage of the platform’s practices. As foobar notes in the Twitter thread above, “compromised Phantom wallets came from seed phrase imports used in Slope.”

If you or someone you know is concerned about the safety of their funds on a Solana-based wallet, move funds to a hardware wallet where the seed phrase key has not been typed or inputted digitally on any device. Until a post-mortem from Slope and other reputable resources in the community emerges, there will be a variety of assumptions around these circumstances – so stay tuned and stay secure.

Related Reading | TA: AVAX Struggles To Hold Above Resistance As It Eyes $40

Featured image from Pexels, Charts from TradingView.com
The writer of this content is not associated or affiliated with any of the parties mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.



Source link

Senators Stabenow, Boozman introduce crypto bill that extends CFTC’s regulatory powers

Senators Stabenow, Boozman introduce crypto bill that extends CFTC’s regulatory powers

United States Senate Agriculture Committee chair Debbie Stabenow and ranking member John Boozman introduced the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act bill on Wednesday. The bill has been expected for several months. Like the Digital Commodities Exchange Act (DCEA) introduced into the House of Representatives by members of the House Agriculture Committee in April, the new bill enlarges the role of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The new bill is not the companion to the DCEA, however.

According to the summary, the bill’s definition of digital commodities “includes Bitcoin and Ether and excludes certain financial instruments including securities,” which are regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The bill mandates registration by the CFTC of a broad spectrum of market players, such as “digital commodity broker,” “digital commodity custodian,” “digital commodity dealer” and “digital commodity trading facility,” which are collectively understood to be “digital commodity platforms.” Digital commodity platforms could be cross-registered with the SEC under the bill.

In addition, the bill would require the registration of “associated persons of digital commodity brokers and digital commodity dealers.”

The bill was met with wide approval within the crypto community, mainly on Twitter. Blockchain Association policy head Jake Chervinsky called it “a good bill overall & confirms a growing consensus for CFTC regulation.” Coinbase chief policy office Faryar Shirzad said he was “really pleased to see the introduction” of the bill.

CFTC chair Rostin Behnam released a statement saying “new legislative authority is needed to clarify ambiguities and provide a regulatory framework to the digital commodity market.”

The general accolades were not without notes of caution. Coin Center released a blog post expressing gratitude for the “careful approach to developing this legislation” but cautioned:

“We have reservations about the breadth of definitions for regulated activities and we believe there is a need for a clearer exemption of persons engaged in constitutionally protected activities such as publishing software.”

The DCEA also addressed digital commodity registration but left it up to the platforms to register with the CFTC or remain subject to state registration.

Patrick Daugherty, head of the digital assets practice at Foley & Lardner and adjunct professor of Cornell Law School, told Cointelegraph in an email, “The legislation […] does not make clear that digital assets (other than Bitcoin and Ether) are not securities and are therefore covered by the DCCPA. It is therefore open to the SEC under its current leadership to continue to assert that virtually every digital asset is a security, which would be unfortunate.”

Daugherty also observed: “It is not clear to me that decentralized exchanges are, or are not, intended to be covered by this legislation. The platforms that are covered must be operated by “persons,” but DEXes have no personnel.”

Related: US crypto regulation bill aims to bring greater clarity to DAOs

The bill enters an already crowded field, joining the DCEA and the more recent Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act, which was introduced in June. Both bills give the CFTC a larger role in digital asset regulation. Notably, the DCEA and the present bill originate in the congressional agriculture committees, which are the bodies with supervisory powers over the CFTC.

It is known that Representative Maxine Waters, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, and Representative Patrick McHenry, the committee’s ranking member, are also working on crypto-focused legislation. Since the Financial Services Committee shares oversight of the SEC with the Senate Banking Committee, the Waters-McHenry bill is expected to be more favorable to the SEC.

The Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act bill will undoubtedly go through revisions as it is considered in Congress. It is unlikely to come up for a vote in the current Congress due to scheduling issues.