Here are some major developments from the world of crypto over the past few days
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) have joined forces with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the Philippines to take action against criminals who use cryptocurrencies to conduct fraud and other financial crimes.
The three institutions also held an International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) Investigation and Enforcement Training workshop last month.
Emilio B. Aquino, the chair of the Philippine SEC, said that the goal of the workshop was to “strengthen the capability of the SEC Philippines’ enforcement personnel in conducting investigations on securities-related crimes like insider trading, market manipulation, off-market fraud, and crypto scams.”
The Ethereum-based decentralised finance system Balancer has advised users not to visit its website following an attack on its frontend. The platform notified its community on September 19 at 11:49 pm UTC, urging users not to interact with the Balancer protocol until further notice. Balancer said the attack is being looked into.
Although the company hasn’t made an official statement whether customer assets were impacted, Balancer contributor Cosme Fulanito said that the vault is still “100 per cent fine”. However, Blockchain security companies, such as PeckShield and Blockchain researcher ZachXBT have said at least $238,000 worth of cryptocurrency have been stolen. Some users have also reported that when interacting with the website, they are being prompted to approve a malicious contract that drains users’ wallets.
Incidentally, this is the second attack on Balancer in less than a month after it warned of a critical vulnerability on August 22, 2023, suffering an estimated $2 million exploit.
Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Bitcoin Ordinals, has clarified that only the inscription numbers would be changed in an effort to streamline the protocol’s numbering scheme, but they would not be scrapped entirely.
Every non-fungible token (NFT) issued with the ordinal’s protocol has a distinct inscription number. They performed functions akin to serial numbers and were crucial to the creation of the protocol’s digital art.
But according to Rodarmor, maintaining the inscription numbers has resulted in an “ugly code and stalled development”. As a result, Rodarmor has now suggested making inscription numbers “permanently unstable”, which has deprioritised the numbering scheme that gives distinctive numbers to inscriptions made in the Bitcoin network.