By Tim Hakki
6 min read
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
With crypto prices cooling by double-digit percentages over the week as Autumn approaches, it’s fair to say that any respite from crypto’s ongoing winter this year has been fleeting.
A recent wave of high-profile attacks and bankruptcies has put the industry on red alert. It’s not just thieves and insolvent crypto lenders raising alarm, it’s also western governments—specifically the United States and the Netherlands and their policies on Tornado Cash, a transaction privacy tool that works by mixing users’ crypto up in a common pool before sending it off to its intended destination.
Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department decided to ban American citizens from using Tornado Cash or transacting with Ethereum addresses linked to Tornado’s community. By that Friday, the Netherlands’ Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) arrested a “suspected” Tornado Cash developer. The crypto community and privacy advocates decried the move as a declaration of war on coders.
Neeraj Agrawal, director of communications at crypto think tank Coin Center, announced that his organization is challenging the U.S. Tornado sanctions in court.
On Tuesday, internet security researchers at ESET Labs tweeted about a phony Coinbase job listing. The PDF file is really a trojan horse deployed by North Korean state-sponsored cyber criminal hacking group Lazarus.
The Ethereum Name Service started the week by announcing that over the last three months, the number of registrations for .ENS domain names has doubled. Ethereum Name Service allows people to register memorable domains for their crypto wallets, instead of being limited to the unwieldy string of random numbers and letters that typically represents a blockchain address.
On Wednesday, Twitter user @mochains shared news of new crypto regulation in Canada. According to the announcement he shared, Canadian authorities have selected Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash as “unrestricted cryptocurrencies.” All other crypto will be subject to a $30k cap per annum.
Later that day, Twitter CEO Brian Armstrong fielded an important question.
Also that day, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Federov, shared a balance sheet revealing what his country has spent its crypto donations on since the beginning of Russia’s invasion.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk jokingly announced he’s buying Manchester United. MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor has a better idea.
Lastly, Bitcoin hodler Hodlonaut wants you to help him defend his claim that Dr. Craig Wright, a man who claims to have invented Bitcoin, is not the Satoshi he says he is.
Recently, the UK High Court ruled that Dr. Wright put forward false evidence as part of his latest defamation court battle against crypto podcaster Peter McCormack, who, like Hodlonaut, has repeatedly called Wright a liar. McCormack was asked to pay Wright £1 ($1.18) in damages.
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