tl;dr
• Solana led the charge, but it looks like Slope may be the root cause• Portugal's biggest bank, Banco Comercial Portugues closed the account of CriptoLoja, a crypto exchange based in Lisbon• Gcash follows PayMaya in offering digital asset trading in the popular ewallet platform• 35K repos were dupl...
• Solana led the charge, but it looks like Slope may be the root cause
• Portugal's biggest bank, Banco Comercial Portugues closed the account of CriptoLoja, a crypto exchange based in Lisbon
• Gcash follows PayMaya in offering digital asset trading in the popular ewallet platform
• 35K repos were duplicated in GitHub and laced with links to malware
• Coinbase partners with Blackrock in a bidirectional institutional services deal while appealing to the Supreme Court over lawsuits
• Binance and Mastercard partner to offer a card to Argentina
Major announcements that have major implications. Here is what's on my mind today.
1. So, it looks like the problem with the hack that affected the Solana community yesterday could have all started with the Slope wallet. As you know I have not been a fan of Solana for a little while now. That said, I have to stop and say I love how the community came together to track down what the problem was. Not to mention the speed at which they reacted. Hat tip to the whole dang community! The coin business is not for the faint of heart. It means the problem is your problem even if it is not your problem. I am beginning o believe again.
2. Portugal's biggest bank, Banco Comercial Portugues closed the account of CriptoLoja, based in Lisbon. In an odd move Banco Santander has also initiated a similar closing. Could this be the end of crypto is Portugal? It could be considering there has been no official word as to why the accounts are being closed. Pedro Guimaraes, founder of Mind the Coin said, "While there is no official explanation, some banks just tell us they don't want to work with crypto companies. It's almost impossible to start a crypto business in Portugal right now." This could be a massive betrayal of the Cryptoverse, but it could also be that those two companies simply messed up. Time will tell.
3. April 6th I told you PayMaya was going to integrate digital assets into its payment platform. Well, not to be outdone, GCash is now also jumping into the fray and will allow users to trade digital assets on the mobile wallet platform. As more ewallet platforms around the world continue doing this I can easily see how this could become the new consolidation space. Keep an eye out for the ones that don't have deep pockets. They could easily become acquisition targets in the future.
4. In a major development over 35K repos on GitHub have been cloned as malware has infiltrated the platform. According to security researcher Stephen Lacy, who first uncovered this yesterday, there are infected projects including crypto, golang, python, js and others. GitHub Security is all over and say no repositories were compromised, the malicious code was posted to the cloned repositories. They also said the clones have been quarantined and there is no evidence that GitHub nor maintainer accounts were compromised. Another hat tip to fast-acting community!
5. So, Coinbase cuts a deal with Blackrock that sends the shares soaring as high as 45%. Coinbase Prime customers will be able to use Blackrock's Aladdin platform to trade stocks and Blackrock customers will be able to use Coinbase Prime's services. Coinbase saw a nice pop as high as almost 45% at one point. Nice news to drop as Coinbase petitions the Supreme Court to halt lawsuits in seeking arbitration. I think it is more bad management as they have had a lot of time to settle those cases and didn't. And they are relatively small cases, too.
6. Binance and Mastercard partner to offer a card to Argentina. People will be able to more easily spend digital assets via the card. This is the second such deal by Mastercard. The first deal was with Nexo in Europe. Mastercard is laying some serious groundwork for its future in the Cryptoverse. Made me think