Welcome to another news article! The cryptocurrency market experienced a crazy weekend! From Solana smartphones, to Axie Infinity reimbursing victims and much more!
In this issue:
1. Solana smartphone Saga draws conflicting responses from the cryptocurrency world.
2. White-hat hacker tries to recover ‘millions’ of missing Bitcoin, but discovers just $105
3. Axie Infinity will reimburse victims of the Ronin exploit and restart the bridge.
4. It seems the NFT-themed restaurant Bored & Hungry no longer takes cryptocurrency.
5. Bitpanda announces layoffs, stating no product quality compromises
6. Hoskinson proposes to Congress software-enabled crypto self-regulation.
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The Solana team has introduced mobile phones to Web3 by unveiling Saga, an Android-powered mobile device that will be distributed with the Solana Mobile Stack for Web3 developers. The community hailed the new development with a variety of responses, ranging from comparisons to Apple and Ethereum to worries about Solana’s network disruptions.
Vinny Lingham applauded the move and referred to it as Web3’s “iPhone moment”; he thanked Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko for enabling it. David Ticzon was equally impressed, tweeting that Solana was the “Apple of Web3.”
Several community members used this occasion to compare Solana’s development to that of the Ethereum network. Twitter user Thesolmane noted that although Solana released a Web3 phone, Ethereum had remained “innovation-free for years.” Nathanweb3 detailed in a Twitter thread how Solana is becoming a serious danger to Ethereum. According to the Twitter user, SOL’s engineers are able to recognise ETH’s user experience issues. Due to this, Solana’s team is resolving the difficulties and attempting to simplify matters for common users.
While many responded positively, others could not avoid bringing up the subject of Solana’s network disruptions. At the beginning of June, Solana’s (SOL) price plummeted as the network experienced its sixth outage of the year. Twitter user Metamaxie questioned why Solana is attempting to be a phone maker when it should be concentrating on making its blockchain stable.
Joe Grand, a computer engineer and hardware hacker well-known for retrieving crypto from inaccessible locations, spent hours hacking into a phone to locate barely a quarter of a Bitcoin.
In a Thursday YouTube video, Grand went from Portland to Seattle in an attempt to collect “millions of dollars” in Bitcoin (BTC) from a Samsung Galaxy SIII phone belonging to local bus company Lavar. Lavar first acquired BTC in July 2016 in a “very shady” manner, paying a person at a café and saving the cryptocurrency on a phone wallet before storing the phone and losing sight of it.
Lavar was unable to recollect the swipe password after discovering the phone in 2021, but he recalled putting up the option to delete the data if too many erroneous tries were made. After seeing Grand’s YouTube videos, he and a buddy made contact with him, enabling the white hat hacker to make many attempts to access the phone’s memory and retrieve the crypto.
After micro soldering, downloading the memory, and determining the Samsung’s swipe pattern for access — which turned out to be the letter “L” — Lavar opened his MyCelium Bitcoin wallet and discovered only 0.00300861 BTC, which was worth $105 USD at the time, but is now worth roughly $63 USD at the time of publication. Grand was subsequently able to ascertain that the bus operator acquired $400 worth of Bitcoin in 2016, the majority of which went to the defunct BitBlender crypto mixing business.
In the next week, Sky Mavis, the creator of the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity (AXS), will pay Ronin bridge hackers.
In March, hackers stole tokens worth $620 million worth of ETH and USDC. Bloomberg reported on Friday that after the bridge reopens on Tuesday, clients would be able to withdraw one ETH for each they held before to the attack.
In April, Sky Mavis raised $150 million, led by Binance, to compensate hacking victims. Accel, Animoca Brands, 16z, Dialectic, and Paradigm were among the investors.
Following the breach, the hacker transferred the stolen assets via TornadoCash. This year, the decentralised finance (DeFi) industry has lost $1.22 billion.
The Ronin hack prompted Bitcoin market fluctuations. Despite this, the Ronin blockchain accomplished significant advances. At the beginning of June, sales volumes of blockchain nonfungible tokens (NFT) hit $4 billion. It is a popular network for digital collectibles. Overall, only Ethereum has sold more NFTs. This is superior than Solana, Flow, Polygon, and WAXP.
The Los Angeles Times reported on Friday that Bored & Hungry, a newly launched burger establishment themed around nonfungible tokens (NFTs), no longer takes cryptocurrencies as payment for its meals.
When questioned by the Los Angeles Times, a Bored & Hungry staffer said, “Not today – I don’t know.” The person did not indicate when the decision to remove crypto from the menu of payment alternatives was taken, nor did they indicate when crypto payments will return.
The original release of Bored & Hungry occurred in April of this year. At the time, a staffer told the Los Angeles Times that the majority of customers didn’t appear to care about crypto payment alternatives and were largely apathetic to “the restaurant’s commitment to the crypto cause.”
Another client of Bored & Hungry told the Los Angeles Times, “People want to keep their ethereum.” They will not want to utilise it.“ Richard Rubalcaba, a customer, said, “I don’t know how [cryptocurrency purchases] would function with the collapse.”
Many of the restaurant’s guests have indicated that they are not crypto-enthusiasts and visit the venue only for the cuisine. Jessica Perez, a customer, said, “We rank this establishment on par with In-N-Out, if not higher.”
Changes to a venue’s payment policy seem to reflect the global crypto and macroeconomic catastrophe. Fear not, hungry cryptocurrency fans, as Chipotle started accepting cryptocurrency payments through Flexa in early June. Several nations are confronted with stringent restrictions and inspection, and the cryptocurrency industry faces challenges of contagion.
Bitpanda, an Austrian crypto and stock trading platform, joins the increasing list of corporations announcing major layoffs in an effort to “emerge financially healthy” from the current bear market.
In recent weeks, the bear market has resulted in multiple disastrous results for various ecosystems, like Terra’s (LUNA) and Abracadabra’s Magic Internet Money (MIM) de-pegging fiascos. Bitpanda took the “difficult choice” to reduce the number of employees to about 730 after seeing the accidents from the front row.
LinkedIn data shows that Bitpanda is in the process of laying off roughly 277 full-time and part-time workers. the actual number of Bitpanda employees that have announced their intention to leave the firm is unknown.
Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Cardano, urged Congress that it should regulate cryptocurrencies but leave compliance to software developers.
During a Thursday congressional session, Hoskinson compared the ideal setup for crypto regulation to how financial self-regulation works, telling lawmakers, “it’s not the SEC or the CFTC handling KYC-AML, it’s banks:”
“This is a public-private collaboration. It is necessary to set these limits; then, as innovators, we can create software to facilitate their implementation.” The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are two financial authorities disputing authority over the cryptocurrency business.
Representative Austin Scott of Georgia said that neither the SEC nor the CFTC have the personnel to supervise the hundreds of cryptocurrencies on the market, stating that “it is impossible to regulate all of these currencies.”
Hoskinson said that the capacity of cryptocurrencies to store and transmit data meant that a significant portion of this regulatory work could be performed automatically. In addition, he cited this as reason for allowing the crypto business to establish self-regulating organisations (SRO) to advise regulatory compliance, similar to the private banking industry.
Hoskinson proposed that the industry should build a “self-certification system” that would automatically monitor compliance until an abnormality was detected, at which time it would be reviewed by a financial authority.
Hoskinson predicted that even quadrupling the capacity of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would not be sufficient to audit every American, indicating further why manpower should not be an issue for crypto legislation.
Rather, Hoskinson explained to Scott that cryptocurrencies may be designed to delay transaction settlements until legally necessary checks are completed.
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