Episode 232 - Blockchain adoption cases review, 11 New York lawsuits against crypto companies, and more.

Welcome to this week's Crypto Basic News episode! Tune in to listen to the gang talk about the progress of blockchain adoption, Cryptopia's big win in court, new lawsuits against 11 crypto companies in new York and much more!

• Rapid Fire
• Reddit may be devising a point system on the blockchain
• Redditor MagoCrypto posted the video, which is a walkthrough of a new build of the Reddit app that shows a feature with mention of community points. When delving into the FAQs of the wallet feature there appear to be pages on distribution, wallet, backup and recovery, and on the blockchain
• Crypto Funding Dropped Considerably in March Due To COVID
• VC funding for crypto projects was reduced to March 2019 levels after COVID swept the nation.
• Aside from a Bakkt $300 Million deal with Microsoft, the total VC funding was $117 million
• Former UFC fighter Ben Askren shows support for Bitcoin Halving.
• He was sponsored by Litecoin back in January 2020 for a fight and changed his Twitter handle to "Bitcoin Halving May 13th". Ya love to see it. Also of note, UFC partnered with Dapper Labs in February, a company that builds digital collectibles on the blockchain.
• It appears Bank of America is partnering with Ripple
• Question: "What do you see as the things sort of coming down in the next sort of five to 10 years that our clients should maybe start thinking about or even getting ready for?"
• Answer: "So not just the capability but the actual experience and ability to get things done anytime, anywhere because we are an around the clock society. And the second one is the ability to integrate. And Derrick touched on this a lot, it's not about our platform and our capabilities, it's about you as a client and the infrastructure you have and the ability for us to integrate, whether that's with platforms and capabilities that we built or partnerships that we have with the likes of Ripple or Swift. These are Fintechs that we're partnering with. They've come through all of our rigor of legal and compliance and we're able to leverage our banking as a platform to deliver that to you. So I really think the future is all about client experience and integrated platforms versus siloed products and capabilities. And then of course we've for Bank of America talk a lot about intelligent treasury, which brings all of that together. And you touched on this, Jonathon, as being an advocate for our clients and helping them navigate this changing environment. So I'm really excited and looking forward to see what the next few years bring."
• April Rent Stats Are In And They Aren't Looking So Good
• March logged 81% of renters paying by the 5th
• Real-life Examples of Blockchain-Based Digital TransformationsWe know that blockchain architecture is a great way to collect, store, and share data
• Article from Security Blvd looks to give real life examples of blockchain implementation
• US Air Force & Data Security
• Majority of military networks are centralized systems with thousands of connected devices, so vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
• They contracted Cyber-security firm Xage Security - uses a blcockhain-based system to regulate the terms of nodes joining the system & tracking their activity
• Non-profits & transparency
• One of the primary concerns with charities is corruption, trust, allocation of funds
• Blockchain powered charity platform GiveTrack allows donors to track their specific donations to see how/what impact is being made
• Blockchain also makes crossborder transfers easy
• Visa
• Launched B2B payment netowrk, using blockchain to process payments without an intermediary
• Information also stored using blockchain record-keeping, everything is transparent and secure. in 60 countries already
• Spotify & Royalties
• Industry shifted from download to streaming, making royalties very complicated
• Medichain uses smar contracts to improve attribution, uses end-to-end protocols for registering, identifying, and tracking creative works online
• Used to be an open media library to virtually sign & timestamp content, then spotify bought it
• Metlife & Medical Insurance
• Company in Singapore created an app (Vitana) to help women with Gestational Diabetes
• 20% of women there develop this during pregnancy, so how to get payment without filing paperwork
• Practitioner enters positive test results into medical data, app automatically triggers smart contract that deposits a payment into patients bank account
• Crytopia Exchange Users Score Big Win In Court
• Crypto Exchange Users Get Big Win in CourtOf course we all remember May 2019 the exchange went into liquidation after a May 2019 "hack" of NZD $30 million (equivalent of $17.85 Mill USD)
• Because the exchange operated as a trust by handling the cryptocurrencies on behalf of the account holders and holding these in separate trust accounts, Justice Gendall took the view that the digital assets should be classed as property.
• Justice Gendall said, "I reach the conclusion that the cryptocurrencies here situated in Cryptopia’s exchange are a species of intangible personal property and clearly an identifiable thing of value. Without question they are capable of being the subject matter of a trust."
• Account holders will be reimbursed of their balances.
• Apparently the founder of Cryptopia, Adam Clark, suspects it was an inside job. "A hacker somehow knew where everything was. Someone walked in with all the keys and deleted the logs on the way out," Adam told Stuff, adding "They didn't take the untraceable currency. It wasn't about spending the money, it was about fucking the company. They had direct access."
• New York: 11 cryptocurrency companies suedEleven cryptocurrency companies were sued in a New York court due to violating cryptocurrency laws.
• Including Binance, Fundacion Tron, BitMEX, KuCoin
• group of investors filed multiple lawsuits against 11 cryptocurrency companies alleging that they were tricked into buying unregistered securities in the United States.
• Lawsuit include 42 defendants in 16 countries
• Among the names that would appear in the documents are Brendan Blumer (Block.one), Dan Larimer (Block.one), Vinny Lingham (Civic), Justin Sun (Tron), Changpeng Zhao (Binance) and Arthur Hayes (BitMEX),
• Part of the suit is that they were told they were utility tokens, no need to register as securities with the SEC
• "One fact to note is that the law firm that is the cause is the same one that sued Bitfinex in October 2019 for alleged manipulation of the cryptocurrency market and the renowned Kleiman case against Craig Wright in which a lawsuit for a billion dollars was introduced."
• This would take years and has multiple jurisdictions (China, Singapore, Switzerland, Israel, Japan, Canada, & Estonia)

THAT'S A SCAM

• Decentralized exchange Bisq Is Hacked For $250k+"A Critical security vulnerability" was found and tradin was halted on Tuesday. 4000 XMR and 3 BTC were stolen from 7 different victims.
• "In plain words, this exploit was the result of a flaw in the way Bisq trades are carried out, not in the way funds are stored (i.e., there is no honeypot since Bisq is P2P)," Bisq stated.
• The attacker was able to intercept cryptos coming to users' default fallback address, which is the address where cryptos are sent to upon a failed trade

r/CryptoCurrency - I have created a list of cryptocurrency scams happening right now. I ended up losing some money last week and I don't want anyone to lose as well. So I researched on various scams taking place. If I have missed any please comment below..I will add it.

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