Fintech Daily Digest

Someone is stealing millions of dollars worth of Ethereum by guessing users' private keys. Normally this should be impossible, but lots of keys seem to be very weak. Researchers are unsure how those weak keys are being generated and used.

Finland's Act on Virtual Currency Service Providers clarifies that the FSA will henceforth be statutorily required to register all crypto exchanges, custodian crypto wallet providers and cryptocurrency issuers operating in the country.

In what seems to be one of the greatest crypto scandals 2019 has seen so far, the United States Attorney General in New York accused Bitfinex of using Tether's cash reserves to cover a rumored $850 million funding gap with reserves meant for backing the stablecoin. Both companies share the same owner.

In the long run the answer to the high cost of remittances is a shift away from expensive cash-based systems and a bypassing of banks and transfer firms altogether.

E*Trade Financial Corp. May be getting ready to let customers trade cryptocurrencies on its platform. The firm will start by adding Bitcoin and Ethereum, and will consider adding other currencies in the future.

Ontology will launch Paxos Standard (PAX), a regulated USD stablecoin, on the Ontology blockchain, in May.

France's new crypto law grants blockchain-related projects the right to a bank account, provided they opt in to being regulated

Rather than brashly setting out to replace banks altogether, big tech's strategy is to quietly seize the customer relationship one product at a time by offering a seamless digital financial services experience tied to their core platforms. This presents bankers with a dilemma: should they try to beat back the invaders or join forces in order to gain access to their customers?

Rather than relying on a proof-of-work consensus protocol, ethereum 2.0 will rely on a proof-of-stake consensus protocol whereby validators stake their own funds and attest to blocks and transactions being created on the network.

Launched in December 2017 as an ERC-20 token, MakerDAO is pegged 1:1 with the United States dollar, with its peg being maintained via over-collateralization with ether (ETH). In other words, users receive the equivalent of $1 in DAI by depositing more than $1 in ETH, and they can later reclaim their collateral by repaying the DAI they've received plus a "stability fee" in MKR, MakerDAO's other (nonstablecoin) token. By charging users this additional fee, the MakerDAO system theoretically prevents the value of DAI from dropping below $1, since the fee makes it expensive to mint more DAI tokens.

Quadriga cofounders Michael Patryn and the now-deceased Gerald Cotten worked together for a period at Midas Gold, a digital currency exchanger that ran from 2008 until May 2013, when it was pulled offline. Now it appears their connections stretch back even further.

What does QuadrigaCX, the Canadian exchange that recently lost $190 million in users' funds and Bitfinex, which lost $850 million in funds, have in common? They both relied on a shady Panama "bank," Crypto Capital, to handle payment processing.

Following the NY AG's accusations of a $850M cover-up, Binfinex refutes the claims as 'riddled with false assertions' and that the funds are not lost.

Payments platform Wirex is launching 26 fiat-backed stablecoins on the Stellar blockchain network, including the U.S. dollar, euro, the British pound, Hong Kong dollar and the Singapore dollar.

A majority vote to increase fees on programmatic lending platform MakerDAO has passed an initial round of polling today. This time, the winning vote is to increase fees by 2%, which, in comparison to past weeks, is a comparatively small increase to the usual 3 or 4%.

Genesis Global Capital wrote $425 million of crypto loans in the first quarter, bringing its total originations since the business launched in March 2018 to $1.53 billion.

"The New York Attorney General's office has alleged that crypto exchange Bitfinex lost $850 million and subsequently used funds from affiliated stablecoin operator Tether to secretly cover the shortfall."

Arca Investment Management is seeking US SEC approval for a US Treasury securities fund whose shares would be tokenized on the ethereum blockchain.

Ripple's XRP is having a disastrous start to 2019. In a year when bitcoin is storming back towards bull territory, XRP has crashed 16 percent. The third-largest cryptocurrency is now the worst-performing digital asset in the top ten.