The Block
Quick Take A solo bitcoin miner beat the odds — around 1 in 5,000 — to solve a block and take home the total subsidy and transaction fee reward. The bitcoin miner earned $218,544 for mining block 841,286 using CKpool in a solo mining configuration.
SlowMist’s information security chief alerted that a hacker from North Korea’s Lazarus Group is posing as an executive member of asset management firm Fenbushi Capital. Lazarus usually impersonates an investor to target prominent DeFi projects, SlowMist said.
Australia’s ASX stock exchange is expected to list its first approved batch of spot bitcoin ETFs by the end of 2024.Issuers including VanEck, BetaShares, and DigitalX have already filed applications for such ETFs earlier in the year.Australian investors have been trading spot bitcoin ETFs since 2022, currently listed on CBOE Australia
Quick Take South Korea is looking to promote the temporary crypto crime investigative unit into a department, according to a local report. The country received over 16,000 suspicious transaction reports from crypto companies last year, a number 49% higher than the previous year.
Looking ahead to May, the Pyth network’s first major token unlock since launch promises to unlock over $1.25 billion worth of tokens at current value. Plus, hundred-million unlocks from Avalanche, Aptos, Arbitrum, and Memeland.
Quick Take Ahmad Shadid, CEO of Solana-based decentralized compute provider io.net, explained on X how the protocol has been working to expel users from the network who spoofed GPUs in order to farm io.net rewards. Crypto investors had questioned the true numbers of GPUs available on io.net’s platform. Shadid called the attack a “painful lesson” and promised that it would not delay the launch of future releases or the $IO token.
BlackRock has announced that Moonpay’s top lawyer will join the board of BlackRock’s $IBIT spot Bitcoin ETF, one of the top contenders in the market.Haswell is also a member of the Core blockchain’s founding team.
Customers of the Russian crypto exchange Beribit have reportedly occupied the exchange’s offices, demanding to withdraw their funds. Meanwhile, legislators of the Russian Duma have introduced legislation to ban crypto exchanges in the country.
Quick Take zkSNACKs, the company behind the privacy-boosting Bitcoin wallet Wasabi Wallet, announced today that users from the United States will be barred from using its products indefinitely. The decision was likely prompted by the arrest of Samourai Wallet’s founders earlier this week.
The DOJ, in an opposition filing, says most users accessed Tornado Cash through the website, which the founders operated, even if it was technically possible to use Tornado Cash directly on-chain. Tornado Cash developer Roman Semenov is facing charges of money laundering and conspiracy related to the creation and operation of Tornado Cash alongside two others.
