“We are currently experiencing a service outage for our Ethereum Mainnet API. Our on-call team is investigating and working to restore service functionality,” the Infura status page reads. The issue started today at 08:12 UTC.

Exchanges such as Bithumb and Binance have had to disable Eth and ERC-20 tokens on their platforms because of the service outrage.

CZ added that that are also investigating a possible Ethereum chain split at block 11234873

“Etherscan and Blockchair are showing two different chains and data after this block. We’re resolving now but have temporarily closed withdrawals,” said CZ.

Lead developer at Blockchair, Nikita Zhavoronkov gave an explanation to the chain spilt in a twitter thread. He clearly pointed out that Ethereum developers introduced a change in the code that led to the chain split starting from block 11234873 and since some service providers did not upgrade, they got stuck on a minority Chain.

Technically, that was an unannounced hard fork,” said Zhavoronkov. “Something similar happened to #Bitcoin 7 years ago when there was a database upgrade…Fix: upgrade geth and run debug.setHead(11234872).” Geth is a tool used to run a full Ethereum node on the system.

Infura has pointed out that it has identified the root cause and is fully ready to restore the service functionality back after bringing in more hands to help them.

Affected components include the Ethereum mainnet archive data, Mainnet filters, Mainnet logs, Mainnet Web socket JSON-RPC API and mainnet HTTPS JSON-RPC API. More work is currently going on and so far Infura said that the root cause was traced to several components within its infrastructure, these components were locked to an older version, a stable version of the Go-Ethereum client that encountered ” a critical consensus bug at block 11234873″.

The scammer links a site cryptoforhealth .com (might want to stay off the site until twitter comes up with a solution) where they claim to help people in this hard times of Covid-19, they also claim that top exchanges such as Binance, Kraken, Gemini etc are in partnership in these giveaways. They ask you to participate by sending them bitcoin first ranging from 0.1 to 20 BTC which is a typical sign of a scam. 

PLEASE BE WARNED, THIS IS SCAM !!!

The companies mentioned above would never ask you to send them Crypto for any reason.

The CEO of Binance, CZ has asked users not to click the link and not send any Cryptocurrency..unfortunately a few minutes later, he also got hacked. 

Crypto Twitter sees Massive Hacks. 

The hack is said to have started with a Cryptocurrency trader who goes by the name @AngeloBTC on twitter, he was hacked first. Then followed by Binance, CZ, Justin Sun and many others. 

They even Retweeted these tweets with those hacked accounts which shows that they are either a group doing this or one person. 

The hacker also uses one wallet address in all the hacks involving cryptocurrency accounts. 

Extended Hack to non crypto influencers

The hackers have also extended this activities into other large personalities in the society such as Bill Gates, kim kardashian, Kanye West, Barack Obama and many more.

The Hack has struck the Crypto Space with a lasting scare since today will never be forgotten not even for the Twitter team. They single highhandedly hacked a whole lots of accounts

The Twitter support has said that they are working on identifying what the problem was, and Tron CEO, Justin Sun who was also a victim of the hack has offered to pay $1 million to anyone that can i identify who did the hack and get their accounts back.

YouTube Promoted Scam Ads

It is surprising or a bit disgusting and annoying to find out that YouTube could actually allow promoted cryptocurrency scam ads to be displayed to millions of their customers, they do not allow legit cryptocurrency ads to be advertised, so why allow scams. Recently, these misleading ads have been constantly displayed on YouTube videos. YouTube at some point started removing videos that had anything to do with cryptocurrency, they however debunked it as an error promising to reinstate the videos back. (Forbes article).

With all that has been happening, one is left with the option of wondering if the Google subsidiary YouTube is very well conscious of what they are doing and seriously wants to paint cryptocurrency as a bad choice to newbies who are most likely going to fall to the scam.

What the Scam Ads look like

You would normally see them anywhere you would have seen a YouTube ad (before and in between videos). Sometimes too they are uploaded like a live stream on the Video platform. The scammers take videos of popular individuals in the crypto space like CZ, Vitalik , Elon Musk and even recently the CEO of Cardano Charles. They take these videos of them speaking in public gatherings like blockchain summits, on these videos they add text promising you 100% or more returns of your initial deposits almost immediately.

It is worth noting that YouTube is yet to address any of this and it is alarming because individuals are losing money on these scams.

Here is what CZ had to say

Meanwhile, we can’t even buy ads on YouTube…  crazy world.Quote Tweet

ADAs CEO, Charles Hoskinson

Will Scam always be there?

Sadly, the answer might be YES. Our daily lives are filled with it honestly, in Banks, in Face to face dealings and the rest of them. We could however minimize the risk of getting scammed by learning and understanding how they work, and fixing the amount of greed we have. When offered something too good to be true, let’s try to contact the official handles or communities to confirm them before sending funds.

They will try to be smarter and create new ways to scam, but so will you, you will be ready.

Both companies will operate independently and work together in ensuring more mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency by bridging the gap between fiat and digital assets. 

Swipe is available in 31 countries and has over 60 million locations where their debit card could be used as payment. They also listed BNB on their platform, this will help create more liquidity to BNB by making it available and spendable to Euro in all locations currently supporting Swipe Visa Debit Card. 

Binance Card

Binance exchange had earlier announced earlier in April their plan on introducing a Binance Card that could be used to shop and pay with cryptocurrency anywhere in the world. 

Today Binance CEO, Changpeng Zhao announced the beta testing of the Binance Card. 

He showcased the first use of the Binance Card and also started that he is taking part in the card beta testing. 

With the latest Torus update to V1.7.2, users can send cryptocurrency to any twitter or Github accounts, they can do this even if they haven’t logged into the Torus wallet app before. The new update also offers users the option of creating a new Ethereum wallet with any of the following social media handles : Google, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, Discord, Apple ID, Github, LinkedIn, Twitter, Line and Passwordless Accounts. 

Crypto Twitter

This news is most beneficial to the Crypto Twitter (CT), a term used to refer to cryptocurrency traders and investors on the twitter social media platform. 

There is a large amount of the cryptocurrency community on twitter, they are sure to make use of the new development to tip individuals or favorites just like it’s down on telegram. 

Testing the new Protocol 

Torus Labs tested the new twitter function on some top cryptocurrency personalities on twitter. They sent Eth to Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum,  they sent to Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and also to Binance CEO CZ. 

Whether or not this individuals received it is still unknown as at the time of writing. 

DEFI

Defi simply stands for Decentralized Finance; they are open-source technologies with the sole aim of improving different aspects of the financial system through the elimination of intermediaries or what we commonly refer to as “middle-man”.

DeFi Rankings

According to Coinmarketcaps ranking protocol we find Compound (COMP) leading with a market cap of $552.33M as at the time of writing, followed by Maker and Ox.

Binance exchange has also announced the launch of Compound (COMP) on their leverage platform with traders able to trade it with as high as 50x leverage. This comes after Coinbase announced support for the Defi token COMP and also allowed users to earn it through the Coinbase Earn initiative, an initiative where you learn about a particular cryptocurrency and still earn while doing that.

Coin telegraph reported that COMP is also listed on OKEX exchange.

With Sun having a stake in Poloniex, it was likely that the criticism from CZ would influence the listing decision. Apart from BNB, the exchange has also listed the Binance stable coin (BUSD). Currently, BNB is paired with Tether (USDT), Bitcoin (BTC), and Tron (TRX) with BUSD trading against Bitcoin and Tether.

On CoinMarketCap (CMC), Binance Coin is among the top ten leading cryptocurrencies with a market capitalization of $2.8 billion. Its stable coin, on the other hand, occupies position three among leading stable coins and position 49 among top cryptocurrencies on CMC.

The listing seemingly clears the bad blood between Sun and CZ concerning Sun’s acquisition of a considerable chunk of Steem tokens. Steem is a blockchain-based social media and content platform. With a large number of tokens, the Steem community feared Sun would have the upper hand when deciding about governance on the platform. To express their dissatisfaction, the Steem community spearheaded a hard fork which was supported by Huobi and Binance, which are leading cryptocurrency exchanges. The hard fork saw the creation of the Hive blockchain.

Announcing support of the Hive blockchain in March, Binance noted:

“We will take a snapshot of all STEEM tokens held by Binance users at the time of the final Steem block… and will distribute HIVE tokens at a ratio of 1 STEEM = 1 HIVE.”

Initially, Huobi and Binance had supported Sun’s takeover plan, but after a backlash from the Steem community, CZ misguided into believing they were voting for scheduled upgrades.

On why they decided to conduct a hard fork, Hive noted:

“The intention of this community-driven fork is to support and build on the strong Steem community values that have made our ecosystem so diverse and exciting. This new direction steps away from the burden of the Steemit Inc. ninja-mined stake.”

You gotta ask yourself…Why are earth would CZ pay $400m for Coin Market Cap? 🤔😳 — Crypto Traders Pro

A lot of people might have asked this question, for some they feel they have the answer while others are curious. Maybe the answers are provided with the recent steps taken by Coin market Cap.

After a while of acquiring CMC, CZ tweeted out.

He was obviously asking for feedback from the community on what to do next or what they would like to see improved on CMC. Among other answers were the request to fight out wash trading and hunt exchanges with inflated volumes so as to look big.

In a bid to fight off inflating volumes ( wash trading ) reported by different exchanges. CZ tweeted out with an enclosed link to the ranking of the exchanges on CMC showing the new ranking protocol.

Exchanges are now ranked based on their web traffic and on a scoreboard of 0-1000. What this means is that Exchanges will no longer be ranked based on their trading volume but rather on the number of visits and activities conducted within the website.

With the new ranking protocol we find Binance topping the list with a 1000 points , followed by Coinbase pro and Bitmex exchanges respectively. This action and ranking has left some individuals wondering if truly Binance has 100% of human activity and no inflating of trading volumes and if this ranking protocol was chosen by them since they know that they get a lot of visitors over time.

This might hit as a surprise since Binance based on the previous ranking was always found between top 10 and Decrypt reported it to be on the 15th at some point after acquisition of CMC.

This is what Chan Chief Strategy Officer and current acting CEO of CMC said regarding the web factor ranking protocol last year before acquisition.

“We’ve seen other people do things like you’ve said, web traffic as a way [to verify exchanges are legitimate] but people trade using API keys so that’s why web traffic is not a good indicator.”

“We still do not believe that web traffic is the be-all and end-all metric. To repeat ourselves, as per our blog post, web traffic is one of the many factors that we are iterating on to provide a better adjusted volume metric for our end users.” — Chan

While some individuals are happy over this development, some have questioned it. Among this is the founder of Quantum Economics Mati Greenspan.

Here is what he had to say. 

We have got a lot of users too who are not pleased and have stated that they had expected  this to happen or had switched over since to other ranking platforms.

There is no doubt that Binance will use CMC to promote their own exchange and products, but how far will they go and will it still remain the highest traffic crypto website online?

Tokocrypto is the first cryptocurrency exchange in Indonesia to receive regulatory approval from the Commodity Futures trading Regulatory Agency (BAPPEBTI) in 2019.

This means that users can simply buy crypto in Binance with the use of this partner.

The amount invested in this exchange was not made known but the use of funds was. This is found on the Binance blog itself where it said that funding was to accelerate the growth of Tokocrypto business. This includes product and services, advancement of technology, more expansions across nations and many more.

Relating to this investment, this is what the CEO of Tokocrypto exchange Pang Xue Kai had to say

“This investment in Tokocrypto serves to validate Indonesia’s promising blockchain ecosystem, showcasing the confidence from a leading global player. The investment from Binance will help establish Tokocrypto’s leading services in the Indonesian market and accelerate our vision in bringing an open financial ecosystem through blockchain technology.”

As we know, CZ who is the CEO of Binance Exchange over the years has had eyes on the Asian markets, even mentioning it back in 2018 in a Podcast with Laura Shin on how they are currently targeting the Asian market, and they have grown quite well since then, even going as far as Africa and other continents. On this investment he says he sees a lot of exciting new opportunities in Indonesia, below is his statement.

“with fast technology adoption, strong economic growth, and the world’s fourth-largest population, Indonesia will become one of the leading centers of the blockchain ecosystem in Southeast Asia. Our investment in Tokocrypto will allow us to explore exciting new opportunities together for the Indonesian market with a regulated local partner to further enable the freedom of money.” ~ CZ stated

Over the years, Binance has been expanding in its investment and partnerships starting from early Trust wallet to CoinMarketCap. Binance has also announced today deposit and withdrawal for South African Rand. This too added to other fiat currency trading pairs integrated by them including the NGN recently done.

In all honesty, Binance is doing all it can within it’s power to hold on to the that position of the best trusted exchange in the crypto world.