On January 13, the inventory of a number of Cryptopia wallets was emptied out. This emptying out continued for some time and custodians of the organization suspended all trades the next day stating the maintenance services of cryptocurrencies as the reason. On January 15, Cryptopia reasoned it as a security breach. New Zealand legal authorities will step in to investigate the incident. Until January 17, all the inventory of Cryptopia was emptied out.

In recent days, hackers changed the stolen assets to cash through cryptocurrency exchanges. Among the exchanges wherein the most amount of changing took place are Bibox, Binance, Huobi, and HitBTC. About $15 million of the stolen assets remain under the control of hackers in two wallets. Elementus has announced that it had these two wallets under surveillance, and would report its activities.

More than 76 thousand wallets were attacked in this incident. This indicates that thieves had gained access to thousands of private keys belonging to these wallets.

It seems that, in this incident, hackers had no urgency to steal, and stole the assets of Cryptopia during five days. Even though Cryptopia found out the existence of this security breach, it was not able to take the needed steps to prevent this incident, and the pullout of assets from its wallets continued. The only acceptable explanation for the inaction of Cryptopia in this incident is the lack of access to its wallets.

It seems that Cryptopia had stored all its private keys in one server, and hackers gained access to all the private keys through this server before Cryptopia was able to erase the server.

Despite this incident, around two thousand wallets from Cryptopia have an inventory equal to 380 Ethereums (approximately $46000). It seems that users of these wallets were not aware of this incident and Cryptopia’s security breach and still use their wallets. Elementus have published a list of all vulnerable wallets.

On January 17, the CEO of Binance trade center declared on twitter that it has blocked a portion of stolen tokens transferred to this organization. The transparency of Blockchain allows monitoring of trades conducted with stolen assets. Therefore, any trade center that is sensitive to such incidents can block them. By providing an alert system for trades conducted using stolen assets, Elementus has encouraged trade centers to block these illicit trades.

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Kraken is one of the most well-known online Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies trades exchanges. Launched in 2011, it is located in San Francisco. This exchange belongs to a company named Payward Inc., and by receiving the amount about millions from investments, it is one of the largest exchanges in the world. Kraken works with numerous cryptocurrencies, and international traders can easily turn benefit from the services of this exchange.

Payward Inc. was founded in 2013 in San Francisco, the U.S. The net worth of this company is $1.5 million.

Coinbase is a cryptocurrency exchange located in San Francisco, California. This exchange trades cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Litecoin with fiat currencies from 32 countries. Fiat money is a currency without intrinsic value, and government regulations determine its value. It’s also called unbacked currency. These two exchanges in the field of cryptocurrency join Binance, Huobi, and OKEx exchanges following being committed and obliged to observe this event to be held this week by Ethereum block.

Bitcoin Cash, with the symbol of BCH, is a fork for Bitcoin Classic and was created in August 2017 to improve scalability. The volume of each block is increased in Bitcoin Cash, and it is possible to process more transactions. Ethereum is the second cryptocurrency in the cryptography industry market and is based on Blockchain technology which was introduced under the supervision of a 23-year-old Russian youth named Vitalik Buterin. The goal of creating Ethereum was to make processes intelligence and create a space to execute decentralized and automatic software.

Ethereum Classic is a fork Ethereum which is similar to Ethereum up to block 1920000. It has been attempted to solve the security flaws. Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and an open source payment network based on Blockchain technology. Litecoin provides the opportunity to make relatively fast and cheap payments all over the world. In this cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, network security is guaranteed through encryption and mining process by a proof-of-work algorithm.

Employees of Coinbase company wrote in this regard, “Coinbase intends to support hard fork Constantinople Ethereum fully. As soon as the improving of facilities to confirm the security of the network, we will temporarily stop sending and receiving Ethereum in all commercial areas.”

Fork or branch in cryptocurrencies is a type of software update. In fact, the fork has taken place when the protocol of a cryptocurrency or code is updated. It creates a different copy of cryptocurrency Blockchain, and both Blockchains are allowed to operate in different parts of the network simultaneously. It is composed of two types: soft fork, a branch of optional cryptocurrency which is compatible with it; hard fork, a branch of obligatory cryptocurrency which is not compatible with its previous version. Previous rules are nullified, and a new code is used in the hard fork.

Kraken also confirmed in a tweet that it will support Constantinople. Also, authorities added that they expect it not to be opposite to Ethereum and there will not be any fight with Ethereum chain the way they handled hard fork of Bitcoin Cash in November.

Kraken further added in its tweet, “Kraken will support it; though we expect the old chain to be nullified very soon, no new coin will be valid for Ethereum holders.”

ETH/USD has seen short-term support while running hard fork. In the cross-market coverage, ETH/USD pair saw the highest profit among the top 20 cryptocurrencies in the market, with an 8.7 percent growth in the past 24 hours.

Constantinople hard fork is considered a prominent stage in Ethereum network; because its developers intend to transfer it through a plan from proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm to proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithm. This hard fork is an important step toward becoming a whole network and includes all kinds of technical developments.

Proof-of-work is a mechanism to protect information based on the need to do a particular operation. When working with cryptocurrencies, specific information is demanded. The proof-of-work algorithm aims to make sure of the calculations that were done when creating the new block.

In the proof-of-stake algorithm, new blocks are created instead of being mined. Unlike the proof-of-work algorithm, proof-of-stake does not require much computational power, and by avoiding the creation of centralized mining pools, reduces the possibility of harmful attacks.

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According to a report published by CNN website, this startup has been showing all of its ads in the fields of cryptocurrencies and Ethereum without any difficulty, though, during the past couple of days, ads containing the word “Ethereum” have no longer been shown in Google ads.

Has Google Blacklisted Words Related to Cryptocurrencies?

Many news agencies, too, claimed that it seems Google has blacklisted many words related to the field of cryptocurrencies. However, it sounds it has not happened yet. The fact is that in September 2018, due to the high volume of scams in the field of cryptocurrencies, Google blocked all related ads. Many of companies and websites that received services from Google in the field of cryptocurrencies have done clandestine activities regarding hacking users’ information, and this has made Google cautious about providing ad services in the field of cryptocurrencies. In March 2018, Google finally allowed some ads related to words such as “Bitcoin” and “Ethereum” to be shown in its search results, yet it still had many constraints.

Google also published a statement in March 2018 saying that due to the high volume of scams and financial damages in the field of cryptocurrencies, this company will take extreme caution in showing ads related to this field.

Also, it turned out that Google will check all ads related to the field of cryptocurrencies using many filters to prevent scams.

Altogether, it seems that Google does not have a particular problem with the word “Ethereum” itself, in case the security of users increases considerably in the future, we can be hopeful that online ads in this realm will receive more support, especially from Google.

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In this series of twits, ConsenSys, Ethereum Blockchain-based software company founder, pointed out that his company has laid off many of its staff. He said that ConsenSys continues working and is now balancing priorities and activities it has started six months ago. He announced that ConsenSys, as a Blockchain technology-based company, is still investing on projects related to its field and employs people appropriate to the organization purposes for its internal projects.

In the same tweet, Lubin showed his disapproval because of a great deal of cynicism and hunched the media offer without real statistics and a correct understanding of the condition. Moreover, he said that he felt optimistic about ConsenSys and Ethereum future and he believed in this company’s very bright future 2019.

ConsenSys laid off 60% of its employees

A little before, there has been written in the reports that ConsenSys would lay off to 60% of its employees; namely, more than half of 1200 employees who work there. Furthermore, it is going to transfer some of its projects and startups to the outside of the company while some of them lack any financial support. According to the source publishing this news, ConsenSys wishes to change its incubator to a more traditional investment section.

Cryptocurrencies market status compared to other industries

Cointelegraph has recently reported that in comparison to other important jobs suffering from layoffs in various international industries, cryptocurrencies market, and its associated jobs are still benign. Cryptocurrency market has been compared with that of the 1990s and internet emergence. In the Internet market, too, after some years of rising growth, some companies were forced to announce their termination. Those companies which remained started cryptocurrency and Blockchain market then. Internet-related companies being closed in the 1990s and the beginning of 2000, left more 80000 unemployed. Comparing cryptocurrency and the greatest layoff in the history, it can be seen that cryptocurrency market still has benign status.

In September, the other Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterim, announced that there is no hope for Blockchain market to have 1000 times growth again. Despite all these controversial statements the fact that which Ethereum founder is nearer to reality is something to be proved in the future.

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