Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, ado
Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.
Top Stories This Week
Hodlers beware! New malware targets MetaMask and 40 other crypto wallets
According to a report from security researcher 3xp0rt, a powerful new malware variant known as the “Mars Stealer,” an upgrade of the information-stealing Oski trojan of 2019, can target more than 40 browser-based crypto wallets, including MetaMask and Coinbase Wallet, along with popular two-factor authentication (2FA) extensions.
The nefarious software utilizes a grabber function that steals private keys after it has been downloaded, unbeknownst to the user who may have visited or utilized various channels, such as file-hosting websites, torrent clients and any other shady downloaders.
Notably, the malware checks the set language of the device, and if it matches the language ID of locations such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Russia, the software leaves the system without any malicious activity.
However, for any device with a language outside of those categories, the malware targets files holding sensitive information, such as crypto wallets’ address info and private keys. Then, it leaves without a trace.
Jack Dorsey: Diem was a waste of time, Meta should’ve focused on BTC
Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has unsurprisingly slammed the move of a competitor, with Meta (formerly Facebook) taking the hit for its “wasted effort and time” not working on Bitcoin.
Dorsey is an avid Bitcoin supporter who has made the asset a focus of his newer, shinier company, Block. During an interview with BTC bull Michael Saylor on Tuesday, Dorsey commented on the recent shutdown of Meta’s stablecoin project, Diem, which has been plagued with regulatory pushback since it began.
“Those two or three years or however long it’s been could’ve been spent making Bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world,” the almighty Dorsey said from his throne.
Rise of Web3: Metaverse tokens surge as Meta’s share price plunges
Speaking of Meta, the firm’s share price took a nosedive of around 26% on Thursday following a lackluster quarterly earnings report that revealed an annual profit decrease and a decline in daily active users.
Meta reported $33.67 billion worth of total revenue for Q4 2021, compared to $28 billion the year prior. However, its net income fell to $10.28 billion from $11.2 billion one year earlier. A hefty $10 billion investment in its Reality Labs division also contributed to the disappointing quarterly results.
While the centralized metaverse-focused firm faced choppy waters, native tokens from decentralized counterparts in The Sandbox (SAND) and Decentraland (MANA) jumped 17.5% and 20%, respectively. Commenting on the news, Animoca Brands chairman and co-founder Yat Siu suggested that this was part of a broader trend in which the top talent and users from Web2 platforms are shifting to the open world of Web3.
$2.5B in stolen BTC from Bitfinex hack awakens
According to blockchain analytics bot Whale Alert, a hefty $2.5 billion worth of BTC obtained via the 2016 Bitfinex exchange hack moved from the hacker’s wallet to an unknown address on Tuesday.
The funds have remained inactive since 2016 as the hackers are essentially unable to cash out the holdings. Many onlookers have pondered whether the hacker has started moving the funds around again to manipulate the market and scare investors into selling their BTC.
The largest transaction Whale Alert detected was around 10,000 BTC, or $383 million, while other transactions amounted to as little as 0.29 BTC. The wallet address that received the blacklisted BTC now holds a total of 94,643.29 BTC, which is around $3.6 billion.
Another solo Bitcoin miner solves valid block, becoming the 4th in 2022
A solo Bitcoin miner and Solo CKPool user with a whooping 1.14 petahashes per second (PH/s) of computing power was lucky enough to generate a $240,000 block reward on Tuesday. While the odds of it happening were estimated to be lower than 20%, it is apparently the fourth “blockfind” for the CKPool since mid-January.
The miner utilizes the Solo CKPool, a service that offers anonymous solo Bitcoin mining for a fee. While the miner is described as a “whale” in this instance due to their high computational power, in January a CKPool miner with a minuscule hash rate of just 126 terahashes per second (TH/s) was able to solve a valid block.
CKPool’s solo miners have solved 264 blocks over the entirety of the Bitcoin blockchain’s existence, representing a mere 0.037% of the total 721,240 blocks solved.
Winners and Losers
At the end of the week, Bitcoin (BTC) is at $37,948, Ether (ETH) is at $2,830 and XRP is at $0.61. The total market cap is at $1.76…
cointelegraph.com