Binance exec: "You mean someone deposited 124 BTC and we can just repudiate their ownership? What's the catch?"
Not sure this redounds greatly to anyone's credit. If the "money" gets returned to where it was stolen from, that would be good I guess.
Two cryptocurrency exchanges have frozen accounts identified as having been used by North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group. This story starts with a crypto researcher who goes by “ZachXBT” and late last week spotted an entity called “Lazarus Group” moving 41,000 ETH “from the Harmony Bridge hack through Railgun on Jan 13-14 …
The catch is that criminals will think twice before signing cryptocurrency over to Binance because Binance might decide not to credit their account with fiat currency in return. It is the reverse of an FTX which took fiat currency and did not transfer any 'real' cryptocurrency to the wallets of the creditors.
If crypto wants to be taken seriously in financial circles, that means accepting internationally accepted standards of regulation including blocking criminal activity. Of course in this case the excchanges' interests align with those of law enforcement since this hacker group is targeting exchanges to steal crypto. Remains to be seen whether they will block assets of other known bad actors where they have no skin in the game themselves.
That's the tightrope to be walked between centralised control, which can be abused at a single control point but offers users some protection, vs complete decentralisation which is a de facto wild west.
I've not bothered keeping up with everything, but BTC and ETH in particular never attempted to fulfill the coin spec as put forward on the cypherpunks list in the late 90's. Fully anonymous coin is technically possible--the spec has been out for more than twenty years. But it has limitations which apparently have made it undesirable.
Am I reading this right? So $63.5 million was stolen. And now $2.6 million has been frozen/captured? I know Crypto is in meltdown, but I kinda doubt by that much.... ;)
Well done you caught 4% of the stolen crypto. I'd normally say it's better than nothing, but well frankly, it seems more like a distraction. Move a small amount overtly, so that gets the headlines, so you can move the rest quietly and safely.
Or did that 3rd exchange who didnt block the stolen crypto (why no naming and shaming??? Assuming you can actually shame someone in crypto, but I digress...), did that 3rd exchange get the vast majority of the funds, probably because it seems they knew they wouldnt get frozen. I guess the Binance and Huobi quantities were a test to see if they could use those exchanges safely or not...