WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - May 17

Welcome back to this week's edition of our WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter!

Ethereum’s "Trillion Dollar Security Initiative”

In order to improve Ethereum’s base layer and bring more global technology and financial institutions on chain, the Ethereum Foundation is beginning a new project that will assess the underlying architecture of the chain and identify strengths and weaknesses that will be improved. Why call it the “trillion dollar” initiative? Because they want to upgrade the chain to be able to support trillions of dollars of assets, which means really focusing on security and scalability.

Learn more here.

Wallets are SuperApps

A Dune Analytics report examined more than a dozen of the most popular wallets, including Metamask, Phantom, and more. If you joined crypto even two years ago, you know how rough the UI was of crypto wallets and apps - trying to connect all over the place and switch networks etc. A lot of that has improved lately, and it seems that wallets are doing a lot of the lead on the improvements as they are abstracting complexity and making onboarding much easier with direct payments and in-wallet trading. While this is a necessary improvement, security is also something to keep in mind - the more complex something is, the more vulnerabilities it might have, so as always, we suggest keeping your assets in various place so if one gets hacked/lost, you don’t lose everything.

Learn more here.

Coinbase yays and nays

Coinbase is one of the largest centralized exchanges in the world, and the company recently went public with their COIN stock. It’s gotten large enough that it is expected to rise into the S&P 500, the tracker of the top 500 companies in America, on Monday. That’s obviously a yay as it gives the crypto industry more legitimacy and positive coverage.

However, they also had a nay wherein hackers bribed Coinbase customer service reps to give them personal info of Coinbase users. Importantly, this did not compromise private keys or wallet addresses, but it did compromise names, addresses, phone numbers, and government-issued IDs of about 1% of Coinbase users. So, if you are a Coinbase user, you’ll need to be very cautious of scam emails, phone calls, and even snail mail.

The attackers sent an email to Coinbase asking for a $20m ransom, but CEO Brian Armstrong released a video saying they will not pay it, and instead offering a $20m bounty for any information leading to the identity of the hackers.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore