WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - May 18

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

Coinbase temporarily went down

Early this week, one of the leading crypto exchanges was unavailable. Their site went down as a “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” for about three hours before it came back online, but some users still weren’t able to withdraw their funds. You can check the exchange’s status on their live page. As of Wednesday morning, it seemed everything was working fine again. This is a reminder to not store your funds on exchanges because you do not control them.

Learn more here.

Tornado Cash developer found guilty

The now-notorious developer of the Tornado Cash crypto mixer, Alexey Pertsev, was arrested in the Netherlands in August 2022 on facilitating money laundering charges. This week, he was found guilty and sentenced to 64 months in prison. His prior time served, between his original arrest and now, doesn’t seem to be considered part of these 64 months. Other Tornado Cash devs are facing allegations of money laundering and sanctions violations in the US, but the laws are a bit different than in the Netherlands so they may not be held personally responsible for the use of their platform. It’s not totally clear if Pertsev is being held responsible for others’ actions on his platform or if he himself was found to have performed money laundering on the platform. He is of course appealing the ruling.

Learn more here.

Worldcoin Foundation goes (kinda) open-source

Worldcoin is a crypto project working toward universal basic income (UBI), and the Worldcoin Foundation (WF) is the organization. In order to distribute UBI fairly, they created a device that scans people’s irises to use biometric data to distinguish real people from bots. In an attempt to make their code more secure, the WF has made their secure multi-party computation (SMPC) system open-source. The SMPC is what encrypts the iris scans of users. This isn’t the first part of their software that’s gone open-source as their eyeball scanner is already. The WF has gotten a lot of trouble in the past few years by regulators for its user data practices (or lack there of) so this is a step towards better private management, supposedly.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore