Private Equity Moris Beracha Wuani

By Max Boddy The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) outlined regulatory compliance issues for cryptocurrency custodians in an announcement on July 8. According to the joint statement, the organizations have yet to discover a set of circumstances in which a crypto custodian could comply with the SEC’s Customer Protection Rule, which is described as follows: “Put simply, the Customer Protection Rule requires broker-dealers to safeguard customer assets and to keep customer assets separate from the firm’s assets, thus increasing the likelihood that customers’ securities and cash can be returned to them in the event of the broker-dealer’s failure.” The report further claims that a crypto custody service may not be able to sufficiently demonstrate that it actually controls the assets it purports to hold. The SEC and FINRA discuss how simply holding a private key, for instance, is not sufficient to demons...

By  Daniel Palmer Russian hackers, not North Korean, may be the bad actors behind probably the biggest ever theft from a cryptocurrency exchange. Japanese newspaper  Asahi Shimbun  reports Monday that virus variants known to be linked to Russian hackers have been found on employee computers at the Tokyo-based Coincheck exchange. Coincheck  suffered a breach  in January 2018 that resulted in the loss of 500 million NEM tokens worth around $530 million at the time – an amount even bigger than that  lost by Mt. Gox . According to the report, the malware found at the exchange had been emailed to employees and included types called Mokes and Netwire, which allow malicious distributors to gain access to victims’ machines and operate them remotely. Mokes apparently first appeared on a Russian bulletin board in 2011, while Netwire has been around for 12 years. The Coincheck hack has previously  been linked  with North Kore...

By Yogita Khatri Cryptocurrency exchange Binance said it is revamping security measures after losing some 7,000 bitcoin worth over $40 million in a hack earlier this week. “Significant” changes related to its application programming interface (API), two-factor authentication (2FA) and withdrawal validation are being made, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said in a blog post published on Friday. The exchange did not disclose more details regarding these efforts, but said it is also improving its risk management and know-your-customer procedures to fight phishing, among other additional security measures at the back-end. Binance will take action of some of the measures within this week and in the coming weeks in order to resume services at the earliest, according to the post. Zhao said tentatively, the exchange is looking to resume withdrawals and deposits “early next week.” Binance will also be adding support for hardware-based 2FA devices such as YubiKey “very soon,”...

By Marie Huillet    Denmark’s Tax Authority has been authorized by the country’s Tax Council to obtain information regarding all trades of cryptocurrencies across three domestic crypto exchanges . An official announcement published on the agency’s website reported this development on Jan. 14. The authorization means that three unspecified Danish crypto exchanges now have legal disclosure obligations to hand over identity information that includes names, addresses and personal tax numbers, as well as details of all crypto transactions made on their platforms between Jan. 1 2016 to Dec. 31 2018. The Tax Authority has said it will use the information to ensure that citizens who have traded in crypto have duly paid the correct tax. Karin Bergen, a director at the agency, is quoted as saying that its fresh mandate will give it completely new opportunities in relation to its control in the cryptocurrency sector.   Any information pertaining to f...