During an AMA session on Reddit, the US Secret Service revealed that it holds several million dollars worth of seized cryptocurrency for security and educational purposes. This and more news can be found in this handy daily digest so that you are always up to date with the latest events happening within the crypto world.
Secret Service keeps confiscated cryptocurrencies
📍According to statements from the US federal agency, it has recovered several million dollars in stolen cryptocurrency funds in the past year. The agency revealed that the seized cryptocurrencies are being held for security and educational purposes, to meet its goal of protecting the country's financial stability and to understand how cryptoassets work as part of the future of money.
Earlier last year, the US agency reported that it had around $102 million in cryptocurrencies seized in various operations carried out since 2015.
Ethereum introduces a new EIP to boost NFTs
📍Ethereum developers have introduced a new EIP to expand NFT use cases. The Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 6551 proposes the creation of a new token standard for NFTs, allowing users to use these digital assets as individual wallets.
If the Ethereum Improvement Proposal is implemented, the network will allow for each ERC-721-based NFT token to be assigned a smart contract account. Through such accounts, NFTs will have the ability to own assets and interact with the Ethereum-based decentralized application ecosystem, without requiring changes to existing smart contracts or ERC-721 token infrastructure.
The developers who submitted the proposal note that the improvement proposal will expand the use cases for non-fungible tokens, which are increasingly becoming a way to represent identity on-chain.
Lido enables ether withdrawals
📍Staking platform Lido has enabled ether withdrawals one month after the implementation of Shanghai. Lido has informed its users that ether withdrawal has been enabled as part of its Lido V2 upgrade.
In a release, the staking platform that manages nearly 30% of the staked ether on the network, highlighted that Ethereum stakers can now directly unstake their ether through the protocol, burning their stETH to exit the protocol at a 1:1 ratio with Ethereum.
In addition to enabling withdrawals, Lido added new features to its protocol, such as Staking Router, which encourages the creation of a more diverse validator ecosystem by “enabling the development of on-ramps for new node operators, ranging from individual stakers to DAOs and distributed validation technology (DVT) clusters.”
Crypto community rejects Ledger's new service
📍Ledger, the largest hardware wallet manufacturer in the crypto industry, has announced a new service that allows users to recover their seed phrases via the cloud. The new service, called Ledger Recover, could help people who have forgotten their passwords or lost their hardware devices and cannot access their crypto funds.
However, Ledger's idea of backing up a wallet's seed phrase and linking it to a person's identity has not been well received by the crypto community. Although Ledger guarantees that the duplicate seed phrase of a hardware wallet is kept encrypted and does not compromise self-custody or the security of stored funds, 1inch co-founder Anton Bukov, manifested that the company has broken its own security principles by exposing the seed phrase of a wallet through the cloud.
On the other hand, Ethereum investor Ryan Berckmans points out that Ledger has betrayed its customers with the Ledger Recover service, turning the leak of private keys into a product.
Also, user @boredape93, a self-proclaimed degen and NFT investor, reminded the company that he had purchased a Ledger wallet under the assumption that it would be impossible to share his keys since they would never have to leave the device. “No one wants to be exposed to a new potential attack vector,” the user noted.
Polygon Labs CISO Mudit Gupta has also cast doubt on the security of Ledger’s new service. However, the company has clarified that it is a completely optional service that users must approve from their devices. “Otherwise, the backup is never created… There is no backdoor to a backup,” manifested the company.
Continue reading: How will MiCA help Europe become a more crypto-friendly destination?
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