Data

Envision partners with HBAR and UN on new digitization platform for carbon markets

Envision Blockchain and the HBAR Foundation have teamed up with the UN to create a new suite of decentralized tech to streamline the complex carbon markets.

The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP28, saw several new initiatives aimed at innovating the fight against climate change and streamlining the complex carbon credit markets.

The dMRV system was developed in collaboration with the UN Climate Change Global Innovation Hub (GIH) and built on the HBAR blockchain.

The platform offers a suite of features, including artificial intelligence and guided search features for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) methodology library and other standard registries across the carbon market Industry.

The CDM methodology library consists of hundreds of rulesets required to create a carbon credit, independently developed in an analog process supporting the carbon market.

The further scaling of the library of digitized and open-source methodologies allows registries, project developers and other market stakeholders to use digital technologies to resolve trust and transparency issues.

Cointelegraph spoke with Wes Geisenberger, vice president of sustainability and ESG at HBAR Foundation, to understand the importance and workings of the new dMRV platform and how it could help digitize the complex carbon credit market.

Geisenberger told Cointelegraph that the UN GIH/UNFCCC secretariat’s staff were deeply involved in methodology development while supporting the “toughest challenges in climate negotiations.

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MetaMask third-party provider was hacked, exposing email addresses

The incident affected users who submitted a MetaMask customer service ticket between August 1, 2021 and February 10, 2023.

The email addresses of some MetaMask users may have been exposed to a malicious party due to a recently discovered cyber-security incident. According to parent company ConsenSys, the incident affected users who submitted a customer support ticket to MetaMask between August 1, 2021 and February 10, 2023.

According to the April 14 blog post, unauthorized actors gained access to a third party’s computer system that was used to process customer service requests, potentially allowing them to view customer support tickets submitted by MetaMask users.

These tickets did not ask for information other than what was necessary to help the user, including email address to facilitate replies. However, they did include a “free text-field,” which some users may have used to submit personally identifying information. This may have included “economic or financial information, name, surname, date of birth, phone number, and postal address,” the post stated.

Consensys emphasized that it does not ask for personally identifying information in customer conversations, but some may have provided it anyway.

The company estimates that the breach may have affected up to 7,000 MetaMask users who submitted customer support tickets.

In response to this incident, hardware wallet provider Keystone warned MetaMask users that some might receive more phishing emails due to the incident since the attacker may use this swiped email database to look for potential victims.

Phishing is a scam that tricks a user into providing sensitive information to an attacker. It is often performed by sending an email to the victim that appears to be from a trusted party or someone the victim knows.

Related: MetaMask launches new fiat purchase function for cryptocurrency

Consensys said it had taken steps to eliminate unauthorized access in the future. As a result, tickets submitted after February 10 should be unaffected by the incident. They have also contacted the Data Protection Commission of Ireland and the Information Commissioner’s Office of the United Kingdom to report the breach. In addition, the company’s third-party customer service provider is working with a cyber-security and forensics team to perform a more detailed investigation of the incident.

MetaMask came under fire from privacy advocates in late 2022 when it revealed that it sometimes logged users’ IP addresses. However, it updated its app in March to give users more control over which providers could obtain this information.

MetaMask third-party provider hacked, exposing email addresses

The incident affected users who submitted a MetaMask customer service ticket between August 1, 2021 and February 10, 2023.

The email addresses of some MetaMask users may have been exposed to a malicious party due to a recently discovered cybersecurity incident. According to parent company ConsenSys, the incident affected users who submitted a customer support ticket to MetaMask between August 1, 2021 and February 10, 2023.

According to the April 14 blog post, unauthorized actors gained access to a third party’s computer system that was used to process customer service requests, potentially allowing them to view customer support tickets submitted by MetaMask users.

These tickets did not ask for information other than what was necessary to help the user, including an email address to facilitate replies. However, they did include a “free text-field,” which some users may have used to submit personally identifying information. This may have included “economic or financial information, name, surname, date of birth, phone number, and postal address,” the post stated.

ConsenSys emphasized that it does not ask for personally identifying information in customer conversations, but some may have provided it anyway.

The company estimates that the breach may have affected up to 7,000 MetaMask users who submitted customer support tickets.

In response to this incident, hardware wallet provider Keystone warned MetaMask users that some might receive more phishing emails due to the incident since the attacker may use this swiped email database to look for potential victims.

Phishing is a scam that tricks a user into providing sensitive information to an attacker. It is often performed by sending an email to the victim that appears to be from a trusted party or someone the victim knows.

Related: MetaMask launches new fiat purchase function for cryptocurrency

ConsenSys said it had taken steps to eliminate unauthorized access in the future. As a result, tickets submitted after February 10 should be unaffected by the incident. The company also contacted the Data Protection Commission of Ireland and the Information Commissioner’s Office of the United Kingdom to report the breach. In addition, the company’s third-party customer service provider is working with a cybersecurity and forensics team to perform a more detailed investigation of the incident.

MetaMask came under fire from privacy advocates in late 2022 when it revealed that it sometimes logged users’ IP addresses. However, it updated its app in March to give users more control over which providers could obtain this information.

Bitcoin tops Donald Trump, guns in America: Google Trends

Popular terms such as guns, Chuck Norris, health insurance and politics did not even make it to the top 10 in the list.

Amid the growing discussions around Donald Trump, guns and other topics tied to politics and entertainment, Bitcoin (BTC) remains the most Googled term in the United States. 

A search volume comparison based on Ahrefs data revealed that Americans are curious about Bitcoin, with Nevada taking the spot as the “most Bitcoin-crazy state” in the United States. Despite former U.S. President Donald Trump making headlines consistently, he only takes the second position on the list of the most-searched terms in America.

Search volume comparison (U.S. and global). Source: Ahrefs

As shown above, other popular terms following Bitcoin and Donald Trump include breaking news, Elvis Presley and Disney World. Previously popular terms such as guns, Chuck Norris, health insurance and politics did not even make it to the top 10 in the list.

Search comparison of Donald Trump and Bitcoin. Source: Google Trends

In the last 30 days, Google searches for Donald Trump exceeded Bitcoin for just two days — on April 4 and 5 — when reports of the former president’s possible arrest emerged, according to Google Trends data.

State-wide comparison of Bitcoin searches. Source: Google Trends

A state-wise comparison revealed Nevada as the state with the biggest number of “Bitcoin” searches, followed by Miami, California and Washington.

The primary reason for this finding is attributed to lower taxes and local government initiatives to promote innovation, according to Trading Browser. “Nevada’s long-standing gambling respiration might be a contributing factor to the success and high interest in Bitcoin,” the study added.

Related: Binance.US unable to find bank partners in the United States: Report

A new report from the U.S. Department of the Treasury concluded that North Korea and criminals use decentralized finance services to bag illicit profits.

However, as Cointelegraph reported, the Treasury believes that “most money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing” occurred using fiat currency or outside the digital asset ecosystem.

Magazine: DeFi abandons Ponzi farms for ‘real yield’

US President Joe Biden urges tech firms to address risks of AI

President Biden urges technology companies to prioritize secure AI products before public release, stressing the need to address potential risks to society, national security and the economy.

United States President Joe Biden stated on Tuesday that the safety of artificial intelligence (AI) is still uncertain, and emphasized that technology firms should ensure their products are secure before releasing them to the public.

During a meeting with science and technology advisers, Biden acknowledged that AI could be beneficial in tackling issues such as disease and climate change. However, he stressed the significance of addressing possible risks to society, national security and the economy.

At the beginning of a meeting with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, he stated that technology companies must ensure their products are secure before releasing them to the public. When questioned about the potential hazards of AI, he replied, “It is yet to be determined. There is a possibility.“

According to the president, social media has already demonstrated the negative impact that powerful technologies can have in the absence of appropriate measures to protect against them. “Absent safeguards, we see the impact on the mental health and self-images and feelings and hopelessness, especially among young people,” Biden said.

Related: Multiple US state regulators allege AI trading DApp is a Ponzi scheme

He repeated his call for the U.S. Congress to approve non-partisan privacy laws that limit the personal data gathered by technology firms, prohibit child-targeted advertising, and gives priority to health and safety in product development.

The Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy, a technology ethics organization, recently urged the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to prevent OpenAI from releasing new commercial versions of GPT-4, a language model that has both impressed and alarmed users due to its human-like capacity to create written responses to prompts.

Magazine: All rise for the robot judge: AI and blockchain could transform the courtroom

Ethereum Archive Node service shuts down saying it ‘succeeded’

ArchiveNode.io has closed its doors following three years of providing archived Ethereum blockchain node data.

Ethereum mainnet Archive Node service, ArchiveNode.io, said it will be shutting down, claiming that the project has been a success.

On April 4, ArchiveNode.io announced it was “sunsetting” its services after more than three years of providing free Ethereum mainnet Archive Node services to developers, students, and researchers.

An Ethereum Archive Node is an instance of an Ethereum client configured to build an archive of all historical states. This type of node is a useful tool for querying historical blockchain data that is not accessible on full nodes.

Additionally, Archive Nodes are not required to participate in block validation so they can theoretically be built from scratch, however, they do require much greater storage capacity.

The announcement was made by “DeFi Dude” who initiated the project and claimed the project was being shut down as “we succeeded,” before adding:

“Our service is no longer necessary and other alternatives exist today that did not exist when we got started.”

He added that nobody was running Archive Nodes when the project started. The only option was to pay Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura $250 monthly to access archive data.

The goal of the project was to “get archive data into the hands of developers, students, and researchers who wanted to build cool shit, but didn’t have the time, money, or resources available to run their own archive node.”

He confirmed the project was never to “make money or profit.”

Related: SEC lawsuit claims jurisdiction because ETH nodes are ‘clustered’ in the US

He added there is currently a robust remote procedure call (RPC) provider market offering access to archive data making the project obsolete.

ArchiveNode.io thanked the Ethereum Foundation for their initial grant of $10,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to get the project off the ground.

According to a Cointelegraph report in August, just three centralized cloud providers account for more than two-thirds of Ethereum nodes. More than half of the total nodes were hosted on AWS, according to data at the time.

Features: ‘Account abstraction’ supercharges Ethereum wallets: Dummies guide

Ethereum Archive Node service shuts down, saying it ‘succeeded’

ArchiveNode.io has closed its doors following three years of providing archived Ethereum blockchain node data.

Ethereum mainnet archive node service ArchiveNode.io says it will be shutting down, claiming that the project has been a success.

On April 4, ArchiveNode.io announced it was “sunsetting” its services after more than three years of providing free Ethereum mainnet archive node services to developers, students and researchers.

An Ethereum Archive Node is an instance of an Ethereum client configured to build an archive of all historical states. This type of node is a useful tool for querying historical blockchain data that is not accessible on full nodes.

Additionally, Archive Nodes are not required to participate in block validation so they can theoretically be built from scratch; however, they do require much greater storage capacity.

The announcement was made by “DeFi Dude,” who initiated the project and claimed it was being shut down because “we succeeded,” adding:

“Our service is no longer necessary and other alternatives exist today that did not exist when we got started.”

He added that nobody was running Archive Nodes when the project started. The only option was to pay Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura $250 monthly to access archive data.

The goal of the project was to “get archive data into the hands of developers, students, and researchers who wanted to build cool shit, but didn’t have the time, money, or resources available to run their own archive node.”

He confirmed the project was never to “make money or profit.”

Related: SEC lawsuit claims jurisdiction because ETH nodes are ‘clustered’ in the US

He added there is currently a robust remote procedure call (RPC) provider market offering access to archive data making the project obsolete.

ArchiveNode.io thanked the Ethereum Foundation for their initial grant of $10,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to get the project off the ground.

According to a Cointelegraph report from August, just three centralized cloud providers account for more than two-thirds of Ethereum nodes. More than half of the total nodes were hosted on AWS, according to data at the time.

Features: ‘Account abstraction’ supercharges Ethereum wallets: Dummies guide

More than 3,600 Bitcoin ATMs went offline to record largest monthly decline

With 3,627 crypto ATMs going down last month, March 2023 becomes the month with the largest monthly decline of crypto ATMs.

Contradicting the growing global Bitcoin (BTC) adoption rate, physical ATMs dedicated to fiat-crypto conversions are on the decline. In March alone, 3,627 crypto ATMs were removed from the network, bringing down the total ATMs to 33,727.

In the decade since the first Bitcoin ATM was launched on Oct. 29, 2013, the net change of cryptocurrency machines installed and removed monthly remained positive most times — implying that total crypto ATMs worldwide were steadily increasing. However, the trend is reversing, according to data from Coin ATM Radar.

Net change of cryptocurrency machines number installed and removed monthly. Source: Coin ATM Radar

As shown above, net crypto ATM installations declined for four months between September 2022 and March 2023. However, with 3,627 crypto ATMs going down last month, March 2023 stands out as the month with the largest monthly decline.

Number of bitcoin machines installed over time. Source: Coin ATM Radar

The chart above shows the number of Bitcoin machines installed over time, revealing the sudden drop in the total crypto ATMs. The significance of this reduction seems enormous, considering that the highest number of ATMs installed in a month was 2,048 — back in January 2021.

The number of cryptocurrency machines installed per each top manufacturer over time. Source: Coin ATM Radar

On the bright side, April broke the three-month-long downtrend by recording 37 crypto ATM installations on April 1. Current market leaders in manufacturing crypto ATMs are General Bytes, BitAccess and Genesis Coin.

Related: Bitcoin ATM maker shuts cloud service after user hot wallets compromised

After losing customer funds in a “security incident” in March that saw its customers’ hot wallets accessed, General Bytes promised to reimburse the losses.

Magazine: Web3 Gamer: Shrapnel wows at GDC, Undead Blocks hot take, Second Trip

“We have taken immediate steps to prevent further unauthorized access to our systems and are working tirelessly to protect our customers,” General Bytes said in a statement.

Government requests for user data from Big Tech increased by 25%: Report

Requests for user data from Big Tech companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft continue to rise year-over-year from governments worldwide.

How Big Tech companies treat user data has been controversial for some time. Meta, Apple, Google and Microsoft are often accused of collecting and selling the personal data of their users. Though, where exactly this data goes, and how much of it is given over to companies and governments, is unclear.

However, a new study from Surfshark reveals requests for personal user data from global governments are on the rise. The study focused on the period from 2013 to 2021, with 2020 seeing the largest year-over-year increase of 38%, followed by a 25% increase in 2021.

Meta, Microsoft, Apple and Google were the four Big Tech firms included during the survey, with Meta having the most accounts of interest from authorities. Two out of five accounts hosted by Meta were requested (6.6 million) during the study period. 

Total number of accounts requested (2013–2021). Source: Surfshark

Apple, on the other hand, had the fewest, with just 416,000 requested accounts from global authorities. 

The study shows that 60% of requests came from authorities in the United States and Europe. However, the U.S. requested more than double the accounts per 100,000 users than all countries in the European Union combined.

Following the U.S. in the top spots are Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom and France.

Related: Nodes are going to dethrone tech giants — from Apple to Google

According to the report, data requests are often related to criminal investigations and civil or administrative cases in which digital data is necessary.

Gabriele Kaveckyte, a member of the privacy counsel at Surfshark, said, along with data requests, authorities are also looking into ways to monitor and tackle crime via online services.

“On one hand, introducing such new measures could help solve serious criminal cases, but civil society organizations expressed their concerns of encouraging surveillance techniques….”

On the part of tech companies, the disclosure rate of user data has increased by nearly 71%. Apple leads the pack when it comes to disclosing such information, with an average disclosure rate of 86% in 2021 and 82% across the study period. 

Percentage of partially or fully disclosed user data requests (yearly average). Source: Surfshark

Decentralization and Web3 tools have often been touted as solutions to overcome Big Tech’s monopoly on user information. Some have even said Web2 platforms like Facebook and Twitter will be “obsolete” thanks to blockchain technology. 

In February, a decentralized version of Twitter, called Damus, officially launched in app stores to be a “social network you control.”

Even Big Tech companies have begun to break into the Web3 space, with Meta unsuccessfully introducing nonfungible tokens on Instagram and Facebook.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime

Crunchbase taps AllianceBlock to boost novel applications in DeFi

Crunchbase partners with AllianceBlock to make business data more accessible to blockchain businesses and developers.

AllianceBlock, a decentralized finance solutions provider, has partnered with Crunchbase, a prospecting platform, to make its data available to Data Tunnel users.

This partnership will make Crunchbase’s business data more accessible to blockchain businesses and developers, allowing them to create applications such as default probability models, customer acquisition profiles, maps of untapped markets and more.

Crunchbase’s content includes investment and funding information, founding members and individuals in leadership positions, mergers and acquisitions, news and industry trends.

The Data Tunnel serves as a platform for both conventional institutions and individuals, who typically rely on multiple sources of information to make well-informed decisions pertaining to their assets. With Data Tunnel, they can share, study and combine information without a middleman. The AllianceBlock data tunnel was launched in October 2022 to create a public marketplace for standardized data.

In 2021, AllianceBlock announced its integration with Avalanche, an up-and-coming “Internet of Finance” protocol. The integration allows users to access AllianceBlock’s DeFi Investment Terminal, peer-to-peer financial services, nonfungible token capabilities and Know Your Customer solutions directly on Avalanche. The partnership also includes development work with Ava Labs, the developers behind Avalanche.

Related: Crypto Biz: Mastercard opens network to USDC, OKX departs Canada, Bitcoin climbs

The same year, AllianceBlock combined technologies with Flare, a fellow blockchain tech entity that seeks to enable blockchains to access real-world data in smart contract execution. The two companies sought to improve their blockchains with each other’s tech, from cross-chain bridges to decentralized exchanges to oracle networks.

Magazine: Hodler’s Digest SBF bail guarantor to go public, UK crypto framework and Celsius news: Hodler’s Digest, Jan. 29 – Feb. 4