Swift Sees ‘Clear Potential and Value’ in CBDCs, Whitehat Hackers Interested in Ethereum and Solana, Safeheron Says Multisig Wallets and Dapps Are Vulnerable, Gate.io Plans Visa Crypto Debit Card

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CBDC news

• Interbank messaging company Fast announced “further progress with its experimental central bank digital currency (CBDC) interconnection solution,” reporting that 18 central banks and commercial banks found “clear potential and value” in the API-based CBDC interconnection after an extensive review. During the in the coming months, Swift will develop a beta version of the solution for payments that can be further tested by central banks, while also holding a second phase of sandbox testing, where the Swift community can further collaborate with a focus on new use cases, including in securities settlement (such as an exchange of securities), trade finance and contingent payments, it says.

Security news

• Bug bounty and security service platform Immunefi released its ‘The Hacker Ecosystem Survey 2023’, and found that white hats are primarily interested in Ethereum (92%), with Solana (31%) in second place. 76.1% of white hats see attack surfaces growing, but 88.5% also see increased security measures from projects across the industry. Most whitehats cite reentrancy (43.2%) as the most common vulnerability they encounter when reviewing code, followed by access control (18.2%), with other vulnerabilities including input validation (9.1%), oracle manipulation (6.8 %), logic errors ( 6.8 %), rounding errors (4.5 %), throttle optimization (4.5 %), uncontrolled returned values ​​(2.3 %), uninitialized proxy (2.3 %) and flash loans (2 .3%). Most of the respondents (77%) are mainly interested in solving technical challenges, followed by money (69%), then career opportunities (62%) and community (38%).
• Safeherona digital asset self-hedging infrastructure provider, said it identified a vulnerability affecting the integration of potentially hundreds of multi-party computation (MPC) wallets and decentralized apps (dapps), including Fire blocks and dYdX. The vendor “discovered that users of dYdX and other dApps using the STARK key authentication method unwittingly expose their MPC wallets to unauthorized access and control,” the report said. Safeheron also announced the upcoming release of its open source MPC-ECDSA protocol in mid-March, which helps patch this vulnerability, it said.

Exchange news

• Port groupthe parent company of crypto exchange Gate.ioplans to launch a Gate Visa crypto debit card through its Lithuania-based company, Gate Global UAB. A waiting list and registration process is now available for the new card, open to users in most of the EEA countries with plans to expand to other regions, it said.
• Coin base announced the launch of Wallet-as-a-Service (WaaS), a set of wallet infrastructure APIs that allow any company to onboard its users to Web3. WaaS allows companies to embed Web3 / crypto experiences natively via Web3 wallets similar to Web2 wallets (which ApplePay, but Web3), the announcement said. Companies like Thirdweb, Floor, Tokenproofand Moonbeam already uses WaaS to integrate users into Web3 experiences across games, token-gated events and digital marketplaces, it added.

Tax news

• Cryptocurrency portfolio tracker and tax calculator CoinTracker announced its partnership with tax preparation company H&R Block for the 2023 tax season, enabling users to leverage automated crypto tax filing features to ensure accurate crypto filing. The partnership brings benefits to H&R Block and CoinTracker users, including a free CoinTracker tax plan for those with fewer than 25 crypto transactions, a 10% discount on CoinTracker tax plans for those with more than 25 crypto transactions, and a 20% discount on H&R Block online products for CoinTracker -users, it says.

Web3 news

• zkSync announced an integration with Axleswhich enables Web3 applications built on zkSync Era’s zkEVM to compose dapp functions and liquidity across all 32+ chains that Axelar connects to – which include Cosmos chains, EVMs and other Ethereum Layer 2 chains. According to the blog post, “Bridges have historically been a key vulnerability in crypto, accounting for $1.4 billion in stolen funds (69% of total hacks) from January to August of last year alone.” Axelar’s interchain communication option looks to solve this, implementing cross-chain functionality through APIs. They added that cross-chain functionality is critical to getting more users to Web3, and that integrations like these would make launching multi-chain dapps easier for developers.
• Web3 Accelerator Outlier Ventures announced the first cohort for its Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Base Camp accelerator program, which uses ZKproofs to innovate infrastructure, scale and privacy, including zkSig, Radius, Syndr, Truffles, DataHiveand vSelf. According to the press release, “Outlier Ventures’ first ZK Base Camp will provide tailored mentorship, networking and support from over 400 top mentors and ecosystem partner organizations, including Aleo, Aztec, ImmutableX, NetherMind, Polygonand zkSync.”

Investment news

• Alpha Sigma Capital announced an investment from Transform Ventures and its founder, Michael Terpin, into his new holding company, Alpha Transform Holdings, created by merging selected assets from Transform Ventures and Alpha Sigma Capital’s parent company, creating a new holding company. The new company will also create two new funds with a combined $100 million AUM. The press release said the investment includes funding for Alpha Transform Holdings parent company, the new Alpha Liquid digital asset fund, and a closed-end venture capital firm for early equity investments in blockchain, AI and emerging technology companies. Terpin also made a personal investment in cash, bitcoin and ethereum of $2.65m, with an option to invest an additional $2.9m.