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Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has published a forensic review on last week's $1.5 billion hack, revealing that its systems had not been infiltrated and that the issue seemed to have stemmed from compromised Safe wallet infrastructure. Bybit concluded from the review that "the credentials of a Safe developer were compromised," which allowed the Lazarus hacking group to gain unauthorized access to the Safe wallet and subsequently deceive Bybit staff into signing the malicious transaction.However, a person familiar with the matter told CoinDesk that despite the wallet's infrastructure being compromised by social engineering, the hack would not have been possible had Bybit not "blind signed" the transaction. The term refers to a mechanism where a smart contract transaction is approved without comprehensive...

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I'm Ben Schiller, managing editor at CoinDesk.In this issue:Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade Goes LiveAvalanche Visa card launchedEthereum Foundation executive director leavingHackers using GitHub to steal bitcoinNetwork NewsPECTRA GOES LIVE ON TESTNET: Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade went live on the Holesky testnet Feb. 24 but failed to finalize in the expected time. The Pectra hard fork combines together 11 major upgrades, or "Ethereum improvement proposals" (EIPs), into one package. At the heart of this is EIP-7702, which is supposed to improve the user-experience of crypto wallets. The proposal, which was scribbled by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in just 22 minutes, will allow wallets to have some smart...

Bitcoin miners that are still drawing electricity from grid-attached power sources will struggle after the next halving event in 2028, MARA Holdings (MARA) said in a shareholder letter. "For those miners still relying on grid-attached power, the writing is on the wall. Energy costs will only rise. The 2028 halving will likely force another industry-wide reckoning. Many may not survive," the letter said. The statement comes as the mining industry has already been struggling to stay profitable following a recent halving event that saw bitcoin rewards cut in half, forcing some miners to diversify their revenue sources into high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). Read more: AI Is Here, but That Doesn’t Mean Bitcoin Miners Are Finished: BlockspaceMARA, one...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a ruling on Wednesday largely agreeing with a lower court’s 2023 decision to toss out a class action suit against decentralized exchange Uniswap.A group of investors originally sued Uniswap Labs, the company behind the decentralized protocol of the same name, and some of its venture capital investors in 2022, alleging that the company was responsible for harming investors by allowing scam tokens to be issued on its protocol.District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) sided with Uniswap in 2023 and scrapped the suit before it went to trial, likening the plaintiffs’ arguments to “a suit attempting to hold an application like Venmo or...

Gotbit founder Aleksei Andriunin, a 26-year-old Russian national, was extradited to the U.S. on Tuesday to face fraud charges stemming from allegations that his firm participated in a “wide-ranging conspiracy” to manipulate token prices for paying client cryptocurrency companies, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a press release on Wednesday.Andriunin was arrested in Portugal last October and subsequently indicted by a Boston grand jury on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud, charges which carry a combined maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. The indictment also charged Gotbit itself, as well as two of its directors, Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili, both also of Russia.Between 2018 and 2024, prosecutors say that Gotbit...