Weekly Crypto News — August, 7 (Bullish bitcoin. Who Hacked Twitter? Prankers rap in court and other news of this week)

What important crypto events happened last week?

Coins, Tokens:

📌Bitcoin price will be $ 100,000 in two years. Dan Morehead, CEO of cryptocurrency hedge fund Pantera Capital, predicts Bitcoin will hit $100,000 within two years. He announced this during the Thinking Crypto podcast. Based on the analysis of previous halvings, analysts at Pantera Capital suggested that Bitcoin has the potential to rise to $115,000 by next August. Also Messari analyst Ryan Watkins estimated the value of the first cryptocurrency at $50,000, provided that institutional investors invest 1% of their funds in bitcoin.

📌On August 4 at 13:00 UTC, the Ethereum Foundation developers launched the final Ethereum 2.0 testnet, Medalla. The event was watched by nearly 1,700 spectators. More bids have been collected than the developers anticipated. However, not all the validators were present. You can read more about this in our article.

📌 XRP price rose 40% in one week.

Blockchain:

📌Coca-Cola expands blockchain use to improve supply chain efficiency. Coke One North America, or CONA, a Coca-Cola’s partner, will join the distributed ledger technology companies and the Baseline Protocol, Unibright and Provide founders.CONA will use the Baseline Protocol to enhance transparency and reduce friction in “cross-organization supply chain transactions.” This will allow to simplify transactions both between internal bottling suppliers and external raw material suppliers.

📌Blockchain secures user privacy in COVID-19 contact tracking apps. ShareRing blockchain platform CEO Tim Bose claimed that he has plans to launch a tourism product using digital identity, a “covid passport” using blockchain. Travelers must take a covid test to prove they are healthy. This information is kept in the mobile application as a “proof of health”. Traveler’s health proof can be scanned at airports, hotels or shops to determine their status.

Projects:

📌 Pavel Durov refuses to sell Telegram. The creator of Telegram, Pavel Durov, twice rejected offers to sell the messenger despite of the threat of blocking it. Proposals came a couple of years ago from two funds from those countries that blocked Telegram. Attempts to block Telegram were made in three countries — Russia, Iran and China.

📌 Dash release the first crypto debit card in Latin America. Dash and Mexican cryptocurrency exchange Tauros.io have released a Visa debit card in Latin America. Now, the offer is only available to Tauros customers in Mexico. The card will work in many shops and stores in Mexico. It converts cryptocurrencies to pesos using the Tauros mobile app and conducts online transactions.

📌 The Polkadot Project (DOT) has launched a testnet to evaluate parachains-based sharding. The new testnet, dubbed Rococo, is specifically designed to test communication protocols between planned Polkadot shards. At launch, three separate parachains called tick, trick, and track will be available. Developers will be able to add their own parachains. The network is based on the Proof-of-Authority consensus algorithm. Rococo’s testnet is an important step to Polkadot’s mainnet release.

Goverment:

📌State bank of Switzerland launched crypto services. Basler Kantonalbank (BKB), a state-owned commercial bank in Switzerland, plans to provide cryptocurrency services through its banking subsidiary, Bank Cler. Development is in its early stages and there is no indicative launch date yet.

📌COVID-19 pandemic dampens Japanese interest in cryptocurrencies. Analysts of the Japanese Bitbank exchange reported a decrease in the number of active accounts on the country’s bitcoin exchanges. “Corona shock hit the traditional financial market and triggered margin calls. At that time, many investors, perhaps, had no choice but to withdraw funds from crypto-exchanges,” — analysts said.

📌 Germany’s financial regulator BaFin is seizing bitcoin ATMs. Shitcoins Club has about 17 bitcoin and altcoin ATMs in Germany. BaFin ordered KKT UG, the parent company of Shitcoins, to stop all cryptocurrency transactions in Germany back in February for allegedly operating without banking trading licenses. But Shitcoins CEO Adam Gramovski ignored the demands of regulators and did not shut down his offices.

📌India will ban cryptocurrency trading. Indian authorities are preparing to tighten regulation of cryptocurrencies. The bill will go to parliament in early September.

Hacking, Law:

📌Prankers hacked the online hearing for Twitter scammers. On August 5, a hearing was held for 17-year-old teenager, Graham Ivan Clarke, accused of mass hacking into Twitter accounts in order to steal user funds. Under the disguise of CNN and BBC journalists, prankers joined the broadcast. They interrupted the judge, used foul language and rapped.

📌Deceived Chinese crypto investors organized their scam. Three Chinese residents lost money after unsuccessful investments in dubious cryptocurrency projects. To make up for losses, they organized their own fraudulent scheme: they launched fake Baiye Chain project and associated mobile app, and managed to attract more than 20 participants to the project, who invested more than $43,000 in the project.

📌Canon became a victim of crypto scammers. On July 30, Canon’s servers were attacked by a ransomware virus. Hackers demand cryptocurrency and threaten to publish user data claiming they managed to steal nearly 10 TB of photos, files and other data.

📌51% attack on Ethereum Classic. From July 31 to August 1, a “51% attack” occurred in the Ethereum Classic blockchain. 807,260 ETC are withdrawn in 11 transactions. The attack was not detected for several days as a result of hacker’s complex planning and knowledge of the Ethereum Classic protocol.

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Originally published at https://coinjoy.io.