Avengers of Crypto, Tether (USDT) Only 75% Tethered, Elon Musk & Ethereum | Hodler's Digest

This week the Avengers, Marvel's mightiest heroes, have gathered to fight their last battle against Thanos, the Mad Titan. But who are the Avengers of cryptocurrency? To start, Vitalik Buterin is the obvious choice for Captain America, the good guy that prefers to stay out of the crypto space pettiness for the most part and seems to truly just want to save the world from the big bad banking system. As for Iron Man, CZ also seems to fit the bill. He he has lots of money, no superpowers, but is super smart and can build gadgety stuff. Does that sound familiar? Nick Fury would be Joseph Lubin as Fury gathered the Avengers and sent them out into the universe. Lubin gathers blockchain disruptors at Consensys and sets them out into the fintech world. And as for Thanos who destroyed half of the universe's population, we give the title of the crypto bear market which destroyed half of everyone's crypto portfolios. And last of all is me, the Black Widow. This is the most accurate as I am a formerly Russian spy that is defected to the US in the pursuit of good everyone. I'm Molly Jane, the Black Widow and this is your week's Hodler's Digest. Let's take a look at the latest market updates. It is now official. USDT the stablecoin issued by Tether is not fully backed by Fiat currency. As revealed by Tether's general counsel Stuart Hogner. The company holds around $2.1 billion in cash and short term securities which is only 74% of the total value of Tether's circulating supply. The revelation came amidst the latest scandal involving crypto exchange Bitfinex, Tether's affiliated company. The New York Attorney General's office obtained a court order against the exchange which allegedly lost $850 million in customer funds after placing them with an unregulated payment processor, Crypto capital. Bitfinex reportedly tried to cover up the loss by securing a secret 900 million dollar loan from Tether that used its customers Fiat reserves to provide the amount. Well, what's wrong with that? Well, secretly using customers funds to prop up a sister company equals fraud. The CEO of iFinex, Bitfinex and Tether's parent company has defined the allegations of her funds being lost as categorically false. The funds he said, were sized by authorities and safeguarded in a number of jurisdictions including the UK and the US adding that Bitfinex is working to obtain their release. According to Tether's lawyers, there is actually no need for each tether to be backed by a dollar. In fact, banks are commonly operating on far smaller reserves as their customers funds are deployed in the form of investments. This is a fair point, but it goes against everything that tether has ever publicly said about it having one to one fiat reserves. A few days later, news broke that Bitfinex is planning to launch its own token via an IEO with expectations to raise up to $1 billion. According to Xiaodong, a prominent Chinese trader and Bitfinex shareholder, the raised funds will help Bitfinex to tackle the crisis. The announcement fueled the wave of controversy around the scandal, with many asking if Bitfinex is so sure it can retrieve customers funds, then what's the point of an IEO? 2018 was all about buying a Lambo with crypto. 2019 has a more humble offering earning crypto for sharing traffic data. So forget the question when Lambo and ask instead where traffic when coffee Jaguar Land Rover, the UK's largest car manufacturer, is partnering with the IOTA foundation as part of a mission to achieve zero accidents, zero congestion and zero emissions. The plan is to reward drivers with IOTA tokens for sharing data on road conditions and traffic. Users will be given a smart wall that additionally can be used for coffee, tolls, parking fees and if you have an electric car, recharging. Jaguars and Land Rovers will be fitted with IoT sensors that provide data to Tangle, IOTA's distributed ledger, which will then notify the relevant authorities. For example, if you're driving past a road accident, data can be collected in order to warn other drivers and signal any infrastructure problems local authorities need to take action on. Currently, the project is in its pilot phase and is being tested out on the Jaguar F Pace and the Range Rover Velar. IOTA also partnered with VW last year to work on a similar project to develop a digital car pass that would use Tangle to collect data about the car itself. Vws could potentially pay for parking without the driver ever having to roll down their window. This is all part of a broader technological vision that would see vehicles of all types, from trucks to convertibles, communicating with each other as they become increasingly driverless. So are we heading towards a utopia or a dystopia? So far, most predictions have been off. After all, we were promised flying cars, but it looks like we got talking ones instead of. Crypto. Market Cap website CoinMarketCap will remove exchanges from its circulation if they don't provide mandatory information before June of this year, an occasion of its sixth birthday, CoinMarketCap announced the launch of the Data Accountability and Transparency alliance, which will provide greater transparency, accountability and disclosure from projects in the crypto space. The initiative came about amid the growing demand of transparent price data after researchers demonstrated that a big fraction of Bitcoin trading volume on CoinMarketCap was indeed faked. The information expected from the exchanges include live trading data and order book data. In case exchanges will fail to provide the information within 45 days, they will not be included in the price and adjusted volume calculations. A number of major exchanges, among which are Binance, Bittrex, Okex and Huobi, have already joined this alliance.

It has been over 10 years since the publication of Bitcoin's white paper and we still don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Craig Wright claimed the title, but the Internet basically said nah fixatoshi. One man who is strange enough, smart enough, old enough, and is kind of the nerdy Bruce Wayne type is Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO was one of the more, shall we say, long shot guesses on the identity of Bitcoin's inventor. He's also had a fairly high profile and weird relationship with crypto. He's hinted he was Satoshi, he's promoted dogecoin, and there have even been a hydra of fake Elon scamming people out of crypto this week, Ever the man of mystery, Musk tweeted a single Ethereum followed by jk. This prompted Buterin to take the bait and invite him to devcon. This then led to an exchange between the two. In response to Musk's question about what should be developed on eThereum, Buterin listed five of his top picks for the network's development. Devcon is in October and so far Musk has not accepted the invite, but nor has he declined it. So what do you think? Would you like to see Elon Musk at devcon?

Microsoft has lately been under fire after hackers infiltrated Outlook email accounts to steal cryptocurrencies. Apparently, the hackers managed to steal login credentials from Microsoft customer support workers and then use them to access email accounts of regular users. In April, it had already been revealed that the content of Outlook's accounts was compromised by hackers whose intentions were still unclear. Back then, Microsoft claimed that hackers could not have access to actual email content, but only to email metadata and subject lines, a statement that now proves to be inaccurate as it became clear that hackers did access email content to reset crypto user exchange passwords and withdraw crypto funds. One of the victims, Dutch engineer Jevin Reedmester, had his Kraken account compromised as a result of the hack and lost one Bitcoin. Following his claims, other users came out on Reddit claiming to have suffered similar losses, with one saying to have lost an equivalent of about $25,000 since the hack. Microsoft has been largely blamed by the hack's victims for underplaying the issue. The Dutch engineer now plans to file a police report and hold Microsoft accountable for its loss and the leak of the personal data. We reached out to him and asked him to give us his perspective on the hack. So how did you find out about the hack?

So I tried to log in on my Kraken account and I got the message that my password wasn't working, which was really strange because I used this password manager to keep all my passwords up to date. So I went to my mailbox, my Outlook Hotmail account, to see if I could find some kind of email from krakow.com and then these mails in my trash folder came up. There were like four kinds of emails from kraken.com then upon closer inspection of the emails, I realized there were some password reset emails included. Then I found in my mailbox some other emails about a withdrawal address being added to mine Kraken account. Okay, weird, but let's see. Then there was another email confirming a withdrawal. So then that's the moment when my heart started pumping a little faster because I didn't request or withdraw any crypto. So it could be someone else doing it.

You say you want to hold Microsoft accountable, but how do you plan to do that?

I wasn't phished. There wasn't a keylogger on my PC. I didn't lose any passwords. So this really was a fault for Microsoft. Something was stolen. So if something gets stolen, you file a police report. So I hope by seeking publicity right now that they are that triggers them to at least contact me and maybe see what the consequences are instead of just waiting and hoping everything will blow over.

Do you agree with our crypto avengers? And if not, what are your suggestions? Comment below. And as always, remember to like subscribe and Toddle Cointelegraph like subscribe and Hodl.