Most Validators Approve ETH Gas Limit Increase
The majority of Ethereum validators supported increasing the gas limit, which will improve network performance without hard forks. According to Gaslimit.pics, 52.3% of participants agree, which is above the minimum threshold of 50%. The gas limit has been stable at 30 million since August 2021.
Vitalik Buterin announced an upgrade of Pectra, which will take place in March. The volume of blobs will increase from three to six, which will improve L2 performance. The decision will be made through staker voting, similar to the change in the gas limit.
El Salvador Bought 11 BTC
On February 4, the Salvadoran government increased its national Bitcoin reserve by 11 BTC (approximately $1.1 million), deviating from the usual practice of buying one coin daily. As a result, the government currently has 6,068 BTC at an average price of $46,102, for a total value of $598.4 million. In late January, as part of an agreement with the IMF, the Salvadoran Congress approved changes to the national crypto strategy aimed at ensuring the “stability of Bitcoin as a legal tender.”
Big XRP Ledger Network Outage
On February 4, the XRP Ledger network was restored after more than an hour of downtime, Ripple CTO David Schwartz announced. The issues began at block 93,927,174, and the blockchain was rebooted 64 minutes later. Validator operators were forced to manually intervene to select an optimal starting point and restore consensus, ensuring a coordinated flow of data across the ledger. Ripple noted that the incident did not impact the security of user funds.
Community Outraged by TON "Monopoly" in Telegram
Telegram developers have required all third-party crypto wallets to use only the TON Connect protocol to connect to The Open Network, a representative of the TON Foundation said. This is part of an agreement that all mini-apps in the messenger ecosystem must work exclusively on the TON blockchain. Developers must implement the changes by February 21, including contract migration and asset transfer. After that, support for all protocols except TON Connect will cease.
The TON Connect protocol allows applications to interact with the blockchain via a wallet instead of a login and password. These changes will not affect the Wallet wallet proposed by Telegram. Some third-party developers expressed dissatisfaction with the restrictions and implementation deadlines.
Attack on MetaMask and OKX in AdsPower Browser
On January 21, hackers attacked the supply chain of the AdsPower browser, which is aimed at protecting user privacy. According to the latest data from experts, the main goal of the attackers was to inject malicious code into the extensions of the MetaMask and OKX cryptocurrency wallets.
According to the analytical company SlowMist, malicious agents installed a hidden vulnerability in the browser, through which they stole mnemonic phrases and private keys, which made it possible to steal cryptocurrency.
The attack remained unnoticed for three days, after which the AdsPower developers removed the malicious code and the corresponding extensions from users' browsers. The victims were sent notifications and advised to transfer funds to secure wallets.
Preliminary damage estimates are about $4.7 million, the investigation into the incident is ongoing.
Kraken May Know Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi Nakamoto was last active in 2014, and crypto exchange Kraken likely has information about his identity. This is the conclusion reached by Conor Grogan, head of product at Coinbase, after analyzing wallets associated with the creator of Bitcoin.
The expert examined a recently published list of Satoshi addresses provided by Arkham. These wallets contain 1.096 million BTC worth $108 billion. Although there is no complete certainty that they belong to Nakamoto, there are strong grounds for this assumption.
There are 24 confirmed outgoing transactions, and the most frequent receiving address is the wallet "1PYYj", which received BTC from the Canadian exchange CaVirtEx. In 2016, CaVirtEx was acquired by Kraken, which may mean that the exchange has information about Satoshi's true identity.
Grogan recommended deleting data about the Bitcoin creator, if any.
