Robbing the Bank with A Cellphone

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Cryptocurrency investor robbed via his cellphone account sues AT&T for $224 million over loss

What’s the Story? Title is self-explanatory.

Why It’s Important? Many people have had their cryptocurrency stolen over the past few years because of something called a phone port attack. In layman’s terms, a hacker would call a telecom company like AT&T, pretend to forget their pin # and AT&T would reset it which gives the hacker access to your cellular account. Most online accounts including cryptocurrency exchanges are linked via cell-phone #s. If you have a cell phone #, you can reset someone’s internet account such as on Coinbase and have total access. It was incompetent of telecom companies to allow such attacks to occur and we are glad someone is doing something over this. Hopefully, they will take privacy and security more seriously.

There’s Now an Exchange-Traded Bitcoin Note That American Investors Can Buy

What’s the Story? CoinShares has launched an ETN that trades OTC which will allow investors to buy Bitcoin from a traditional brokerage account.

Why It’s Important? At the moment, Greyscale is the only OTC Bitcoin traded product and CoinShares should provide healthy competition. The big difference between Greyscale and CoinShares is that CoinShares will mirror Bitcoin returns while Greyscale sometimes trades at a premium or discount to NAV. These types of products help grow the ecosystem because investors can purchase Bitcoin without accessing the spot markets. Both Greyscale and CoinShares will continue to be used as a proxy for buying Bitcoin until an ETF is approved. I expect that these products will have a hard time competing with a Bitcoin ETF if they don’t receive regulatory approval.

Coinbase Says It Was Signing Up 50,000 Users a Day

What’s the Story? Coinbase was signing up as many as 50,000 users a day during its peak.

Why It’s Important? We hate headlines like this. On the surface, it might make it appear that Coinbase is growing rapidly (which could be the case), but sign-ups aren’t a key metric. The more important metric is what percentage of sign-ups were buying cryptocurrency products. Just because users were signing up, doesn’t mean they were buying any products. They could’ve just been checking out Coinbase’s site. The biggest surprise to us was that Coinbase now has over 1,000 employees. To us, that is a more bullish sign for cryptocurrency than their user sign-up numbers.

What We Read This Morning

• The Great Filter: Why You Shouldn’t ICO on Ethereum: Stellar explains why their platform is more superior to ICO versus Ethereum.
• Toward a million markets…: Paradex lays out their plan on how they will eventually list 1 million tokens on their platform.
• Bitwise Launches Three New Indexes; Announces New Index Advisory Board: Bitwise announces some new products and advisory members.

Follow us on Twitter for witty banter about cryptocurrency and blockchain @amlewis4 and @MichamJake.

Originally published at pop.substack.com.