Kucoin Reopens Withdrawal And Deposit Services
KuCoin, a Singapore based cryptocurrency exchange announced earlier this week the reopening of its withdrawal and deposit services. The exchange was forced to shut down operations following an attack on its systems that led to the loss of $275 million.
As per the announcement, the exchange will allow users to withdraw and deposit all tokens listed on the platform. However, the exchange noted that there may be a limit to some of the tokens citing “ongoing judicial proceedings.”
The exchange has been working to restore its operation in the last couple of months. In October, the exchange announced a partial reopening that allowed users to only move their BTC (Bitcoin), ETH (Ethereum), and USDT (Tether).
Johnny Lyu, the co-founder and CEO of KuCoin recently announce that they have recovered about 84% of the stolen assets in crypto. Lyu explained that the recovery process has involved “on-chain tracking contract upgrade and judicial recovery.”
Coinbase: Outage Affect Operations And Disables Margin Trading
Coinbase’s operations were hit on Thursday after an outage took down most of its services. According to reports, the exchange experienced connectivity issues that were caused by Amazon’s internet infrastructure (AWS) outage which affected a large portion of the internet.
In a message to its users, the exchange explained that:
“We are currently experiencing elevated error rates on some backend systems due to an Amazon AWS outage. You may encounter intermittent delays or errors while transacting, as well as accessing other parts of our applications. Customer support inquiries are also delayed.”
Amazon stated on its Service Health Dashboard that:
“We continue to work towards recovery of the issue affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API in the US-EAST-1 Region. We also continue to see an improvement in error rates for Kinesis and several affected services, but expect full recovery to still take up to a few hours.”
Many Coinbase users took to social media to express their displeasure. Reportedly, the exchange has similar incidences over the last few months. Since March, there have been nine separate outages that have led to different types of outages or connectivity issues.
The incident came a day after the exchange disabled its margin trading product in order to comply with the new rules set by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Paul Grewal, Coinbase chief legal officer explained in a blog post that:
“In response to new guidance from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, we are disabling our margin trading product.”
Users on the exchange are currently not being able to open new margin trades while the open limit orders will be canceled. The exchange plans to take this product offline in December once all existing margin positions have expired.
Notably, many in the crypto community are worried that other exchanges will take the same decision as Coinbase.
Libra to launch in 2021
Libra reportedly will launch in January 2021 after a long battle with authorities and many in the crypto community. As per reports from three people involved in the project, Libra will be launching as the lesser version of the original token. The Libra association, which has 27 members including Facebook, will launch as a digital currency backed to the dollar.
The exact date of the launch is still unknown and the project is still awaiting approval from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) to operate as a payment service. The approval will mark the end of a various backlash from authorities. The project has also seen some of its notable partners leave the project since its release in 2018.
Polish City Adopts Ethereum Blockchain For Emergency Services
A city in Poland, Olsztyn is using SmartKey built on the Ethereum Blockchain to streamline emergency services.
Olsztyn becomes the first city to harness the Ethereum Blockchain. As per the announcement, the city has already completed a successful trial run of SmartKey. SmartKey is expected to help rescue teams perform their jobs much more effectively.
One Gustaw Marek, the marshal of Warmińsko-Mazurskie Voivodeship in Olsztyn explained:
“The need for our rescue services to perform their duties without obstruction is a delicate one. The use of blockchain and SmartKey technology seems to be like the perfect solution, giving reassurance to building owners and inhabitants, but also freedom for our emergency services.
