Pig butchering, or financial grooming as it’s started to be referred to, is still catching the headlines but this time for a good reason. Earlier this month two criminal rings were disrupted and the scammers have been arrested. Police in Namibia recently announced the arrest of 20 individuals who were…

This is the term being used to describe the situation where you’re airdropped a token that appears to be from a legitimate source when in fact it’s fraudulent and intended to direct you to a phishing website. The term is inspired by “sleep minting” a technique used by scammers to…

In September this year Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum) became the latest target of a sim swapping attack. His Twitter account was compromised and sent out a tweet which directed any of his 4.9million …

To understand sequencers it’s first important to revisit the topic of what a layer 2 network is vs a layer 1. Taking Ethereum as an example layer 1, there’s a block (referred to as a slot) every 12 seconds which can fit up to 30million gas worth of transaction related…

Treasuries are pools of cryptoassets which are used to fund public goods, or services for a specific blockchain-based project or protocol. They effectively operate as a ‘budget’ to further develop the offering and can be made up of a mix of the project’s own tokens, stablecoins and other cryptoassets. These…

A few weeks ago I wrote a long read about the Lightning Network, a layer 2 scaling solution for Bitcoin which allows users to make off-chain payments with near-instant settlement and near-zero fees. You can read the full piece here: https://tara-annison.medium.com/a-comprehensive-guide-to-the-lightning-network-aa2f7f9c6c31 One of the key concepts of the Lightning Network…

So far this year there’s been over $410m stolen from dApp exploits and bridge attacks alone ( https://web3isgoinggreat.com/) and the running total stands at more than $3billion. This represents dastardly hackers taking advantage at the protocol level and finding backdoors, unexpected contract behaviours and using tricks such as flash loan…

This weekend Bitcoin’s layer 2 scaling solution, the Lightning Network, hit a record-high capacity of 5,630 BTC — a 42% increase in the last 12 months. …

As long as DeFi dApps are exploited, scammers scam, and exchanges get hacked there will be a need for crypto criminals to launder the proceeds of crime so that they can eventually convert it into fiat. After all, cash is still king when it comes to crime. The go to…