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Aaron Gong, vice president of futures at major cryptocurrency exchange Binance, explained to Cointelegraph how the firm managed to become one of the top crypto futures trading platforms.

As Cointelegraph reported earlier this week, Binance recently overtook BitMEX and became the second-largest platform in terms of 24-hour Bitcoin (BTC) futures trading volume. When asked whether he is surprised by such success, Gong said that the firm created the product with the plan of becoming the top Bitcoin futures trading platform:

We knew we would be there soon, and we made it in slightly more than 6 months time.

According to Gong, the three primary reasons behind the success of Binances futures products are the low taker fees, new features and a large amount of altcoin pairs. He said that too many exchanges offer negative maker fees:

Too many other exchanges offer negative maker fees, where most orders are just computerized market makers competing for best bid and ask with extremely limited taker interest during periods of low-volatility.

Gong also said that innovation also drives trading volumes when it comes to Binances futures. He claimed that the exchange has had a few firsts when it comes to the crypto futures market:

We are the first major crypto exchange to launch max 125X leverage for BTC contracts, and the first of its kind to launch cross collateral and smart liquidation mechanism. These features have gained tremendous popularity amongst our users.

The third reason for the success of Binances futures contracts, Gong explained, is the number of altcoin contracts. He said that the firm launched 24 futures contracts on the platform, adding:

As of today, Binance Futures houses half of the top 10 most liquid altcoin contracts, many of which are also the most traded pairs amongst all futures exchanges.

Gongs strategy to drive the volume of futures contracts on Binance is to continue bringing more functionalities and products to the industry. He said that he believes Binance has outdone its competitors, as other crypto trading platforms suffered problems such as overloads, poor risk management, and counterintuitive product designs. He explained that Binances design was largely driven by users complaints about other platforms:

We specifically aimed to address these issues and improve the users experience. As such, we put tremendous efforts to build an industry-leading matching engine that is able to process more than 100,000 orders per second. [...] Whilst there were issues of system overloads, outages, glitches, and even rollbacks elsewhere, weve proven time and again to be a safe, reliable, cheap and liquid venue for hedging.

It is worth noting that Binances trading platform ran into a number of issues in February. On Feb. 19, the exchange halted trading to resolve an unexpected technical issue with its infrastructure.

As a Feb. 25 Cointelegraph analysis illustrated, this incident took place after a week in which the platform was often unresponsive to trader input as the exchange was unable to manage a large uptick in user volume.

In early March, Binance halted trading again to fix a malfunction. The exchanges co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao purportedly blocked Jay Hao the CEO of competing exchange OKEx on Twitter, after he publicly offered to help fix the infrastructure.

However, Gong said that the malfunctions did not affect Binances futures trading infrastructure and that futures traders were not affected:

Our futures system has been proving to be performing well during the most volatile period since we launched. The futures market is running on a separate matching engine.

More here:
Binance Reveals the Secret Behind Its Cryptocurrency Futures Success - Cointelegraph

The pressures on for Congress to pass a $2 trillion spending bill to thaw the frozen economy. While they negotiate the largest ever emergency relief bill in US history, markets are getting restless. Stock futures have been volatile as the bill makes progress and stalls, then makes progress and stalls again. Voters are getting restless too. Both sides are badgering each other to Hurry! while negotiating a $2 trillion transaction with other peoples money.

Any time either side of the partisan divide has a scruple, the other party attacks them for holding up the bill. They insinuate the other side doesnt care about all the people who are hurting right now. Of course, a swarm of each partys rank and file supporters also join in the shouting. The farther you zoom out from the picture, the more ludicrous the entire affair looks from afar.

Further, so much of the bill, styled as an emergency stimulus package, is just a massive grab bag of goodies and pork-barrel spending for bloated Washington bureaucracies America can definitely live without, and special interest groups with lobbyists on K Street. $25 million for the JFK Center for the Performing Arts. $75 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. $75 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities. And a monster $500 billion slush fund for Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to dole out to corporations at his discretion with little oversight.

When a terrible crisis strikes, politicians and special interest groups huddle together in Washington and grab all the money and power, they can possibly get their hands on. Its the American way. Washington did this to Americans during the 2008 Financial Crisis with Bushs $700 billion Wall Street bailout in 2008, and Obamas $831 billion stimulus bill in 2009.

At least in 2008, many Americans put up a fight about it. They tried to melt the Congressional switchboard calling their representatives to urge against these massive appropriations. Today America is so slavish and afraid because of coronavirus that even Trumps anti-socialist supporters are eager to get their checks.

And the $2 trillion stimulus package at the center of all this drama is dwarfed by the money the Federal Reserve is pumping into the banking system. Top White House economist Larry Kudlow says itll amount to $4 trillion. And Congress doesnt actually have any of the money for its spending bill. Its borrowing all of that, so the Fed will have to create most of it out of thin air. Just like the $4 trillion its creating to shore up banks. That will make the entire monetary expansion $6 trillion in total.

The entire adjusted monetary base is currently $3.3 trillion. So the monetary-political complex is about to triple the money supply in the coming months. Thats what they did in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Quite more than doubled it actually. And that crisis not only gave us Bitcoin but saw it rise in price so dramatically until 2017, it became the greatest investment in world history by ROI. Thats how highly sought after something like Bitcoin is for merchants and investors.

Expanding the fiat money supply at such breakneck speed will not necessarily make cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin more valuable. But it will drive monetary inflation that causes dollars to depreciate against Bitcoin, driving its nominal value higher. Though, the result of this exercise in fiscal and monetary madness will likely be increased demand for crypto. People looking for an inflation shelter will have a powerful instrument in the intensely deflationary cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Bullish.

* Disclaimer: This article is the opinion of the author and does not represent professional financial or investing advice.

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What Will $6 Trillion in Monetary Expansion Do To Cryptocurrency? (Opinion) - CryptoPotato

Cryptocurrency and ransomware have had a long history together. They are so closely intertwined, in fact, that many have blamed the rise of cryptocurrency for a parallel rise in ransomware attacks.

Ransomware attacks are certainly increasing they rose by 118% in 2018 but its not clear that this is due to cryptocurrency. While the vast majority of ransoms are paid in crypto, the transparent nature of these currencies actually means that they are a pretty bad place to hide stolen funds.

In this article, well take a look at the relationship between cryptocurrency and ransomware, as well as what the future holds.

There are at least two ways in which cryptocurrency is important for ransomware attacks. The first one is the most obvious the majority of the ransoms paid during these kinds of attacks are generally in cryptocurrency. This was the case, for instance, in the WannaCry ransomware attacks, still the largest attack of its kind in history. Victims of the attack were instructed to send roughly $300 of Bitcoin (BTC) to their attackers.

There is another way in which crypto and ransomware are intertwined, though. Today, plenty of hackers are offering ransomware as a service, essentially letting anyone hire a hacker from online marketplaces. If you are so inclined, you can even buy ransomware off-the-shelf from these marketplaces. Both of these services can be paid for in youve guessed it cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is also implicated in many other forms of cyberattack. Cryptojacking a form of attack that uses victims computers to mine cryptocurrencies is also on the rise, and new forms of malware such as Adylkuzz can be used by almost anyone with even a slight level of technical knowledge. Though these forms of attack are not technically ransomware, they further suggest the deep relationship between cryptocurrency and cybercrime.

At first glance, it seems obvious that ransomware hackers would demand payment in cryptocurrency. Surely these currencies, based on anonymity and encryption, offer the best place to store stolen funds?

Well, not really. There is actually a different reason why ransomware attacks make use of cryptocurrencies. As Coin Center director of research Peter Van Valkenburgh wrote in 2017, it is the efficiency of cryptocurrency networks, rather than their secrecy, that attracts hackers. As he later put it:

Its electronic cash, so its easy to write software that can automatically demand payment and automatically demand that payment has been made.

The value of cryptocurrency during a ransomware attack is actually the transparency of cryptocurrency exchanges. A hacker can simply watch the public blockchain to see if victims have paid up, and can automate the process of giving a victim their files back once this payment has been received.

This point also suggests a slightly curious aspect of the role of crypto in ransomware attacks: Cryptocurrency is, perhaps, the worst place to store ransom money. The open, transparent, nature of Bitcoin blockchain transactions means that the global community is closely watching the ransom money. That makes it extremely difficult to convert these funds into another currency, and means that they can be tracked by law enforcement.

As the director of research at Coin Center, Peter Van Valkenburgh, stated:

In the U.S., every major bitcoin exchange is regulated by FINCEN. Right now the $50,000 extorted from victims is just sitting on the bitcoin network. ... That [exchange into local currency] is where youre vulnerable to being identified.

The fact that stolen funds can be tracked in this way doesnt necessarily mean that the hackers who stole them can be brought to justice, of course. The anonymity of cryptocurrency means that it is often impossible for law enforcement agencies to uncover the true identity of ransomware hackers, though of course there are exceptions.

Chief among these, according to Coin Center, is that the blockchain allows one to trace all transactions involving a given bitcoin address, all the way back to the first transaction. That gives law enforcement the records it needs to follow the money in a way that would never be possible with cash.

Because of that, and also in response to a number of recent high-profile ransomware attacks, some have called for cryptocurrency to be regulated more closely. Regulation will need to be implemented carefully, however, because one of the major attractions of cryptocurrency for ordinary citizens and hackers alike is the fact that it is anonymous.

This means that attempts to regulate the space may make catching criminals even more difficult. As pointed out by Will Ellis, head of research at community advocacy group Privacy Australia, cryptocurrency bans led to a rise in VPN use, as investors seek to circumvent Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering requirements in their home countries.

In addition, most governments simply dont have the understanding or the resources to regulate the crypto space effectively. Some are so far behind that they arent even certain how to define what cryptocurrencies are. In this context, it is difficult to see how the close link between ransomware and cryptocurrency can ever be broken.

Related: From the UK to Malaysia: How Countries Have Been Classifying Crypto Across the World

The lack of governmental oversight of cryptocurrency, combined with the rapid rise in ransomware attacks, means that individuals need to protect themselves.

Some companies and individuals have taken unusual approaches. Companies have stockpiled Bitcoin not as an investment, but rather in case they need to pay a ransom as part of a future attack. Some enterprising individuals have even taken matters into their own hands, such as the German programmer who hacked back following a cyberattack using his own systems.

For most of us, though, protecting against ransomware attacks means doing the basics correctly. You should ensure that all of your systems are up to date, subscribe to a secure cloud storage provider and backup frequently. Companies of all sizes should partner with a managed security services provider to monitor enterprise networks, perform risk assessments and make recommendations specific to their data environment.

Ultimately, the relationship between cryptocurrency and ransomware is unlikely to be broken anytime soon. And while cryptocurrencies are certainly involved in the majority of ransomware attacks, we should not make the mistake of blaming crime on the currency it is conducted in.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Sam Bocetta is a freelance journalist specializing in U.S. diplomacy and national security, with an emphasis on technology trends in cyber warfare, cyber defense and cryptography. Previously, Sam was a defense contractor for the United States Department of Defense, working in partnership with architects and developers to mitigate controls for vulnerabilities identified across applications.

Originally posted here:
The Role of Cryptocurrencies in the Rise of Ransomware - Cointelegraph