Bitcoin Daily: Australian Crypto Exchange Exposes 270,000 Members’ Names, Emails; Bitcoin Sees Record Number Of Users

Australia’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, BTC Markets, revealed in a series of tweets that it had mistakenly revealed its client names and email addresses in an announcement from the company.

    Get the Full Story

    Complete the form to unlock this article and enjoy unlimited free access to all PYMNTS content — no additional logins required.

    yesSubscribe to our daily newsletter, PYMNTS Today.

    By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.

    While the company sends test emails before issuing an announcement, in testing this email, it did not notice that email addresses had been grouped together. Instead of sending individually, the announcement was sent in batches of less than 1,000.

    “We will self-report to the Office of Australian Information Commissioner and fully comply with the data breach reporting requirements,” BTC Markets tweeted. “In addition, there will be an internal review and additional rigor placed around data security and training.”

    In other news, Bitcoin hit a new record of active entities — or wallet clusters run by one user — on Tuesday (Dec. 1).

    There were 432,451 active entities that transferred funds, according to CoinDesk, citing data from Glassnode, beating out the previous record of 410,972 active entities in December 2017.

    This comes one day after Bitcoin climbed over $19,800, hitting a new record high, edging out the previous record price set in 2017.

    Analysts and investors are betting that this time the price rise is here to stay, unlike December 2017’s bubble, which crashed the following year, and the same goes for the climb in active entities.

    “While the metric has breached highs not seen since 2017, it has done so gradually without ‘bubble-like’ growth,” said Matthew Dibb, co-founder of Stack, a provider of cryptocurrency trackers and index funds, according to CoinDesk. “We take comfort in this when correlating address clusters with forward-looking price action.”

    Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Draft Bill on Virtual Assets has been given initial approval by the country’s parliament in the first of three hearings, reported CoinDesk.

    The bill notes that virtual assets will be regulated by Ukraine’s Ministry of the Digital Transformation. They must be backed by goods or services and can be removed from the market. The bill also leaves open the possibility to not count virtual assets as a legal currency.

    And, $10.8 million of Compounder Finance’s investor fund were stolen in an attack that took advantage of a “hidden backdoor” in its smart contracts, according to CoinDesk.

    Compounder’s developers created the backdoor to be able to withdraw all the funds at will — a function that is normally not allowed, according to CoinDesk.

    They were able to steal $5 million dai, $4.8 million Ether, $750,000 wrapped bitcoin, and “a small assortment of other token” CoinDesk reported.

    “The Compounder team swapped the safe and audited Strategy contracts and replaced them with malicious ‘Evil Strategy’ contracts that allowed them to steal users funds,” Solidity Finance, who audited Compounder, told CoinDesk. “… The team had the power to update strategy pools and they did so maliciously here to steal users’ funds.”


    EazyPay Deploys Mastercard Receivables Manager for B2B Transactions in Bahrain

    Mastercard

    Eazy Financial Services, which does business as EazyPay, has become the first acquirer in Bahrain to adopt Mastercard Receivables Manager.

      Get the Full Story

      Complete the form to unlock this article and enjoy unlimited free access to all PYMNTS content — no additional logins required.

      yesSubscribe to our daily newsletter, PYMNTS Today.

      By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.

      The company will use this solution to help merchants in Bahrain automate their B2B virtual card receivables, according to a Tuesday (July 29) press release.

      “EazyPay supports businesses with digital payment solutions designed to simplify operations and elevate the customer experience,” Nayef Tawfeeq Al Alawi, founder, managing director and CEO at EazyPay, said in the release. “As virtual cards gain traction for supplier payments, Mastercard Receivables Manager empowers us to strengthen the B2B payments ecosystem across key industries and large market segments.”

      Mastercard Receivables Manager eliminates manual processes by streamlining the capture of virtual card payments, processing them straight through and delivering remittance data directly to merchants’ accounting systems, according to the release.

      For merchants, this adds up to better efficiency, working capital and cash flow, per the release.

      “At Mastercard, we are committed to delivering value-added services that help acquirers and their merchants operate more efficiently,” Saud Swar, country manager, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan and other Levant at Mastercard, said in the release. “Receivables Manager addresses a critical challenge for suppliers managing high volumes of virtual card payments by automating processing, reducing time and boosting efficiency.”

      Mastercard announced Tuesday that it launchedwidescale global availability” of Mastercard Receivables Manager, two years after the introduction of the automated solution for virtual cards.

      Since the product’s debut in July 2023, Mastercard Receivables Manager has been enhanced with new capabilities such as multi-language and secure card-on-file to support digital commerce around the world.

      The PYMNTS Intelligence reportVirtual Mobility: How Mobile Virtual Cards Elevate B2B Paymentsfound that virtual cards can deliver security, efficiency and return on investment to B2B payments.

      In an earlier collaboration between Mastercard and EazyPay, the companies teamed up in January 2023 to enhance EazyPay’s eCommerce offerings with Mastercard Payment Gateway Services (MPGS), which is now known as Mastercard Gateway.

      Before that, in June 2021, the two companies worked together to equip smallto medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and micromerchants with online payment technologies and access to financial services.

      For all PYMNTS B2B coverage, subscribe to the daily B2B Newsletter.