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In today’s Crypto Minute: Ian Balina was hacked; Mastercard throws their Blockchain hat into the ring; Coinbase acquires Earn.com for $120 million!
Popular ICO Investor Ian Balina Hacked
According to CrowdFund Insider, Popular ICO investor and YouTube influencer Ian Balina has reported on Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram that he has been hacked. Sources estimate Balina may have lost almost two million dollars of Ether and other coins in the hack. Balina asked for help tracking coins being transmitted out of six Etherscan wallets and stated that the hacker was attempting to sell the stolen coins on the Hong Kong-based Kucoin exchange.
Hackers may have accessed Balina’s password-protected encryption keys by hacking into his Evernote after hacking his email.
Mastercard Patents Blockchain Tech To Combat Fake Identities
As seen on Cointelegraph, Mastercard is officially in the Blockchain space. They have filed a patent for a Blockchain system to store and verify identity data, in an application published by the U.S Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) April 12th.
Mastercard states:
“Traditionally, proof [of identity] has been provided via government identification, credit cards, business cards…[such] proof may be inaccurate… or may be entirely fabricated in ways that may be difficult to identify… there is a need for a technical solution to provide for the immutable storage of identity and credential data.”
MasterCard-approved nodes would require each entity to provide, as a minimum, a public key and a geographic jurisdiction in order to generate a data file. Mastercard has previously been “pro-Blockchain” and “anti-Bitcoin”.
Coinbase Acquires Earn.com, Starting What Could Be A Spree of Acquisitions
Techcrunch has reported that Coinbase has acquired Earn.com, the U.S. startup that uses the blockchain for its paid-email service. The $120 million deal is Coinbase’s fifth acquisition to date, its most recent was a deal to buy Cipher Browser last week. Earn.com had raised more than $120 million from investors, according to Crunchbase data, which gives some idea of the total deal package.
Founded as secretive bitcoin mining operation “21E6” in 2013, the company quickly raised more than $100 million, but struggled as the price of bitcoin fell and expensive operational costs weighed it down. The CEO left the company, but later returned to the company when it had less than a year in runway after wracking up large capital commitments that it couldn’t pay back, even with millions of dollars of mining profit each month. Srinivasan, the CEO, refocused the company to offer a service that rewards users financially for answering emails and completing tasks. Today, Srinivasan said, the company — which was renamed to Earn.com last year — is profitable, with revenue at an eight-digital annual rate run with “hundreds of thousands” of users.
Source: ICO Alert