Decentralized marketplace and e-commerce protocol Syscoin has partnered with the stablecoin platform TrustToken.

The goal of the collaboration is to speed up payments and to provide further solutions to Ethereum’s blockchain. It also means that the five stablecoins of TrustToken, namely TUSD, TGBP, THKD, TCAD, and TAUD, will run on Syscoin’s blockchain and be available for users.

A Collaboration Between Syscoin and TrustToken

According to a release shared with CryptoPotato, the popular decentralized marketplace and e-commerce protocol Syscoin has teamed up with stablecoin platform TrustToken.

Right off the bat, this means that the stablecoins provided by the platform will now run on Syscoin’s blockchain as well. These are TUSD, TGBP, THKD, TCAD, and TAUD.

Stablecoins have grown in popularity over the past few months, mainly because of the DeFi boom, where they are used to enable staking, liquidity provision, and so forth. However, there was also an obvious challenge with all of it – scaling. Supposedly, Syscoin is intended to help with that. Using Z-DAG (Zero Confirmation Directed Acyclic Graph), the protocol claims to be able to settle transactions in less than 10 seconds with comparatively low fees.

The partnership will also enable users to mine two cryptocurrencies at the same time – SYS and BTC.

Distribution of the Roles

While Syscoin’s task would be scalability, TrustToken comes in for the stablecoin part. It’s a platform that aims at an open financial system through a selection of stablecoins.

The stablecoins it offers are collateralized, and it has also partnered with Chainlink, as well as other protocols.

The overall partnership is aimed at creating a solution for scalable and secure token payments at a lower risk interoperability with Ethereum’s network. It should make TrustToken’s stablecoins function quicker and cheaper following the enabling of the bridge.

Speaking on the matter was Syscoin’s Foundation Chairman Jag Sidhu, who said:

“Digital assets have growing needs for better usability, robust decentralized security, and a scalable way of ensuring every transaction complies with regulations. Syscoin uniquely aligns with all of these requirements. We look forward to TrustToken’s family of stablecoins becoming future-proof and gaining significant advantage with Syscoin.”

• The US-based cryptocurrency lending company BlockFi has partnered with the American multinational financial services corporation Visa to bring Bitcoin to the masses.
• Bloomberg reported that the two US companies will offer a credit card that rewards clients’ purchases with the primary cryptocurrency, instead of traditional options such as cash and airline miles.
• Dubbed the Bitcoin Rewards Credit Card, it will allow customers to receive 1.5% of their purchases back in BTC. 
• Should the user spend more than $3,000 in the first three months after receiving the card, he will be entitled to a bonus of $250 in bitcoin. However, the innovative card will come with a $200 annual fee.
• Evolve Bank & Trust, a subsidiary of Evolve Bancorp Inc, will be the card’s issuer. All three parties involved plan to launch the card in early 2021.
• Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of BlockFi, Zac Prince, commented that his company is “excited to add credit cards to our suite of products and expand Bitcoin’s accessibility to a broader set of customers.”
• With the BlockFi partnership, Visa has doubled-down on its endeavors with bitcoin-related collaborations. Earlier this year, the US giant and the BTC-friendly shopping app Fold launched a Visa co-branded debit card that rewards users with up to 10% of BTC back for every dollar purchase on retailers like Hotels.com, Nike, Starbucks, and Uber. 
• BlockFi raised $50 million in Series C funding earlier this year, and Morgan Creek Capital’s Anthony ‘Pomp’ Pompliano joined its board of directors.

The Australian cryptocurrency exchange, BTC Markets, has inadvertently exposed more than 270,000 emails of its customers. The company apologized for the inconvenience and reassured that all other data, including users’ funds, is safe.

BTC Markets Exposes Customers’ Emails

A user going by the Twitter handle Stevosxrp.crypto took it to Jack Dorsey’s social media giant and Reddit to first complain about BTC Markets’ screw up. The Australian-based exchange later confirmed the breach on its official Twitter account.

Earlier today, an announcement from BTC Markets exposed client names and email addresses. This is a deeply regrettable situation and we apologise wholeheartedly for it.

— BTC Markets (@BTCMarkets) December 1, 2020

The statement explained that BTC Markets “uses an external system to send client-wide emails.” Although the exchange has used this service for years “without an incident,” including sending test mails, this time, the testing “didn’t pick up that the sample email addresses in the batch were added to the same email, rather than sent individually.”

Consequently, the names and email addresses of account holders were exposed. BTC Markets claimed that this process was instant; therefore, “it was not possible to stop the batch send once the error was realized.”

The CEO of BTC Markets, Caroline Bowler, later revealed that all account holders were affected because the emails were sent in batches.

Funds Are SAFU, But The Damage Is Done

The exchange said that it will “self-report” to the Office of Australian Information Commissioner and “fully comply with the data breach reporting requirements.” Furthermore, the company plans to conduct an internal review.

Despite the data leak, BTC Markets reassured its users that the platform is still secure, no passwords were revealed, and all customers’ funds are safe.

Nevertheless, the exchange suggested that users’ should enable two-factor authentication (2FA) to enhance the security of their accounts.

None of those reassurances seemed to have an effect on the users, though. The Twitter thread explanation was met with numerous complaints from customers.

While most highlighted their disappointment with having their personal emails and names revealed, some took it a step further. One user claimed that the BTC Markets’ name is “now as good as dog s**t.”