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.

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.”