Today in Crypto: Crypto Firms Offer High Pay to Lure UK Cybercrime Police; Crypto Broker Reports Falling Q1 Lending

Coinbase is debuting features to add compliance support, according to a company blog post published April 28.

The feature, called Coinbase Know Your Transaction, will be able to screen transactions for financial institutions and help manage risk, based on the company’s proprietary risk scoring system. The company said this will help expand economic freedom while making crypto more accessible.

Meanwhile, cybercrime police officers in the United Kingdom are seeing job offers from crypto firms, Bloomberg wrote Friday (April 29).

The companies are coming armed with cash, seeking help with regulation-related troubles. The report noted that the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), which represents all U.K. forces, is losing experienced cybercrime officers and staff at a much higher rate than the rest of policing.

“The loss of experienced cyber officers and staff is a significant problem for us,” Andrew Gould, head of the NPCC’s cybercrime unit, said in the report. “Their skills are in high demand in the private sector so we can see them doubling or tripling their pay which is why they go.”

In other news, the Swiss National Bank apparently isn’t friendly towards using bitcoin as a reserve currency, Reuters reported Friday.

Thomas Jordan, chairman of the bank, said buying bitcoin “is not a problem,” but he was opposed to using it as a reserve currency.

“From the current perspective we do not believe bitcoin meets the requirements of currency reserves, that’s why we have until now decided not to have bitcoin on our balance sheet,” Jordan said.

Furthermore, Bloomberg reported Friday that El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s plan for a bitcoin-backed bond has not been working out.

Bukele said the bitcoin-backed bond is a better option than going for multilateral lenders in Washington and pursuing more conventional financing. However, he hasn’t gotten even a penny of the $1 billion he’s seeking, which has deepened concerns that the country can’t pay back its $800 million bond.

In more crypto news, Bloomberg also wrote Friday that Genesis, one of the biggest crypto brokerages for institutional investors, originated over $44.3 billion in loans in the first quarter — a decline from over $50 billion in the previous quarter.

The loans mostly came from new institutions entering the industry and by more demand for cash loans, the report said.

Finally, Rari Capital and Fei Protocol have been hacked, losing almost $80 million on Saturday (April 30), Bloomberg reported.

There was an exploit targeting multiple pools of Fei Protocol’s merged partner, Rari. Fei Protocol works to build an algorithmic stablecoin and is pegged to the value of the dollar.

The hackers reportedly took funds through exploiting a “reentrancy vulnerability,” meaning when a protocol’s smart contract makes a call to an external smart contract, leading to exploiting a vulnerability in the first call’s code.