Hello everyone, and welcome once more to the MNO blog where information always comes first and which has been running for over fifteen years now, first established back in 2007.

I must say I don’t remember any period of such a standstill in the HYIP industry at the this point of the year. Usually in October things are getting busy and we have at least one leader, but not this time. Spooked by the worldwide economic crisis and international conflicts like the war in Ukraine people are now getting very cautious when it comes to their money. They prefer to save and keep easily accessible cash reserves for emergencies rather than invest into the bleeding cryptocurrency market or risky HYIP ventures. The professional admins seem to be absent at the moment, or just running a string of fast scams which serve exclusively as the tool to replenish their wallet. Ambitious admins capable of exceeding the expectations and managing long-running programs looks like a thing from the distant past now.

At the current moment we can clearly state that the HYIP industry as we know it is completely and utterly dead. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t recover at some point in the future, but in the short term it looks less and less likely.

Of course, I do realize that the desire to earn money never goes away and people are always on the lookout for any extra sources of income, especially now. That is why I am considering expanding the horizons of the MNO blog by adding a section where I will talk about the income streams where people can earn some additional money by doing some online tasks, like answering surveys, participating in market research, helping brands in exchange for incentives, and so on. I would like your input though on whether it’s worth my time to tell you about these perfectly legitimate source of earning some extra cash without investing any money of your own. So, please answer this question and if the response is positive I will be presenting you with some reviews of the sites which will be rewarding if you need some extra cash in your wallets. Please vote in this poll:

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Thanks in advance for your votes, guys, and we will take a look at the results next week with possibly the first site to be offered for your consideration.

Meanwhile, if you wish to be the first to know about these and other earning opportunities why not add your email address to the list of subscribers on this page and enjoy receiving the entire MNO blog posts directly to your mailbox on a regular basis? Besides, for a more up-to-date information on the addition of money-making opportunities and change of their statuses you may always follow MNO on Telegram, Facebook, or Twitter. And remember to stay in touch via this contact form, email me directly at abramsonp@gmail.com or simply chat on Telegram @mnoblog

Let’s now have a look the most talked about events that happened in the crypto world over the last business week, October, 03-10, 2022 in our traditional Weekly CryptoNews Digest.

It’s been an interesting week in the crypto industry, and one where putting the actual exchange rates to one side for a moment the bad stories seem to trump the good. It’s not entirely doom and gloom of course as I shall try to give as fairly and even handed summation of the most recent events as I can.

It’s been a rough year for cryptocurrency, and things are not looking any better after over half a billion dollars of cryptocurrency tokens were stolen from crypto giant Binance on Thursday night. The exploit hit the Binance Bridge, a cross-chain bridge that allows for the transfer of tokens between two related blockchains operated by the Binance cryptocurrency exchange, and collectively known as BNB Chain. According to well-known smart contract analyst samczsun, the attacker was able to forge transactions that allowed them to withdraw two million BNB tokens from the bridge, worth roughly $570 million. Funds estimated at around $87 million were removed from the BNB ecosystem entirely; but the remaining funds could not be immediately transferred because BNB Chain took the drastic step of halting the blockchain entirely, meaning no transactions whatsoever could be processed.

A tweet from the BNB Chain account said that the blockchain was running again as of the early hours of Friday morning. In an “ecosystem update,” the BNB Chain team apologized for the exploit, and said that the project would hold a series of on-chain governance votes to determine whether to freeze the hacked funds, and if a bounty should be offered for catching the hackers responsible. “Looking at the broader picture, we have seen a series of attacks on targeting vulnerabilities in cross-chain bridges,” the blog post read. “We will openly share the details of the postmortem and all lessons on how to implement more advanced security measures to shore-up these vulnerabilities.” In recent years, cross-chain bridges have become the most common site of ultra-high value hacks, partly because they store very large sums of cryptocurrency tokens at any given time. While the earlier era of the cryptocurrency industry was characterized by frequent attacks on exchanges, security has greatly improved, and a hacker would need to breach numerous layers of security to withdraw funds. With cryptocurrency bridges, the ability to forge one valid transaction is in some cases enough to make off with a nine-figure sum.

Moving on to the next news item, troubled crypto lender Celsius which has been covered a number of times on the MNO Weekly Digest seems to be going from bad to worse. It’s been revealed that the names and transaction history of hundreds of thousands of its customers were made public in a court filing. The 14,500-page long document contained information such as customer names, crypto wallet IDs, transaction types and amounts, which services the customer had used, and the types and quantities of tokens held. The user data leak has already received widespread condemnation on social media. Nick Hansen, CEO and co-founder of Luxor described the leak as one of the greatest breaches of customer information ever. And quite frankly it’s hard to argue with that.

Celsius has not provided any explanation as of yet as to why this level of information was revealed and if it was required by the court. The news comes after Celsius slid into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 2022, revealing a $1.2 billion hole in its balance sheet. The firm is currently set to auction off its remaining assets as part of its attempts to repay its debts to investors. An external administrator was also appointed to oversee its legal proceedings, with FTX strongly rumored to be the leading candidate among potential buyers. Nothing to worry about for the highest Celsius executives mind, it was also noted by the court that the two highest ranking members there conveniently managed to pocket a cool $17 million dollars between them in the days before the company went bankrupt. Talk about good luck, eh? Yeah, right!

Changing direction now to somewhat more positive news developments, though I do want to continue with the above mentioned FTX. They seem to be moving upwards to bigger and better things this week as we shall see. The crypto exchange leader is partnering with Visa to make it easier for individuals around the globe to use crypto holdings for everyday purchases. The pair are rolling out Visa debit cards linked to FTX accounts in 40 new countries starting in Latin America, allowing crypto holders to use their digital assets to pay for goods and services from their FTX wallets with Visa’s network of 80 million merchants. The partnership marks the latest in a string of crypto announcements from payments giants, suggesting they continue their efforts to move deeper into the space despite the plunge in cryptocurrency values this year. The belief is that digital currencies will have a lasting impact on the future of financial services and money movement according to a source at Visa, noting that despite the market’s trajectory, the payments company’s views on crypto remain undaunted and particularly encouraged by the use of crypto stablecoins in global commerce.

FTX and Visa plan to have the offering go live across Europe by the end of the year. The debit card also comes with zero administrative and processing fees. Visa already supports debit cards issued by Coinbase, Binance and several others including an FTX card for U.S. customers. The deal is only the start of a long-term global relationship that follows the recent announcement from Mastercard, which said it would offer a risk rating tool to improve fraud prevention for banks and card users interfacing with crypto across its network.

And that actually brings us very conveniently on to the next news story about Mastercard and crypto. Mastercard will debut a new piece of software that helps banks identify and cut off transactions from fraud-prone crypto exchanges, the company has announced. Called Crypto Secure, the system uses sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms to determine the risk of crime associated with crypto exchanges on the Mastercard payment network. The system relies on data from the blockchain, a public record of crypto transactions, as well as other sources. The service is powered by CipherTrace, a blockchain security startup Mastercard acquired last year. Based in the US, CipherTrace helps businesses and government agencies investigate illicit transactions involving cryptocurrencies. Its main rivals are New York firm Chainalysis and Elliptic, which is based in London. Mastercard is launching the service against a backdrop of growing crime in the emerging digital asset market. The amount of crypto entering wallets with known criminal connections surged to a record $14 billion last year, according to data from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. And 2022 has seen a spate of high-profile hacks and scams targeting crypto investors. On the Crypto Secure platform, banks and other card issuers are shown a dashboard with color-coded ratings representing the risk of suspicious activity, with severity of risk ranging from red for “high” to green for “low.” Crypto Secure doesn’t make a judgment call on whether to turn away a specific crypto merchant. That decision is down to the card issuers themselves. Mastercard already uses similar technology to prevent fraud in fiat currency transactions. With Crypto Secure, it’s expanding such functionality to Bitcoin and other virtual currencies. Compliance has become an important focus in crypto lately as more banks and payment companies enter the fray with their own services for trading and storing digital assets.

What do McDonalds fast food burger restaurants and fine art galleries have in common? Not much you might think, even if it does sound like the opening line to some awful joke. But if you live in the Swiss city of Lugano – a place which aspires to be some kind of crypto friendly oasis for want of a better description – then actually quite a lot. In fact as reported in earlier updates on the MNO Crypto News Digest Lugano wants to be seen as, in the city’s own words, “the Bitcoin capital of Europe”. Well, progress has certainly been made on that front.

A group called the Plan B Foundation, which is a joint initiative between the city of Lugano and USDT Stablecoin issuer Tether, announced a collaboration with payment facilitator GoCrypto to officially bring Bitcoin, Tether, and LVGA payments to more widespread acceptance among residents and businesses, thus enabling citizens to use their wallets at McDonald’s and other merchants. Users can utilize their wallets at these places to pay with the Bitcoin Lightning Network, USDT, and local payment token LVGA, while the city will work to bring in more businesses over the next 25 days, said the announcement. By the end of 2023, the Plan B Foundation aims to enable more than 2,500 merchants to accept these three currencies.

In the meantime, they expect to service over 2,000 customers at the upcoming Plan B Forum, a Bitcoin conference that will be held on October 28-29 in Lugano. At an earlier event back in March of this year you might remember as reported on MNO that Lugano city officials said Bitcoin and Tether would become de facto legal tender in the southern Swiss city as it partners with Tether to become the afore mentioned “Bitcoin Capital of Europe.” Some of the products and services highlighted at the time, which citizens would be able to pay for with crypto, include all public services, personal and corporate municipal taxes, ID and passport issuance fees, naturalization fees, tuition fees at public schools, and rent for event spaces.

And finally for today, while the subject of online gaming doesn’t interest me very much as it’s never been something I ever had the time or inclination for, I do know it’s a massive hobby for an entire generation of people across the globe. So with that in mind, Sega, one of the most influential Japanese based gaming companies, has announced that it will build its first blockchain-based game. The project, which will be built by another gaming company, Double Jump Tokyo, will be based on the Sangokushi Taisen franchise, a popular arcade game in Japan. The Sangokushi Taisen franchise is comprised of a series of strategy games that allows its players to use of virtual cards in the virtual field. The structure of the game lends itself to the implementation of blockchain elements, like the tokenization of some of the assets of the game and the trading aspect of the cards. However, none of the companies have announced how these blockchain elements will be included as part of the game mechanics. No tentative release date for the game has been announced yet, but Sega has not announced the development of any similar project. I’ll report on any future updates in due course, assuming I feel they might be relevant or of interest to MNO readers.

If you like what you read on MNO about cryptocurrencies please make sure you tune in next Monday for this coming week’s CryptoNews Digest. And please remember to vote in the poll which may determine a much needed change of direction for the MNO blog over the next few months, due to a lack of quality HYIPs. Hopefully, this will be only a temporary thing, but time will tell. It really all depends on your input, as I work for you only and the blog is here to benefit its readers.

Thanks for reading and talk to you again next week on MNO – For Money Lovers!