The first week of the new year has gone by so quickly, and already, so much has happened.
Everything from trouble within the Ordinals camp, to an alleged "virtual rape", to some of last year's drama spilling into the new one.
Here are the key events in crypto, from last week:
The Ordinals protocol is more than one year old and has been the object of much controversy.
However, things soon took a turn when the arguments changed from being between pro versus anti-Ordinals developers to clashes within the camp.
In December 2023, UniSat, a popular wallet provider that supports BRC-20 tokens (a Bitcoin token standard) announced their plans to upgrade their wallet to support the latest version of Ordinals, called Jubilee.
This new upgrade was expected to bring several improvements to the world of Ordinals, including faster and cheaper transactions, as well as enhanced security.
However, Domo, the original creator of the BRC-20 token standard was not having it.
He accused UniSat of being reckless and irresponsible for rushing this new upgrade, and that Jubilee would likely cause conflicts for BRC-20 token holders and developers.
UniSat clapped back, in what is now known as the first and messiest fight within the ordinals camp, as outlined by this story.
As shocking as the headline sounds, this actually happened.
According to reports from the Daily Mail, a girl under 16 was playing Horizon Worlds (an immersive virtual reality game run by Meta) at home earlier this week.
She was wearing a VR headset, which allowed her to see and control her avatar—a computerized version of herself—in the virtual world.
However, things quickly took a dark turn, when she was suddenly attacked by several male avatars who sexually assaulted her avatar brutally and violently as she was exploring the game.
This incident is regarded as the first of its kind in the world, and authorities may not even fully understand how to tackle metaverse-related crimes.
Are virtual murder, theft or rape real-world crimes? If so, should they be treated as such?
Read the full story here.
As per recent reports, Crypto ATMs have been on the decline in 2023.
The number of crypto ATMs worldwide has decreased by almost 6,000 units since August 2022, hitting its lowest point in the previous two years, as shown by data from coinatmradar.
Data from coinatmradar.com data also shows that March 2023 experienced a significant downturn with 3,568 machines going offline.
However after the dip in March, installations saw a little uptick in April and May, and this pattern continued into July.
After the significant decline, October led the way in terms of new additions. However, in total, 2023 saw a decline of nearly 6000 crypto ATMs. Read the full story here.
In a surprising and almost funny turn of events, CertiK, a leading security firm fell victim to a phishing scam sometime this week.
In detail, the attacker got in touch with a CertiK employee by posing as a journalist from Forbes.
The attacker then sent a link for a scheduled interview, claiming to be interested in speaking with CertiK about their accomplishments.
However, this URL was a phishing attack that the hacker eventually used to gain access to CertiK's X account.
After gaining access, the scammer then posted messages on CertiK's account, stating that Uniswap's router had been hacked and that users needed to connect their wallets and revoke their approvals for Uniswap on Revoke.cash.
CertiK was quick to get on top of things and neutralize the attack in 37 minutes, but it is unclear if any money was stolen.
According to a recent report published by SlowMist, crypto security incidents, such as scams, hacks, and exploits, have decreased in both frequency and severity in 2023. Still, a few of the top cryptocurrency platforms, like Ethereum and Polygon, have taken the most hits from these incidents.
According to the report, 464 crypto security incidents occurred in 2023, with damages totalling about $2.5 billion.
With 303 events and $3.8 billion in damages, this amounts to a 34.2% decrease in losses from 2022.
The report also concluded that:
Disclaimer: Voice of Crypto aims to deliver accurate and up-to-date information, but it will not be responsible for any missing facts or inaccurate information. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile financial assets, so research and make your own financial decisions.