01-12-2018: Kraken Exchange Down 48+ Hours, Possibly Hacked

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Kraken, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges has been down for over 48 hours and customers are beginning to panic. Kraken went offline at 9 p.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday for maintenance that was initially scheduled to last two hours, plus an additional two to three hours for withdrawals, according to an announcement on the San Francisco-based company’s website. In previous updates, Kraken mentioned it’s working on unexpected and delicate issues. The short history of cryptocurrencies has been rife with hackers and stolen bitcoins. In the most famous case, Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in 2014 after hackers stole hundreds of thousands of its clients bitcoins. Kraken is one of the exchanges that the CME Group Inc. is using to price the bitcoin futures it introduced last month [Bloomberg].

New data shows that U.S. exchange Coinbase may be spamming the Bitcoin Network. As the company continues to suffer technical outages due to high demand, its effect on the Bitcoin mempool has become the source of renewed calls for SegWit as a priority. Twitter user Civ Ekonom wrote in response to Coinbase’s latest reported system breakdown “You are ALONE spamming the network. If you would use segwit and batch all outgoing transactions the mempool would be EMPTY.” Earlier this week we reported on user-filed petition on Change.org to force a SegWit upgrade as a priority. That petition has now accrued over 8000 signatures [bitcoinist].

Yesterday, South Korean justice minister Park Sang-ki sent the bitcoin market into a frenzy after announcing a proposed law to ban cryptocurrency trading. However, shortly after Park’s statements, a number of other government ministries expressed surprise and disagreement with the announcement. Now, more than 120,000 people have reportedly signed a petition to South Korea’s Blue House in opposition to the rumored legislation. Yun Chang-hyun, an economics professor from the University of Seoul, stated, “The latest idea to ban it all seems to have come out of a fear that when the bubble bursts and things go wrong, it will be all on the government” [ethnews]

The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, Binance, continues to see explosive growth in spite of price reductions across the market earlier this week. The company added 240,000 users in just one hour on Wednesday January 10th, surpassing all previous growth records. The company has hosted almost $5 bln in cryptocurrency trades in the past 24 hours. The exchange temporarily closed new registrations last week while undergoing an update to allow for higher volumes, and has since re-opened them to limited numbers [cointelegraph]. And lastly, for a limited period of time, KFC Canada is selling a bucket of fried chicken for Bitcoin presented in a bitcoin-themed container demonstrating the price of the fried chicken bucket at the time of the sale. Currently, the bucket sells for $20 which is equivalent to 0.0010102 BTC, however, given the current transaction fees of bitcoin, the bucket will cost just over $30 [newsbtc].

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