In the start of this new year two major events took place which although not related directly , will have huge impact on the crypto space. One of the event was the infamous $16M hack on cryptopia exchange and the other one was the launch of win.win project, which is a decentralized exchange in the making.
Cryptopia hack
The hack, which is seemingly the first major security breach of 2019, was announced by the platform on Jan. 15. The exchange said that the hack occurred on Jan. 14.
Cryptopia did not announced the extent of hack till now but as per the information available by third party accessory as much as $16 million worth of Ethereum (ETH) and ERC20 tokens were stolen. The attack continued for two weeks following the initial breach as the exchange had not regained control of its wallets. Hackers stole and additional 1,675 ETH ($175,875) from 17,000 Cryptopia wallets, with Elementus stating that, among the 17,000 affected wallets, 5,000 were emptied when the platform was first breached, but subsequently refilled.
Cryptopia exchange has shown a very professional behavior and updated its user with major updates timely and recently in the start of the March 2019 they have gone live wit their read only website and soon they will go live with full functionality. It seems a good thing that the exchange is back on track but there are many take away from this event:
This was not the first hack of a centralized exchange and it will never be the last one.
Cryptopia initially told users it was undergoing unscheduled maintenance, issuing several updates before officially reporting the breach.
Till now, no official statement of the losses due to hack from the exchange.
Any such event cripples the market and some projects disappear altogether due to their inability to sustain the losses because they were listed on only one major exchange.
it is not clear yet, how cryptopia will compensate the users for their lost fund or they will not?
Decentralized Exchanges
There can be many solutions to such hacks but I truly believe that decentralized exchanges is the one ultimate solution. One such project whose launch coincided wit the cryptopia hack is win.win project.
from the win.win website "the most important and critical function is the ability to store and exchange our digital assets in a secure manner. Centralized exchanges have been proven to be unreliable and insecure, often hacked or abused. We believe that in order to advance the mass adoption of crypto, a new architecture must be introduced to enable secure and direct peer-to-peer value exchange. The true philosophy of blockchain, is to eliminate the need of middleman and to enable transactions without having to place trust in third parties."
The TWINS cryptocurrency will be used to power the exchange platform for buy and sell order listings and to reward the community-supported and decentralized hosting of network nodes.
Why win.win project
There are a number of decentralized exchnages then what a new project would change. The answer lies in the functioning of the win.win team. This project is being supported/backed by NEW.Capital, a registered company whose mission is is to ensure that new great ideas are not lost have the best chance to succeed. New Capital is a registered company with operational offices at different locations of the world.
Transparency which is totally absent from all the centralized exchanges and which is also evident from the recent cryptopia hack, is a must according to win.win team.
Edwin Terek, one of the Pioneers of the win.win team said: “The biggest revelation and disappointment has been the lack of transparency in the blockchain industry. One of the main ideas of blockchain is to promote trust. Yet, many of the participants behave in a way that is completely contrary to these ideals, and brazenly display a complete lack of transparency.”
Also, they are a very dedicated and hardworking team of enthusiastic persons who are not afraid from day one to expose their identities. They are public and hold meetings/ conferences worldwide with their prospective partners or service providers.
In the one month of their launch they have been on a spree of partnerships- be it a new exchange or a master node service provider, they have done it all. And on top of it, they have been very cautious while chosing any exchange or forging any partnership. They try to scrutinize or at least get to know the other party , before they go official with them.
They are transparent and want their partners to be the same.
Besides, in just a month TWINS has a small but very vibrant, active and supportive community, this also shows that how much people believe in the project.
That's why I believe, this might be the one true decentralized exchanges which can solve the problem of hacking of centralized exchanges once and for all.
Official project links:
Website: https://win.win/
Github: https://github.com/NewCapital
Discord: https://discord.gg/SAMDbxV
Bitsane Exchange link — https://bit.ly/2UeDKDd
p2pb2b Exchange link- https://bit.ly/2SxYPqR