stake

Ethereum and BNB Theft at Stake.com Crypto Casino Sends More Shockwaves Through the Industry

Stake.com, a popular crypto casino, was hit by a massive heist involving Ethereum (ETH) and Binance Coin (BNB), which amounted to tens of millions of dollars, in a shocking turn of events.

Stake’s Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) hot wallets were compromised, but the business assures customers their money is safe. Bitcoin, Litecoin, XRP, EOS, and Tron wallets, among others, are safe for the time being.

An Analysis

On-chain transaction analysis reveals a startling $16 million in stolen Ethereum (ETH), USDC, USDT, and DAI from an Ethereum wallet. Apparently, to avoid any blocking by Tether or Circle, these stablecoin holdings were changed to ETH. In this fraud, almost 6,000 ETH were stolen.

In addition, tokens worth $17.8 million were illegally gained from the BSC chain, and another $7.8 million came from the Polygon wallet. Both of these amounts are referred to as the total amount stolen. Collectively, attackers got off with somewhere about $40 million.

Speculation that Stake.com’s platform has been systematically infiltrated has been fueled by comments from MetaMask’s Product Manager, Taylor Monahan, who noted that the transactions were precisely organized.

This lends credence to the hypothesis that the theft was carried out straight from the internal systems of the platform, most likely via the unauthorized acquisition of private keys. Important to remember is that they were “hot wallets,” meaning they lacked the extra protection of offline keys. Still, it has not been possible to determine who was responsible for this daring heist yet.

What This Means for Stake.com

Stake.com, established in Curacao, promotes itself as the premier crypto casino by offering an online gaming platform for cryptocurrency betting. Since its 2017 debut, Stake.com has enabled users to gamble on sports and online games using cryptocurrencies such as BTC, ETH, and DOGE. Bets in fiat currencies, like as the US dollar, are also accepted on the site. The company has had legal problems before, but nothing like what happened yesterday.

It is part of the growing industry of cryptocurrency casinos, which has seen success in part because of its customers’ need for privacy. Because they do not need users to reveal their identities via the Know Your Customer (KYC) process and accept cryptocurrencies for deposits and withdrawals, these sites have opened anonymous worldwide betting.

Despite the serious breach in security, Stake.com has continued to operate normally. The corporation has assured customers that their money is safe and is once again processing withdrawal requests. It seems likely at this point that the stolen goods belonged to the business, rather than specific consumers.

On the other hand, withdrawals have been enabled again, suggesting that Stake.com is confident in its capacity to make up the lost funds. Without these guarantees, customers are hesitant to make withdrawals for fear of going bankrupt. Thankfully, it does not seem that this is an issue with Stake.com.

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Atari Crypto Casino Coming in 2021

In March, renowned video game developer Atari announced that it has plans to launch a crypto casino. Known as Atari Casino, the new crypto casino would allow users to enjoy playing the company’s iconic gaming titles such as Pac-Man, Pong, Space Invaders, and Asteroids among others using digital currencies like Bitcoin. While the game developer is yet to provide any information regarding a specific launch date, it is anticipated that the launch could be as early as May or even April depending on various factors.

Still, this is a very exciting move for Atari. Last year in October, the company launched its first digital currency. This was shortly followed by the announcement of its plans to join the Ethereum virtual reality game Sandbox. Needless to say, these were the first indicators of Atari’s growing interest in expanding its presence in the crypto space. It is safe to say, an Atari-owned crypto-based gaming site was inevitable.

Lucrative Collaboration

For this venture, Atari partnered with Decentral Games on the Ethereum blockchain. The two partners have been working on several Atari-themed games as well as Atari non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – players will be able to leverage the latter to earn more digital currency. NFTs have grown very popular over the past several months and it is not surprising to see that big brands such as Atari are trying to capitalize on it.

Atari Casino will be based in “Vegas City” which is a gaming district in Decentraland, the Decentral Game’s metaverse. For anyone who is not familiar with the concept, Decentraland is simply a virtual world where visitors can visit using their avatars.

“By combining our expertise in building crypto casinos with Atari’s decades of experience in developing video games, we are excited for our community to immerse themselves in an innovative and new gaming experience,” Decentral Games’ statement read.

Some of the amazing things that players can look forward to on Atari Casino include games of luck as well as several titles that require both skill and luck. Anyone familiar with Atari’s classic offerings will be very happy with the nostalgia-inducing games that will be available on the platform.

High Hopes

According to the joint statement from Atari and Decentral Games, they expect to see bets of up to $150 million in 2021. This is further expected to rise to a whopping $400 million over two years. These are some pretty ambitious projections but they are pretty confident in being able to pull it off. For now, we will just have to wait and see how it all plays out.

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Hamster-Powered Marble Races Come to Ethereum

Crypto gambling continues to grow thanks to several innovative developments that have been causing quite a stir in the gambling industry. We have already seen lots of amazing innovations but, as it turns out, there is so much more to come. The latest development in the sector has come in the form of a new model of gaming.

Referred to as “Mia & the Marbles” the new model of gambling that is now available on Ethereum has been in development for over two years. It is a pretty ambitious project that has the potential to shake up the crypto gambling sector in many ways.

How Does It Work?

Mia & the Marbles (M&M) is powered by Mia, a female Djungarian or “winter white dwarf” hamster, and her trusty hamster wheel. With the help of a group of accomplished developers, Mia and her wheel make some very fun and engaging marble races possible. The result is a very unique and surprisingly robust marble-racing and wagering platform.

Needless to say, this is a rather unusual form of gambling but it is implementation has proven that there is indeed room for such extraordinary ideas. Speaking on the project, the developers behind Mia & the Marbles affirmed that participants can rest assured that they will be treated to all the benefits that come with Ethereum. That is, all the marble races are provably fair, provably live, and easily-verifiable.

“We can guarantee that the races are taking place in real-time and are not pre-recorded. We do this with our provably live video stream that shows the first 8 bits of the current Ethereum blockhash physically on the race track with 8 movable pegs. A high peg stands for a 1, a low peg for a 0.”

Also integrated into the new model of gambling is a compensation service. This has been put in place to sort out any races where accurate results cannot be introduced after two days.

More to Come?

Many ambitious projects are currently being pursued in the crypto gambling space but, as expected, not many of them see the light of day. The M&M project’s success is, however, proof that with the right kind of push, just about anything is possible. Even though the form of gambling the new game introduces stands out quite a bit for being unusual, the strong push for fair gambling was certainly bound to turn some heads.

That said, there are lots of opportunities in the online gambling and crypto sectors which means that M&M is probably just the beginning of even more launches.

Ethereum

Ethereum Drops Below $200, Further ICO Selloff Expected

Over the past few months, Ethereum investors have had to cope with bears from everywhere thanks to the pessimistic news and sporadic or wavering statements that have grown rather rampant within the period of its existence. While a lot of work has been put into the Ethereum project, the digital currency otherwise known as ETH has managed to plunge so deeply to a new all-time low of about $183 – this is the first time that the cryptocurrency market is seeing a bloodbath that has caused a plummet of close $198 billion.

There was a boom in the number of Initial Coin Offerings in towards the end of the 2017 and early this year, something that drew the attention of a number of different market players including mainstream media. Ethereum happened to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of this rapid increase in the number of Initial Coin Offerings. In fact, the digital currency remains to be the second biggest cryptocurrency market and its smart contract has spawned several projects including Tron and EOS.

Unfortunately, this year has not been Ethereum’s best year having gone through a constant drop this year. This drop in Ethereum’s value has been one of the most shocking outcomes in the cryptocurrency industry and the ICOs are reportedly to blame for the digital currency’s downward price trend.

“The blockchain space is getting to the point where there’s a ceiling in sight. If you talk to the average educated person at this point, they probably have heard of blockchain at least once. There isn’t an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore,” Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum commented on ETH’s decline.

This is certainly not good news for speculators and crypto enthusiasts who purchased digital currencies at high prices at the beginning of the year with the hopes of stopping glosses from the year-long slump. As such, it is very important for stakeholders to have practical anticipations for possible gains especially considering last December’s astounding flare-up in crypto prices that was described as a “retail bubble” by many investors.

Why Fingers Are Pointing to the ICOs

Ethereum-based ICOs have spent 157,700 ETH over the past 8 days – this is equivalent to $29.9 million at the digital currency’s present value and is the highest amount spent since March. Due to this, there has been speculation that the cryptocurrency startups have been offloading Ethereum for fiat currency on major exchanges.

Alex Kruger, a cryptocurrency analyst, says that about 4 percent of the Ethereum held in visible ICO wallets was transferred out last month. Kevin Rooke, another cryptocurrency analyst, also pointed out that the Ethereum reserves held by ICOs fell to $600 million in the last week. This ICO cash-out is one of the causes of ether’s 40 percent price drop over the past month.