Winklevoss twins donate nearly $5 million to crypto super PAC: CNBC Crypto World

CNBC Crypto World features the latest news and daily trading updates from the digital currency markets and provides viewers with a look at what’s ahead with high-profile interviews, explainers, and unique stories from the ever-changing crypto industry. On today’s show, Ryan Jones, senior director of product management at Consensys, the developer of the self-custodial crypto wallet MetaMask, discusses a new feature focused on enhancing security for wallet users.

Chapters:
00:00 – CNBC Crypto World, Feb 21, 2024
0:27- Ether rises
0:44- The headlines
2:38- Crypto bankruptcies

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Winklevoss twins donate nearly $5 million to crypto super PAC: CNBC Crypto World

Today usdc issuer Circle announces its backing away from the Tron blockchain authorities freeze hundreds of crypto wallets in a global Crackdown on ransomware group lock bit and Ryan Jones of consensus the developer of metamask breaks down a new privacy enhancement feature for wallet users welcome to cnbc’s crypto world I’m

TAA mck cryptocurrency prices are mixed this morning with Bitcoin hovering near the flat line at noon Eastern it traded at around $ 51,3 ether meanwhile in the green it climbed back above the $2,900 level cardano though in the red this morning falling to 59 let’s talk about the top stories

Circle the issuer of usdc is cutting off support for the Tron blockchain the stable coin platform announced that it will stop minting usdc on the blockchain effective immediately it also told its institutional customers it will support their transfers to other blockchains until February of next year Circle pointed to its risk management framework

For the reason behind the decision and said the move will help ensure that usdc remains trusted transparent and safe next Cameron and Tyler winlos are backing crypto Focus Super PAC Fair shake a filing with the federal elections commission shows the brothers donated $2.45 million to the pack in the

Last reporting period fairshake also reported around $73 million in cash on hand now some other notable donors Electric capital blockchain capital and payward the company operating as Kraken ahead of this year’s election Fair Shake has poured more than a million dollars into ad buys for crypto-friendly candidates on both sides of the aisle

And finally hundreds of crypto wallets have been frozen in a Crackdown on ransomware group lock bit europ pole announced on Tuesday that more than 200 crypto accounts with ties to the group had been frozen and that two members of the group had been arrested in Poland

And Ukraine the doj also said in a statement that it worked with international law en enforcement to disrupt the group which has over 2,000 victims and raked in more than $120 million in ransomware payments public facing websites were taken down and servers were seized to disrupt lock bit’s ability to carry out

Attacks all right for our main story yesterday self- custody web 3 platform metamask announced a new privacy enhancement feature for wallet users crypto world’s Talia Kaplan spoke with Ryan Jones senior director of product management with consensus the developer of metamask to learn all about the new

Feature he also weighs in on what else the company is doing to ensure Security in an effort to prevent billions loss to fraud big announcement for metamask this week focused on enhancing security for wallet users now yesterday metamask introduced the integration of privacy preserving security alerts for extension

And mobile app users with the goal of driving wider adoption so now all self- custodial wallet users around the world will automatically receive alerts about potentially malicious transactions an important development especially because according to chain analysis crypto users around the world had 1.7 billion dollar stolen hacked or fished last year alone

Can you break down how this new feature works exactly and elaborate on the goal of this development yes of course um as you said there’s a huge risk within this space in terms of scams uh and people essentially losing money within the self custodial space And so there’s a lot of work that

We’ve been needing to do in terms of protecting our users we had a few different methods in place already but of course there’s no one solution that is the silver bullet and so what’s really important is we are working with a specialists in the space to make sure

That we are adding that protection and so there’s a series of steps that each of these different providers that we’re working with are leveraging as a means to go and determine which of these uh applications or smart contracts are potentially malicious and then we are able to alert our users before they

Actually go and make a transaction that could potentially put their assets at risk and so what’s great is of course one of our core principles is making sure that we are doing this in as privacy preserving as possible and so we’re not sending any data externally to

Any of these third party providers but we’re leveraging the data that they provide to us to be front and center for those users as they’re making those transactions metamask estimates that this year alone the security alerts will prevent hundreds of Millions worth of dollar assets from being stolen I read

That a common tactic used by hackers is creating fake browser extensions that try to steal private Keys when installed on devices and that these malicious extensions often imitate popular crypto wallet extensions like metamask in an effort to trick users into giving up their private keys so was this part of

The reason you felt this new security feature was absolutely necessary I think this was one of the reasons for sure what we’ve actually seen is a lot of uh the malicious intent comes from individuals interacting with malicious applications themselves and so we see about of all the new applications

Or what we call decentralized application staps that get released about 10% of them are malicious and so the bulk of users are going in in this permissionless ecosystem interacting with them and we want to just provide more protection to them at that State there are of course a bunch of different

Ways that people are trying to scam individuals whether it’s uh fake websites or fake extensions and a big thing here is to all always double check the URL that you’re going for and we will not ask you for your secret recovery phrase uh that’s associated with that so really make sure that

You’re protecting that at all cost and so we made a series of different steps of making sure that a user understands what it means to open up and show that secret recovery phase and then now of course when they’re connecting and interacting with apps also making sure

That there’s warnings that pop up for those users a big premise of what we want to do within the space is make sure that we never block a user from actually taking an action but what we want to do is protect and inform that user so that

They can make the most informed decision for themselves uh while they’re actually interacting with this ecosystem now earlier this month consensus announced that the crypto wallet in metamask will now let users buy crypto through Robin Hood allowing those using the trading platform greater access to digital

Assets so now that it has been a couple of weeks since the announcement how is the integration going so far and is it revealing a shift toward rer mainstream ad option for sure yeah and so uh I think the integration with Robin Hood has been great the team has been great

In terms of working with us we’ve seen some great flows in terms of individuals moving from Robin Hood to our self- custodial wallet of metamask and even those going back as well and so one of the things that we really wanted to decrease is that barrier from custodial

To self- custodial and so you’ll be seeing a few more uh of those sort of Integrations to help individuals who start in this custodial uh ecosystem and then move to something like metam has to go and interact with the web 3 ecosystem and so we’re trying to make uh that

Interaction a lot simpler so it does become more mainstream for those users to leverage a tool that’s right for them what do you think the industry as a whole should do to move toward Mass adoption of crypto what steps do you think should be taken yeah so uh I’m a firm believer

That the technology shouldn’t just be used because it’s just the new technology right it’s here as a means to allow for people to do things that they couldn’t do before and so working on ways to abstract away the complexity that’s associated with uh the technology

To make it so that every uh day users can all of a sudden just do something that’s brand new for them and so I think we’ve been making a lot of steps to do that we’re not fully there yet um but even in some of the new decentralized

Social constructs uh individuals can go they can use their standard email and sign in just like any web 2 and they can interact uh with individuals within that space and they don’t need to understand what chain they are what token they’re using none of that and they’re able to

Leverage kind of the power and the value that’s associated with the blockchain and the decentralized ecosystem now in October metamask was no longer available on the Apple App Store but I see it’s back now so I’m wondering where does that stand right now how long was it

Unavailable and what did you think about that development when it first happened why did Apple make it unavailable to begin with yeah so uh it was only unavailable for a very short period of time we got to back up and running certainly worked with the Apple team to

Make sure that that happened it had nothing to do with security it didn’t have anything to do with kind of Apple’s uh like sets or regulations that are associated with it so it’s a series of things on our side that we wanted to make sure we had in place uh before

Getting it back up onto the store so um I think from that perspective we all worked really well in terms of making sure that that happened and wanted to get it back up to our users as fast as possible so certainly was a little bit

Of a hiccup uh and making sure that that doesn’t happen again but it’s been uh it’s been helpful in terms of having that communication between Apple and then of course we work closely with Google as well and people shouldn’t expect it to happen again type of thing

Correct got it now metamask is a crypto wallet designed primarily for the ethereum blockchain so yes I’m wondering what you’re paying attention to as it pertains to ethereum is the next big upgrade which is expected to happen soon something that’s on your radar yeah so we’re really excited about the upgrade

Uh that is coming we call it the Duncan upgrade it’s uh coming out shortly uh the area that’s really important for this is that it is improving uh infrastructure for us and moving more towards uh the speed and low cost of what we call layer twos and so again in

In terms of the differences between a couple years ago to today you now are able to interact with the ecosystem at a much uh lower cost and a much higher speed and so that we believe will again bring on more of the masses uh to

Interact in a lot of new use cases that are associated with it and then of course of course we are certainly very ethereum focused but we do now have a product that we call snaps and so there’s something like 15 different nonm chains that we actually support through

Snaps and we’re working on integrating those uh some of those directly Within by default uh for end users as well so we do realize that this is a multi-chain world and we want to make sure that metamask continues to be the most flexible wallet out there and can work

With you wherever you want to go okay that’s all for crypto world today we’ll be back again tomorrow and we’ll see you then