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Cryptocurrency users should exercise extreme caution as a prominent industry leader warns of a potential new wave of crypto airdrop scam emails.

Paolo Ardoino, the CEO of Tether, revealed that a prominent email list management provider widely used by crypto firms was allegedly compromised in a data breach.

Ardoino alerted his 234,000 followers in a June 5 X post:

“We received now 2 independent confirmations that a prominent vendor used by crypto companies to manage mailing lists might have been compromised.”

Although Tether’s CEO has not disclosed the name of the breached company, he promised more details after the investigation is complete:

“Not making names yet until investigation is completed, but please beware of any emails suggesting crypto-airdrops received since 24 hours ago.”

Cointelegraph has approached Tether for comment.

To protect against phishing emails, Hakan Unal, senior blockchain scientist at on-chain security firm Cyvers, advises users to double-check the authenticity of emails and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on crypto platforms.

He told Cointelegraph:

“The immediate concern is the risk posed to individuals who might receive these compromised emails.

“To stay safe, users should verify the authenticity of such emails and enable multifactor authentication on all crypto accounts.”

READ MORE: Australia to Launch First Spot Bitcoin ETF

Minutes after Ardoino’s initial warning, the attack was confirmed by cryptocurrency tracking site CoinGecko.

The breach has impacted a crypto email newsletter vendor used by several companies, according to Bobby Ong, the co-founder and chief operating officer of CoinGecko.

Ong warned users that CoinGecko might be affected in a June 5 X post:

“We at CoinGecko may be potentially affected and are actively working with our vendor to investigate further to determine the extent of this breach.

“We have seen phishing CoinGecko emails being sent from other client accounts.

“There is no CoinGecko token being planned so don’t be duped by the phishing emails.”

Ong cautioned users not to click on any links related to a fraudulent CoinGecko token or any emails promising new token launches.

Crypto scams and hacks remain a major concern in the cryptocurrency industry.

Over $574 million worth of digital assets were lost across 30 individual crypto hacks in May 2024, according to a June 1 X post by PeckShield.

This represents an approximate month-over-month increase of 666% from the $385 million lost to crypto hacks in April.

To submit a crypto press release (PR), send an email to sales@cryptointelligence.co.uk.

The crypto space is all about decentralization, self-sovereignty and privacy, but it’s quite rare to see projects really follow this ethos. Bitcoin and Ethereum are unquestionably decentralized, but outside of those, most projects are managed more like Silicon Valley startups than decentralized communities. There is an exception: EOS, the startup turned decentralized community project.

EOS was once considered the blockchain most likely to challenge Ethereum’s dominance. Built on solid technology and designed by visionaries in the Blockchain space, it was hailed as the original “Ethereum Killer.” 

Initially, the project enjoyed immense success, becoming the most successful ICO of all time in 2018, raising over $4 billion. But it was unable to adapt to the bear market and saw its market share quickly drop to near irrelevancy — so much that by the time we found real use cases for smart contracts, it was already too late.

The protocol had originally outlined ambitious goals, including the capacity to process 1 million transactions per second and hosting 1000 dApps. Unfortunately, by the end of 2019, none of these promises had been fulfilled. While chasing for greatness, Block.One, the company developing EOS, failed to make the network competitive in that state of the market, and gradually abandoned the project.

Block.One launched several spin-off projects, most notably Voice, a blockchain-based social media network, and Bullish, a centralized exchange. While Voice relied on EOS technology, it did not use the network as it existed. It was pretty clear that the company did not care about EOS and its community, and mostly coasted on the huge amount of cash it had raised prior.

With tensions reaching a boiling point, the users and backers who had believed and invested in the project decided to take action. They founded the EOS Network Foundation (ENF), a non-profit organization aimed at addressing Block.one’s mismanagement and providing financial and non-financial support to EOS.

In December 2021, under the leadership of Yves La Rose, the ENF officially severed ties with Block.one, booting its remaining EOS share and transferring $6.5 million worth of tokens to the ENF’s official account to ensure the future development of EOS.

EOS EVM 

During the Block.one era, EOS was recognized for its immense technical potential, earning the nickname “Ethereum on Steroids” from its enthusiastic supporters. But one of the biggest obstacles to adoption was the EOS development experience, which simply lacked the variety of tools and existing developers to make it self-sufficient. 

Under the new community leadership, EOS quickly pivoted to offering its own EVM protocol, which is deployed as a regular smart contract on the EOS blockchain. The latest version is EOS EVM v0.6.0, which provides EOS USDT as a native token and facilitates cross-chain trading and “bridge messages” between the EVM and the regular EOS VM.

The EOS EVM is exceptionally fast and provides full support with other Ethereum-based contracts, which makes it possible to run complex apps like order book exchanges.

The ENF is making concerted efforts to incentivize programmers to develop on EOS with financial and strategic support though its ENF Grant Framework, Pomelo, and EOS Network Ventures.

With that said, the EVM is a “bare-minimum” implementation of a viable blockchain today. While EOS brings interesting innovations to the EVM space, it’s difficult to stand out now. But there are other ways to use the efficiency of EOS.

EOS’ commitment to Bitcoin

Bitcoin is seeing a bit of a renaissance as Ordinals NFTs and Layer-2 solutions are starting to see some interest and traction. The benefit is that it would unlock the hundreds of billions in BTC currently not doing much of anything on the Bitcoin blockchain.

EOS has recently launched exSat, which acts as an extra layer to connect Bitcoin with EOS by using EOS’s memory (RAM) and to store Bitcoin data. This includes all kinds of information from Bitcoin, like transaction records and Ordinals NFT data.

The network is pushing hard on exSat, planning on using up to 50% of its total memory (RAM) for it. It has also recently amended its tokenomics in part to make this possible, dedicating 350M EOS ($283M) for growing the liquidity of its native RAM market and thus expanding the throughput of the network.

Other planned changes include fixing the token supply to a maximum of 2.1 billion tokens released in regular halving cycles, which is something that Bitcoin fans might find familiar.

Years of EOS development and adaptation to the current market might finally pay off. The performance of the network enables it to become an infrastructure backbone of the space, giving computing resources to projects that need it.

The story of EOS is a curious demonstration that a rough start must not necessarily lead to defeat, as long as there’s someone who’s not giving up. The strength of the community is everything, and sometimes it might lead to projects taking their own life, rejecting their original creators. For an industry as misunderstood as crypto, being resilient and decentralized might just be the only way to thrive over a very long term, and the EOS community is certainly strong on those fronts.

In the span of just 15 years, cryptocurrency has evolved from a niche experiment to a global phenomenon, with worldwide adoption recently pushing the market past the $2.5 trillion mark. 

While there is a tendency for commentators and critics to focus on the growth of crypto in the United States – a recent Harris Poll suggests 77% of Americans believe a U.S. presidential candidate should know crypto – much of the momentum is actually coming from other regions. In particular, Asia.

Although it would be an exaggeration to say Asia is poised to eat America’s lunch on the crypto front, there are sure signs that the next major wave of adoption, both retail and institutional, will be largely driven by users in this region.  

Policymakers Prove Asia is Open for Crypto Business

This is not a new trend, of course: crypto adoption in Asia has been on a rise for a number of years, with Hong Kong’s recent listing of a batch of cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds (ETFs) marking something of a high-water mark. Singapore, meanwhile, has gradually morphed into a major web3 hub, while blockchain gaming companies are sprouting up in developer epicenters across South Korea, Japan and the Philippines.

Such impressive Asian growth is due in part to progressive policies by regulators in countries like Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, all of whom have provided much-needed regulatory clarity around security token offerings (STOs); the sort of clarity that is sadly lacking in the U.S. 

Unsurprisingly, the 2023 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report by Chainalysis ranks Central & Southern Asia and Oceania (CSAO) 3rd by the metric of raw crypto transaction volume, trailing behind only North America and Central, Northern & Western Europe (CNWE).

Asian Crypto Projects Gaining Traction

The number of Asia-based crypto projects finding traction is a lengthy one, with many – including exchanges, VCs, accelerators, and DeFi protocols – shaping up as industry leaders.

In India, which has emerged as the world’s second-largest crypto market in terms of raw transaction volume, one project gaining momentum is Dabba. A DePIN-based internet service provider, it aims to increase connectivity for a vast population that currently lacks internet access. 

With only 30 million of India’s 1.4 billion people having WiFi, and less than half with any internet at all, Dabba leverages Solana’s high-throughput blockchain to deploy DePIN devices as hotspots offering super-fast, cheap internet. Device owners earn Dabba tokens for sharing their data, and the project aims to deploy over 100,000 hotspots by the end of 2024. Dabba is no flash in the pan project, either: its first hotspot, built over Raspberry Pi, launched in a bakery shop in Bangalore in 2016, long before the DePIN craze was a thing.

In Thailand, the EVM-compatible Fuse blockchain ecosystem is making its own strides and doing a terrific job of onboarding businesses and consumers to crypto rails. Notable for features like Account Abstraction (enabling the removal of complex blockchain actions for normies), web3 payment support for everyday transactions, Wallet as a Service, and a mobile stack that allows businesses to spin up their own branded wallets, Fuse works closely with centralized Thai exchange Bitazza. Their goal? To enable South East Asian businesses to launch and manage token communities via the Fuse-powered, loyalty-driven Freedom Wallet. 

Asian builders gonna build, but O.G. blockchain platforms like EOS are also expanding their footprint in the region in a big way. Last year, the network received approval to trade its native currency against the yen on licensed Japanese exchanges. The debut of the EOS token on BitTrade, which is licensed and regulated by the country’s Financial Services Agency (FSA), was a major milestone for a network that was on life support for a few years before being resurrected by the EOS Network Foundation. 

“While the West continues to antagonize blockchain companies, Asia is welcoming us in with their arms wide open. In Asia, the future is bright for crypto!” ENF Executive Director Yves La Rose tweeted last year.

The Future is Asia

There’s no getting away from it, Asian nations are emerging as central players powering the swelling wave of global crypto adoption, a consequence of their robust regulatory frameworks and talented developer communities.

Reinforcing this view, Yat Siu, Cofounder of Hong Kong-based gaming titan Animoca Brands, stated on a recent podcast that “The leading force in Web3 is clearly Asia.” Siu also believes the overall crypto market could expand up to 200x over the next decade, thanks in part to growth in the region.

Whether that prediction proves fanciful or not, expect Asia to continue to have a major say in the industry’s evolution.