Researchers have found a vulnerability on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network that could allow an attacker to lock up as much as 600 BTC worth of liquidity for up to three days, using only 0.25 BTC to pull it off.

Decentraland, a long-awaited Ethereum-based virtual reality game, went live this week. It lets players buy and sell virtual real estate and other items, and interact with each other on property they own.

Brazil’s central bank is launching a near-instant payment system in what the organization’s president implied is a direct response to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• Researchers find Vulnerability to Lock Bitcoin’s Lightning Network Channels for 0.25 BTC
• Ethereum-based Virtual Reality World Decentraland Goes Live
• Brazil's Central Bank Announces Near-Instant Payment System as Response to Bitcoin

At the time of writing, bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $9,645.33 (0.37%) with a daily Top Tier volume of $2.09 billion. As for ether (ETH), it is trading at $258.84 (0.09%) with a daily Top Tier volume of $1.70 billion. The MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 10 Index is currently tracking at 3,742.12 (0.59%)

Researchers find Vulnerability to Lock Bitcoin’s Lightning Network Channels for 0.25 BTC

Two researchers from the Hebrew University, Ayelet Mizrahi and Aviv Zohar, have published a Medium blog post detailing a vulnerability they found that could allow an attacker to lock most of bitcoin’s layer-two scaling solution’s payment channels for as little as 0.25 BTC.

According to the post, an attack on the network could end up locking as much liquidity as possible for an extended period of time and isolating hubs from the rest of the network. The attack would involve a hacker requesting numerous small payments and exhausting the number of simultaneously opened hash time locked contracts (HTLC). The paper adds:

“The attacker is both the source and destination of this payment and can severely delay the final execution of the payment (up to several days). The attacker can then re-run the attack once again and lock the same path for an additional period of time.”

The post reads that “recent changes in default parameters agreed upon by Lightning Devs made the attack easier to carry out.” Researchers’ results showed that 650 BTC of liquidity on the Lightning Network could be paralyzed for up to three days with only 0.25 BTC used to attack.

The post also details that it’s possible to disconnect a single node from the network if an attacker makes payment requests over a path going back and forth through the victim’s node. According to 1ML data, there are currently over 11,500 nodes on the Lightning Network,  which has a total capacity of 897 BTC.

Ethereum-based Virtual Reality World Decentraland Goes Live

Decentraland, an Ethereum-based virtual reality game has gone live. The game lets users connect via their Ethereum wallets and interact with a digital world through them. In it, it’s possible to purchase virtual real estate in the form of non-fungible tokens called LAND.

Unlike other popular, similar games like Second Life, Decentraland is built on top of the Ethereum network and, as such, users hold ownership of all in-game items. Transactions conducted in the virtual world are recorded on the blockchain and cannot be rolled back.

Using Decentraland’s software development kit (SDK) users can also build interactive 3D scenes on their purchased lands without having to code. To celebrate the game’s launch the organization behind it hosting a treasure hunt offering virtual items, including LAND, worth $100,000 in value.

In Decentraland there’s a marketplace where users can trade tokens, accessories, and more. The project is already reportedly trading 10 times more virtual property than the famous CryptoKitties game.

Brazil's Central Bank Announces Near-Instant Payment System as Response to Bitcoin

Brazil’s central bank has announced the launch of a new near-instant payment system that will allow for peer-to-peer payments to be processed in up to 10 seconds, in a direct response to bitcoin itself.

Local news outlet Livecoins reports the platform is set to go live on November 10. The publication cited Roberto Campos Neto, president of Brazil’s central bank, saying PIX was a response to the “new digital economy” marked by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. He was quoted as saying:

“Pix came from a need for people to have a payment instrument that is both cheap, fast, transparent and secure. If we think about what has happened in terms of the creation of bitcoins, cryptocurrencies and other encrypted assets, it comes from the need to have an instrument with such characteristics.”

Per Neto, PIX will support Brazil’s financial transformation and help cut costs by reducing the need for physical money. The system will let its users pay utility bills, send money in P2P transactions, and more via various methods. These will include QR codes, address keys similar to those in cryptocurrency wallets, NFC technology, and more.

Flipside Friday

The Flipside Crypto Disparity Ratio is a tool helping you find out which cryptoassets are under and overvalued. The crypto disparity ratio scores cryptoassets based on market capitalization and FCAS ratings, with a score over 1 showing it’s undervalued, and under 1 showing it’s overvalued.

 Peerplays (PPY), a gaming blockchain project aiming to disrupt the global gaming industry through Graphene technology, tops the undervalued list with a score of 2.56. XYO, an ERC-20 token used for a decentralized network of devices that anonymously collects geospatial data, has topped the undervalued list with a score of 2.12.

It’s followed by the Raiden Network’s token at 1.47. The Raiden Network is an off-chain transfer network for ERC-20 tokens in the Ethereum network, providing users a scalable, cheap alternative to on-chain token transfers. Behind it is Storj, a decentralized cloud storage platform letting users earn tokens by renting idle hard drive space.

On the overvalued side we have Qubitica (QBIT), a community of over 1,000 developers, IT companies and investors working to advance blockchain technology. Its community is working on blockchain and AI projects, and the QBIT token represents participation shared in Qubitica and related projects. Qubitica’s value ratio is 0.37.

It’s followed by Monacoin, the once-popular cat meme cryptocurrency which has even been used to buy land in 2014 at 0.38. Behind it is Aurora (AOA), a smart contract platform for decentralized applications looking to create contracts to link various industry applications at 0.41.

State of the Crypto by Top Tier Exchange Volume

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