The number of bitcoins being held by whale entities, defined as clusters of addresses controlled by a single network participant holding between 1,000 and 10,000 BTC, has risen by over 80,000 to 4.216 million BTC.

One of the “Big Four” accounting firms EY, commonly known as Ernst & Young, has announced the company contributed a set of tools to privately manage transactions on the Ethereum network. The company’s protocol reportedly helps ETH transaction fees become more affordable as well.

A ransomware group known as REvil has brought the networks of at least 200 U.S. companies down and demanded at least $70 million in bitcoin for a solution.

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Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• Bitcoin Held by Whale Entities Hits Two-Month High
• EY Launches Protocol to Bolster Private Transactions on Ethereum
• Ransomware Group Demands $70 Million in Bitcoin From 200 U.S. Firms
• Daily Movers - KAVA, GRT, SNX
• Sponsored: Crypto.com - The World’s Fastest Growing Crypto App

Bitcoin Held by Whale Entities Hits Two-Month High

The number of bitcoins being held by whale entities, defined as clusters of addresses controlled by a single network participant holding between 1,000 and 10,000 BTC, has risen by over 80,000 to 4.216 million BTC.

The figure is the highest seen since May, and comes as the number of whale entities on the network jumps to a three-week high of 1,922. The renewed accumulation by whales is good news for the market, as wealthy investors played a significant role in helping BTC move from $10,000 late last year to over $60,000 earlier this year.

Whales became sellers shortly after the new all-time high was reached, as their bitcoin stash dropped by 8% to 4.17 million BTC by early May. The latest uptick in the whale balance suggests the bottom may have been reached close to $30,000.

EY Launches Protocol to Bolster Private Transactions on Ethereum

One of the “Big Four” accounting firms EY, commonly known as Ernst & Young, has announced the company contributed a set of tools to privately manage transactions on the Ethereum network. The company’s protocol reportedly helps ETH transaction fees become more affordable as well.

EY’s global media relations executive Joanna Hardy has detailed in a blog post that EY’s protocol, called “Nightfall 3” leverages zero-knowledge proofs and other technologies to bolster privacy and transaction affordability on Ethereum.

Hardy wrote:

“The project, known as Nightfall 3, combines zero-knowledge proofs (ZK or ZKP) with a new model for handling transaction verification to increase efficiency and reduce transaction costs known as an optimistic rollup. The combined protocol is known as a ZK-Optimistic Rollup.”

Hardy added that when using the system, the cost of a single transaction could be “one-eighth of the cost needed to make a conventional, public ERC20 token transfer.” The prototype code for Nightfall 3 is available on GitHub and in the public domain.

Ransomware Group Demands $70 Million in Bitcoin From 200 U.S. Firms

A ransomware group known as REvil has brought the networks of at least 200 U.S. companies down and demanded at least $70 million in bitcoin for a solution.

According to reports, over the weekend REvil targeted software supplier Kaseya and used its network-management package to spread the ransomware via the cloud. Over 1 million machines were said to be infected. On a blog post published to the dark web, the group wrote:

"On Friday we launched an attack on [managed service providers]. More than a million systems were infected."

REvil is notably the group that attacked Colonial Pipeline and managed to get the company to pay a $5 million ransom after its functionality and services were restricted, leading to a gas crisis in the U.S.

The world’s largest meat company by sales, JBS Holdings, also paid the group $11 million after being attacked in May.

Daily Movers – GRT, KAVA, SNX

Several tokens are leading the charge in the last 24-hour period. Some of these are well-known cryptocurrencies with more liquid trading pairs, so we’ll be focusing on these over low-cap cryptos that may have higher percentage changes.

The Graph (GRT) - The Graph is an indexing protocol for querying data for networks like Ethereum and IPFS, powering many applications in both DeFi and the broader Web3 ecosystem. Anyone can build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL to retrieve blockchain data.

Synthetix (SNX) - Synthetix is a decentralized synthetic asset issuance protocol built on Ethereum. These synthetic assets are collateralized by the Synthetix Network Token (SNX) which when locked in the contract enables the issuance of synthetic assets (Synths). This pooled collateral model enables users to perform conversions between Synths directly with the smart contract, avoiding the need for counterparties.

Kava (KAVA) – The Kava Chain is a decentralized, permissionless, censorship-resistant blockchain built with the Cosmos SDK. The KAVA token is an asset on the Kava Chain, which is secured by its token it is used across the full chain as a transport and a store of value. It is given as a reward for minting USDX on the Kava app.

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