Global digital payments company MoneyGram has added a feature to let users of its mobile app in nearly all U.S. states buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies. The service offers Bitcoin, Ether, and Litecoin.

An emergency update was released to all of the Lightning Network’s LND node operators after a critical bug was found to be causing LND nodes to fall out of sync with the network. This is the second critical bug the Lightning Network has experienced in less than a month.

The largest cryptocurrency options exchange by market share has lost $28 million after its hot wallet was hacked. The company has halted withdrawals and is set to cover the losses with its reserves.

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Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• MoneyGram Introduces Crypto Purchases On Its App
• Lightning Network Releases Emergency Update Over Critical Bug
• Crypto Exchange Deribit Halts Withdrawals After $28 Million Hack
• Chart of the Week: Volatility Across Digital Assets Falls to Yearly Low
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MoneyGram Introduces Crypto Purchases On Its App

Global digital payments company MoneyGram has added a feature to let users of its mobile app in nearly all U.S. states buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies. The service offers Bitcoin, Ether, and Litecoin.

The functionality is being enabled by cryptocurrency exchange Coinme, which saw MoneyGram make a strategic minority investment in it earlier this year. The investment followed MoneyGram’s move with Coinme to let customers buy and sell BTC for cash at 12,000 retail locations in the U.S. Alex Holmes, MoneyGram’s Chairman and CEO, said:

"Cryptocurrencies are additive to everything we're doing at MoneyGram. From dollars to euros to yen and so on, MoneyGram enables instant access to over 120 currencies around the globe, and we see crypto and digital currencies as another input and output option.”

MoneyGram said that it plans to add more cryptocurrencies to its app next year, as global regulations allow. The rollout is part of the company’s vision to increase adoption by bringing “real-world cryptocurrency and blockchain use cases to life.”

Lightning Network Releases Emergency Update Over Critical Bug

An emergency update was released to all of the Lightning Network’s LND node operators after a critical bug was found to be causing LND nodes to fall out of sync with the network. This is the second critical bug the Lightning Network has experienced in less than a month.

The company behind the development of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, Lightning Labs, revealed that some LND nodes stopped syncing with the network, and released a hot fix. Non-update nodes are reportedly vulnerable to malicious channel closings once channel timelocks expire in two weeks.

The update’s release reads:

“This is an emergency hot fix release to fix a bug that can cause lnd nodes to be unable to parse certain transactions that have a very large number of witness inputs.”

The critical bug was seemingly triggered by a developer dubbed Burak on Twitter. The same developer was, back in October, responsible for a multisig transaction that was rejected by btcd and LND nodes, leading to the rejection of the block it was contained in and every subsequent block. Lightning Labs fixed that bug on the same day it was caused.

Crypto Exchange Deribit Halts Withdrawals After $28 Million Hack

The largest cryptocurrency options exchange by market share has lost $28 million after its hot wallet was hacked. The company has halted withdrawals and is set to cover the losses with its reserves.

In a thread on Twitter, Deribit noted that client funds are safe and that the firm’s cold storage addresses were not affected by the incident. It added that it maintains 99% of its user funds in cold storage to “limit the impact of these types of events.”

Deposits and withdrawals at Deribit have been halted while the firm performs security checks, although deposits that had already been sent to its wallets will nevertheless be processed after the required confirmations.

Deribit’s insurance fund wasn’t impacted by the incident. The firm said it “remains in a financially sound position and ongoing operations will not be impacted.”

Chart of the Week: Volatility Across Digital Assets Falls to Yearly Low

Annualized 30-day volatility has fallen to the lowest point in 2022 for multiple digital assets, particularly layer-1 blockchains. Bitcoin’s volatility reached a low of 26.8% on October 22nd, while ETH's volatility also hit an annual low of 31.9% on the same day.

The volatility reduction over recent months is a function of declined interest in digital assets from retail after negative performances over the last months. Market participants have also reduced the amount of risk they’re taking over the current challenging macroeconomic environment, contributing to the decline in volatility.

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