13 Oct Symbol blockchain news update โ 13/10/21
Good morning everyone and welcome to another edition of the Symbol Blog update ๐ I don’t have too much to cover today but there is an important update on the aggregate transaction scam and how this is being tackled. I urge you to inform yourselves about what happened and how to avoid falling for it.
Aggregate transaction harvesting scam
So this is an important tweet thread from @elcoiki regarding the aggregate transaction scam that has been plaguing us recently and describes what happened and what steps were taken (and are being taken still) to protect users from falling for this in the future.
I am not going to cover the entire thread and I have already reported several times on how the scam works but there are some interesting revelations in there. Firstly there were a total of 31 victims and a total of 2.4 million XYM was stolen. As expected most of the users scammed were new to Symbol and didn’t understand how harvesting or aggregate bonded transactions worked.
You can find a list of all of the scam transactions here. Looking at the list and following a few jumps between accounts I ended up at one that was sending all transactions out with a numerical message, presumably to an exchange. Hopefully he is not too clever and can be apprehended before too long.
Initial measures have already been taken to try to stop the scam. You may have noticed a warning in the latest desktop wallet release when signing an aggregate transaction. This demonstrates how important it is to keep your wallet up to date and running the latest version..
It seems that there are many more sophisticated features that are planned for future wallet releases to try to avoid this, or similar attacks, from happening again. You can read more about what these are (including some cool mockups) in the thread.
I just want to point out that this is not a flaw in the Symbol blockchain. Aggregate transactions are a powerful feature but users need to educate themselves on how they work and know what they are signing. If there was any criticism it would have been with the wallet notification system, especially for the mobile wallet which did not display details of what the aggregate transaction was so the user was blindly signing something (I know they shouldn’t have but details still should have been displayed).
The responsibility does ultimately fall with the user but I am glad that the team are working hard to try to ensure that improvements to the wallets are implemented and safety checks and warnings are clearly presented in the future. I just really hope that nobody else falls for this scam, I hate to see this kind of thing happen and I can only imagine how devastating it would be for the victims.
Spend your XYM online
Onto something less depressing..! ๐ I’m not 100% sure but I think that the original video below was made by @HANABATA_KE but it has been translated to English by our favourite translator @RadioRa26841511! It shows 13 different mail order shops that accept XYM payment. I am not sure whether they all ship internationally but I know that @sakamotometal do – just send them a DM on Twitter and they will sort it out for you.
๐ Keep your eyes peeled, and watch out for a cameo appearance from my son in the video! ๐
Spend your XYM in person
It looks like Zoi Zoi, who make some pretty funky textiles and homeware are going to be the latest in a growing line of companies to accept XYM payments! They will start taking XYM payments at the Lohas Festival in Osaka which starts later this month and I think(?) they may roll this out more widely in the future.
It is great to see so many businesses embracing XYM payments, I would love to see this happen outside of Japan too. Maybe when we build more of a worldwide following this will become a reality. If anyone reading this owns their own business then maybe it’s something to consider. If you need help getting set up to accept XYM payments then the community would be more than happy to help you with this. I am really looking forward to going out in the UK and being able to pay with XYM. One day.. ๐
NEM development
I just saw this tweet from @NCOSIGIMCITYNRE. Looks like something is going on in the NEM GitHub repository.
First commit since April 2019 and how the world has changed since then.. 2019 BC (before COVID) ๐ฌ Things really went downhill from 2020 ๐ญ
The commit in nem.core has the title “refresh project” so I am guessing that there is more to come here..? I guess watch this space..
Major likes
Finally I was tagged in this post from @bestgoldangel and it is getting a ton of likes on Twitter. Obviously we all know that XYM deserves a Binance listing but I wanted to feature this not for the sentiment but for the artwork. Angel always produces beautiful tweets and this one is no exception. Maybe we need to team up somehow in the future. Would be great to bring some more artistic flair to liven up my blog posts ๐
Thanks!
Thanks for reading and we will be back soon with another update! If you have any news that you would like to report then please let me know either tag me on Twitter, DM me, find me on Discord or use the contact form to get in touch. Life is a bit crazy at the moment so I know I will miss important stories – help me out if you can please, I would really appreciate it! ๐
We haven’t had a guest post in forever either so if you are feeling brave and would like to share something with the world then let me know. I am happy to proofread and format the article – you just need to write the content ๐ Finally, if you have something that you would like to see me write about then let me know, if I can do it then I will!
I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!
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