Richard Ma, the CEO and founder of Quantstamp, stands at the forefront of the cryptocurrency auditing landscape.
With his firm recognized as one of the leading smart contract auditing entities, Ma’s perspective offers invaluable insights into the evolving challenges and paradigms of crypto safety.
In an interview with CryptoPotato that was held at Token2049 in Singapore, Ma delves deep into the current limitations of smart contract auditing, the varied nature of crypto hacks beyond just smart contracts, and offers a discerning guide on assessing the credibility of security audits.
Richard Ma’s journey in the world of cryptocurrency commenced with a direct and personal brush with its vulnerabilities.
“When I discovered Ethereum… I invested in the DAO (2016). A few weeks

Ripple’s XRP, Shiba Inu (SHIB), and Dogecoin (DOGE) are undoubtedly amongst the cryptocurrencies with the most devoted communities in the industry.
Their price action tends to be explosive and directional, driven by massive retail interest.
Pinning them against each other provides some valuable insights into their current market dynamics, factors that can shape their future prices, as well as specifics surrounding their tokenomics.
The most obvious answer to the question is that XRP seems to be the best-suited cryptocurrency out of the three to reach $1 because it’s already trading at $0.50, but it’s interesting to explore what ChatGPT thinks on the matter for each individual coin.
Ripple (XRP) Price Depends on the Ripple v. SEC Lawsuit
The popular AI-based chatbot has

Ripple’s XRP has become one of the most-traded altcoins throughout the past few months, and this has largely to do with the recent ruling in the case between Ripple Labs and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
The presiding judge, Analisa Torres, ruled that secondary XRP sales do not constitute an investment contract. This essentially means that they are not securities and do not fall under the purview of the SEC.
Leading Up to the XRP Price Prediction
The news had an immediate impact on XRP’s price, which doubled in a day. You can find more about it in our short video here:
[embedded content]It’s also worth noting that many cryptocurrency exchanges had previously delisted XRP, fearing repercussions, but once the ruling was in, most of them immediately

Bitcoin’s price increased by a little less than 1% in the past seven days. The week was, overall, positive for the industry as the total market capitalization approaches the $1.1 trillion cap.
The biggest news of the week is undoubtedly the US FOMC meeting that happened on Wednesday.
According to the official announcement, the central bank took the decision to maintain the target range for the federal fund rate at 5-1/4 to 5/12 percent. The statement also noted that job gains have slowed but also that they remain elevated altogether. The unemployment rate in the country is also reported as low, while the inflation remains above its target.
Bitcoin’s price didn’t react to the news and remained flat. All in all, it couldn’t initiate a leg-up, although it did try to poak

Ripple’s XRP has mostly been touted as a means for cross-border payments part of the XRP Ledger. But it appears that people have found some interesting, unexpected, and, quite frankly, rather cool uses of the cryptocurrency.
It’s worth noting, though, that other coins, such as BTC and ETH, would probably do a similarly good job for the use case in question.

It was brought up as a response to a Twitter threat by the popular lawyer John Deaton. He represents tens of thousands of XRP holders in the case against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
The case in point is using XRP for booking a private jet or sharing one with your millionaire friends. As ridiculous as it may sound, the company offering this service – TapJets – has even provided an amicus brief

The cryptocurrency market has remained mostly flat for the past 24 hours, and Bitcoin has been unable to make a move throughout the period. However, this might as well be a stepping stone and a preparation for an attempt at $27K.
Most of the altcoins have remained flat with certain exceptions, so let’s dive in.
Bitcoin Preparing for $27K?
Bitcoin’s price has failed to produce anything of substance throughout the past 24 hours and remains largely situated around where it was trading yesterday – at around $26,500.
Source: TradingViewThat said, according to the co-founder of Glassnode, $27K seems to be the next resistance to overcome, while there might be some selling pressure induced by profit booking at around $27.4K and later at $28.2K, if the cryptocurrency is to reach

Shiba Inu is getting ready for the next bull run.
In a new post, the content strategist of the project, Lucie, took it to X to calm the community while also talking about the team’s future plans. Let’s dive in.

SHIB Readying for a Bull Run
The content strategist of the Shiba Inu ecosystem – Lucie – took it to X to talk about future plans while also making some clarifications to calm the community down.
…There’s no need to worry. The market is the market, and FUD is just a bunch of desperate losers attempting to peddle their questionable coins from their mom’s basements.
We need to stay focused.
SHIB is strategically positioning itself for the upcoming bull run.
The team member didn’t name any projects. However, it’s worth noting that there have been multiple warnings as

There’s been an interesting ongoing discussion among XRP aficionados on Twitter lately, with some laying arguments as to what the future of Ripple should look like so that it supports the company’s vision, as well as that of XRP holders.

A community member, Yassin Mobarak, took it to X to comment:
I’m sensing Ripple is shifting from reliance on XRP in cross-border payments to new use cases such as institutional custody of digital assets, derivatives, CBDCs, and carbon credit markets.
Not saying that’s a bad strategy at all, but in order for XRP to prosper long-term, we cannot rely on just Ripple.
Indeed, there have been multiple announcements recently related to Ripple. Just a few days ago, the company expanded its liquidity hub to two new countries – Brazil and

Ripple’s XRP has been one of the most popular cryptocurrencies for the past three years, and most of it probably came from the importance of the company’s case against the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
In fact, as CryptoPotato recently reported, the cryptocurrency ranked very high in a list that tracks the performance of various coins in terms of social engagements. XRP ranked third, following only Bitcoin and Ethereum.
And while a lot of the attention goes toward XRP’s price, there are other important metrics to keep tabs on.
If you’re interested in finding out how XRP might perform in the next bull market, though, take a look at our most recent video:
[embedded content]
With that out of the way, let’s have a look at some of the most important on-chain metrics to

The past few days have been relatively positive for Bitcoin’s price, which has been increasing since Tuesday, September 12th.
At the time of this writing, BTC is trading at around $26,500, but the co-founder of Glassnode has a bullish prognosis.

Consumer Price Index Important for Bitcoin’s Price
In his prediction, the co-founder of the popular cryptocurrency analytics resource, Glassnode, outlined that the US Consumer Price Index (CPI) jumped by 0.6%, which led to some fluctuation in the BTC price.
Indeed, as CryptoPotato reported earlier this week, the core CPI, which excludes more volatile sectors such as food and energy, has noted a yearly increase of 4.3%.
Interestingly enough, the CPI itself clocked in at 3.7%, while the estimations were for it to be 3.6%. Initially,

It’s safe to say that Ripple is going through quite a bit, and it seems it’s been this way ever since the United States Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against the company.
Back in 2020, the Commission alleged that Ripple Labs had conducted an unregistered sale of securities worth more than a billion dollars, essentially claiming that XRP is a security.
Needless to say, this caused much damage to the cryptocurrency and its community.
Now, no other than a community member is revealing signs of what they believe to be a coordinated attack on XRP:
Source: XThe user didn’t go into details and failed to substantiate all of the claims, but it did spark a discussion around the Ripple lawsuit.
Ashley seems to believe that Judge Torres will come out with a

The case between Ripple and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission has surely done a lot of damage to the company and its cryptocurrency – XRP.
In fact, a lawyer who represents tens of thousands of XRP holders recently took it to X to outline the damage that the lawsuit has caused the company. He argued that it harmed not only the cryptocurrency’s adoption but also potentially affected major developments in the past three years.
XRP Amid the Ongoing SEC Saga
Indeed, once the presiding Judge, Analisa Torres, ruled partially in favor of Ripple, determining that secondary contracts of XRP do not constitute investment contracts, the cryptocurrency doubled in price almost immediately.
This could be perceived as a testament to the eagerness of investors who want to

Ripple is pushing a new upgrade to its XRP Ledger that will introduce a couple of very important features. In fact, the company’s CTO has, on multiple occasions, expressed his excitement over the upgrade and said that he’s very much looking forward to it.
But this has also sparked a discussion on the impact of the implementation on XRP’s price. Let’s dive in.
What’s The Fuss All About?
As CryptoPotato reported, Ripple is about to implement an upgrade to its XRP Ledger that will see the integration of two very important features: an automated market maker and a clawback feature. The first one is of interest for this story.
The automated market maker (AMM) will be non-custodial and should be integrated as a native featured to the DEX “in a way that provides increased returns

Shiba Inu is undoubtedly one of the most popular cryptocurrency projects. But what’s interesting about it is that it boasts a tremendous base of retail investors as part of its community.
That said, retail investors tend to be the perfect target for a number of bad actors. And, in the crypto industry, scammers are becoming more creative by the day. There are a variety of ways in which hackers are trying to get your precious crypto, and faking a token is just one of them.
However, with many new developments in Shiba Inu’s roadmap, malicious parties seem to have been taking advantage and faking certain aspects of the project. This is why the team came out with an official warning:

$Treat has not been launched yet!!!
Beware of scammers pretending otherwise.
— | ✨Shibarium✨

If there’s one particularly grim story in crypto’s not-so-long history, FTX’s bankruptcy must be among those competing for that spot.
The exchange’s downfall is likely even to get televised as one of the most scandalous catastrophes in modern financial times.
That said, according to a recent court ruling, FTX now has approval to dump its cryptocurrency holdings in a bid to make creditors whole. This has been one of the headlines of the week. Note that the exchange is now run by a team that’s completely unrelated to Sam Bankman-Fried, and its sole purpose is to make creditors as whole as possible.
The exchange has a lot of crypto. According to a recent report by CoinGecko, this is what their holdings look like:
Source: XApparently, there’s almost $120 million worth of XRP

Binance continues delisting certain cryptocurrencies. It’s the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and it’s important to keep tabs on the coins that are being removed from it because this usually carries certain implications.
The exchange doesn’t cite the exact reason for its decision but says that there are multiple factors, low liquidity, and trading volume being among them.
This time, Binance will remove and cease trading for the following pairs:
At 03:00 UTC, the exchange will remove AMB/BUSD, ASTR/BUSD, BAT/ETH, DASH/BUSD, GMX/BUSD, HOT/BUSD.
At 05:00 UTC, the following will be gone: IMX/BNB, KNC/BNB, MC/BUSD, MDT/BUSD, NULS/BUSD, RAD/BUSD, RAY/BUSD, REQ/BUSD
At 07:00 UTC, these pairs will cease trading: SSV/BUSD, STMX/BUSD, TROY/BUSD, WOO/BUSD
It’s important to

Market depth is an interesting concept to understand, especially for those who are into cryptocurrency trading.
In essence, it’s a way to gauge how liquid a certain cryptocurrency is and if its order book is healthy and can consume a certain number of orders.
That said, Ripple’s XRP is one of the most traded altcoins on the market, and it boasts a massive daily volume across most of the major cryptocurrency exchanges. Therefore, it’s interesting to take a look at how much money is needed to move its price.
Starting with Binance – the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange – to move the price of XRP by 2% in a positive direction, you need to execute a market order of $1.9 million. On the other hand, if you want to bring it down by the same amount, you have to sell $3.3

The ongoing case between the United States Securities and Exchange Commission is one that the entire cryptocurrency community has its sights set on. But, for some reason, it’s just as polarizing.
There doesn’t seem to be room for a middle ground, as it’s always been a make-or-break type of situation. Now, however, one user has decided to bring up the question of a settlement.
In a discussion on X, Marc Fagel – a former SEC Regional Director, chipped in on the ongoing dispute between Ripple and the Commission. Speaking on whether the request for an interlocutory appeal will be granted, he said:
… the specific requirements for interlocutory appeal are hard to meet. I think the odds are against granting the request unless the court looks to the points you raise.
The points in

Ripple – the company behind one of the leading cryptocurrencies, XRP – has announced that it will acquire Fortress Trust.
According to a recent announcement, Ripple has agreed to acquire Fortress Trust.
Fortress Trust is a well-known financial institution that’s focused on cryptocurrencies.
Mainly, it provides Web3 financial, technology, and regulatory infrastructure to blockchain-oriented companies.
The sum of the acquisition remains undisclosed.
Speaking on the matter was CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, who said:
As an early investor in FOrtress Trust, we’ve had a chance to get to know the team, its vision and technology. Since their launch in 2021, they’ve built an impressive business with recurring revenue and a strong roster of both crypto-native and new-to-crypto

The market has been relatively calm throughout the past seven days, and it failed to deliver any substantial increase (or decrease) in most of the cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin.
Starting with the BTC price, it’s more or less where it was this time last week – slightly below $26,000. To be fair, the cryptocurrency is down around 0.8% over the past seven days, and it wasn’t for the past day, the week looked as if it never happened. The price hovered around $26K in search of a direction and never finding it. This all seemed about to change yesterday evening when BTC shot up to $26,500. The bulls were completely unable to maintain the momentum (if it can be called that), and the bears pulled it back below $26K, where it currently trades.
The same is true for most of the

Shiba Inu’s ecosystem has gone through quite a bit throughout the past few weeks. It saw what is probably one of the most important releases in its roadmap – the layer 2 scaling solution, thematically called Shibarium.
The launch of the network didn’t go without problems, and developers had to temporarily take it private.
As CryptoPotato reported earlier, the chain relaunched with the help of an unexpected ally – Sandeep Naiwal from Polygon.
Shiba Inu Lead Developer With Important Updates
That said, Shytoshi Kusama, the lead developer of the Shiba Inu project, went on X to provide a few updates in light of what’s been happening lately.
First things first, he noted that WBone is complete. In a detailed blog post, another Shiba Inu developer – Kaal Dhairya – made some

To this day, privacy arguably remains the fatal flaw of the most popular blockchain networks.
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum use fully transparent public ledgers to store their transactions. While technically anonymous, careful digging can allow external parties – including governments – to uncover the identity of any number of parties behind an address or set of transactions.
For the more privacy-focused blockchains and protocols, authorities have mostly banned centralized exchanges from listing them or sanctioned them in the West, limiting onramps to crypto privacy-preserving technology. As such, a persistent problem for developers has been striking a balance between privacy tech and realistic adoption.
In conversation with CryptoPotato at EthCC Paris, Adrian Brink –

The cryptocurrency market is going through hard times. It’s been a complete disaster for the past seven days, and the worst took place today.
Bitcoin’s price plummeted by a whopping 7.6% in the past 24 hours alone, bringing its total losses to above 11% for the week. The crash also led to a massive wave of liquidations worth over $1 billion in terms of leveraged positions. The volatility wiped off both short and long open interest, and the market is left crumbling.
BTC is far from being the only cryptocurrency that’s having bad times. In fact, the total market capitalization dropped to below $1.1 billion, losing over $130 million in the past 24 hours alone.
Ethereum is down by 10%, BNB – by 9.7%, while Ripple’s XRP crashed by close to 20% in the past seven days. This might

Shiba Inu (SHIB), Pepe (PEPE), and Bone Shibaswap (BONE) are among the top five trending coins in the market today. Interestingly, none of them is making the headlines for a good reason.
Data from CoinMarketCap indicates the three meme coins are currently all in the red. BONE is down 12.83% in the last 24 hours, and more than 20% over the last seven days.
On its part, Shiba Inu is currently 8.16% below its price from the previous day and 10.5% over the week. At 2.15%, PEPE has lost the least value among the three in the last 24 hours. However, it has fared worse than SHIB and BONE over 30 days, dropping as much as 19% from its price over that period.
Market watchers believe the bad performances of SHIB and BONE could be down to controversy surrounding Shiba Inu’s new

Shiba Inu has shared yet another announcement with its community.
The ecosystem’s marketing strategist took it to Twitter (now known as X) to reveal that the SHIB Doggy DAO has partnered with a leading digital asset advisory and investment firm.
Source: XSHIB Doggy DAO Shakes Hands with ATH
The new partnership is struck between Alpha Transform Holdings (ATH) and SHIB Doggy DAO. The latter is the decentralized autonomous organization that’s governed by holders of the SHIB token and funds the projects that are now built on Shibarium.
Meanwhile, ATH is a digital asset advisory and investment firm that’s comprised of a team of veteran leaders from heavyweights like Nasdaq, News Crop, and Disney and has advised projects like Tether and even Ethereum, per the report.
Commenting

The numbers for July’s Consumer Price Index are here. The market has failed to react as Bitcoin’s price recorded an ever-so-slight uptick in volatility before calming back down almost immediately.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the United States has just revealed the rate of July’s Consumer Price Index.
To those unaware, it’s the metric that many people use to gauge the rate of inflation in the country.
Per the announcement, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers increased by 0.2%, seasonally adjusted.

The US #CPI Numbers for July are in:
-> CPI +3.2% YoY (EST. +3.3%)-> CORE CPI +4.7 % YoY (EST. +4.8%)
This time, the news did not drive much movement, with $BTC barely climbing by $50! pic.twitter.com/jwUXDHsygk
— CryptoPotato Official (@Crypto_Potato) August

Cypher Protocol, a Solana-based futures DEX, has been forced to pause its smart contract in the wake of an exploit that resulted in a loss of more than $1 million.
The Why
Late last night, Cypher’s devs announced that they had suffered a “security incident”, resulting in the need to pause their smart contract until a post-mortem was carried out. An appeal to the hacker was also made, promising a discussion on the next steps should the bad actor care to reply.

Cypher has has experienced an exploit/security incident. The smart contract has been frozen.
The team is currently working with individuals and investigating
To the hacker: We are writing to see whether you would be open to speaking with us about any potential next steps.
— cypher ©️ (@cypher_protocol) August 7,

Pro-XRP lawyer John Deaton has said he’s willing to wager on the outcome of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s appeal against a recent ruling that determined Ripple’s XRP token is not a security under certain circumstances.
Deaton, the founder, and host of CryptoLaw, remarked in a post on X (formerly Twitter) while supporting the view of fellow lawyer and crypto enthusiast Bill Morgan, who claimed the judge in the SEC vs XRP case had not erred in her decision.

Excellent 🧵 explaining that Torres didn’t make a distinction between the different sales out of thin air. She took each type of sale CHOSEN and DEFINED by the SEC and applied the Howey test. I’m willing to bet significant funds she doesn’t get reversed on appeal. https://t.co/5jAfwusrng
— John E Deaton

It’s the weekend, and, let’s be honest – nobody is expecting a lot of action. And while there are some weekends that defy this sentiment… this one is not among them.
In fact, the vast majority of the major cryptocurrencies have failed to move, charting incredibly insignificant differences in their price compared to 24 hours ago. Let’s take a look.
Bitcoin Getting Squeezed at $29K
Bitcoin’s price has been tremendously calm throughout the past week, and it’s been trading around $29,000 for a while now. This is a very narrow range for a cryptocurrency that’s as volatile as BTC.
But that volatility seems to have disappeared lately and on a 5-day weighted average, BTC has been less volatile compared to even gold.
Source: Binance via TradingViewAs you can see in the above 1-hour

Another day – another failure for Bitcoin to break away from its current range around $29,000. The primary cryptocurrency’s volatility has fallen to historic lows and the rest of the market doesn’t seem too exciting either.
But there’s one barking exception.
Bitcoin Stagnates at $29K
They say there’s never a dull moment in crypto, but if you’re mostly following the performance of large-cap coins throughout the past week, you can probably see that this can be a bit of an overstatement.
Bitcoin’s price has completely flatlined throughout the last few days, and the past 24 hours have made absolutely no exception, as seen in the chart below.
Source: TradingViewBTC’s price made an attempt to push above $29,300 but was quickly reminded that it’s not its place and retraced back