According to the "PeckShield Annual Digital Currency Anti-Money Laundering Report 2020," there were 60 attacks against DeFi and losses of more than $250 million. Among them, at least 10 were flash loan attacks, with targets including bZx, Balancer, Harvest, Akropolis, Cheese Bank, Value DeFi, and Origin Protocol and other DeFi projects, and at least five were re-entry attacks adopted to attack Uniswap , Lendf.Me, Sushiswap, Akropolis, and Origin Protocol.

Umbrella Protocol, a DeFi insurance protocol developed by Yam Finance, announced to launch the internal alpha testing. The test is live on mainnet with a $10,000 cap on funds, with the intent for user’s to test functionality in production with small capital amounts.

Citing the official resources, Elrond announced that it is working with Runtime Verification to complement the Elrond dev toolkit with a set of formal tools based on K Framework. "With otherwise expensive & complex testing tools available in the Elrond devkit the overall security of our DeFi ecosystem raises to meet institutional-grade requirements," it stated.

Jimmy Donaldson, aka “Mr Beast,” a prominent YouTuber boasting 50.2 million subscribers and 8.5 billion total views, now owns a verified Brave browser account — potentially exposing some of his enormous audience to virtual currency. Donaldson is not new to crypto and is believed to have made a considerable amount of money via cryptocurrency investments. The star previously hosted videos discussing crypto before his channel exploded in popularity and he reportedly purchased a $100,000 car using his crypto profits. However, his account was later purged of all content relating to virtual currency.

The total market cap of stablecoin USDT has exceeded $23 billion, now reading $23.001 billion, with an increase of over $2 billion within the first week of 2020.

Citing DeBank, affected by the uptrend of BTC price, the total lock-up amount of Bitcoin-pegged cryptocurrencies now has broken above $5.2 billion, creating a historical high. Among these cryptocurrencies, WBTC is taking the crown with the lock-up amount marking $4.09 billion, followed by renBTC ($462 million) and HBTC ($400 million). However, the issuance of Bitcoin-pegged coins has shown a gradual downward trend after reaching a peak of 153,634 on November 5, 2020. Up to now, the circulation of WBTC, renBTC, and HBTC is 109,508, 12,376, and 10,705, respectively.

According to JGZ.com, in the last hour, $4.14 million in cryptos was liquidated on OKEx; Huobi Global liquidated $5.77 million in cryptos; Binance liquidated over $22.65 million in cryptos; BitMEX liquidated $2.27 million worth of BTC perpetual contracts.

South Korean game company Nexon plans to cooperate with Bithumb shareholder Vidente to acquire Bithumb for 500 billion won (approximately US$460 million). Currently, the main shareholders of Bithumb are Bithumb Holdings (74%), mobile broadcaster Vidente (10%) and Omnitel (8%).

Swiss crypto investment manager FiCAS AG says it has received regulatory approval to make its cryptocurrency exchange-traded product (ETP) available across the European market.

The Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine has picked the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) to develop its central bank digital currency project (CBDC). According to the official announcement, both parties signed a “Memorandum of Understanding” to deploy Ukraine’s crypto strategy. The National Bank of Ukraine has been exploring CBDC’s for some time, there are reports on the matter since 2016.