The Thursday Recap #7

Welcome to our latest Thursday Recap, our weekly update on the industry and what we’ve been up to here at Recap HQ. If you missed the previous instalment you can catch up here.

Account Dashboard

The account dashboard is ready for its first release which will be available today. Right now it will show you a stacked value chart of your account from its first transaction, the current balances (as calculated by Recap, helping you locate discrepancies), the asset value split and the most recent transactions. We’ll be adding currency and date filters in the coming weeks. We welcome your feedback.

We’re currently building the follow on from this feature, a Portfolio Dashboard. This will show the same data across all of your accounts and is the first step to allowing Recap to fulfil the role of portfolio tracker as well as a tax calculator. We’ll be adding many more features to support the portfolio tracker use case over the coming months.

Government Cryptotax Advice For Business

The UK tax authority HMRC released a policy paper last week ‘Cryptoassets: tax for businesses’. The contents of this advice were not unexpected given the treatment of cryptoassets detailed in the earlier ‘Cryptoassets: tax for individuals’.

We will be further analysing the contents of this paper over the coming week, planning new features and identifying areas where Recap can assist businesses who are holding or using cryptoassets.

Stellar Foundation Destroyed Half of XLM

Stellar Development Foundation has decided to burn 55 billion tokens (around 50%) of its Lumen (XLM) crytocurrency according to a report by CoinDesk. The foundation made the announcement at their own Stellar Meridian conference with people in attendance greeting the news “warmly”. Suffice to say it can only be speculated how many of the attendees have a holding in the token. 😁

Security Firm Rogue Worker Sold User Data to Scammers

According to the BBC, Trend Micro (the cyber-security company) have suffered their own security issues recently. Trend Micro confirmed on their blog that a rogue employee accessed customer records and passed that data onto an “unknown third-party malicious actor”. Trend Micro stress that they do not call customers unexpectedly and that if you receive an unsolicited call from someone claiming to be from Trend Micro, you should hang up and report it to Trend Micro support.

This story is another example of why privacy is so important. What if this data included the details of your crypto transaction, how much crypto you own, or which addresses are yours? It’s a recipe for disaster when a $5 wrench can steal your crypto and the attacker knows exactly what you own. Reasonable doubt or hidden accounts wont protect anyone in that scenario. Only the end-to-end encryption of Recap can protect your financial data against these threats.

BitMEX Leak E-mail Addresses

Over the weekend of the 2nd of November, BitMEX suffered an incident that led to the disclosure of e-mail addresses of some of its customers. According to their own blog post, “many of our users received an email which contained the email addresses of other users in the “To:” field”, this meant that a number of email addresses were disclosed to other users. BitMEX state that no other information was disclosed and that is in contact with customers that have been affected by this incident.

OneCoin Lawyer On Trial

The BBC reports that the trial of Mark Scott, a US lawyer accused of laundering approximately $400m of proceeds from the OneCoin cryptocurrency “scam”, has started in New York. He has been accused of routing the money out of the US while trying to conceal the true ownership and source of the money.

Microsoft Offers "Ethereum As A Service" to Enterprises

Well, here we go - crypto tokens are coming to large company near you! As reported by Forbes, Microsoft has “created a mint for issuing a wide range of crypto assets” called Azure Blockchain Tokens (classicly boring Microsoft naming in full effect). This new service will allow companies or (at this point in time) literally anyone, to “design, issue and manage a wide range of assets” on the Microsoft run Ethereum blockchain.

Keep updated

That wraps it up for this week, so please check back next Thursday for more Recap and crypto news and don't forget to keep an eye on our social media and join our Telegram group or leave a message via chat here on the website or in app.