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Co-Creator of Libra is following Libra’s open source alternative

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A fork of Libra’s open source code, OpenLibra was officially announced today at DEVCON 5. Libra Co-Creator, Morgan Beller, is already following their twitter page. It looks like they have been building a community for the past four months and are now ready to bring information to the public. 

Co-Creator of Libra following OpenLibra on Twitter

Their website looks very much like a white-paper, and basically reiterates what everyone already thinks of Libra. OpenLibra doesn’t like how centralized and plutocratic Facebook’s blockchain project is. 

Boasting a core-team with members from the Ethereum Foundation and Cosmos, they plan to “embrace what is powerful” and replace what is concerning with Libra. 

The webpage seems to spend more time talking about what they don’t like about Libra than how they plan to succeed with OpenLibra. A user on Twitter noted that there are already similar projects. 

Beller is not a part of the community, core team nor a contributor on their Github. She may just be observing to see how much traction an alternative gets. 

OpenLibra believes that Facebook will eventually release Libra, and this idea will be the open-source response.

UPDATE

The OpenLibra website initially had listed various members of their core team and which projects they had worked on. Cryptocult was contact today by a representative on behalf of Lucas Geiger to clarify that no Chainlink members have been part of the OpenLink core team or community. Shortly after publication of this article, the entire list of members was taken off the website.

 

 

Tether and Bitfinex expect “meritless” lawsuit

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Tether and Bitfinex are so closely tied that they plagiarized each other’s press release about expected upcoming lawsuits. Both iFinex companies used Trump-esque language, calling their accusers meritless and claiming new information was based off of a bogus study. 

They claim to be targeted by “mercenary” lawyers, who by definition are interested in making money and ignoring ethics. 

“It is irresponsible to suggest that Tether enables illicit activity due to its efficiency, liquidity and wide-scale applicability within the cryptocurrency ecosystem.” 

Tether & Bitfinex controversy 

News of additional lawsuits came shortly after Bitfinex and Tether won a motion to halt turning over documents in the New York Supreme Court. Bitfinex had been accused of creating Tether out of nothing in April 2019 and was sued by the New York Attorney General Letita James. 

The story goes that Bitfinex was processing transactions through Crypto Capital, who’s funds were seized by various governments. Since Bitfinex couldn’t get their money back, they decided to take an approximate $625 million loan from Tether. Tether continued to print their currency, even with the large deficit. 

James’ office isn’t happy about the iFinex not having to turn in documents and believe that they have been stalling the entire time. 

“Respondents have been crystal clear that their litigation strategy is to delay this process as long as they can, by procedural maneuvers and duplicative motion practice”

Reactions from the community 

Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of Alameda seemed to identify with iFinex’s defense against allegations.

“The TL;DR: USDT issuances sometimes come with BTC price increases because people create USDT to buy BTC, nothing shady required to explain that.”

Others aren’t believing the plea of innocence

“Bitfinex new tactic: attempt to preemptively discredit any person on earth who at any point might sue them”

LEO, Bitfinex’s proprietary coin felt the pain of lawsuit news, with price dropping 5% soon after the announcement.

Bitfinex's exchange coin dropping 5% in value after expected lawsuit announcement

Brave announces plans for a decentralized VPN

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Brave, the web browser winning over the crypto community recently published research on their decentralized VPN. VPN⁰ is still being tested, but it promises to solve the risk of peer to peer hosting through other decentralized VPN solutions. 

Why decentralize a VPN?

Many American crypto traders don’t like U.S. exchanges because they don’t let you lose your money quick enough. This pushes U.S. traders to purchase a VPN and access sites with margin like BitMex. Decentralized products generally don’t require identification to use, and anonymity is popular in that trading crowd. 

Crypto enthusiasts also tend to be more familiar with the ability to keep others from selling your data. That is the main appeal of decentralizing a VPN. There are many VPNs who sell your data to third parties. 

Right now you can choose a decentralized VPN that connects you to someone else in the world who might be doing illegal things with it, one that sells your data, or one that is pricier than a Netflix subscription. 

Brave doesn’t discuss any subscription fees, but promises to be a solution for the first two issues mentioned. 

How do they do it? 

They do it by using long winded cryptographic techniques that I won’t bore you with. Essentially, it all boils down to this quote. 

“VPN⁰ allows relay nodes to control which traffic they transmit, without learning what  content it contains”

In order to make sure it worked for real world usage, they integrated their tech with ProtonVPN, OpenVPN and Mainline using a Raspberry Pi. Everything worked out, and they think they can beat out any competition. 

How Brave's decentralized VPN works

“This post has presented VPN⁰, to the best of our knowledge, the first dVPN with strong privacy requirements and high performance.”

Speed of VPN⁰s zero knowledge calculation is the bottleneck they claim to be researching now. There is no release date, but if everything works like they say it will and is affordable, the product will likely win over crypto traders and blockchian enthusiasts.