Blockchain Voting System of Russia Nearly Intruded by Hacker
A hacker has tried to disrupt the blockchain voting system in Russia. Currently, they use this to help in deciding constitutional changes in the Russian federation.
Based on Russian news agency TASS, Artem Kostyrko, head of the Moscow government’s IT technology department, stated that an observation node on the blockchain had been targeted. Nonetheless, the system was still performing correctly.
As per the report, it is not clear what the hacker got in the attack and how far they penetrated with the intrusion.
Kostyrko explained, “At present,an increased security mode has been introduced. There was no interruption in voting. All votes are in the guaranteed delivery service, that is, they will be recorded on the blockchain.”
Aside from that, the website went down during the first day of electronic voting. This was because of an overload, according to information from the Central Election Commission.
As Golog Grigory, the head of Russia’s election observer’s movement stated, the independent observers might not connect to the blockchain. Also, the issue might not be about an observer node to monitor the process.
In the TASS report, the voting started last Thursday and will end Tuesday, June 30. There are approximately 1 million applications to use the blockchain system for the vote registered in Moscow. About 140,000 would be from Nizhny Novgorod.
Augur Launches V2
The blockchain-powered event betting company, Augur, noted that users of its REP cryptocurrency must migrate their tokens after a new version of the platform will be available beginning July 28.
The announcement was posted on the platform’s website on June 29. It said Augur v2.will launch on the Ethereum (ETH) main net by the end of the next month. With that, the REP token holders should manually migrate their coins to the new version, REPv2.
Augur said that they would rename the current tokens REPv1 to reduce any confusion.
Moreover, the firm mentioned that the release of Augur c2 needs all REP token holders to join in any forking, should it occur. And if they fail to do so within 60 days, all their holdings can’t participate in forked and future universes of Augur forever.
But still, the platform highlighted that they do not require immediate action. Based on Augur, they aim the forking to be a remarkably rare event. And during the announcement, they said it would cost Augur over $9 million. This makes the new tokens presumably worthless.
The platform’s native REP token, REPv1, ranks 44th by market cap and is trading at $16.77.
The U.S. Elections
Furthermore, Augur is a predictions market that uses smart contracts to allow users to make and bet on the result of any event using ETH. Also, the platform came under fire in 2019 from having an apparent design flaw. This might have let several users operate scams by settling their bets on the outcome of events before they might have concluded.
Particularly, the market for the United States 2018 Midterm Election exhibited an overall volume of over $3 million on the question of which of the two parties, Democrat or Republican, would manage the House of Representatives. The market settlement date was almost four weeks before changes in leadership would take effect.
