Bancor entered recovery mode earlier this month in the aftermath of a $12.5 million theft from the network. The team worked tirelessly to repair the damage and reinforce our defenses before bringing the system back online. In its first full week since reactivating, Bancor came roaring back, processing over $30 million in conversion volume, with a flurry of new tokens activating on the network. Bancor’s resurgence is a testament to the resilience of its network and the demand for its automated conversion method.

Here’s the latest:

An Alliance of Crypto Defenders

What became immediately apparent following the security breach on Bancor is the need for greater industry collaboration in the fight against theft. While thieves leave a clear paper trail on the blockchain, stakeholders still lack resources to connect the dots in order to prevent the liquidation of stolen assets on exchanges and elsewhere.

Bancor will soon unveil a broad alliance of crypto defenders — including major exchanges, token projects and crypto security firms — who pledge to contribute resources and capabilities to fight criminals together. Members will collaborate on mechanisms to warn and assist each other in times of peril, coordinate around shared blacklists, and develop open-source tools aimed at stopping thieves in their tracks. One such tool, to be released in the coming weeks, maintains a real-time multi-chain list of accounts involved in fraudulent transactions, as well as a public interface to allow blockchain users to visualize and understand the movement of their funds.

Stay tuned for more, and email us if you’re interested in getting involved: contact@bancor.network

A Deep-Dive on Decentralization

After the theft, Bancor used its publicly disclosed Anti-Theft Override to freeze stolen BNT in order to recover $10 million of BNT before it was liquidated. The move fueled an ongoing debate in the industry over what it means to be decentralized and the role of security mechanisms in nascent blockchain ecosystems.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has argued that “logical centralization is actually good” amid calls to implement a network-wide upgrade to return lost ETH from last year’s Parity breach. Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer recently noted that the majority of top ERC20 tokens retain centralized “pause functions” in the event of emergencies.

The Bancor team embraced this discussion in posts and interviews. As Bancor Product Architect Eyal Hertzog said:

“Naturally, as with any technology, new challenges will emerge even as a result of new solutions to problems. Our job as innovators, explorers, and stewards of these revolutionary decentralization technologies, will be to ask the right questions, not insist on our answers. Bancor is long on decentralization, and even longer on collaboration. It will take both to get anywhere worth going — and we welcome the discussion on these and other topics along the way.”

Here’s a round-up of the Bancor team’s contributions to the conversation:

Bancor VP of Growth Omri Cohen on Keith Wareing:

New Tokens

A number of new tokens activated on the Bancor Network this month, bringing the total number of live tokens to 115. That’s more than 6,670 pairs — for instance, DAI to ETH or BNB to KIN — with more coming soon! Here are the latest live tokens:

An Update from Kenya

Bancor’s community currency initiative in Kenya is gaining steam. As an MVP of the regional network is nearing completion, the team has announced it is using POA Network to help minimize Ethereum transaction costs. By integrating with POA Network, Bancor is able to take advantage of low transaction costs and a high level of decentralization across 18 independent validators. To achieve further reductions in maintenance costs, integration with the EOS blockchain is also being developed.

Bancor’s Director of Community Currencies, Will Ruddick, is overseeing the initiative on the ground in Kenya in partnership with his local non-profit Grassroots Economics. Grassroots’ Director Caroline Dama recently visited the White House as a finalist in the WomensConnect USAID program.

Read more on Caroline’s visit to the White House & watch Will discuss the potential of blockchain-based community currencies:

LiquidEOS Progresses

Eyal and the LiquidEOS team visited Korea this past weekend to meet with fellow EOS Block Producer representatives and to discuss solutions to EOS RAM Allocation. Read Eyal’s proposal to improve access to affordable RAM, and watch him present it in the panel below (Eyal’s portion starts around 6:12:00):