19 September, 2022
ECB Taps Amazon to Work on Digital Euro
The European Central Bank (ECB) has partnered with five companies “to develop potential user interfaces” for a digital Euro. According to the official statement, “The prototyping exercise is an important element in the ongoing two-year investigation phase of the digital euro project.” The bank disclosed plans to integrate and test the prototypes developed by the five companies with the Eurosystem’s “interface and back-end infrastructure.”
The firms were selected from a pool of 54 organizations. Caixabank and Worldline will work on peer-to-peer online payments. EPI and Nexi will focus on point-of-sale payments and Amazon will deal with e-commerce payments. The ECB aims to complete prototyping, integration and testing in the first quarter of 2023 when the bank will also publish its findings.
BlockSec Finds ETHPoW Replay Exploit
ETHPoW was the target of a replay exploit that led to the loss of 200 ETHW tokens. Blockchain security firm BlocSec reported that the attack was carried out through the Omni Bridge on the Gnosis chain. As per the security research report, the attacker initially transferred 200 ETHW via the Omni Bridge and then replayed the same call data of the PoS chain on ETHPoW, siphoning an extra 200 ETHW in the process. BlocSec further noted that “the root cause of the exploitation is that the Omni bridge on the PoW chain uses the old ChainId and doesn’t correctly verify the actual ChainId of the cross-chain message.”
Meanwhile, ETHW developers confirmed the incident but denied the possibility of the attack originating from the ETHPoW blockchain. The ETHW team explained via a blog post that “ETHW itself has enforced EIP-155, and there is no replay attack from ETHPoS and to ETHPoS, which ETHW Core’s security engineers have planned in advance.” The team warned that “bridges need to correctly verify the actual ChainID of the cross-chain messages.”
