Stealing money is not easy. So why go to all the effort if you’re not serious?

Earlier this month, Ethereum Classic fell victim to a 51% attack when someone got hold of the majority of the network’s computing power and used it to double spend coins, stealing $1 million in funds. Now the hacker has returned some of the money. 

Gate.io, which originally lost $271,000 worth of ETC said the hacker returned $100,000 worth. And YoBit reported it got back $61,000 of $65,000 worth of stolen ETC. 

“We still don’t know the reason [for the return],” Gate.io said in a blog post on January 10. “If the attacker didn’t run it for profit, he might be a white hacker who wanted to remind people the risks in blockchain consensus and hashing power security.”

If you are a crypto exchange, you’re probably not seeing the profits you did back in the crypto heydays of 2017 and early 2018. So how do you make up for that? One option is to start listing lots of questionable coins. Another is to set the stage for the long-hoped-for influx of institution money.

Along those lines, Bittrex announced an over-the-counter (OTC) desk on January 14. The service handles trades of $250,000 or greater for the nearly 200 coins already offered by the exchange. In doing so, Bittrex joins other U.S.-based exchanges in launching OTC trading desks, including Coinbase and Poloniex.

Ethereum’s Constantinople upgrade has been delayed yet again. Shortly before the scheduled January 17 release, smart contract audit firm ChainSecurity found vulnerabilities in one of five ethereum improvement proposals (EIP). ChainSecurity describes the vulnerability in detail here. Ethereum core developers are now weighing late February as a time to move ahead with the upgrade—sans the buggy EIP.

A new twist has emerged in the saga of QuadrigaCX, one of the largest crypto exchanges in Canada. The saga began in January 2018 when the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce froze about $22 million in US dollars in an account opened by Quadriga’s payment processor. The majority of the frozen funds were released in December, but customers still aren’t getting their money.

Now, after waiting more than a month to post the news, Quadriga says that its CEO and founder Gerald Cotten is dead. Usually, when the CEO of a company dies, that is something you want to tell people right away.   

The announcement (archive) on the company’s website appears to come from Cotten’s wife, Jennifer Robertson, who explains that Cotten went to India to build an orphanage for needy children. While there, he died of complications to Crohn’s disease.  

“Gerry cared deeply about honesty and transparency — values he lived by in both his professional and personal life. He was hardworking and passionate, with an unwavering commitment to his customers, employees, and family,” Robertson wrote. [Emphasis mine.]

Several of Quadriga’s customers went to Reddit asking for proof of Cotten’s death. Some wondered how Cotten found time to travel to India when his company was in the midst of major litigation. 

Binance, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges by trading volume, has launched a  fiat-to-crypto exchange in Jersey. A tiny 5-by-9-mile island in the English Channel, Jersey is one of the world’s wealthiest offshore tax shelters.

In October, Binance also set up a fiat-to-crypto exchange in Uganda. And it is planning to set up more of these entities in countries like Singapore, Malta, South Korea, Liechtenstein, Argentina, Russia, Turkey, and Bermuda.

Tron’s accelerator developer contest is looking like a big scam. The event was supposed to offer $1 million in prizes, with the first prize being $200,000. After the competition ended on January 4, developers took to Twitter and Reddit to complain that something “fishy” was going on. Apparently, Tron changed the prize amounts, and the main prize went to some vague company nobody has ever heard of.  

Brave browser, the project run by JavaScript creator and former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, claims that is is no longer fundraising on behalf of others, after releasing version 0.58.21 of the browser. David Gerard wrote an update and posted some pics of the new interface. If you get a chance, tip Gerard some BAT via his YouTube channel, so he can continue to test out the platform.  

Also, Brave browser has started allowing developers and testers to view ads. You can’t earn BAT for viewing the ads yet, but all that is coming. Eventually, Brave says, “users will then be able to earn 70% of the revenue share coming from those ads.”

The business model has gotten a ton of criticism. Essentially, the browser strips all ads and add trackers — which is how most publishing sites make their money — and then substitutes its own Brave-approved ads.

There’s been some important developments in the Tezos class-action litigation. Next up, likely the court will rule on whether the Tezos initial coin offering—which raised a record-setting $232 million in mid-2017—was an unregistered securities offering.

A ransomware threat known as Ryuk has pulled in $3.7 million in bitcoin over five months.

The Winklevoss Twins still think Bitcoin will be worth more than gold, maybe in the hopes they will be billionaires again. “The only thing gold has over bitcoin is a 3,000 year head start,” Cameron told Fortune.  

Brock Pierce, who got into cryptocurrency in the early days, and his wife Crystal Rose Pierce are expecting a child in March. They are naming the baby Crypto Pierce.

About 5% of daily Bitcoin transactions involve tether (USDT), according to a Medium post by Omni, the platform that tether operates on.  

Despite competition from a slew of new stablecoins, tether still dominates the stablecoin market, according to the latest report from CryptoCompare.

In case you missed it, I published a complete Tether timeline. I’m continuing to to update the story based on whatever new info I stumble upon. So keep checking back—and if you have information to add, send me details!