BitStamp Exchange Activity Trackable due to Multisig Wallet Implementation

Today, 13% of Bitcoin is protected by multisig technology. A growing minority of Bitcoin users employ a multi-signature wallet, which uses more than one private key to access the wallet. By using this approach, wallets are much less vulnerable to security breaches, as no single party possesses all the information necessary to decrypt the wallet. Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan tweeted about the significance of the multisig uptick: More cryptocurrency wallets offering multisig support. More Bitcoin wallet providers have recently enabled multisig functionality, as it seems to be headed....

Times have been busy in the bitcoin wallet world lately. Two hardware wallets - Trezor and BTChip - have finally shipped, and wallet security continues to mature. In spite of all this, though, people who should know better are still being robbed because they fail to add more protection to their bitcoin holdings. To tackle the issue of bitcoin wallet vulnerabilities, it's important to look at the security protections that are currently available for wallets, and to explore what work still needs to be done in the future. Multisig. 2014 was to be the year of multiple signatures (multisig),....

Coinbase Vault, first revealed a few months ago, has now implemented a multisig feature that has been demanded far and wide by Coinbase's international customer base. In one fell swoop, Coinbase has set themselves apart from their competitor, Circle, in a big way. Today, Coinbase announced their Multisig Vault, which allows users to control their own private keys on Coinbase. This means that even in the event of Coinbase's untimely demise, bitcoins "stored" in the Coinbase multisig vault would still be accessible to the user. Users would be able to use open source tools, like this one, to....

In the aftermath of the recent theft of more than $65 million worth of bitcoins from Bitfinex, parts of the Bitcoin community have been wondering what role BitGo’s multisig-focused security offering may have played in the whole ordeal. According to the company’s website, BitGo handles more than 10,000 Bitcoin transactions per day and helps its users transfer more than $1 billion worth of value per month. Many exchanges, such as Bitstamp and Kraken, use BitGo’s services. Bitcoin Magazine reached out to Bitstamp Head of Business Development Vasja Zupan to get the exchange’s thoughts on BitGo....

Following the 5th January announcement that it was suffering a "hot wallet issue" later determined to be the work of malicious actors, Bitstamp spent much of the last week offline, temporarily closing what had been among the top three exchanges for BTC/USD trading. The unexpected news set off a flurry of concerns that, less than one year after the demise of then-leading USD/BTC exchange Mt Gox, history could be repeating itself, and that Bitstamp may be the latest bitcoin exchange to close its doors due to a high-profile hack. By 9th January, however, Bitstamp indicated it would resume....