Emergency supplies can’t resolve the crisis, as re-routed volumes would disrupt other regions
The latest speculation about Russia’s hypothetical invasion of Ukraine and potential sanctions pledged by Western countries in response has raised serious concerns about energy security in Europe, which has already been shaken by the pandemic and the Covid-related supply crunch stretching across each and every sector of the region’s economy.
Europe is going through a severe energy crisis, with surging prices for heating and electricity placing an intolerable burden on households and businesses.
Russian gas supplies account for roughly 40% of Europe’s consumption, with any disruption of deliveries expected to aggravate the current situation and cause spikes in energy prices.
Though major energy producers like Qatar or Azerbaijan have pledged emergency gas supplies to the region, the volumes shipped by Russia are reportedly hard to replace without affecting other big consumers across the world, especially in Asia, the world’s fastest-growing market.
“Europe has no alternative to Russian gas,” BCS Global Markets Senior Analyst Ron Smith said as quoted by Bloomberg. “You would have to divert half of the LNG that Asia consumes in order to replace Gazprom PJSC. And what would that mean? That would mean massive energy shortages all across Asia, you would export Europe’s energy crisis to Asia,” the expert added.
According to Qatar’s energy minister, Saad Al-Kaabi, the volumes of gas the EU needs can’t be replaced by any one supplier unilaterally without disturbing deliveries to other regions.
The official stressed the importance of fulfilling obligations under long-term contracts with existing customers, and said strengthening European energy security would inevitably take collective efforts from a number of gas producers.
Increased competition for liquefied natural gas (LNG) is expected to keep prices high, according to the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank, as cited by the agency. The researchers say that Europe would have to curb demand in case of any prolonged disruption lasting through the next two winters.
Europe currently relies on the LNG that’s been arriving on its shores, helping to ease high prices, but Asia is expected to regain its spot as a premium export market for US cargoes of the fuel as early as May, according to BloombergNEF calculations.
“This idea that ‘we will fill the gap with LNG’ – no, you can’t. It’s physically impossible to do, there’s not enough LNG in the world to do that,” Smith told the agency.
British lawmakers said on Wednesday that Big Tech companies whose online platforms carry fraudulent adverts should be made to compensate those who fall victim to such actions. The call is part of wider efforts to combat a growing epidemic of online fraud in Britain.
According to Mel Stride, chairman of the cross-party Treasury committee, there is not sufficient regulation governing social media and other websites where victims are often first lured in. He told Reuters that “The government should look at some kind of arrangement that makes the polluter pay.”
“Online platforms are hosting this stuff, not really putting enough effort into weeding it out, and indeed financially benefiting because they’re getting the advertising revenues,” Stride said.
The comments come as the Treasury committee published the findings on Wednesday of a report on economic crime. According to the report, trade body techUK said in December that Facebook (now known as Meta), Twitter, and Microsoft had committed to requiring that potential advertisers of financial services be authorized by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. The commitment followed similar steps taken by Google, TikTok, and Amazon.
The report noted, however, that there was no set timeline for those changes and that other major online platforms have not followed suit.
Online fraud has risen sharply in the UK in recent years, with an upsurge during the Covid-19 pandemic. Reuters reported in October that Britain has become a global epicenter for bank scams, with a record £754 million ($1.38 billion) stolen in the first six months of last year, up 30% on the same period in 2020. British banks have signed up for a voluntary code to reimburse fraud victims who do enough to protect themselves.
Billions in market capitalization was wiped out after the first Meta quarterly report misses expectations
Shares of Facebook’s parent company Meta went into a nosedive after the markets closed on Wednesday, following an underwhelming quarterly report, the first since CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the name change.
The stock stood strong at $323 a share when the markets closed at 4pm EST, but collapsed to $249 just half an hour later, for a loss of almost 23%. In just the first 11 minutes of after-hours trading, $16 billion in Meta’s market cap had been wiped out.
What triggered the sell-off was Meta’s quarterly report showing lower revenue, earnings per share, and the numbers of daily and monthly active users than expected by investors.
Meta EPS misses User growth falls short Revenue forecast misses
Whereas investors expected around $30.15 billion, Facebook’s figures showed $27-$29 billion, CNBC reported, citing a Refinitiv survey of market analysts. According to the same source, earnings per share came in at $3.67, short of the expected $3.84.
The number of daily active users (DAU) stood at 1.93 billion, less than the expected 1.95 billion, while the monthly active users (MAU) also undershot the 2.95 expectation, ending up at 2.91 billion, according to Street Account.
This is the first quarterly report since Zuckerberg announced his social media behemoth would be changing its name to Meta, to better represent its focus on the upcoming metaverse and encompass the existing Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp brands.
China’s e-yuan will be accepted at all venues at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games
China is ready to showcase its state digital currency, the e-CNY, as an official payment method at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, which kicks off on Friday.
According to a statement from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), all payment services related to the Olympics have been prepared, including accounts, bank cards, mobile payments, cash, and the digital yuan.
The e-CNY is China’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), which is essentially a clone of the fiat yuan in the form of a digital asset. Unlike decentralized cryptocurrencies, which are banned in China, the e-CNY is fully controlled and governed by the central bank.
The e-CNY is already accepted at the Beijing Olympics’ official store in the Main Media Center (MMC), which officially began 24-hour operations on Monday.
The Olympics will be part of a gradual e-CNY rollout, which has already been test-launched in five major Chinese cities, including Shanghai and Shenzhen. On January 4, the PBOC also launched the e-CNY wallet on the iOS and Android app stores countrywide. By mid-January, the e-CNY wallets had nearly 261 million individual users, roughly one-fifth of the entire Chinese population, with e-CNY apps ranking as the fastest-growing by downloads in the country.
However, the e-CNY is still in pilot mode. Although the wallet is available for download across the entire country, only users from the five pilot cities and the Olympics venue can sign up and actually use the digital currency. For now, the e-CNY can only be used for a limited number of transactions.
The fast-growing decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has been increasingly targeted by cyber criminals
One of the most popular bridges linking the Ethereum and Solana blockchains became a victim of a hack attack on Wednesday resulting in a crypto theft worth more than $320 million.
Developers representing Wormhole confirmed the exploit on its Twitter account, saying the network bridge is currently down while the team investigates a potential exploit. The official website says that the portal is temporarily unavailable.
Wormhole is a protocol that lets users move their tokens and NFTs between Solana and Ethereum. Crypto holders often do not operate exclusively within one blockchain ecosystem, so developers have built cross-chain bridges to let users send their digital assets from one chain to another.
It is DeFi’s second-biggest exploit ever, and the largest attack to date on Solana, which is increasingly gaining traction in the non-fungible token (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems.
“The $320 million hack on Wormhole Bridge highlights the growing trend of attacks against blockchains protocols,” blockchain cybersecurity firm CertiK co-founder Ronghui Gu was quoted as saying by CNBC. “This attack is sounding the alarms of growing concern around security on the blockchain.”
Meanwhile, the founder of Solana DeFi platform Step Finance, George Harrap, told CoinDesk he expects Jump Capital, which purchased Wormhole developer Certus One, to step in to backstop the hacked ETH. Otherwise, he said, a number of Solana-based platforms that accept ETH as collateral may now be partially insolvent.
“If nobody backs it and the coins are truly gone then Wormhole ETH is worth 0 and everyone who has a balance of it becomes worthless, DeFi protocols, users, everyone,” Harrap said.
Cryptocurrency platforms have suffered a number of high-value hacks in recent years. In August, Poly Network was hit by a major attack that saw the hacker steal more than $600 million worth of tokens. The theft was thought to be the biggest crypto heist ever, surpassing the $534.8 million stolen from Japanese digital currency exchange Coincheck in 2018 and the estimated $450 million worth of Bitcoin that went missing from Tokyo-based Mt. Gox in 2014.
Poly Network’s hacker, however, gave back nearly all of the money, with the exception of $33 million of Tether that was frozen by its issuers.
