Ethereum is moving towards further decline.  ETH is holding key support in the price ranges at $145.  There is strong resistance in the $152 area.  There was resistance near $150 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD.  The price will struggle to climb above $152 and $155. ETH should break this resistance to continue higher.

One of the Upbit hacker has moved $51.7 Ethereum Stash and they have labelled themselves “1337.” It seems like they are looking for somewhere to cash out.  The transactions were in bits ranging from 10 ETH to 100,000 ETH.  The first Ethereum wallet of the hacker is complete empty.  The 342,000 ETH is now completely split among 4 different addresses.  They have been sending small “testing” amounts to Huobi, the cryptocurrency exchange.

The “1337” is “leetspeek” for “elite,” which is commonly used as a reference to “elite hackers.” It is expected that these transactions will not be approved as the hackers have intentional kept their transaction fees very low.  The fee is too low to be acceptable by the network. Due to the recent price movements the amount of Ethereum is worth at $52 million.

Virgil Griffith, An Ethereum Founder Researcher was arrested for aiding North Korea to evade sanctions using blockchain technology.

Vitalik Buterin on Twitter stated, “I refuse to take the convenient path of throwing Virgil under the bus, because I firmly believe that that would be wrong.” He has further required that the ETH community start off with a petition to free the researcher.

Buterin stated that Girffith is a “friend of his” and that “this whole thing has nothing to do with the Ethereum Foundation. The Ethereum Foundation paid nothing and offered no assistance; it was Virgil’s personal trip that many counseled against.”

Permission is denied to Griffith to travel to North Korea.  When presenting the paper at Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference in April, Griffith knew the consequences of violations of sanctions against North Korea.  Consequently, he was arrested on November 28, 2019 for violating International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act, is a crime which carries a sentence of nearly 20 years.

Previously, Griffith has been publically asking for advice about renouncing his US citizenship. He also solicited others to travel to North Korea to attend the conference in Pyongyang.  The trip made was the personal trip of Virgil and the Ethereum foundation did not offer any kind of assistance in this regard.

Buterin calls Griffith’s paper as an advanced tutoring and that it was based on publically available open source software.  He stated that there was no hackery here.