Today in Crypto: While Down, NFTs Hold Value in Christie’s Auction; N. Korean Hackers Suspected in $100M Harmony Blockchain Hack

With non-fungible token (NFT) sales falling, there are still some digital art stars that have been doing well in spite of the difficulties facing the crypto market, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday (June 28).

This comes as Christie’s recently held a charity sale that was testing how enduring tokenized art can be – the sale, called “Cartography of the Mind,” raised more than $1.6 million. However, none of its offerings were going for over $250,000.

The sale was sort of a “who’s who” for NFT artists like Beeple, Refik Anadol and Mad Dog Jones, who rose to prominence amid the mass appreciation for digital art last year, which followed a flood of crypto investments and NFT purchases.

However, few of them have previously undergone a big market test, with the markets having collapsed in the spring.

In other news, the North Korean-based hacking collective called Lazarus Group is likely behind the heist on California blockchain Harmony, which took $100 million, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (June 29).

This came from data from Horizon Bridge, which lets cryptocurrency move across different blockchains. Additionally, the forensics company Elliptic Enterprises said it thinks Lazarus Group was responsible because the laundering method used has its same hallmarks.

This comes after the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert saying the group had been sponsored by the North Korean government, having targeted crypto firms since 2020. This case saw the hackers targeting username and password credentials from Harmony workers in the Asia-Pacific region to break into the bridge.

Finally, Bloomberg wrote Wednesday that the U.S. government’s attempts to collect billions in taxes isn’t going as planned, with the Biden administration’s plans to delay when crypto brokerages and exchanges have to start gathering detailed client information complicating things.

The report said the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service will likely be pushing off a January date when the firms were supposed to begin tracking customers’ capital gains and losses.

This move would mean the tax agency will have to wait longer to get the kind of data it already has for stocks or bonds.

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