The Italian Ministry for Ecological Transition’s Twitter account was hacked on Thursday and its badge replaced with a photo of Russian Vitalik Buterin, co-creator and inventor of Ethereum, a digital platform that adopts blockchain technology.

The profile picture of the young Russian-Canadian businessman was quickly deleted, but many netizens managed to take screenshots, which sparked all sorts of reactions.

According to several analysts interviewed by the Italian press, it was an attempted scam, since one of the fake tweets published during the operation indicated that Buterin was offering its cryptocurrency for free.

“A typical modus operandi of scammers who take advantage of the popularity of crypto-currencies,” said Gianluca Grossi, editor-in-chief of the Criptovaluta.it site, quoted by the Ansa agency.

The ministry’s account remained inaccessible for several hours, as did the website.

The authorities are investigating the case, which comes ten days before the September 25 legislative elections in Italy and at the very moment when Butarin announced, on his own twitter account, that he had carried out the technological transformation of his “blockchain”. (blockchain) to use less energy due to rapid growth.

“And it’s over! (…) All those who contributed to the success of Merge (“fusion”, the technical name of the mutation, ndr) can be very proud today”, he writes.

To issue Ether, the digital currency usable on the internet, Ethereum, the contract platform, consumes around 45 TWh of electricity per year, or around 10% of the annual electricity consumption in France.

Some manufacturers have therefore decided to boycott it, so Ethereum is trying to lower consumption.

Ether accounts for around 20% of the total value of existing virtual currencies, surpassed by bitcoin (40%).

For its part, Ethereum has a much wider field of applications than its competitor, because it serves as a support for multiple uses.

Thousands of developers around the world are creating applications on Ethereum and inventing new types of applications, many of which are already in use.

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