Crypto
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Rari Fuze hacker offered $10M bounty by Fei Protocol to return $80M loot
Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Fei Protocol offered a $10 million bounty to hackers in an attempt to negotiate and retrieve a major chunk of the stolen funds from various Rari Fuse pools worth $79,348,385.61 — nearly $80 million. On Saturday, Fei Protocol informed its investors about an exploit across numerous Rari Capital Fuse pools while requesting the hackers to return the stolen funds against a $10 million bounty and a “no questions asked” commitment. We are aware of an exploit on various Rari Fuse pools. We have identified the root cause and paused all borrowing to mitigate further damage. To the exploiter, please accept a $10m bounty and no questions asked if you return the remaining user funds. — Fei Protocol (@feiprotocol) April 30, 2022 While the exact losses from the explo...
Top 5 cryptocurrencies to watch this week: BTC, LUNA, NEAR, VET, GMT
The month of April has been a forgettable one for equities and cryptocurrency investors. Bitcoin (BTC) plummeted 17% in April to record its worst ever performance in the month of April. Similarly, the Nasdaq Composite plunged 13.3% in April, its worst monthly performance since October 2008. However, a major positive for crypto investors is that Bitcoin is still above its year-to-date low near $33,000. In comparison, the Nasdaq 100 has hit a new low for 2022 while the S&P 500 is just a whisker away from making a new year-to-date low. This suggests that Bitcoin has managed to avoid a major sell-off, indicating demand at lower levels. Crypto market data daily view. Source: Coin360 Along with Bitcoin, Ether (ETH) has also managed to sustain well above its year-to-date low. Accor...
Self-custody, control and identity: How regulators got it wrong
The recent European Union proposal requiring centralized crypto exchanges and custodial wallet providers to collect and verify personal information about self-custodial wallet holders shows the dangers of recycling traditional finance (TradFi) rules and applying them to crypto without appreciating the conceptual differences. We can expect to see more of this as countries look to implement the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Travel Rule, initially designed for wire transfers, to transfers of crypto assets. The (missing) link between self-custody, control and identity The aim of the proposed EU rules is “to ensure crypto-assets can be traced in the same way as traditional money transfers.” This assumes that each self-custodial wallet can be linked to someone’s verifiable identity and that...
NFTs, DAOs and the importance of roadmaps
When CryptoKitties came out, it was hilarious to me. “Wait a second,” I thought. “So, you mean this JPEG can have sex with this JPEG and make a new baby JPEG? Say what?” When CryptoPunks started out in 2017, they seemed silly to many. They were just 128 X 128 pixels. Who cares about that? They weren’t really cool until Gary Vee had a mastermind call with influencers and said, “Crypto Punks are going to be huge, go get a bunch of them.” They went in and cornered the market and raised the prices. Bored Apes was right around the same time as Gary was launching his project. They got big influencers together and said, “Let’s get these.” And so they all bought those, the prices rose over time. At one time, these cost 2 Ether (ETH). That was a lot back then! Now the floor is like 80 ETH. All thes...
Go green or go home? What the NY State mining moratorium could mean for crypto industry
On April 26, the State of New York put itself at the forefront of the regulatory struggle with crypto, as its Assembly voted for a two-year moratorium on crypto mining operations that use energy generated by fossil-fuel power plants. Depending on how one looks at it, this development could either signal a new alarming legislative trend or a trigger that would accelerate the digital asset industry’s movement toward a more sustainable path. Moratorium with further evaluation The lower chamber of the NY state legislature, the Assembly, passed a bill that would put a two-year hold on any new mining operations using the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism, as well as on the renewal of existing permits. The bill, S6486D/A7389C, is marketed by its sponsors as a necessary act of complian...
6 Questions for Dawn Newton of Netki
We ask the buidlers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector for their thoughts on the industry… and throw in a few random zingers to keep them on their toes! This week, our 6 Questions go to Dawn Newton, co-founder and chief operating officer of Netki — a remote digital identity verification technology provider intended to facilitate compliance with KYC/AML regulations. Dawn Newton is the chief operating officer and co-founder of Netki, the Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering technology provider purpose-built for blockchain. Dawn’s work is driven by her desire to increase global access to crypto assets in a sustainable, secure and equitable manner. At Netki, Dawn has contributed to the development of OnboardID, which facilitates identity verification and onboarding for ...
Warning: Smartphone text prediction guesses crypto hodler’s seed phrase
Seed phrases, a random combination of words from the Bitcoin Improvement Protocol (BIP) 39 list of 2048 words, act as one of the primary layers of security against unauthorized access to a user’s crypto holdings. But, what happens when your “smart” phone’s predictive typing remembers and suggests the words next time you try to access your digital wallet? Andre, a 33-year-old IT professional from Germany, recently posted on the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit after discovering his mobile phone’s ability to predict the entire recovery seed phrase as soon as he typed down the first word. As a fair warning to fellow Redditors and crypto enthusiasts, Andre’s post highlighted the ease with which hackers can use the feature to drain a user’s funds just by being able to type the first word out of the B...
ApeCoin slides 40% in three days despite Otherside metaverse land sale — here’s why
ApeCoin (APE) caught its bulls off-guard with APE price losing nearly 40% in just three days. No dutch auction APE’s price reached its second-highest level, hitting $27.57 on April 28, up more than 2,650% from its mid-March debut. Nonetheless, traders started unwinding their positions after Yuga Labs, the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection’s creator, released the details of the mint of its Otherside Metaverse lands, dubbed “Otherdeed.” Yuga Labs revealed that the NFT mint would cost a flat 305 APE (~$5,250 at today’s price), in contrast to expectations that the company would sell the metaverse land parcels in a dutch auction manner. Thus, the disclosure may have reduced the need for people to hoard more ApeCoin tokens, leading to a drop in demand. APE ...
Liquidity has driven DeFi’s growth to date, so what’s the future outlook?
In mid-February 2020, the total value locked within decentralized finance (DeFi) applications first exceeded $1 billion. Fueled by the DeFi summer of 2020, it wouldn’t even take a year before it multiplied 20-fold to reach $20 billion and only another ten months to reach $200 billion. Given the pace of growth so far, it doesn’t seem outlandish to imagine the DeFi markets hitting a trillion dollars within another year or two. We can attribute this monumental growth to one thing — liquidity. Looking back, DeFi’s expansion can be defined in three eras, each representing another significant development in removing barriers to liquidity and making the markets more attractive and efficient to participants. DeFi 1.0 — Cracking the chicken and egg problem DeFi protocols existed prior to 2020, but ...
ETH gas price surges as Yuga Labs cashes in $300M selling Otherside NFTs
While the community was witness to the largest NFT mint yet, Ethereum (ETH) gas prices rose to unprecedented levels, in addition to users experiencing failed transactions due to blockchain bottlenecks. Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs launched a sale of Otherdeed non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that represents digital land deeds on their new venture, the Otherside metaverse. With each piece of land selling at 305 ApeCoin (APE) or nearly $5,800 at the time of the sale, Yuga Labs made $319 million after 55,000 NFTs sold out almost instantly. The Otherdeed NFT mint is sold out – we are awestruck at the demand shown tonight. Apes and Mutants, the opening of the 21-day claim period is being delayed until the price of gas drops to reasonable levels. We’ll tweet when the claim opens. https...
Price analysis 4/29: BTC, ETH, BNB, SOL, LUNA, XRP, ADA, DOGE, AVAX, DOT
The U.S. dollar index (DXY) turned down from its 20-year high on April 29 but that has not changed the bearish price action seen in Bitcoin (BTC) and the U.S. equity markets. Equities remain under pressure and this week, Amazon stock saw its biggest intraday drop since 2014 after uncertainty over the U.S. Federal Reserve’s tightening measures placed investor sentiment back into choppy waters. If Bitcoin extends its correction, on-chain analysis platform Whalemap believes that the $25,000 to $27,000 zone may be the best place “to go all-in” on Bitcoin. Long-term investors do not appear to be panicking over the current weakness in Bitcoin and on-chain data from CryptoQuant shows that the combined BTC reserves of 21 crypto exchanges has plummeted to levels not seen since September 2...
Finance Redefined: Samson Mow’s DeFi question, Fireblocks expands to institutional and more
The week was filled with several new project developments and key updates from leading decentralized applications (DApps) and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Fireblocks has expanded its institutional access to Terra’s DeFi ecosystem and Solana partnered with the Notifi network to improve the abysmal participation rates in governance votes. We will also look into the Cointelegraph research into the Terra ecosystem’s future and see if it can sustain the current growth. Samson Mow, the former executive at Blockstream, questions the decentralized aspect of the DeFi ecosystem. Top DeFi tokens saw another week of bearish price action despite several new developments and barring a few, the majority of the tokens in the top-100 registered double-digit losses over the past week. Fireblocks ...
