This week in crypto was a little more quiet than usual. While fungible markets seem to regain some ground and NFTs fueled by peak mania, the rest of the industry have found themselves torn between ETHDenver and the Superbowl. Nevertheless, this week saw one of the biggest Exchange hacks being solved as well as more big announcements and impressive numbers from some of the most important players in the space.
Metamask merge with MyCrypto
After lots of speculation, the NY-based Ethereum Titan ConsenSys is looking to acquire the Ethereum Wallet MyCrypto. The 12 people team behind MyCrypto will be integrated into ConsenSys and will work alongside the Metamask team to scale the biggest Crypto Wallet.
User safety and product security are hallmarks to both MetaMask and MyCrypto, said Taylor Monahan, founder and CEO of MyCrypto, speaking with CoinDesk. Security, she said, is of increasing importance as the ecosystem grows and a more diverse range of people enter the crypto space. “We want to make sure that everyone has a good experience with cryptocurrency. Namely, not losing all of their crypto."
Led by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based ConsenSys is a titan in the Ethereum ecosystem, having developed a blockchain product suite that includes Diligence for smart contract audits and security, blockchain for business protocol Quorum and developer toolkit Truffle.
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$4.5 Billion Bitfinex hackers caught
The breaking news of the week was most definitely the capture of two hackers who were supposedly involved with the notorious 2016 Bitfinex, in which the hackers managed to steal the equivalent to $4.5 Billion USD (today) from the Exchange. Apparently, the hackers made no sophisticated efforts to hide or secure the stolen Bitcoin and used a CEX under their real name to store them. Authorities were able to retrieve 3.6 of the 4.5 billion USD from the hackers.
Two individuals were arrested this morning in Manhattan for an alleged conspiracy to launder cryptocurrency that was stolen during the 2016 hack of Bitfinex, a virtual currency exchange, presently valued at approximately $4.5 billion. Thus far, law enforcement has seized over $3.6 billion in cryptocurrency linked to that hack.
According to court documents, Lichtenstein and Morgan allegedly conspired to launder the proceeds of 119,754 bitcoin that were stolen from Bitfinex’s platform after a hacker breached Bitfinex’s systems and initiated more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions. Those unauthorized transactions sent the stolen bitcoin to a digital wallet under Lichtenstein’s control. Over the last five years, approximately 25,000 of those stolen bitcoin were transferred out of Lichtenstein’s wallet via a complicated money laundering process that ended with some of the stolen funds being deposited into financial accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan. The remainder of the stolen funds, comprising more than 94,000 bitcoin, remained in the wallet used to receive and store the illegal proceeds from the hack. After the execution of court-authorized search warrants of online accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan, special agents obtained access to files within an online account controlled by Lichtenstein. Those files contained the private keys required to access the digital wallet that directly received the funds stolen from Bitfinex, and allowed special agents to lawfully seize and recover more than 94,000 bitcoin that had been stolen from Bitfinex. The recovered bitcoin was valued at over $3.6 billion at the time of seizure.
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Aave’s Lens Protocol
Decentralised Finance (DeFi) project Aave has announced the launch of Lens Protocol, a decentralized social media (DeSo) platform on Polygon in a bid to expand its operations and explore new opportunities. The company aims to create a self-sustaining economy that has an equitable relationship with its users. The open-source "Web3, smart contracts-based social graph" is based on an ecosystem of dynamic non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and is named after 'lens culinaris', a plant that has a symbiotic interaction with soil microorganisms.
Users can create NFT-based profiles, which will have a history of all posts and comments as well as other content that you will generate while following on the platform and being represented by NFTs. The users will own their own data on Lens while other applications can plug into the open social graph.
Lens Protocol will also explore ideas that include DAO profiles and social-based verification as per the website. AAVE's move into social media has been planned for a while now and the founder and CEO Stani Kulechov revealed that the DeFi giant is planning an alternative to Twitter. The initial plan was for the platform to launch on Ethereum, but the launch shows that Lens protocol was built on Layer 2 scaling solution Polygon.
Punk #5822 sold for 8000 ETH
To close this week’s Weekly up we wanna talk about the record-breaking sale of Punk #5822 for 8.000 Ether. The Punk was acquired by Deepak Thapliyal CEO of Chain Protocol, who made waves yesterday with the purchase of this beautiful CryptoPunk shattering records and buying the rare NFT for 8,000 ETH (or ~$23m USD).
This marks a new high for CryptoPunks and the NFT space in general. And while this is really exciting and crazy it should also remind everyone that the NFT market is experiencing volatility and mania as we’ve never seen before. Trades like these should remind investors that we are nearing peak NFT mania and that prices won’t stay as they are forever. So make sure you have conviction in all your projects, derisk if you need to, and don’t wait to take profits. The dip will come it’s as inevitable as the next mania cycle or the next record-breaking Punks sale.