Hello and welcome to FINX’s monthly newsletter. In our monthly newsletter, we cover the news and developments in the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. As we bid farewell to August, here are some highlights of events that happened in the DeFi Industry worth noting.
Major Hacks on Several Platforms Including Solana, Nomad Bridge and General Bytes
At the very start of August, crypto users were shocked by the news of over $5.2 million in digital coins including Solana's sol token and USD Coin (USDC) were stolen across 8000 digital wallets. While the attack was linked to vulnerabilities found in several Slope wallets, the hack remains under investigation with Solana struggling to recover its price after the attack.
Separately, Hackers returned $9 Million of the $190Million stolen from Nomad Bridge, a popular cross-chain bridge for sending tokens between Ethereum, Avalanche, Evmos, Milkomeda C1, and Moonbeam networks. Taking a proactive approach and appointing Crypto custodian Anchorage Digital to safeguard the returned assets, Nomad Bridge ultimately managed to recover over USD36Million after announcing that up to 10% bounty was available and that those who return at least 90% of stolen funds would be considered white hat hackers and Nomad won’t pursue legal actions against them.
Nomad team said a bug “caused the Replica contract to fail to authenticate messages properly,” allowing everyone to join the attack by copy-pasting the initial hack transaction, which was akin to a “decentralized robbery.”
The August hacking spree was far from over as General Bytes became the latest victim with its Bitcoins ATMs operating across 120 countries reported being vulnerable to hackers. To prevent more damage, the Czech Republic-based company has advised users against using its ATMs until system updates were installed and the ATMs can be guaranteed safe again.
Tornado Cash Sanctioned by The US Government
Crypto-mixing services, Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the US Government for its role in laundering more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency since its creation in 2019.
The department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also added Tornado Cash to its specially designated nationals list, along with 38 Ethereum addresses associated with allegedly illicit activities that employed the service. Apart from Ethereum, USDC stored in the wallet, associated with Circle Internet Financial, and Tether was also highlighted. However, while Circle has taken a proactive approach by blacklisting the related addresses, Tether has taken no action as it believes that it does not operate within U.S regulations.
“Unilaterally freezing secondary market addresses could be a highly disruptive and reckless move by Tether,” read the statement on their official blog post.
Ethereum Set Official Date for Merge
Ethereum finally set a date for its Bellatrix upgrade to officially kick off on the 6th of September, with the official completion date ranging between 10–20 September.
The merge focuses on the switch from the Proof-of-Work mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake mechanism which will reduce the amount of computing power for cryptocurrency minting and verification of transactions of crypto investors. Indirectly, the merger will also reduce energy consumption by around 99% in the crypto market.
The merge will be activated on the Beacon Chain as epoch 144896.
Beijing announces two-year Metaverse innovation and development plan
At the end of August, Beijing municipal announced its plan to develop its own Metaverse which will require would require all districts to adhere to the newly released Web3 innovation plan.
The plan will integrate technical approaches like 3D visualization and Geographical Information System (GIS) as well as build an urban space digital platform for the city. Based on the announcement, municipalities and districts will have to provide human and financial support in building a virtual reality as well as focus their effort on digital education.
Conclusion
August has seen a lot of vulnerabilities in Blockchain however, it has also shown how proactive Blockchain companies are at mitigating risk. While we’ve seen shocking news, August also brought interesting developments as can be seen with the Ethereum Merge and the creation of Metaverse sanctioned by the Beijing authorities.
At FINX, we believe that being in the know helps our users to make better choices when pursuing a new activity with their tokens or when taking part in a new Web3 project hence why we are dedicated to bringing monthly updates to our newsletter.
Let us know if there is any other news we should be covering and see you in the next monthly newsletter!