9:30am, Weds 12th Oct 2022, Draper Startup House My Khe Beach, Danang, Vietnam
Key Words: Bored Ape and Binance Hacks, Deflationary ETH, the challenging macro, Metaverse University, Dumping Ethereum PoW tokens
Contents
-
Introductions and discussion requests
-
7 Bored Apes stolen
-
First Ethereum deflationary week under PoS
-
Binance Bridge hacked for $560M
-
Demo: Hash functions
-
Dumping tokens such as USDCW on Ethereum PoW
-
NFT bridging
-
The Macro
-
POAP claim
-
NFT course in the Metaverse with University of Nicosia
-
Mirror
-
Glossary
Introductions and discussion requests
Most of this week’s content was not planned in advance, but came from requests from group members present. This group is a great place to come along and ask questions!
7 Bored Apes stolen
7 Bored Apes were stolen from a hardware wallet recently. This was possible because the user signed setApprovalForAll (a standard NFT smart contract call) to a fraudulent website:
First Ethereum deflationary week under PoS
Ethereum has had a deflationary week! Base fee has increased from around 5-10 gwei (inflationary) to over 20 gwei (deflationary – cutoff is 15.3 gwei). This is because a project called “Xen Crypto” is causing a lot of transactions on mainnet – people are minting coins for free, and paying gas to do so. Xen Crypto is likely a Ponzi scheme, time will tell.
Binance Bridge hacked for $560M
Binance Bridge has been hacked for 2 million BNB, which is over 560 million USD! This was due to a hack in the Binance Bridge, where a bug in the code was exploited to convince the bridge to send 1 million BNB twice. The centralised Binance Smart Chain (BSC) was taken down for a period of time to prevent the attacker converting their ill-gotten loot into decentralised currency such as ETH on Ethereum, which cannot be stopped or taken down.
Demo: Hash functions
The Binance Bridge hack was possible due to a bug in how the bridge handled data hashing. We discussed hash functions, and how changing even the slightest bit of data in a string will completely change the hashed string. We tested this out here:
Dumping tokens such as USDCW on Ethereum PoW
We discussed dumping ETHW (which is ETH on Ethereum PoW chain) by sending it to centralised exchanges, or using the “pow.dump.today” site. We also discussed how to exchange USDCW (USDC on the worthless PoW chain) for ETHW, using the Uniswap V2 contract on the PoW chain here:
Here we can see 1,485,801,184 USDCW and 950 WETHW, so it should be possible to exchange 1,564,000 USDCW for 1 WETHW, currently worth $8. The WETHW can be unwrapped to ETHW, and then sent to a centralised exchange for sale to ETH.
To perform the swap: go to Contract, then Write Contract, then Connect to Web3, then use swap function on smart contract. Homework is to work out the correct inputs!
This technique can be used to dump any worthless ETHPoW tokens using any remaining liquidity. Each tokens has a Uniswap V2 pool on ETHPoW which has the same contract address as the one on Ethereum mainnet. Other swappers such as Sushiswap can also be used.
NFT bridging
We had a question about how to transfer NFTs between Ethereum and its Layer 2 rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum, etc). Native bridges don’t seem to support NFTs yet. We expect the NFT infrastructure to be built in the next 6-18 months for this, currently Ethereum mainnet still has a lot more liquidity for buying NFTs, so may still be the best place to go. However now OpenSea supports Optimism and Arbitrum, this may change soon!
The Macro
We talked about the macro-economic environment in the world today.
Summary: it is bad!
-
10% Inflation (approx)
-
Fertilisers – can’t be shipped from Russia and Ukraine
-
Gives rise to food insecurity – hunger in poorer countries
-
Protectionism – countries preventing exporting of products
-
High oil prices
-
On the bright side, Vietnam appears to be self-sufficient for food, and is also attracting manufacturing business away from China
USD is very strong at the moment, but with 10% inflation, how long can that last? How long can countries keep the money printer off? UK recently had Bank of England support bond buying again to prevent pension funds from being liquidated (in direct opposition to the new government policy of tax cuts!) – there is only so much pain the macro can take before governments use their fiat currencies to support the markets again – after that happens hard assets such as ETH should do better. (Not financial advice!)
POAP claim
Claim a free NFT on the Gnosis chain for attending this event. You can also download the POAP app for your phone. Here is a demo claim link:
NFT course in the Metaverse with University of Nicosia
It is now possible to study a course on NFTs in the metaverse! All components of the course are NFTs, including the course pass, the course materials, and the credential at the end.
Mirror
Each week we publish the meeting notes in a web3 native way using Mirror. Here are those notes. I hope you enjoy!
Glossary
DeFi – Decentralised Finance, finance on a blockchain
POAP – Proof Of Attendance Protocol, free NFT for attending an event
PoS – Proof of Stake
PoW – Proof of Work
Block Time – the average length of time between consecutive blocks in a blockchain. Blocks are what holds user transactions.
