Ecosystem Update #8
Week ending 8 Oct 2022
Note: there won’t be an Ecosystem Update next week
Binance Smart Chain smart contract is exploited for $560m
On Thursday night, 2 million BNB (~$560m) was extracted from the BSC Token Hub. Samczsun explained the exploit in a tweet thread. At a high level, the exploit occurred due to a bug in the bridge that allowed the attacker to forge security proofs. Binance halted BSC immediately upon knowledge of this incident. By that time, the attacker had successfully siphoned ~$127m to other chains. What was left on BSC was frozen. The BNB token didn’t react too badly to the news, only dropping ~2%. It’s at times like these that I share one of my favorite memes:
Flashbots team responds to concerns about censorship resistance
The Flashbots team is in a bit of a pickle. Here’s the situation:
They are OFAC compliant
They are the best team at MEV, so currently 40% of block proposers use Flashbots (and that number is going up)
As Flashbots continues to denominate, there is a real threat to censorship resistance on Ethereum.
The current “solution” proposed by some of the team is to continue to open-source more and more of their code, but it will “take years”
Stephane Gosselin, one of the co-founders of Flashbots, announced his resignation yesterday, related to all of this.
NFT news
Warner Music Group is actively hiring for a Senior Director of Metaverse Development.
MynaSwap, established by the team behind the famous Coolkicks sneaker chain, announced a $6m raise. They are trying to do a trading and vaulting platform for physical collectibles, such as sneakers, sports cards and watches. They will go live on Avalanche, after an investment from the Avalanche ecosystem fund. To sell a physical item, you will send it to their physical vault, and they will issue a token to you.
Hugo Boss is launching a “360-degree metaverse experience.” AKA, they are launching an NFT collection with 1,001 NFTs.
The OpenSea CFO has left after less than one year at the job.
DeFi news
MakerDAO will diversify $500m of their treasury into US Treasuries and Corporate Bonds, once again raising questions as to how censorship resistant DeFi truly is.
The AAVE community is debating whether to launch v3 as an upgrade to v2, or as a separate app. If it’s a separate app, liquidity may be fragmented between the two versions.
Lido is allocating 150k LDO tokens to incentivize bridging Lido to Optimism and Arbitrum.
Sushi DAO votes Jared Grey as their new CEO (“Head Chef”)
GoldenTree announced a $5.3m stake in Sushi.
DeBridge has announced deSwap Liquidity Network (DLN).
Funding news
Tiger Global is trying to raise a $6b tech fund.
Horizon Blockchain Games raised $40m from Brevan Howard and others to build out their NFT platform and their dev platform.
Bessemer VC is setting up a DAO, where approved scouts can propose deals, and put them on chain for a vote. They committed to $250m in crypto investments earlier this year, and they see this as an opportunity to expand their reach.
Stems raises $4 million to do Music NFTs on Polygon.
Golden, a team building a decentralized canonical knowledge graph on the blockchain, raised $40m with a16z leading.
Exponential has raised $14 million in a seed round led by Paradigm. They’re building a platform to make investing in DeFi easy. Read their blog post here.
Other news
Celsius has provided all deposits and withdrawals of users in a public, 15,000 page legal filing. One revelation of that document is that Alex Mashinsky, the former Celsius CEO, managed to withdraw $10m of funds outside of Celsius in the weeks leading up to their insolvency. Their other co-founder, Daniel Leon, stepped down this week.
Despite the 70% drawdown in price, Bitcoin mining hashrate is at an all-time high, and continues to climb, as the latest generation of mining machines comes online. Mining is now at its lowest levels of profitability ever, and there is an open question as to whether some leveraged miners are in trouble now.
ZCash is being clogged up with spam attacks. Because the blockchain uses privacy-preserving ZK-SNARKs, users can submit shielded transactions with dozens of outputs, for negligible fees. The size of the chain has grown threefold to 100 GB in the past 3 months.
South Korea has ordered Do Kwon to return his passport.
The 3AC liquidator has transferred 300 NFTs, which they will start to sell.
Kim Kardashian was sued by the SEC for pumping a token called EthereumMax. Gary Gensler seemed to make a big deal out of this, apparently to the ire of internal employees at the SEC, who are wondering why this case deserves so much publicity.
Jon Cheesman has quietly left FTX, after heading up their OTC and Institutional sales team for just over a year.
Liam Zebedee, someone quite active in the StarkNet community, has released DappNet, which uses ENS and IPFS to bypass OFAC sanctions of websites like Tornado Cash.
Mt Gox payouts won’t be happening until at least January next year.