February 3, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

• FTX has acquired Liquid, a Japanese crypto exchange.

• Thailand is canceling plans to implement a 15% tax on crypto gains.

• Ethereum was the most donated cryptocurrency in 2021 on The Giving Block.

• Crypto exchange Aurox rejected a private token sale and is set to go public.

• Solana Labs released Solana Pay, allowing merchants and consumers to easily use stablecoins as payment.

• RON, the governance token of Ronin, has slid 35% since it launched on the 27th.

• HitPiece, a music NFT platform, is being accused of selling music assets without artist permission.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

• Morgan Stanley says the metaverse is an $8 trillion industry – in China alone. 

• Neopets NFTs are facing harsh backlash from their fanbase.

• Institutions now make up 50% of Coinbase’s business.

• The Walking Dead will drop an NFT collection this month.

• Google is looking into how it can contribute to web3.

The $$$ Corner…

• Crypto data firm Dune Analytics raised $69,420,000 in a round valuing the company at $1 billion.

• Pixel Vault, a decentralized crypto media group, raised$100 million.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

The Second Largest Hack in DeFi History

Wormhole, a cross-chain bridge, was exploited yesterday for 120,000 wrapped ETH (wETH).

Wormhole is a trust-based bridge, meaning Wormhole locks assets into a contract on one chain and mints a wrapped version of the asset onto another chain. According to Paradigm researcher samczsun, the attacker was able to spoof a guardian signature and mint 120,000 ETH on Solana without having to bridge ETH in the first place. Essentially, a “guardian” is a node that signs off on transactions between chains. Simply put, by spoofing a guardian signature, the attacker was able to mint ETH on Solana out of thin air. Optimism’s Kelvin Fichter also came to the same conclusion.

With Ethereum hovering around $2,600, the exploit is worth over $300 million (which ranks as the second-largest hack in DeFi history, according to data from Rekt).

In the hours after the attack occurred, it appears the Wormhole team reached out to the hacker’s address to offer a $10 million white-hat bounty in exchange for returning the funds.

For now, the Wormhole front-end is temporarily unavailable. However, the Wormhole team announced that the vulnerability was patched at 7:41 p.m. ET last night.

The implications of the hack could be far reaching. According to Twitter user @tony_intern, it appears that the attacker was able to steal almost all of the Wormhole wETH, which accounts for 20% of the $1.6 billion in wETH locked into Solana. Essentially, any wETH on Solana that was moved over via Wormhole is worth nothing until Wormhole adds enough ETH to back them all up (as it said it would in the first tweet in this section) – which could wreak havoc on DeFi protocols using wETH.

Recommended Reads

1. Vitalik Buterin on why multichain and cross-chain are not the same thing:

2. Compass Mining’s Will Foxley on a $50 million dispute between Joe Lubin and Kavita Gupta:

3. Travis Kling on the biggest crypto news from January:

On The Pod…

How NFT DAOs Could Shape the Next Blockbuster, Fund Poetry and Change VC

Dapper Collectives CEO and Friends With Benefits founder Trevor McFedries joins Unchained to discuss social tokens, NFTs, the creator economy, $FWB, VC snacks, DAOs, Cooper Turley, and more. Show highlights:

• Trevor’s past, which includes a top 10 album, working at Spotify, founding Brud, creating Lil Miquela, and, of course, falling down the crypto rabbit hole

• what Trevor’s vision for Dapper Collectives is

• what type of activities DAOs will facilitate in the future

• why Trevor is so excited to be working with Dapper Labs and Flow

• what Friends With Benefits is and how the $FWB token works

• what sort of tokens make up the Friends With Benefits treasury

• why venture capitalists who want to be involved with Friends With Benefits need to have a good snack game

• why Trevor is not worried about $FWB becoming a security

• what plans Friends With Benefits has in store for 2022

• Trevor’s response to Friends With Benefits suspending co-founder Cooper Turley regarding 10-year old racist and homophobic tweets

• what can be done to onboard a more diverse demographic to crypto

• how Trevor defines the passion/creator economy

• what Trevor is looking forward to in 2022 regarding NFTs, DAOs, and social tokens

Book Update

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians