December 30, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Coinone, a Korean crypto exchange, no longer allows users to withdraw to external wallets.

  • The number of non-zero ETH addresses crossed 71 million.

  • ProShares filed for an ETF to track metaverse companies.

  • Marathon, a BTC mining firm, has ordered nearly $900 million worth of new machines; DA Davidson pickedMarathon as the top mining investment for 2022.

  • Ready Player Me, an avatar platform, raised $13 million in a Series A.

  • A new token (GAS) was airdropped to anyone who had spent more than $1,559 on Ethereum gas fees in total before December 26, 2021.

  • Decentraland will be hosting a New Year’s Eve celebration in the metaverse.

  • Voyager Digital is being sued over allegedly misleading investors about trading fees.

  • Sperax, an Arbitrum-based stablecoin, raised money at a valuation of $200 million.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Polygon Almost Lost It All

Polygon, an Ethereum scaling solution, disclosed that over 90% of its native token, MATIC, had been at risk of being stolen earlier this month.

The issue arose from a “critical network vulnerability” found within the genesis block of Polygon. According to Immunefi, the company hosting Polygon’s bug bounty, the vulnerability left 9,276,584,332 MATIC available to steal – which is a truly astounding number when considering MATIC’s supply cap is 10,000,000.

A post-mortem from Polygon explains that the bug was fixed in a “silent patch” just two days after a white hat hacker reported the possibility of an exploit to Immunefi. “Considering the nature of this upgrade, it had to be executed without attracting too much attention,” wrote the Polygon team in an attempt to explain why it upgraded the network without announcing much information. Once the code to patch the bug was written, the validator and code community upgraded 80% of the Polygon network in under 24 hours to initiate the fix (without knowing much because of the “silent patch” decision).

The white hat hackers (a second white hat noticed the vulnerability shortly after the first) were paid a total of $3.46 million for their help – a small amount compared to the billions at stake (MATIC has a market cap of over $10 billion). That being said, before the bug could be fixed, one hacker was able to get away with 801,601 MATIC, of which the Polygon Foundation will bear the cost.

Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani concluded, “All projects that achieve any measure of success sooner or later find themselves in this situation. What’s important is that this was a test of our network’s resilience as well as our ability to act decisively under pressure. Considering how much was at stake, I believe our team has made the best decisions possible given the circumstances.”

Recommended Reads

  • @cobie on probabilistic thinking: https://cobie.substack.com/p/probabilistic-thinking
  • Jack Niewold, writer of the Crypto Pragmatist, on crypto narratives in 2022: https://twitter.com/JackNiewold/status/1475911658451185665
  • @shegenerates on DAOs: https://twitter.com/shegenerates/status/1476244606798999555

On The Pod…

Why NFT OG Mitchell Chan Has Released Just One Project This Year

Mitchell F. Chan, who released one of the first NFT projects on Ethereum back in 2017, discusses his projects, making art on a blockchain, how NFTs are transforming the traditional art world, and more. Show topics:

  • Mitchell’s art career before NFTs

  • how Mitchell was inspired by Yves Klein’s 1950’s work ‘Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility’

  • the story behind Mitchell’s OG NFT art project: ‘Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility’

  • what the traditional world thinks about NFTs

  • who is collecting NFT art

  • the story behind Mitchell’s 2021 NFT project: ‘LeWitt Generator Generator’

  • why Mitchell has not minted any more NFTs this year – even though the market has been on fire

  • whether Mitchell thinks NFTs are changing the art world (hint: he thinks yes)

  • NFTs and the financialization of art

  • why Mitchell can empathize with some of the backlash about NFTs coming from the traditional art and gaming industries

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, is now available for pre-order now.

The book, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, comes out Feb. 22. Pre-order it today!

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