October 31, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

What’s Poppin’?

What Are the Potential Impacts of Musk’s Twitter Purchase?

by Juan Aranovich

Last Friday, Elon Musk became the owner of Twitter for $44 billion, and he’s already started making big moves.

Vitalik Buterin Shares His Take on Crypto Regulation

by Samyuktha Sriram

Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin said he doesn’t buy into the idea of KYC on DeFi front ends because it will do little to prevent hackers from executing exploits.

​​‘Baby Alpha’ zkSync 2.0 Launches on Mainnet

by Samyuktha Sriram
Matter Labs’ zkSync “Baby Alpha” v2 is now live on the mainnet amid skepticism from competitors.

Huobi-Linked Stablecoin HUSD Falls to $0.68

by Samyuktha Sriram
The HUSD stablecoin continued to trade further below its dollar-peg after crypto exchange Huobi delisted the token on Friday.

‘Whitehat’ Hacker Returns $13.4M from Team Finance Exploit

by Samyuktha Sriram
Team Finance’s exploiter has now declared himself a “whitehat hacker” and returned $13.4 million worth of funds to affected crypto projects.

In Other News… ✍️✍️✍️

  • Terra cofounder Do Kwon is facing a $57 million lawsuit for allegedly making fraudulent claims on TerraUSD (UST).
  • The Blockchain Association, a crypto lobbyist group, filed an amicus brief supporting Ripple in its case against the SEC.
  • Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of FTX, will receive between $50 million and $100 million from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
  • The community of Cosmos will vote on proposed changes to its security and issuance model.
  • Matter Labs, the entity behind Ethereum layer 2 zkSync, is building a layer 3 called Opportunity to improve scalability.
  • Thorchain, a cross-chain swap protocol, resumed operations after halting the network for 20 hours.
  • FriesDAO was exploited for $2.3 million due to issues with Profanity addresses.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

  • Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck has plans to be listed on Nasdaq in July 2023.
  • El Salvador and the Swiss city of Lugano signed an agreement to foster Bitcoin adoption.

What Do You Meme?

Recommended Reads

  1. Vitalik Buterin on crypto regulation
  2. Bloomberg’s Hannah Miller on several ways in which Musk could bring more crypto into Twitter
  3. The Tie on real world assets

On The Pod…

Avraham Eisenberg, blogger at DeepFi Value – more commonly known as the Mango Markets attacker – shared his insights about the exploitation of code, his personal story, and why there’s hatred directed towards profitable traders. Show highlights:

  • Laura’s description of the Mango Markets exploit
  • the way in which code gets used in a different way from the original intention
  • why Avi decided to return part of the funds he got from exploiting Mango Markets
  • Avi’s clarification of a misconception regarding the bad debt of Mango Markets
  • the difference between arbitrage trades and exploits
  • why people making profitable strategies are hated, according to Avi
  • how Avi got into crypto and the story of his failed online business
  • whether it is possible to run non-zero-sum games
  • what he thinks of Compound’s decision to pause activity on illiquid assets

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, is now available!

You can purchase it here: https://amzn.to/3CvfrbE