April 18, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Uniswap is looking to grow via code that embeds its trading capabilities in websites.

  • Michael Bar, a former advisor to Ripple, is president Joe Biden’s nomination to be the Federal Reserve’s next vice chair of supervision.

  • Tornado Cash, the Ethereum transaction mixer, is now blocking sanctioned addresses from its front end.

  • Monero enthusiasts are planning a ‘bank run’ on April 18th to test whether exchanges hold as much of the coin as they say.

  • Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev thinks Dogecoin needs biggerblocks.

  • A sanctioned wallet connected to North Korea and the $600 million Ronin hack has continued to launder money.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

  • Warner Music has partnered with POAP for future event NFTs.

  • Portugal granted Bison Bank the country’s first crypto license.

  • Despite an announcement at Bitcoin 2022, Madeira, a region of Portugal, will not be making BTC legal tender.

  • The NBA launched an NFT-focused Twitter feed.

  • Louis Vuitton released a new collection of NFTs.

The $$$ Corner…

  • Fasset, a digital asset marketplace, raised $22 million in a Series A.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

A Not So Happy Easter for Beanstalk

Beanstalk, a stablecoin-based project on Ethereum, suffered an exploit of $182 million on Sunday morning. The attacker, according to calculations from The Block’s Igor Igamberdiev, was able to get away with roughly $76 million in assets.

The exploit was carried out via a flash loan attack – where someone takes out a loan on a blockchain and repays it in the same transaction.

In this instance, as explained by Kelvin Fichter on Twitter, the attacker was able to borrow $1 billion over the course of a single transaction, which was then used to purchase BEAN tokens. From there, the hacker was able to transform their BEANS tokens into “Seeds,” the on-chain asset that powers the governance system of Beanstalk. Fichter reports that the attacker was able to gain 70% of all voting power of Beanstalk, which, with a 66% minimum required threshold for emergency governance proposals to pass, means the attacker effectively took control of Beanstalk.

Here’s the TL;DR in a meme (courtesy of Mudit Gupta):

 

 

Once the attacker took control of Beanstalk, they were able to drain the treasury and then pay back the original loan.

As of writing time, the Beanstalk team is investigating the attack and has taken measures to stop the attacker from cashing out. On Discord, the team announced they had turned governance off, which will prevent the attacker from being able to do anything else, and has paused the dApp. In addition, on Twitter, the team wrote: “We’re engaging all efforts to try to move forward. As a decentralized project, we are asking the DeFi community and experts in chain analytics to help us limit the exploiter’s ability to withdraw funds via CEXes. If the exploiter is open to a discussion, we are as well.”

Beanstalk currently has $43.62 locked into its protocol.

Recommended Reads

  1. @pseudoetheos on rollups:

  1. @matthew_d_green on defending smart contracts:

  1. @VirtualKenji on becoming an on-chain sleuth:

On The Pod…

Why Ethereum’s Merge Was Delayed and Why It Won’t Reduce Gas Fees Much

 

 

Tim Beiko, the Ethereum Foundation coordinator for core developers, discusses his recent estimation that Ethereum’s merge, where the network transitions from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, will be delayed until the second half of 2022. Show topics:

  • what the Ethereum merge is

  • why an upcoming difficulty bomb could force developers to delay the merge

  • what shadow forks are and how they affect the decision to go forward with the merge

  • how network difficulty is used in Ethereum to keep a balance between the blockchain and miners

  • Tim’s (purposefully vague) timeline for the merge

  • how the merge could increase Ethereum’s throughput by 9% – and thus potentially reduce gas fees slightly

  • how the Ethereum Foundation plans to address gas fees and scaling issues post-merge

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: http://bit.ly/cryptopians