Layoffs, Hiring Freezes, Offers Rescinded

June 6, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️

• Coinbase rescinds job offers and extends hiring freeze.

• BItso, a Latin-American exchange, and Gemini reduce workforceas well.

• New York State Senate passes moratorium on new proof of work mining using carbon-based energy

• Messari wins $12.5 million developer grant from The Graph Foundation to expand its resources and support the network in its mission of achieving open data.

• DDoS attacker hits Stepn; since the attack, floor price has fallen by more than 15%.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

• Central African Republic intends to tokenize national resources.

• Middle East oil producers move into bitcoin mining with investments in Crusoe Energy.

• Interest in crypto SPACs expected to fall on back of Forbes withdrawal from Binance deal last week.

The $$$ Corner…

• Bill Qian, former head of Binance Labs, left the firm after it raised $500 million.

• Cryptocurrency mining service provider OBM secured a $3 million seed round.

• The Red Village, a play-and-earn game maker, garnered $6 million.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Yuga Labs’s Discord Hacked

On June 4th, last Friday, the Discord server of Yuga Labs was subject to an alleged hack. A participant obtained the login credentials of a senior community manager and absconded with keys related to “approximately” 32 NFTs including one BAYC NFT and two mutant varietals, according to crypto security research firm PeckShield. The attack was first publicized by Twitter user @NFTherder. The value of assets stolen totaled $360,000, according to Mashable.

Yuga did not confirm the hack until 11 hours after the initial tweet from @NFTherder.

This was the second time in less than ten months that Yuga Labs has been compromised. On April 26th, 2022, Yuga disclosed a $2.6 million loss in a phishing attack related to an intruder accessing its Instagram account.

When BAYC founder “Gordon Goner” responded to the incident, he blamed Discord, saying, “Discord isn’t working for Web 3 communities. We need a better platform that puts security first.”

However Steve Fink of NounsDAO tweeted that it’s users’ faults for clicking on phishing links: “you didn’t lose your NFT because you used Discord. [Y]ou lost your NFT because you signed a malicious transaction with your key.”

Yuga Labs recently raised $450 million in venture funding in a seed round entailing a “monster” valuation. As of this writing, Yuga Labs’s ApeCoin token price, as well as the floor price of its BAYC NFT collection, have been almost unchanged since the attack on Friday.

Recommended Reads

1. 1. Nic Carter, Ross Stevens, and Allen Farrington on Terra and DeFi:

   

   2. a16z on the value of metaverse land:

   

   3. Tim Swanson on web3 critics:

   

On The Pod…

DOJ Is Going After a Former OpenSea Employee for Insider Trading

Jason Gottlieb, a crypto attorney and partner at Morrison Cohen, discusses the insider trading case being built by the US Department of Justice against former OpenSea employee Nathaniel Chastain. Show topics:

• why Nathaniel is being charged with wire fraud and money laundering instead of insider trading

• what makes NFT insider trading different from usual insider trading indictments

• why an employee’s “duty of confidentiality” can be important when building an insider trading case

• whether the money laundering charge makes sense

• whether moving money between self-custodied wallets constitutes money laundering

• why Jason does not think this particular case will have widespread implications for the NFT and crypto space

• Jason’s advice for employees at crypto exchanges and companies who may be tempted to trade on private information

• what happens next in the Chastain case

• why the potential sentences are so long – 20 years for each charge

• how likely it is that Chastain has to serve jail time

Book Update

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