February 21, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

• Nexo, a crypto lender, has stopped paying interest on new deposits from US customers.

• The Fed approved a rule restricting officials from owning individual stocks, bonds, crypto, and other assets.

• A judge ordered Terraform Labs to comply with SEC subpoenas.

• Coinbase rewarded a researcher $250,000 for discovering a bug that might have been “market-nuking.”

• Former Presidential candidate Andrew Yang launchedLobby3, a DAO focused on creating a crypto lobbying push in Washington.

• In light of the Canada protests, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell told users concerned about government seizure to move their funds off crypto exchanges (including Kraken).

Today in Crypto Adoption…

• Senator Cynthia Lummis thinks it would be a “great idea” for the Federal Reserve to add BTC to its balance sheet.

• Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, said the state will accept crypto for taxes in fees by this summer.

The $$$ Corner…

• Helium raised $200 million in a Series D valuing the network at $1.2 billion.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

OpenSea Was Hacked – But Not Really

Late Saturday night, reports surfaced that NFTs on OpenSea were being transferred from addresses without the owners’ permission in what appears to be a phishing scam.

“It appears 32 users thus far have signed a malicious payload from an attacker, and some of their NFTs were stolen,” wroteOpenSea CEO Devin Finzer. “We have confidence that this was a phishing attack,” he added. “We don’t know where the phishing occurred, but we’ve been able to rule out a number of things based on our conversations with the 32 affected users.”

According to Finzer, the attack did not occur on any OpenSea-related website, smart contract, or email.

The hacker was able to steal quite a few valuable NFTs, including…

• 17 Azuki NFTs (price floor = 13.64 ETH)

• 3 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs (floor price = 93 ETH)

• 1 Doodle NFT (price floor = 12.8 ETH)

OpenSea CTO Nadav Hollander, in a tweet thread recapping the phishing scam, explained the scam was most likely a “targeted attack as opposed to a systemic issue.” He believes that the phishing scam originated from off-chain messages (i.e., signing a message to join a whitelist, raffle, or token gated Discord group). Hollander also noted that OpenSea would be helping victims of the attack, even though it stemmed from outside the NFT marketplace.

Punk6529, a noted NFT influencer, and threadooor, recommended that users revoke all permissions to OpenSea. “If you are concerned, the safest thing to do to revoke permissions to opensea for valuable NFTs in your wallet here: revoke dot cash (this will cost gas).”

Recommended Reads

1. NYT’s Nathaniel Popper on how he fell down the NFT rabbit hole:

2. Galaxy Digital on Avalanche:

3. @gonbegood on whether stolen BAYC NFTs still belong to the original owner or not:

On The Pod…

Congressman Ro Khanna: How to Get More Democrats into Web3

Congressman Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, discusses crypto and decentralization, his new book, Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us, and how to regulate the crypto industry. Show highlights:

• what Silicon Valley had to do with Congressman Khanna’s journey down the crypto rabbit hole

• why Congressman Khanna is so passionate about decentralization

• why Congressman Khanna thinks crypto could bring tech jobs across the country and world (rather than staying in hubs like Silicon Valley)

• why Congressman Khanna thinks a new regulatory regime is necessary for crypto assets, like stablecoins

• what Congressman Khanna would like vocal crypto opponents like Congressman Brad Sherman or Senator Elizabeth Warren to know about the crypto space

• Congressman Khanna explains the difference between determining if an asset is a security and regulating an asset

• what Congressman Khanna is doing to bring predictability to crypto regulation

• how regulators could incentivize Bitcoin miners to use less energy

• what Congressman Khanna thinks about know-your-customer/anti-money-laundering mechanisms in the DeFi world

• how Congressman Khanna believes crypto taxes should be treated

• what actions Congressman Khanna recommends for bringing more Democrats to the crypto side

• whether Congressman Khanna thinks crypto is a bipartisan issue

Book Update

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