April 29, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

• Telegram users can now purchase crypto in its messaging app.

• Former JPMorgan crypto exec Christine Moy is joiningApollo, an investment firm with over $450 billion in assets.

• Aave founder Stani Kulechov’s Twitter account was suspended (and then reinstated) after joking about being hired as the next Twitter CEO.

• DeGods, a Solana NFT project, is purchasing an ownership stake in a team in the Ice Cube-led BIG3 league.

• Pyth Network, an oracle service on Solana, has now been added as support by seven infrastructure firms.

• Coinbase listed Binance’s stablecoin on its exchange.

• Hashflow, a DeFi trading platform, introduced bridgeless cross-chain swaps.

• Ethereum Name Service NFTs overtook Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs by daily volume yesterday.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

• PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said that the firm needs to “double down” on digital wallets because that is “where the future of the industry is going” and the future of PayPal lies.

• Oklahoma’s lower chamber of its state legislature approved a bitcoin mining-focused bill that would provide tax incentives to miners.

• Ukraine launched a website where users can donate and buy NFTs.

The $$$ Corner…

• Finland will be cashing out $77 million in BTC to euros via Tesseract and Coinmotion and plans to donate the proceeds to Ukraine.

• Crypto wallet Argent raised $40 million in a Series B.

• Crypto wallet Venly raised $23 million in a Series A.

• OurSong, a music NFT platform, raised $7.5 million in seed funding.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Deus Hack 2.0

Deus Finance, a multichain DeFi platform, was exploited yesterday, with the hacker getting away with $13.4 million.

Based on the trail of information left in FTMscan, the attack was rather complex, as the hacker bundled 77 token transfers into a single transaction that involved one flash loan worth $143 million.

According to @lafachief, a developer for Deus Finance, the hacker was able to pull off the attack by manipulating the price of MUON, a token on Fantom, via a specialized flash loan attack that targeted MUON’s reliance on a single DEX to trade. Once MUON was sufficiently inflated, the attacker used the tokens as collateral to take out a flash loan and cashed out roughly $13.4 million.

Peckshield, a crypto-security firm, noted that the attack structure was almost exactly the same as a $3 million exploit that occurred on Deus in March.

It does not appear that any retail users lost money. “No user lost any money, the loss is on the protocol. Which we will cover through our veDEUS going forward. We are working together with Teams from CEXs and other agencies to recover the funds,” wrote @lalachief on Twitter. That being said, total-value-locked into the platform has nearly halved overnight – dropping from $60 million $36 million in less than 24 hours. DEUS, the governance token of the platform, was down 15% yesterday. DEI, the dollar-based stablecoin native to DEUS, briefly de-pegged under $.97, but has since bounced back to $.99.

Recommended Reads

1. Variant Fund on the ownership economy:

2. officercia.eth on the key principles of storing crypto:

3. CoinShares on why the Ethereum merge is going slower than anticipated:

On The Pod…

FTX Wants to Compete With CME — Here’s Why It’s a Big Deal

Chris Perkins, president of CoinFund, a web3 investment firm, discusses his experience at the Crypto Bahamas conference before diving into an FTX.US proposal that would allow for direct trading of crypto derivatives in the US – which appears to be rocking the boat of certain regulators in D.C. Show topics:

• Chris’s two biggest takeaways from his Crypto Bahamas experience

• how Chris’s experience at Lehman Brothers and Citi prepared him for crypto

• what issues arise via the plumbing of traditional financial markets

• why centralized intermediaries make derivatives trading efficient

• what FTX.US is proposing and how it could be a boon for retail traders

• how crypto settlement would work compared to the current batch trading method

• why the acquisition of LedgerX enabled FTX.US to make this proposal

• what license FTX.US feels like it no longer needs since it can settle derivative transactions on a blockchain

• whether FTX.US would expand to other derivatives and what that might do to an entity like CME

• what Chris is listening for in the CFTC’s public discussion surrounding FTX.US’s proposal

• whether FTX.US’s proposal will be a partisan issue

Book Update

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