December 20, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • The Uniswap community voted to launch on Polygon.

  • Polkadot’s parachains are now live.

  • 83% of millennial millionaires own cryptocurrency.

  • FSOC is ready to take steps to mitigate stablecoin risk if Congress does not.

  • Kraken plans to release an NFT platform soon.

  • Multiple big-name DeFi players proposed that Yearn Finance tweak its tokenomics.

  • The SEC extended its decision on Grayscale’s and Bitwise’s bitcoin ETF proposals.

  • Justin Sun is stepping down from his role as CEO of the Tron Foundation to join the Grenada government.

  • Adidas Originals made $23 million in ETH during its first NFT drop.

  • Polygon and Seven Seven Six, the venture firm of Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, has pledged $200 million to develop gaming on Polygon.

  • EduDAO was recently launched with plans to help fund crypto R&D for college students.

  • MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor is interested in earning yield on BTC.

  • RadioShack is going DeFi (lol) 

  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, a forthcoming PC and Xbox video game, is dropping plans to integrate NFTs into gameplay after facing backlash from its community.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Another $30 Million Lost to the Ether

On Saturday, Grim Finance, a DeFi protocol built on Fantom that specializes in optimizing compound yield, announced that its smart contracts had been hacked and that the attacker’s address had “been identified with over 30 million dollars worth of theft.”

According to details from Fantom’s block explorer, FTMScan, the hacker initiated the smart contract to begin its attack at roughly 1:30 pm ET. Seventy-eight transactions later, the exploit was completed. Grim Finance’s team described the event as an “advanced attack” that targeted “re-entrancy loops.” (read here for more information on how the re-entrancy loop was exploited.)

As of Saturday night, Grim thought that all value locked into its protocol was at risk. “The exploit was found in the vault contract so all of the vaults and deposited funds are currently at risk,” explained the protocol on Twitter. “We have contacted and notified Circle (USDC),  DAI, and AnySwap regarding the attacker address to potentially freeze any further fund transfers.”

Data from Rekt, a crypto hack compiler, shows that this is the sixth DeFi hack of December – and it is barely even halfway through the month. As covered on Friday’s Unconfirmed episode, crypto hacks have been quite a trend this year, with Elliptic estimating in November that over $10 billion in value being lost to attacks in the last 12 months (which is almost equal to .5% of the entire market capitalization of the crypto industry). On top of that, a December report from Chainalysis estimated that $7.7 billion has been lost to crypto scams in 2021. This marks an 81% increase in scams compared to 2020.

Recommended Reads

  • Messari’s Chase Devens on stablecoins:

  • Pally.gg’S Montana Wong on the Adidas NFT drop:

  • Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on governance:

On The Pod…

$12 Billion Has Been Lost in DeFi Value to Crime. Here’s How

Jess Symington, research lead at Elliptic, a blockchain forensics company, discusses the massive upswing in DeFi hacks during 2021, resulting in over $10 billion of DeFi value lost. Show topics:

  • the state of crime in DeFi

  • how much value has been lost to exploits

  • whether the majority of hacks are the result of user or developer error

  • the various types of exploits

  • how to confirm when a project did, in fact, rug pull

  • which blockchains are most susceptible to having exploits

  • what has been happening recently in ransomware

  • how DeFi hackers cash out

  • why ransomware attackers, who usually request payment in Bitcoin, have a tougher time cashing out than DeFi hackers

  • whether hackers trend towards a specific profile/demographics

  • how easy it is for law enforcement to find hackers

  • whether blockchain’s transparency is proving to be a helpful tool for regulators

  • Jess’s advice on how to prevent hacks for both protocols and users

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, is now available for pre-order now.

The book, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, comes out Feb. 22. Pre-order it today!

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