rmrk

ALT Euler Finance cofounder loses private key and, with it, $3.8 million As Euler Finance tried to recover from a massive hack in March 2023, and as founder co-founder Michael Bentley was dealing with matters in his personal life, he "made an error and it turns out that one of the private keys [to his personal crypto wallet] is no longer recoverable". The private key would have allowed him to recover assets from his hardware wallet, which had made his assets inaccessible after a malfunction. With the malfunctioning hardware wallet and no recovery key, Bentley has lost access to assets including 1.2 EUL tokens — over 4% of the total EUL token supply. These tokens are priced at about $3.8 million today, though at other times the tokens would have been worth up to about $15 million. "I've now lost a substantial percentage of the crypto assets I held in cold storage, accumulated over more than seven years, including the majority of the EUL allocated to me for participating in Euler governance,

ALT Trader loses $5.7 million to slippage in memecoin trade A trader looking to buy $9 million of a recently popular Solana memecoin, dogwifhat (WIF), lost $5.7 million of their funds to slippage as they placed a massive order in a pool with relatively low liquidity. $5.7 million of their funds were lost to "slippage" — the discrepancy in price that can occur when a trade is so large or a market is so illiquid that the trade itself impacts the asset price. Some have speculated that the trade might be an expensive marketing stunt to increase attention to WIF, which was losing some steam. I'll give it to them: the token's namesake is pretty cute. But not $9 million cute.

ALT Harmony blockchain encounters "infinite mint" bug; accusations of wrongdoing fly On December 7, the Harmony blockchain began encountering a bug that ultimately caused around 150 million of the project's $ONE token (priced at around $2.2 million) to be erroneously minted and distributed to 79 wallets. Most of the recipients, who were anonymous, quickly sold their unexpected windfall. The bug was fixed about a week later. There has been a dispute since then between Harmony employees and a contractor who was involved in identifying the bug, and the contractor has been accused of delaying action to profit from the excess tokens. The contractor also hasn't destroyed some of the tokens he mistakenly received.

ALT The contractor, on the other hand, claims that he didn't profit from the bug, and has objected to Harmony coming after him to destroy the excess tokens when they've done little towards others who profited from the error. According to the contractor, a Harmony employee claimed that he had filed reports to the FBI and IRS about the contractor's behavior, and has tried to have the contractor banned from the annual ETH Denver event.

ALT So long, hexagon: Twitter removes NFT profile picture support Just about two years after launching a feature in which NFT owners could show off their NFTs with special, hexagonal profile pictures, Twitter has apparently removed support for adding NFT avatars. It's unclear if the move is spurred by the massively waning interest in NFTs, or if it's part of Twitter's broad slashing of functionality in the wake of Elon Musk's disastrous takeover and cost-cutting attempts. Those who already had the hexagonal profile pictures now seem to have had them restored to their usual circular shape, and there's no longer any mention of the feature in Twitter's support documentation, and new NFT profile photos can't be uploaded. People can, of course, still right-click and save the images and upload them that way.

ALT Blockchain security firm CertiK suffers compromise of their own The Twitter account of the blockchain security company CertiK was hacked, then used to post tweets ostensibly warning of a massive crypto vulnerability and urging users to click a link to protect their wallets, but which instead linked the account's some 340,000+ followers to a site that would drain their wallets if connected. CertiK quickly regained control of the account and deleted the tweets, later explaining that an employee had been contacted by a "verified account, associated with well-known media". The journalist's account, apparently compromised, successfully phished the CertiK employee by sending what looked like a Calendly meeting scheduling link, but what was in fact a malicious link used to take over the CertiK Twitter account.

ALT Blockchain sleuth zachxbt criticized CertiK, which describes itself as a leading blockchain security firm, for not protecting against the attack, and asked if they would be reimbursing phishing victims.

ALT Radiant Capital lending protocol hacked for $4.5 million Radiant Capital, a cross-chain lending protocol built on the Arbitrum layer-2 network, was hacked for 1,900 ETH (~$4.5 million). The exploit relied on a flaw in the underlying code, which was forked from Compound and Aave. The original code has a known rounding issue, which makes new projects vulnerable to attack shortly after they are deployed if they are not specifically configured to avoid the issue. In this case, the attacker had observed the contract being deployed and performed the exploit only six seconds after the project was activated. Radiant Capital sent an on-chain message to the attacker, offering to negotiate a bounty.

ALT "Top tier" NFTs stolen in NFT Trader hack Attackers exploited old smart contracts from the NFT Trader peer-to-peer NFT trading application to steal pricey NFTs, including at least 37 Bored Apes, 13 Mutant Apes, and NFTs from the VeeFriends and World of Women collections. Some ETH and APE tokens were also stolen. Altogether, the stolen NFTs are priced at around $3 million, though the hacker may not be able to liquidate them for that ammount. One attacker claimed in on-chain messages that the original attack had been perpetrated by someone else, but that they were one of the many copycat attackers, describing themselves as someone who had "[come] here to pick up residual garbage". They requested victims send additional ETH to get their NFTs back. "If you want the monkey nft back, then you need to pay me a bouty, which is what I deserve", they wrote, asking for NFT holders to send them 10% of the Ape floor price — itself likely an additional scam, although that attacker did return some N

ALT Meanwhile, NFT holders were urged to revoke access to NFT Trader, since the platform seemed aware of the attack but unable to stop it. NFT Trader was ultimately able to thwart the attacker to stem additional bleeding, likely thanks to help from community members who pointed out a way the contract could be shut down.

ALT Crypto media outlet Forkast goes bust The crypto media website Forkast has stopped publishing and laid off most of its editorial staff. The last post on the site is from November 22. After raising $1.7 million in seed funding in 2021, the site seems to have run out of runway. It merged with the CryptoSlam data aggregator in January 2023, but that apparently didn't help it sustain operations. The company appears to be trying to rebrand as "Forkast Labs", and is offering crypto data feeds.

ALT DraftKings was secretly paid to run a Polygon network validator In March 2022, Polygon boasted about how "The decision by DraftKings, a NASDAQ-listed company, to take an active role in day-to-day operations of a major network is an important adoption milestone for the blockchain industry." The company had agreed to run a validator on the network, and Polygon claimed in a press release at the time that DraftKings would be "an equal community member" among other validators. However, it turns out that Polygon allocated tens of millions of tokens to the DraftKings validator — far more than they allocated to other validators — on which DraftKings earned a highly unusual 100% of staking rewards. Polygon also sent the company 2.5 million of their MATIC tokens (priced at just over $1.5 million at the time), and it's unclear if this was a purchase by DraftKings or a transfer as a part of the deal.

ALT In October 2023, Polygon kicked DraftKings off the network as the validator had failed to maintain performance standards. Throughout the period that the DraftKings maintained the validator, they earned millions of dollars through the undisclosed partnership.

ALT Hounax crypto scam steals $19 million A scam Hong Kong cryptocurrency platform called Hounax swindled its customers out of HK$148 million (US$19 million). The group drew in customers by offering financial expertise on social media and awarding prize money to those who signed up to the platform. While some customers successfully tested whether they could withdraw their funds earlier on, the platform later stopped allowing customers to withdraw, or told them they would need to pay additional fees to do so. The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission added Hounax to its warning list on November 1, a move that victims have criticized as much too late to stop the damage.