Another decentralized finance (DeFi) project was rug-pulled Tuesday, with some $10.8 million in investor funds stolen due to a hidden backdoor in the project’s smart contracts. Compounder Finance – a self-described clone of Harvest and Yearn Finance built by pseudonymous programmers – had its contracts drained of $750,000 worth of wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), $4.8 million ether, $5 million dai and a small assortment of other tokens, […]
William Foxley
70 posts
The first stage of the next-generation proof-of-stake (PoS) Ethereum 2.0 is now live as of 12:00 UTC Tuesday, according to Beaconcha.in. A generalized blockchain for decentralizing computer-based applications – from iPhone games to government bonds – Eth 2.0 has been under construction since the genesis of the current proof-of-work (PoW) network in 2015. Tuesday’s launch concludes the opening act, or “Phase 0,” of Ethereum’s consensus mechanism […]
Nine months ago, in a Denver convention center, a booth sat empty. Littered with token stickers, the table was supposed to hold the physical representatives of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol bZx. It remained empty, however, as the team struggled to make sense of the digital forces twisting their young project. bZx, as they would come to find out, was 2020’s flash loan “patient zero”. AFTER THE […]
Blockchain project Origin Dollar (OUSD) has sustained an oracle manipulation attack worth $2.25 million in dai (DAI) and $1 million in ether (ETH) , according to early reports. The project’s native token is down 36% on the day, according to CoinGecko. Source link
Uniswap community members are scrambling to update yield farming rewards for the automated market maker’s (AMM) native token UNI as the initial liquidity mining program sunsets on Nov. 17. A governance vote for continuing farming on the same four asset pairs – WBTC/ETH, USDC/ETH, USDT/ETH and DAI/ETH – was proposed by Audius strategy lead Cooper Turley and pseudonymous “monet supply” Monday. The proposal will have to […]
Borrowers can close debt positions on lending platform MakerDAO under the 150% collateral minimum with this one simple trick. A loophole in MakerDAO’s collateralized debt positions (CDPs) market, discovered by Israel-based startup B.Protocol, enables CDPs to be closed far more leniently than the system intends due to a small oversight in the auction market, according to a blog shared early with CoinDesk. The lending protocol is […]
Ethereum developers are weighing changes to publicly disclosing critical bugs following the Nov. 11 “accidental hard fork.” Geth had fixed the bug in early October following a disclosure, but it still existed in prior versions of Geth. The bug temporarily caused nodes that had not updated to the correct version of Geth to go down a different path than other clients. Now, developers are reordering the […]
Decentralized finance platform Akropolis’ yCurve pools have been drained resulting in the loss of $2 million. Source link
Will an active secondary market emerge for ether (ETH) locked into Ethereum 2.0’s deposit contract? That’s the question on the tip of most every trader’s tongue Wednesday after the release of the deposit contract by the Ethereum Foundation. As of press time, that contract holds some 5,000 ETH worth $2 million. Launching a derivatives market for beacon chain ether would provide liquidity for investors who can’t […]
Ethereum 2.0’s deposit contract is now live, heralding the imminent unveiling of the “world computer’s” second act. Released at 15:00 UTC, according to developer Afri Schoedon, the deposit contract is the first physical implementation of Eth 2.0 for everyday users. The deposit contract acts as a bridge between the forthcoming proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain and the current proof-of-work (PoW) mainchain, valued at some $40 billion by market […]
The Tron blockchain halted creation and execution of blocks due to a “malicious contract” against a super representative on Nov. 2, according to multiple reports. First reported by Crypto Briefing, the smart contract blockchain halted block production at 10:00 UTC for some two hours, according to Reddit users. The event is notable as it validates centralization concerns raised against Tron, which already holds an infamous reputation in […]
Ethereum’s “Berlin” hard fork remains a few months away at best, according to the All Core Developers bi-weekly call held Friday. A soft target of January is now in the works, following the planned launch of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain in December. Berlin is a hard fork of the current Eth 1.x proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain. The systemwide upgrade – which includes low-level changes for improving […]
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Harvest Finance has upped its bounty from $100,000 to $1 million for information leading to the return of $24 million in siphoned funds taken in an exploit Monday. According to the Harvest Finance Twitter and Discord account, the anonymous Harvest Finance team is offering the bounty for “tracking down” the attacker and returning the funds. A $50 million flash loan from Uniswap […]
Flash loans can be used for more than just siphoning funds out of poorly put-together decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. That’s one lesson investors can learn from Israel-based startup BProtocol’s manipulation of flash loans to sway election results on DeFi legacy project MakerDAO earlier this week. According to the MakerDAO community forum, on October 26, BProtocol borrowed 13,000 MKR tokens worth some $7 million through a flash […]
“What is the time value of money?” That’s the age-old question Allan Niemerg, former head of research and investments at Cumberland DRW and founder of newly launched Paradigm-incubated Yield Protocol, is trying to answer with his new programmatic money market. Released publicly Oct. 19, Yield is jostling to join a $2.6 billion decentralized lending industry dominated by established players such as Compound by providing a benchmark product […]
An arbitrage trade exploiting weak points in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Harvest Finance led to some $24 million in stablecoins being siphoned away from the project’s pools on Monday, according to CoinGecko. According to reports, an attacker used a flash loan – a technique that allows a trader to take on massive leverage without any downside – to manipulate DeFi prices for profit. The exploit sent […]
A possible exploit in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Harvest Finance has sent the platform’s native token, FARM, tumbling by 65% in less than an hour, according to CoinGecko. According to reports surfacing early Monday, upwards of $25 million in value has been drained from Harvest Finance pools and swapped for renBTC (rBTC) by an unknown attacker. Other funds have been mixed through Tornado Cash, an Ethereum […]
The Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract is a few weeks away at least, according to Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan. Speaking Thursday on the Bankless podcast, Ryan said the deposit contract won’t go live until it receives a thumbs up on an audit of a critical crypto library, BLST, performed by cryptography audit firm NCC Group. “This library is critical to creating keys, signing messages. Critical, in […]
If you’re an Ethereum project looking to get audits done before the close of 2020, it’s probably too late in the game. Audit firms CoinDesk spoke with said they are swamped with decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. The months-long backlog comes amid a sharp pullback across the $11 billion DeFi market, with most tokens down 19% over the last 30 days, according to Messari. Audit firm OpenZeppelin, […]
A vulnerability in LND versions 0.10.x and below has been disclosed to the Lightning Labs team, according to engineer Conner Fromknecht in the Lightning Network developer channel Thursday. In light of the disclosure, the firm is urging node operators to upgrade to versions 0.11.0 or higher as soon as possible. Source link
Ethereum miners are signaling their disapproval of a technical proposal advocated by top Ethereum developers, a new survey shows. Eight of the nine mining projects partaking in a community survey on Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 had a negative impression of the proposal, with seven of the nine saying they would refuse to implement the EIP if it were included in a future hard fork. EIP […]
Mobile and desktop Bitcoin and Lightning wallet BlueWallet has added support for BIP 78 with its PayJoin feature. Source link
Ethereum’s annual developer conference, ETHOnline, kicks off Friday afternoon. Instead of hopping from city to city like past Devcons, catch the latest Ethereum updates from your laptop at home. Friday’s segments are free online here. The conference continues every Friday including October 9, 16, 23 and 30. Each day focuses on one area of interest for Ethereum developers and investors such decentralized finance (DeFi) or scaling […]
The sudden takedown of BitMEX has cast a new light on Ethereum’s decentralized finance (DeFi) markets. On Thursday, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) served the Seychelles-based crypto derivatives exchange with a slew of charges, arresting CTO Samuel Reed and seeking out CEO (and admitted DeFi degen) Arthur Hayes for violating the Bank Secrecy Act. While centralized exchanges (CEXs) reside […]
Ethereum developers will take a second whack at a final Ethereum 2.0 “dress rehearsal” after the first, Spadina, failed due to “critical peering issues,” Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan said in a tweet Wednesday. CoinDesk’s invest: ethereum economy is a fully virtual event Oct. 14 exploring the ramifications for investors of the sweeping changes underway within the Ethereum ecosystem. Learn more. Source link
Artificial intelligence and data service Ocean Protocol has suspended its old contract on the Ethereum blockchain and hard-forked its project, following the $150 million KuCoin hack. On Sunday at 22:00 UTC, Ocean Protocol announced it had migrated from its old token address to a new one to thwart the KuCoin hacker’s attempts to offload 21 million OCEAN tokens worth some $8.6 million, according to the Ocean […]
On Thursday, ConsenSys-incubated startup Liquality released a new wallet that lets you atomically swap digital assets directly from your browser. The Liquality Atomic Swap Wallet can act as a trustless alternative to current methods of porting cryptocurrencies into the decentralized finance (DeFi) space due to the peer-to-peer (P2P) nature of atomic swaps, Liquality co-founder Thessy Mehrain told CoinDesk in a phone interview. The wallet interacts similarly […]
MakerDAO will not compensate victims of March 12’s “Black Thursday” flash crash that left some of the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform’s investors out $8.33 million, according to a vote that closed Tuesday. The Maker community had initially voted in early April to refund sunken investors. Nearly six months later and the community – represented by current holders of Maker’s MKR governance tokens – concluded a final vote […]
Parity Technologies has released the second version of its blockchain building kit, Substrate 2.0, according to a blog post shared Wednesday with CoinDesk. The new release gives developers additional tools to customize a blockchain “precisely for your application or business logic,” the post reads. Parity Technologies is the developer of the Polkadot blockchain with ambitions for developing a Web 3.0, undergirded by a meshing of various […]
To the surprise of many, bitcoin (BTC) has been a breakout star in Ethereum’s decentralized finance (DeFi) moment. Taking the form of wrapped or tokenized bitcoin, the digital asset takes the best of both blockchains – bitcoin’s price value and brand along with Ethereum’s programmability – into one highly in-demand token. Last week alone, the supply of BitGo’s wrapped bitcoins (WBTC) topped 76,000 after setting an […]
An Ethereum smart contract feature that offers rebates for fees has developers scratching their heads, wondering if they should toss the old code in light of an exponential rise in transaction costs. Called gas tokens, these smart contract loopholes are a way to send transactions on the cheap by “tokenzing” gas, the fees paid for running computations on-chain. The feature allows an Ethereum user to buy […]
SushiSwap investors were handed a raw deal over the weekend after the pseudonymous founder of the $1.27 billion, 1.5-week-old decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol cashed out. A fork of DeFi darling Uniswap, SushiSwap is the brainchild of a pseudonymous founder, Chef Nomi, who took the former project an extra yard by adding rewards for providing liquidity to the exchange through a liquidity provider token (LP), called sushi […]
Chainlink has acquired Cornell University’s privacy oracle solution DECO for an undisclosed amount. This is Chainlink’s second acquisition to date, according to an announcement made by the firm on Saturday. DECO was co-created by Ari Juel, former chief scientist at digital security firm RSA, who will also join Chainlink Labs as part of the deal under the same title. Moreover, Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov and Juels […]