Web3 is Going Just Great

Raydium claims the exploit was a trojan attack, though they've provided no further evidence to substantiate this. According to Raydium, a trojan allowed an attacker to compromise the private key belonging to the pool owner account. With control over the private key, the attacker was able to withdraw a mix of assets from the pools. They bridged at least $2 million to Ethereum and tumbled them through Tornado Cash; another $1.5 million remained on the Solana chain, where some projects began freezing assets.

Raydium has offered a 10% "bug bounty" to the hacker if they return the stolen funds.

Ten of the NFTs in the collection came with lifetime passes to Coachella, and sold for six figures. Each year, the NFT holder has to go through the redemption process to obtain their festival pass.

Many of the token owners bought their NFTs with FTX and simply left them in their accounts on the platform. Some were able to transfer their tokens before FTX's NFT platform stopped operating, but many did not.

Mango Markets posted on Twitter to urge users not to deposit into the project, and asked the hacker to contact them "to discuss a bug bounty". The hacker had their own plans, instead submitting a governance proposal in which they would return $46 million of the stolen funds (keeping $70 million) in exchange for a promise that the protocol would not try to freeze the assets or pursue criminal charges. The hacker then used their 32 million governance tokens to vote in support, but ultimately were not able to get the proposal to pass. A different proposal with largely the same terms, but which left the attacker with only $47 million of the stolen funds, passed shortly after.

Now, Helium is ditching its custom Helium chain in favor of a Solana-based token, and scrapping the blockchain entirely for the portions of its service that actually used the blockchain for anything beyond handling rewards.

Helium seems to have realized, finally, that blockchains tend to be slow as hell. In a blog post about the change, they wrote that "specific transactions, including Proof-of-Coverage and Data Transfer Accounting, are processed on-chain unnecessarily. This data bottleneck can cause efficiency issues such as device join delays and problems with data packet communications, which bloats the Network and causes slow processing times." They outline their plans to move these portions of the project to a "more traditional large data pipeline" — that is, infrastructure that's actually well-suited to that kind of processing.

"A pact was formed that involved Ava Labs granting Roche Freedman a massive quantity of Ava Labs stock and Avalanche cryptocurrency (AVAX), now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, in exchange for Roche Freedman agreeing to pursue a hidden purpose," the site claims.

The site does include video clips of Roche saying some surprising things, although the clips are very short and devoid of context. The whole thing should be taken with a grain of salt.

Ava Labs founder Emin Gün Sirer dismissed the claims on the site as "conspiracy theory nonsense". Roche published a statement about the " numerous unsourced false statements and illegally obtained, highly edited video clips that are not presented with accurate context", in which he said that his statements about filing class action suits at the behest of Ava Labs were "false, and were obtained through deceptive means, including a deliberate scheme to intoxicate, and then exploit me, using leading questions. The statements are highly edited and spliced out of context."