MEV bot earns over $1 million in profit, loses almost $1.5 million in hack an hour later

MEV bots are a controversial category of bots who frontrun transactions in ways that are often detrimental to users. One such bot, known as 0xbadc0de, earned a windfall when a trader tried to sell 1.8 million cUSDC (USDC on the Compound protocol) — notionally worth $1.85 million — but only received $500 in assets in return due to low liquidity. The MEV bot, however, profited 800 ETH (~$1 million) from arbitrage trades surrounding the sale.

One hour later, a hacker exploited a vulnerability in the bad code of 0xbadc0de, which allowed them to withdraw all of the ETH in the contract: not just the ETH they'd recently earned in the huge trade, but all 1,101 ETH (~$1.5 million).

The bot operator subsequently sent a message to the thief via an Ethereum transaction, writing that if the thief returned the funds, they would give them 20% as a "bounty". Otherwise, they wrote, "we will have no choice but to pursue accordingly with everything in our power with the appropriate authorities to retrieve our funds". The thief replied by mimicking the message, writing, "What about normal people who you have mev'ed and literally fucked them? Will you return them?" and suggesting that if they returned all of the funds they'd extracted, the thief would pay them 1%.

Someone claims to have burned a Frida Kahlo drawing to "transition it into the Metaverse" as NFTs

a ghostly figure with enormous eyes intertwined with a giant fish, a broom, duck, bird, and other creatures against a green backdrop, with the phrase “Here are the sinister ghosts” scrawled across it.Fantasmones Siniestros (Sinister Ghosts) (attribution)
A businessman has published a video in which he burns a drawing that he claims is an original Frida Kahlo drawing worth more than $10 million — though its value and its authenticity have both been questioned. The entrepreneur created 10,000 NFTs from the drawing, which he's selling for 3 ETH (~$4,000) (reduced from the original 3.5 ETH/$4,700) for a hoped total of $40 million. He claims that in burning the artwork, he has "transitioned [it] into the Metaverse".

So far, the stunt has resulted in two NFTs being minted by outside parties, for total proceeds of 7 ETH (~$9,400) —  not quite the millions the drawing allegedly cost the NFT project creator. Meanwhile, Mexican authorities have said they are investigating whether the businessman committed a crime in intentionally damaging an artistic monument.

Crypto executive exodus continues

The wave of crypto executives stepping down from their roles is continuing, after Genesis' CEO left the company and Michael Saylor gave up his CEO title (but stayed on as chairman) in August.

Now, Genesis' managing director has stepped down after five years. Kraken CEO Jesse Powell relinquished his title, planning to remain at the firm as a chairman. Alex Mashinsky has resigned as the CEO of Celsius Network in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings. And FTX US president Brett Harrison will also be stepping down.

Eight state regulators file enforcement actions against Nexo

Crypto lending service Nexo was hit with a barrage of cease-and-desist lawsuits from eight states: California, Vermont, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Washington, South Carolina, New York, and Maryland. Several of them also tacked on fines, with Washington levying a hefty $1 million against the company, and Maryland fining them $5,000 per violation.

Nexo had previously been warned to stop offering services in New York state and to register under securities regulations, but hadn't done so. Several states called into question Nexo's "real-time audit", which they describe as bogus. Kentucky also noted in their lawsuit that when the company's holdings of their own $NEXO token was taken out of the equation, the company appears to be insolvent.

Four NFTs valued at at least $150,000 stolen from Jason Falovitch

An illustration of a golden brown ape with closed eyes, biting its lower lipBored Ape #7779 (attribution)
Sports manager turned crypto entrepreneur Jason Falovitch is now perhaps best known for his influence in the NFT space. He co-founded the Leverage Game Media company along with Mark Cuban, a group that owns many NFT assets and helps promote NFT projects through their control of major sports social media pages. Falovitch also co-founded @NFT, a group of social media pages that earned a ban from Twitter in February after accusations that they promoted scammy NFT projects without proper disclosure.

On September 25, Falovitch tweeted "I got hackled last night on Opensea. Apes, doodles, eth. It's not pretty." Four NFTs had been stolen from his wallet — two Doodles, and a Mutant and Bored Ape — along with 6 ETH (~$7,750). The Mutant and Bored Apes were both resold, for 15.99 ETH (~$20,700) and 82.69 ETH (~$107,000) respectively. Factoring in Doodle floor prices, the hacker is looking at at least $150,000 in profit.

The loss, however, is larger for Falovitch, who spent ~$377,000 on the four NFTs based on the price of ETH at the times of purchase. Falovitch tweeted after the hack, "Now I'm over $1M hacked in ETH and NFTs." It's not clear if he's referring to other wallets he may control that were compromised, previous hacks he's suffered, or if he's massively overestimating the value of the stolen NFTs. He also tweeted that he discovered his car was broken into as he went to drive to the police department to report the NFT thefts.

Well-known crypto researcher zachxbt, who is known for helping victims of wallet hacks recover their assets, tweeted to Falovitch: "Karma for all of the people you rekt with the scams promoted on your Instagram page. Definitely won't be tracking this one."

IRS gets permission for summons to go after taxpayers who didn't report crypto transactions

The IRS was granted authorization to issue a "John Doe summons", which will require M.Y. Safra Bank to provide them with information on U.S. customers who may have failed to report taxable cryptocurrency transactions. This summons is specifically aimed at customers who used sFOX, a crypto broker that used M.Y. Safra Bank's services. The IRS was also previously authorized to serve a John Doe summons on sFOX directly.

The press release stated, "Based on its recent experiences with cryptocurrencies, the IRS has strong reason to believe that many virtual currency transactions are not being properly reported on tax returns."

CFTC files suit against a DAO

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined the bZeroX blockchain project and its founders $250,000 for allowing illegal trading of digital assets, engaging in activities only allowed by registered futures commission merchants, and not performing proper KYC. They have also filed a civil suit against Ooki DAO, the successor to bZeroX, for violating the same laws.

This will certainly be interesting to watch. DAOs  —  decentralized autonomous organizations  —  are a popular form of web3 project governance where (typically) anyone who holds the governance token can vote on the actions of the DAO. There is little precedent in the way of filing charges against a DAO, and DAOs often don't have the liability protections of more traditional organizational structures.

Man charged with seven felonies over crypto scams

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Utah announced seven felony charges against a man who is accused of several crypto-related scams.

In one, he conned two victims for $1.7 million by claiming to sell a powerful Bitcoin miner that didn't exist; instead, a fake machine in the office was connected to a monitor displaying prerecorded video to make it appear as though the machine was mining cryptocurrencies.

In another, he created a business he claimed would "Bank the Unbankable" by providing financial services to people who couldn't access them. Instead, the millions of dollars were spent on unrelated businesses.

Compute North, one of the largest crypto mining datacenters, files for bankruptcy

Aerial photo of dozens of containers housing crypto mining infrastructure on a large plot of landCompute North facility (attribution)
Compute North has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, in what may be a blow to the crypto mining industry. Compute North is a major datacenter provider, and have deals with crypto mining companies including Marathon Digital, Compass Mining, and others. Compute North had just raised $385 million in February through a Series C equity round and debt financing.

Wall Street Journal suggests that Coinbase tested proprietary trading

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, US-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase tested a group to speculate on cryptocurrencies in hopes of earning funds for the business. The WSJ said they performed a $100 million "test trade" before ending the initiative. Some Coinbase employees described the project as proprietary trading — something Coinbase has testified in front of Congress to say they don't do. Prop trading is controversial because of the potential conflicts of interest, in which firms can end up effectively trading against their own customers.

Coinbase has refuted the WSJ claims in a blog post, accusing the paper of confusing "client-driven activities" with prop trading. In a statement to the WSJ, published in the article alongside the allegations, a Coinbase spokesperson said that "Coinbase does not, and has never, had a proprietary trading business. Any insinuation that we misled Congress is a willful misrepresentation of the facts".

Investors seek to recoup around $30 million from Canadian "Crypto King" in his early 20s

Aidan Pleterski and a woman with her face blurred stand in front of a lime green Lamborghini in what appears to be an upscale suburbAidan Pleterski with one of his many cars (attribution)
"[I] was a 20-something-year-old kid" said Aiden Pleterski, when asked why he kept his "investment" scheme going when he knew he couldn't repay his existing customers. Although he once described himself as the "Crypto King" in several articles he paid to have run, Pleterski is now undergoing a bankruptcy process and facing multiple lawsuits, where creditors are trying to first find and then recoup the more than CA$41.5 million (~US$30.5 million) they've collectively entrusted to him.

So far, the court has seized two McLarens, two BMWs, and a Lamborghini — only a few cars out of the eleven luxury cars Pleterski owned, plus another four he was renting. Investors have also asked about the CA$45,000-a-month (~US$30,000) lakefront mansion he was renting in Ontario, watches, and gold bars, hoping they could be liquidated to repay some of his debts.

Pleterski had promised investors that he would invest on their behalf, taking 30% of any capital gains, with a goal of achieving 10–20% gains biweekly. He also promised that any loss on the initial investment would be paid back in full. Pleterski had made some money in crypto as a teenager, but according to him, he lost most of the money he was given to invest in late 2021 and early 2022 "in a series of margin calls and bad trades". An investor claims that at one point, he was given pictures and videos of financial statements showing an account with $311 million, but when he checked with the company supposedly maintaining the account, they said they had no accounts with that kind of funds. So far, the court and investors alike have struggled to untangle Pleterski's mess — according to him, he was unorganized and didn't track his finances or debts.

Wintermute hacked for $160 million

The algorithmic market maker Wintermute suffered a major hack, according to their CEO. He estimated the loss at around $160 million, also writing that the company is "solvent with twice over that amount in equity left".

Wintermute hasn't disclosed more about the attack, but it's possible that the hacker may have exploited the vulnerability in the vanity wallet address generator Profanity, which was disclosed five days prior. The crypto asset vault admin had a wallet address prefixed with 0x0000000, a vanity address that would have been susceptible to attack if it was created using the Profanity tool.

This is the second incident involving Wintermute in the past few months. In June, the group provided the wrong wallet address to the Optimism project, and Optimism sent 20 million OP tokens to a non-existent address. Another person noticed the error before they did and was able to take the tokens. They ultimately returned 17 million of the tokens to Wintermute, keeping the rest as a "bounty". $OP have been trading at around $1 as of mid-September.

SEC files emergency action to stop CryptoFX scam

CryptoFX is a crypto-based scheme targeted specifically to Latines, promising to invest its victims' assets in cryptocurrencies and teach its customers how to trade crypto. It also reportedly functioned as a pyramid scheme, using a "referral program" to incentivize people to recruit friends, family, and people in their communities.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission filed an emergency action to stop the fraud and freeze assets, which was granted on September 29, 2022. The SEC then filed a complaint against the company and its leaders Mauricio Chavez and Giorgio "Gio" Benvenuto. The SEC alleged CryptoFX had raised at least $12 million from 5,000 investors, which ostensibly would be put into crypto markets but instead was primarily used to "fund [Chavez's] real estate company and extravagant lifestyle".

Sparkster settles for $35 million with the SEC; SEC charges crypto influencer

The firm Sparkster and its CEO Sajjad Daya settled with the U.S. SEC after a cease-and-desist arguing that Sparkster sold securities worth at least $30 million without registration. The firm and Daya agreed to settle with the SEC, and will pay more than $35 million to a fund that will be distributed to the investors who were harmed.

The SEC also charged crypto influencer Ian Balina for his involvement with the scheme. He allegedly accepted a 30% bonus on the $5 million worth of SPRK tokens he purchased in an agreement to promote the project on YouTube, Telegram, and other channels, but did not disclose his compensation. He also organized an investing pool with more than 50 investors, and also didn't register it with the SEC. Balina had advertised that he could help people "make millions with initial coin offerings".

UK financial regulator warns against FTX exchange

The United Kingdom's Financial Conduct Authority issued a warning that FTX is not authorized by them, but is targeting consumers in the UK. "Almost all firms and individuals offering, promoting or selling financial services or products in the UK have to be authorised or registered by us," they wrote in the announcement, noting that FTX is not. Because of this, "you are unlikely to get your money back if things go wrong".

A spokesperson from FTX said they believed that "a scammer is impersonating FTX", which they said they thought led to the warning. However, that statements in the warning are accurate: FTX is not registered with the FCA, and they serve UK customers.

Scammer earns 13 ETH ($17,500) from fake Mutant Ape scheme

An illustration of an ape with skin made from various animal prints, a bright green muzzle with a tongue stuck out and wrapped around a beer can, X-ed out eyes, a bone necklace, and a WW2 pilot helmet with teeth around the brimMutant Ape #21080 (attribution)
The owner of Mutant Ape #21080 was approached with an offer to trade their ape for another Mutant Ape (#55) and an extra 0.5 ETH ($675) to sweeten the deal. The trader agreed, and moved forward with performing the trade on SudoSwap, one of several platforms that allows people to set up NFT-for-NFT swaps. Unfortunately, he didn't check that the "Mutant Ape #55" that the trader was offering was actually the genuine article. The scammer had created a bunch of fake Mutant Apes that look identical through the SudoSwap frontend, but are clearly fakes if you look at the contract.

The trader ended up with a worthless counterfeit and a measly 0.5 ETH for his pricey NFT. The scammer quickly flipped the real Mutant for 13.5 ETH, making a tidy $17,500 profit.

Whale illustrates price manipulation risk in GMX exchange, profits more than $400,000

A candles chart showing a pattern of the AVAX token dropping in price and then going back up as a whale manipulates the price.AVAX chart (attribution)
GMX is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange that boasts zero price impact trades. On most exchanges, users have to contend with slippage: a difference between the price of a token when the user goes to enter the trade and the price when the trade is executed. A sufficiently large trade can itself cause slippage, particularly with crypto assets with lower liquidity.

A whale was able to take advantage of this "feature" by taking large positions in AVAX, the token belonging to the Avalanche blockchain, which has relatively low liquidity compared to larger tokens like Bitcoin or Ether. The whale then manipulated the price by making large trades on a centralized exchange, taking an estimated profit of between $400,000 and $450,000 after fees.

Some had publicly expressed concerns about the possibility of such an exploit earlier in September: Taureau, a founder of another decentralized exchange, had outlined the possibility of an exploit like this on a podcast episode on September 1.

GMX responded to the incident by capping the size of positions that users can take on AVAX. Another project, MM.Finance, announced they would be pausing order execution on their MadMex platform, which is a fork of GMX.

Binance accounting bug involving Helium tokens results in $19 million of erroneous payouts

Helium has two different tokens: HNT, which is paid out to people who run Helium hotspots, and MOBILE, which is paid to those maintaining the new Helium 5G network. However, Binance erroneously treated both tokens as HNT within their exchange. As a result, anyone who sent MOBILE to Binance wound up with that same number of HNT tokens in their wallet — a big benefit, given that HTN has traded between $4 and $7 this past month, and MOBILE is not yet easily tradable.

Binance distributed around 4.8 million HNT before discovering and patching the bug, valued at around $19 million.

Hours after Ethereum transition to proof-of-stake, SEC Chair says PoS crypto could be classed as securities

Official portrait of Gary GenslerSEC Chairman Gary Gensler (attribution)
In the early hours of September 15, Ethereum completed "The Merge —  the long-awaited transition from its original proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake.

Later that day, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler pointed to the staking mechanism as a signal that an asset might be a security as determined by the Howey test.

There has been much discussion over whether cryptocurrencies in general or individually should be considered securities, commodities, or possibly even something else. Broadly, people within the crypto community don't want to see the assets fall under SEC jurisdiction, as the SEC is seen as much less friendly to the industry than the CFTC.

Vulnerability discovered in vanity wallet generator puts millions of dollars at risk

The 1inch Network disclosed a vulnerability that some of their contributors had found in Profanity, a tool used to create "vanity" wallet addresses by Ethereum users. Although most wallet addresses are fairly random-looking, some people use vanity address generators to land on a wallet address like 0xdeadbeef52aa79d383fd61266eaa68609b39038e (beginning with deadbeef), or one with lots of 0s at the end, or some other address the user thinks looks cool.

However, because of the way the Profanity tool generated addresses, researchers discovered that it was fairly easy to reverse the brute force method used to find the keys, allowing hackers to discover the private key for a wallet created with this method.

Attackers have already been exploiting the vulnerability, with one emptying $3.3 million from various vanity addresses. 1inch wrote in their blog post that "It's not a simple task, but at this point it looks like tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency could be stolen, if not hundreds of millions."

The maintainer of the Profanity tool removed the code from Github as a result of the vulnerability. Someone had raised a concern about the potential for such an exploit in January, but it had gone unaddressed as the tool was not being actively maintained.

"No politics at work" Coinbase rolls out a feature to promote crypto-friendly politicians

A mobile screenshot of a list titled "explore legislators", showing various representatives and their "Crypto sentiment". Carolyn Maloney of New York, District 12 is displayed with a negative crypto sentiment.Coinbase crypto policy feature (attribution)
When the "politics" were widespread civil unrest in the summer of 2020 triggered by the police murder of George Floyd, and pressure on the company to release a statement in support of Black Lives Matter, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that there would be no political discussion or activism at work, and those who didn't like it could leave.

Now, he's just announced that Coinbase will be "integrating our crypto policy efforts right into our app" by providing a rating of Congressmembers' negative or positive "crypto sentiment". He also said that they plan to "help pro-crypto candidates solicit donations from the crypto community (in crypto)", and wish to get their users to attend town hall events. "We've also added a very easy way for you to contact your member of Congress to urge them to support pro-crypto policies," Armstrong said in a video demonstrating the feature.

"Double your money" scammers capitalize on Ethereum merge

Tweet by Twitter account with the verified display name "vitalik.eth" but the account handle "iThinkBuzz". Tweet reads "To celebrate the Merge, Ethereum Foundation giving away 50,000 ETH! 🎉

First come, first serve ➡️https://ETH-MERGE.BLOGSPOT.COM

You can only apply once."Tweet by hacked verified account (attribution)
If it seems like you've been seeing a lot of Ethereum co-founder and figurehead Vitalik Buterin around Twitter lately, it may be due to the influx of hacked verified Twitter accounts that have been retrofitted to resemble Vitalik's account. They've been used to share a litany of scam links to supposed Ethereum giveaways in celebration of "The Merge": the much-anticipated change to Ethereum's consensus model that's scheduled to happen on September 15.

Most of the tweets say something like "To celebrate the Merge, Ethereum Foundation giving away 50,000 ETH!", and link out to various websites that invite people to send some amount of Ethereum with the promise that they'll receive twice as much in return — a classic double-your-money scam.

At least 36 verified Twitter accounts were compromised and used for the scam, including the 6 million-follower Cityarabia account that normally tweets for Arabic-speaking fans of the Manchester City football club. On the afternoon and evening of September 14 alone, at least 195 ETH (~$314,000) was drawn in by the accounts and scam websites I found.

South Korea issues arrest warrant for Terra founder Do Kwon

A South Korean court has issued a warrant for the arrest of Do Kwon, the founder of the Terra ecosystem, as well as five other people. According to Bloomberg the allegations include violations of Korea's capital markets law.

Kwon and the others named in the warrant are currently in Singapore. In June, Korea banned current and former Terraform Labs employees from leaving the country, and in July Korean authorities raided multiple exchanges in connection to their investigation.

Starbucks wants you to have an "immersive coffee experience" with their web3 rewards program

A glitchy photograph of a coffee farm, with the text "Starbucks Odyssey" atop it in white capitalsStarbucks Odyssey promotional image (attribution)
When Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz first announced at an employee town hall in April that the company was looking to get into NFTs, I assumed he was just hoping for a headline to distract from all the union busting they'd been doing. After all, they already have a rewards program that by all appearances seems to be quite successful.

Despite that, Starbucks has apparently decided that what its rewards program really needs are "digital collectible stamps", a euphemism for NFTs that somehow makes them sound even less appealing.

These NFTs promise to provide their holders with "immersive coffee experiences", which sounds an awful lot like what cost McDonald's a few million in the mid-nineties.

Unfortunately for Starbucks, between the time they came up with the idea, announced it at their town hall, and are now inviting people to sign up to the waitlist, the NFT craze has died down considerably. Even at the peak of NFT mania, though, I'm not sure if people would have been lining up to buy "digital collectible stamps" that allow them to "claim an ownership stake in their loyalty to Starbucks" (what??)

Ubisoft now claims its forceful introduction of NFTs was only "research"

Remember when Ubisoft decided it was going to shoehorn NFTs into their Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint game, to the nearly universal disappointment of their fans? Remember when one of their execs said that gamers just "don't get what a digital secondary market can bring to them"? Remember when their employees were so unhappy with the NFT plan that they had to hold an internal workshop about it, shortly before giving all employees NFTs of hats?

Well, despite being pretty bullheaded about their stance on NFTs and web3, even Ubisoft is now backing away from it all. In April, only a few months after launch, Ubisoft announced that there would be no more NFTs for the Ghost Recon Breakpoint title. Now, the CEO is putting a different spin on the company's once determination to introduce NFTs: "we are still in research mode" when it comes to web3 technologies, he said. "We probably were not good at saying we are researching. We should have said we were working on it, and when we have something that gives you a real benefit, we'll bring it to you." I imagine that might come as a shock to the handful of people who actually bought the Ghost Recon Breakpoint NFTs, given they were promised "real benefit" back in December and are now left with useless collectibles.

Algorand Foundation discloses $35 million exposure to Hodlnaut

The Algorand Foundation is a group responsible for managing Algorand, a proof-of-stake blockchain. On September 9 they disclosed that they had put $35 million of the project's treasury into Hodlnaut, a lending firm that halted withdrawals on August 8 and applied for creditor protection a week later. Hodlnaut was in turn heavily exposed to Terra, the ecosystem that collapsed in May.

The Algorand Foundation reassured people that the funds potentially lost to Hodlnaut were less than 3% of the Foundation's assets, and "we do not anticipate operational or liquidity issues due to this action". They also wrote that they would be "pursuing all legal remedies to maximize asset recovery".

New Free DAO loses $1.25 million in flash loan attack

A flash loan attack against the New Free DAO project resulted in a $1.25 million loss. The project's token also crashed 99% in the wake of the theft. The hacker quickly sent 1,500 BNB (~$415,000) of the stolen funds through the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer, and sent another 2,900 (~$803,000) to the PancakeSwap decentralized exchange.

Shiba Inu developers leak AWS credentials on Github

If Amazon would like to buy the rights to the slogan "Web3, powered by AWS™️", feel free to reach out, because I'm registering it.

On September 8, a security researcher published a blog post reporting that the developers behind the Shiba Inu coin — one with reality-defying levels of popularity at #13 on the list of coins by market cap — had apparently published their AWS credentials to Github. After making the discovery, his team attempted to contact the developers, but were not able to find a bug bounty program, responsible disclosure policy, or even people they could reach out to personally.

Luckily for Shiba Inu (and somewhat miraculously), the tokens were invalidated two days later before anyone malicious apparently took advantage of the vulnerability. The researcher wrote that the exposure had "the potential to cause serious security breaches, including but not limited to user fund theft, token embezzlement, disruption of services, etc."

Coinbase funds lawsuit against the Treasury Department over Tornado Cash sanctions

In the wake of OFAC adding Tornado Cash to the U.S. sanctions list in early August, Coinbase has announced they will fund a lawsuit against the Treasury Department to challenge the decision. Coinbase itself is not a plaintiff in a lawsuit, though two of the plaintiffs are Coinbase employees, who along with four other individuals filed suit in a Texas court. They say they previously used Tornado Cash for licit purposes, and are now suffering financial damages because they can't legally use the service.

In the suit, they argue that the Treasury Department overstepped its authority in what it can sanction, claiming that "Tornado Cash software, including the smart contracts, consists of immutable open-source software code, which is not property, a foreign country or a national thereof, or a person of any kind." They've also argued that the designation is unconstitutional under both the free speech protections of the First Amendment and the due process protections of the Fifth Amendment.

Crypto reacts to Queen Elizabeth's death

A pixel art illustration of Queen Elizabeth in skeletal form, inside a gilded frameQueenE 74 (attribution)
The news of Queen Elizabeth II's death resulted in the creation of at least 40 memecoins, multiple Queen Elizabeth-themed NFT collections, and special edition NFTs in various existing NFT projects.

Is there a way to include in one's will that you don't wish to be turned into an NFT or commemorated with a "Queen Inu" token when you die? Asking for a friend.

Company begins selling Celsius-themed Monopoly game... three months after Celsius suspends withdrawals

A Monopoly game themed after the company Celsius, with a large Celsius logo in the middleCelsiusopoly (attribution)
After what USA Strong Head of Sales & Partnerships described as "months and months" of work, apparently the company had decided they had sunk too much effort into the Celsius-themed game of Monopoly to scrap the project, and opted to push ahead. What could be more fun to any of the large group of users who have significant funds locked up in the platform than gathering around the table to play "Celsiusopoly", which they can buy for $99 (if they have that kind of money to spare). The center of the board is adorned with the Celsius logo and the slogan "Do Good. Then do well", and there is a "HODL Mode activated" square that might have been a lot funnier before the company involuntarily activated "HODL mode" for all its users.

If you were wondering who might decide to sell such a product, well, USA Strong's founder and CEO is none other than Krissy Mashinsky, wife of Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky.

Both the announcement tweet and the game product page were taken down shortly after the announcement, likely due to the less-than-enthused response from Celsius users.

Investors face $11 million loss in VBit Technologies/Advanced Mining Group, an alleged crypto Ponzi scheme

The Philadelphia Inquirer published a report on VBit Technologies, later Advanced Mining Group, a company that promised investors to buy and operate Bitcoin miners on their behalf and pay them out the returns. Much of the group's operations relied on a system of "affiliates" bringing in more investors — a sort of suspicious triangular-shaped scheme — and executives and top-performing affiliates enjoyed lavish rewards including expensive wines, six-figure sports cars, and fancy vacations.

However, customers trying to withdraw their "rewards" saw increasing delays in receiving their payouts — days, then weeks, then an indefinite pause. A COO hired by the group left the company only three weeks later. On June 27, the group sent an email to its customers explaining that there was a "potential pending settlement" with the SEC — the first customers heard of the existence of any investigation — and that they would no longer serve customers in the U.S. On July 15, the company promised to refund customers what they paid to sign up with the program, but no refunds or further updates have materialized.

The company has faced lawsuits in Washington state and Delaware, and apparently operated for two years after executives had acknowledged they were violating securities laws. The Delaware lawsuit describes the operation as a Ponzi scheme, and alleges that the company sold packages that would have required far more computing power than the company actually had access to.

David Bowie NFTs anger fans

A screenshot of a tweet by the official David Bowie account, which reads "Out of respect for the people of the UK and Queen Elizabeth II, we will be postponing the 'Bowie on the Blockchain' sale. We will update soon." Another user has screenshotted the tweet and crossed out "the people of the UK and Queen Elizabeth II" and replaced it with "David Bowie", making it read "Out of respect for David Bowie, we will be postponing the 'Bowie on the Blockchain' sale."Tweet by Jonathan Dean (attribution)
The latest entry in "group launches NFTs, fans hate it" comes from the David Bowie estate, who decided that "Bowie on the Blockchain" would be a cool idea to raise money for charity.

A tweet from OpenSea announcing the project received some positive replies, and a lot of other NFT projects trying to promote Bowie-themed NFTs they'd included in their collections. However, the tweet from David Bowie Twitter account seemed to be received almost universally negatively, with many commenters writing that they wished the estate would just raise money for charity without getting into NFTs, and others writing that they didn't think Bowie would have supported NFTs.

On September 10, the account announced that "Out of respect for the people of the UK and Queen Elizabeth II, we will be postponing the 'Bowie on the Blockchain' sale. We will update soon."

Flash loan attack nets attacker $370,000 from several sources

An attacker using the Avalanche blockchain successfully executed a flash loan attack impacting one contract and several other liquidity providers. The attacker made around $370,000 in USDC from the attack.

Binance plans to convert USDC and other stablecoins into their own BUSD stablecoin

Binance users who hold USDC (USD Coin), USDP (Pax Dollar), or TUSD (True USD) will find their holdings "converted" into Binance's stablecoin, BUSD, on September 29. The three stablecoins that Binance plans to convert are the second, fifth, and sixth largest stablecoins on the market as of September 5.

Binance claims the move is to "enhance liquidity and capital-efficiency for users", but the conversion and Binance's related decision to stop trading on spot pairs involving those same stablecoins seems like an attempt to increase the status of its own stablecoin against that of rivals.

Poolin suspends withdrawals from their wallet service

PoolinWallet is a crypto wallet service provided by Poolin, which runs the fourth-largest Bitcoin mining pool and third-largest Ethereum mining pool in the world. In the announcement they wrote that "Poolin Wallet is currently facing some liquidity problems due to recent increasing demands on withdrawals. But please be assured, all user assets are safe and the company's net worth is positive." The firm also urged users to ignore rumors of a rug pull.

Poolin users had been complaining about issues withdrawing from their Poolin wallets since at least August, which had sparked rumors of liquidity problems prior to the announcement. Poolin said in their announcement that they would announce their plans to resume withdrawals within two weeks. However, a week later, they instead told customers they would be receiving "IOU" tokens.

Bitcoiner gets 6–15 months in prison, warns others about making peer-to-peer Bitcoin trades

Mark Hopkins, also known as "Doctor Bitcoin" or "Rizzn", announced on social media that he would be spending between 6 and 15 months in federal prison "for the crime of selling Bitcoin a few years ago". His charge carried a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment.

In 2019, his home was raided in connection to a Nigerian lottery scam, for which he converted between half a million and $1.5 million to cryptocurrency over the span of half a year. He was ultimately charged with "illegally operating a cash-to-cryptocurrency conversion business", to which he pleaded guilty (by his telling, in an attempt to get charges against his family members dropped).

Hopkins claims that "any time anyone with a crypto trades p2p (i.e., not with an exchange), they're legally liable under this statute as it's currently interpreted", though authorities have claimed that Hopkins knowingly aided the lottery scammer by telling them "I'm set up as a marketing company, so tell them you're paying for a marketing campaign".

Islamic State tests out NFTs

In the apparent "first known nonfungible token created and disseminated by a terrorist sympathizer", a supporter of the Islamic State has minted an NFT with a message praising an attack on a mosque in Kabul, Afghanistan. According to former U.S. intelligence officials cited by The Wall Street Journal the NFT is likely an experiment with new funding and channels for propaganda.

The token was briefly listed on OpenSea, Rarible, and various other marketplaces before those marketplaces took it down. However, because it was minted on the blockchain, the token itself cannot be removed. "It's very much an experiment...to find ways to make content indestructible," said Raphael Gluck, a co-founder of a jihadist research group.

Crypto scam watchdog group launches NFT project, which is then exploited

An illustration of a man in a brown suit, brown fedora, and sunglasses, smoking a cigar and holding a noose.Bad Guys promotional artwork (attribution)
The group Rug Pull Finder aims to combat fraud, scams, and hacks in the NFT space, often investigating crypto rug pulls and offering audits for projects and smart contracts. They decided to launch their own NFT project, "Bad Guys", which is themed around a group of baddies who steal NFTs.

Ironically, a flaw in the project's smart contract allowed individual wallets to mint many NFTs at once, rather than one per wallet, allowing two people to game the system and snap up more than 450 NFTs rather than the one they were allowed. Rug Pull Finder wrote that "An exploit was shared with us 30 minutes before mint went live. After reviewing it with 3 different dev teams, we did not believe the credibility of the information sent to us... We were clearly wrong, and we are truly truly sorry".

Rug Pull Finder announced that they had reached an agreement with the people who gamed the mint, and would buy back the 366 NFTs the duo still held for 2.5 ETH (~$4,000).

Crypto security researcher OKHotshot wrote, "I think its concerning when security minded projects like RugPullFinder get their discord breached and their code exploited yet they're offering those exact services to customers."

Georgian Coinbase customers take advantage of 100x price bug

Some Coinbase customers in Georgia (the country, not the state) took advantage of an hours-long price bug where a misplaced decimal point altered the exchange rate of the Georgian Lari (GEL) to 100x its actual value. Users were able to sell their cryptocurrencies for GEL to receive, in some cases, thousands of dollars more than the trades were worth. According to Blockworks, some users exchanged $150 worth of crypto for $15,000, more than three times the national average salary in the country.

Some users who took advantage of the bug and withdrew funds to their bank accounts found their accounts frozen shortly after, when Coinbase noticed the error and began working to claw back the funds. According to Coinbase, about 1,000 users took advantage of the error.

Attacker exploits bug in ShadowFi to empty $300,000 liquidity pool

An attacker discovered that anyone could call the burn function on the liquidity pool contract for the ShadowFi project. They were able to exploit this vulnerability by calling the burn function and then taking advantage of the price difference (based on the new circulating supply) to remove all 1078 BNB (~$298,000) in the project's liquidity pool.

The project had only just launched that same day, after running a presale of their SDF tokens. The project promised to allow people to "Take your spending away from the floodlights of surveillance capitalism" and apparently involves sending people prepaid Visa cards to help them cash out their cryptocurrency without connecting a bank account or providing KYC information.

Holding company for Mercado cuts 15% of employees

2TM, the holding company for the Brazilian crypto exchange Mercado, announced they would be laying off 15% of their workforce — about 100 people. The company had previously laid off more than 80 employees in June. Mercado raised a $200 million Series B funding round in July 2021, which valued the company at $2.1 billion — the highest-valued crypto exchange in Brazil.

Describing the layoffs, a spokesperson for 2TM said that Mercado was suffering for playing by the rules. "The competitive environment remains deteriorated and unfair, lacking the approval of the legal framework for crypto-activities, as players following the law are penalized by companies that ignore local rules."

dYdX infuriates users by requesting "liveness checks" via webcam, cancels campaign due to "overwhelming demand"

The decentralized crypto exchange dYdX announced on August 31 that they would give users $25 if they completed a "liveness check", which is accomplished by taking webcam facial scans that can then be compared with scans from other accounts on the exchange in an attempt to combat Sybil attacks.

This infuriated many crypto users, who were horrified that dYdX would try to collect this kind of biometric data. "DYDX just nuked itself. I would never use this platform," wrote a prominent trader.

On September 1, dYdX tweeted that "Due to extremely overwhelming demand of the $25 deposit bonus promotion, we are ending the campaign, effective immediately. Thank you to the many thousands of new users that onboarded to dYdX today. We truly underestimated the amount of interest the campaign garnered." They made no mention of the backlash against the liveness checks, but quietly removed the mentions of the system from their website.

Bill Murray's NFT charity auction nets $185,000, which is then immediately stolen

Black and white photorealistic painting of Bill Murray. The only colors are the lenses in a pair of cardboard 3D glasses that Murray is wearing, and a green bowtie.Token #0 from Bill Murray's NFT collection (attribution)
Bill Murray auctioned off an NFT representing the right to drink a beer with him, during which a painter will paint a picture of the scene that the buyer can keep. The auction benefits Chive Charities, which is a veteran- and first responder-focused non-profit. The NFT sold for 119.2 ETH (~$185,000).

However, hours after the auction, a hacker gained access to Murray's crypto wallet and snagged the ETH for themselves. They also attempted to steal 800 NFTs from the remaining collection by Bill Murray, though a wallet security team was able to safeguard those NFTs in time.

Murray's team confirmed the theft, and said they are working with the police and Chainalysis to identify the hacker.

Attackers steal around $265,000 of user funds from KyberSwap exchange

An attacker was able to insert malicious code into the frontend of the decentralized exchange KyberSwap and steal $265,000 of user funds. The project used Google Tag Manager to allow code to be injected into the project frontend (often for analytics, ads, or marketing purposes), which was used by the attacker to insert malicious code into the project UI that specifically targeted whale accounts — that is, those with large balances.

Kyber identified and remedied the issue after two hours of investigating it, and only two wallets were affected. Kyber promised to compensate the users who lost funds, and also tried to tempt the hacker into returning funds by allowing them to keep 15% of the stolen money as a "bounty" (~$40,000).

Snapchat abandons its web3 plans

Snap Program Manager Jake Sheinman tweeted that "As a result of the company restructure, decisions were made to sunset our web3 team. The same team that I co-founded last year with other pirates who believed in digital ownership and the role that AR can play to support that." Snap, the company behind Snapchat, had been working on a feature that would enable users to import their NFTs and use them as augmented reality filters.

This news came amidst the announcement that Snap would be laying off 20% of its staff, a whopping 1,300 people.

Unable to recover from the April Rari exploit, Babylon Finance shuts down

In April, an attacker exploited vulnerabilities in the defi lending project Rari Capital to steal $80 million. The asset management project Babylon Finance was a major lending pool on Rari, and lost $3.4 million in the hack. After the incident, users withdrew more than 3/4 of the assets on the project.

Since April, Babylon tried to recover from the hack. However, they described it as "the domino that kickstarted a series of unfortunate events". Rari canceled their planned reimbursement, users withdrew their funds from Babylon Finance, the Fuse pool on Rari was abandoned, and the token price decreased from around $20 to around $5.

On August 31, Babylon Finance's founder Ramon Recuero published a blog post announcing that Babylon would be shutting down. They promised to distribute the remaining project treasury among holders. Users were told to withdraw their funds by November 15.

Lawyer Kyle Roche withdraws from several crypto class-action lawsuits after allegations that he was involved in "gangster-style" schemes to hurt competitor projects

Kyle Roche sitting in a dim restaurant setting, speaking and gesturing. A caption on the video reads "I'm just a crazy motherfucker".Roche in one of the secretly recorded videos (attribution)
Kyle Roche, a founding partner and namesake of the Roche Freedman law firm, has withdrawn from class-action lawsuits filed by the company against projects including Tether and Bitfinex, the Tron Foundation, and BitMEX. This change came less than a week after a whistleblower website alleged he had been paid to attack competitors of the Avalanche blockchain with lawsuits intended to harm them and reveal corporate secrets.

Although Roche has denied the claims by the site, and stated that someone deliberately got him drunk and then took clips of videos out of context, it probably doesn't look so good for a lawyer to be referring to jurors as "10 idiots", or plaintiffs in class-action lawsuits as "100,000 idiots".

Helium ditches its blockchain

Helium is a network of wireless hotspots that decided to bolt on a cryptocurrency layer a few years after it was created. Through this, they hoped to convince people to spend hundreds of dollars on Helium hotspots, which earn an average of 0.07 HNT ($0.37) a day (2.1 HNT/$11.24 a month) for supplying connectivity to internet of things devices.

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.

DC Attorney General sues Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy for tax evasion

Michael Saylor sitting in front of a large model shipMichael Saylor (attribution)
DC-based Bitcoin evangelist and former CEO (now chairman) of MicroStrategy has been accused by the DC Attorney General of avoiding years of taxes by pretending to live in Florida, a state without personal income tax. The AG says he evaded more than $25 million in DC taxes this way, with the help of MicroStrategy (which is also named in the suit for helping to enable the tax evasion).

DC permits the court to impose "treble damages" on Saylor if he is determined to have evaded the taxes he owes, which could end up costing him and MicroStrategy more than $100 million in taxes and penalties.