The Poly Network hack was one of the most shocking stories I have ever seen…
During last week’s Podcast, we mentioned the upcoming days in the crypto and NFT days would be insane, and let me tell you, what has been going on has literally exceeded my expectations.
Lately Eddie and I have been talking about hacker episodes in the crypto space…The Bondly hacking left us in awe but never would have expected to witness the biggest crypto hack in history – The Poly Network attack.
On Tuesday, July 10th, Cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Poly Network was attacked, resulting in the drain of $600 million worth in crypto.
Being cross-chained, Poly Network operates on the Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains where tokens are constantly swapped between one another via a smart contract, which contains instructions on when to release the assets to the counterparties. Needless to say that all three chains were struck by the attack.
Luckily, it did not take long before the Poly team were able to identify all three addresses where the stolen assets had been transferred and urged the hacker/hackers to return the hacked assets.
— Poly Network (@PolyNetwork2) August 10, 2021
On Wednesday, the hackers ‘gave up’ and started gradually returning the funds – probably a wise choice, as SlowMist claimed in a tweet that its researchers had “grasped the attacker’s mailbox, IP, and device fingerprints” and are “tracking possible identity clues related to the Poly Network attacker.”
All’s well that ends well.
On one hand the crypto market has experienced some drama this week, but on the other the market has continued looking good with a rise of many crypto projects.
I’d like to focus on one in particular, Cardano, which has announced its plan to add smart contracts next month – better known as the “Alonzo” upgrade.
This is a huge update, as Smart-contract functionality integration would allow Cardano to incorporate other decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.
Cardano is historically known as the direct competitor of Ethereum, leader amongst blockchains when it comes to smart-contract functionality. Will this last upgrade be decisive in overcoming its adversary?
On Friday 13th, amongst the announcement, ADA price soured and reached $2,08, an all-time high since Mid-May… But I’m sure we will be seeing it reaching higher records soon.
P.s. There is an upcoming Cardano Event in September you absolutely can’t miss!
In order to register, click here.
And now to the NFT space, where Rarible has also dropped some hot news towards the end of last week with its Rarible Protocol launch, an open-source tool kit that developers will be able to use in order to create custom NFT storefronts and marketplaces where users will be able to mint and sell their own NFTs.
“The Protocol does almost all the work, so developers can now proliferate the type of front-end NFT project they dream of across markets, without all of the back-end heavy lifting,” commented Rarible co-founder and head of product, Alexander Salnikov.
According to DappRadar, a website that tracks smart contracts in the NFT marketplaces, Rarible has reached a volume of $17 million in trading this month.
This number positions it among the top NFT marketplaces, except for one competitor: OpenSea, that reached over $1 billion in smart contract volume in the last 30 days.
Izzy’s Book Club
I hope you have been enjoying my suggested reads so far.
In this week’s book club, I’d love to suggest a light read that is great if you are on vacay: Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption, by Ben Mezrich.
This is a fun and interesting read about the wild story of the Winklevoss twins, and how they became the first Bitcoin Billionaires back in 2017, by accident.
It all depended on investing their half billion dollar Facebook payout rather than cash in the settlement with Zuckerburg…But prior to this, they had to find themselves at the right place at the right time. I’m not going to spoil this story further…
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