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Singapore court rules $125M Multichain hack was inside job – DL News

Financial Block Staff

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Singapore court rules $125M Multichain hack was inside job – DL News
  • Fantom Foundation director Michael Kong has long had doubts about Multichain’s story.
  • A Singapore judge has ordered Multichain to pay Fantom $2.2 million.
  • Reported arrests in China muddy the waters as to where the money went.

When Multichain close Last summer, after an apparent hack of $125 million in cryptocurrency, Michael Kong dismissed speculation that it was an inside job.

As CEO of the Fantom Foundation, Kong was dismayed to see his project burn when all that cryptocurrency was mysteriously transferred to “unknown addresses in an abnormal manner.”

But Kong couldn’t get his head around the fact that Multichain was a thriving business. Why ruin it?

Kong is not so sure anymore.

In an interview earlier this year, Kong said he couldn’t rule out that someone affiliated with Multichain had managed to get hold of the money. “My perspective has changed a little bit,” he said. DL News“I had a little too much faith in what Multichain was telling us.”

A court ruling now appears to lend credence to Kong’s suspicions.

On July 8, Judicial Commissioner Mohamed Faizal of the High Court of Singapore governed that Multichain owes the Fantom Foundation, the organization that manages the Fantom blockchain, $2.2 million.

A court decision

Fantom, once a top-five blockchain with nearly $8 billion locked in its DeFi ecosystem, now sits just outside the top 50. As of Tuesday, DeFi applications on Fantom managed to generate a total of $129 million, just over half of what they did before the hack.

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On the eve of last year’s exploit, much of the crypto in Fantom’s DeFi ecosystem came from Multichain, a “bridge” that allows users to move digital assets between otherwise incompatible blockchains.

The total value of cryptocurrencies in Fantom’s myriad DeFi applications plummeted after the Multichain incident.

“[Fantom’s] position is that the violation was possible because the CEO of [Multichain] “He had ultimate privileges and control over the cryptocurrency assets stored in the multi-chain bridge,” Faizal wrote in his decision.

This violated the company’s user agreement, the judge said.

The decision could pave the way for the appointment of a third-party liquidator and the eventual return of the stolen tokens, according to the Fantom Foundation.

Faizal also noted that Fantom believes the “siphoned assets” may have been “illegally diverted” from one Multichain entity to another.

The judge was quick to add, however, that this allegation fell outside the scope of the legal case before him.

$1.8 billion lost

The lawsuit sheds more light on an episode that took place during a series of exploits a few years ago.

In 2022, the bridges lost $1.8 billion in hacks, a figure that represents more than half the value of cryptocurrencies stolen from DeFi protocols that year.

A representative for Multichain could not be reached for comment. The company has not defended itself at any point in the Fantom case. trial in Singapore, which started in 2023.

A person familiar with the inner workings of Multichain said DL News The company team had not planned any internal work.

“The truth will be known when the police make the case public,” said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for his family in China.

“It’s conceivable that someone from the police force targeted the CEO of Multichain and said, ‘Hey, he’s got money.

— Michael Kong, Fantom Foundation

Kong claims that former Multichain employees have been “totally uncooperative.”

Multichain is a “bridge” that allows users to move digital assets between otherwise incompatible blockchains. Users on blockchain A can deposit cryptocurrencies into Multichain, which will issue IOU tokens on blockchain B, where they can be used as if they were real.

Arrests in China

In May 2023, founder and CEO Zhaojun He was arrested by police in the southern Chinese city of Kunming, according to a statement made by the company after the hack.

Despite the team’s efforts to keep the bridge up and running after Zhaojun’s disappearance, Multichain suffered an apparent hack on July 7, 2023, when $125 million in crypto was transferred to “unknown addresses in an abnormal manner,” the company said.

Two days later, Zhaojun’s sister tried to salvage what was left, the company said. She transferred much of the remaining cryptocurrency to wallets she controlled, only to also be detained on July 13.

Strapped for cash and unable to contact the CEO or his sister, Multichain said it would shut down and share information as it became available.

For some, the case has become a warning about operational security failure and running a business in a crypto-hostile police state.

Others, without evidence, suggested in a “Multichain Scam” Telegram chat group with over 500 members that Zhaojun and his sister had absconded with the missing cryptocurrency.

At the time, Kong said Multichain may have been the victim of a racketeering operation by local police. He added that employees had told him that some of their colleagues had been arrested.

Fantom investigates

A former employee, named Marcel, said DL News At least five people have been arrested, although this could not be independently verified.

“It’s conceivable that someone targeted the CEO of Multichain within a police force and said, ‘Hey, he’s got money, he’s pretty well-known in the industry. Let’s target him,’” Kong said. DL News last summer. “That’s what I think could happen.”

But evidence that has since emerged has changed that.

The Fantom Foundation, which hired a Hong Kong law firm called King & Wood Mallesons to investigate the situation, was able to confirm that Zhaojun had indeed been arrested, Kong said. DL News.

Jail

Although Zhaojun is likely still awaiting indictment, his colleagues at Multichain have had better luck.

“We understand that some of them have been arrested and released,” he said. “But we have had no contact with them for months because Multichain and its former team members have been completely uncooperative.”

A mysterious arbitration

In November, the Multichain Bridge was open for about two hours, allowing a user to take advantage of a $1 million arbitrage opportunity. The profits were then transferred to Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

So who is behind this move? “We believe it is a person (or several people) from the old Multichain team,” Kong said. DL News this week.

Earlier this year, he said it was unlikely the police had moved any funds because they would likely have used a different method.

The possibility of Multichain’s involvement was raised in court.

In his ruling, Faizal noted that the Fantom Foundation had sued two entities: Multichain Foundation Ltd, which ran the crypto bridge, and Multichain Pte Ltd.

This is because of the “sudden incorporation” of Multichain Pte Ltd “just before the July 7 security breach” and the foundation’s “belief that the siphoned assets could have been illegally diverted” to the entity, Faizal wrote.

But the Commissioner made it clear that this allegation fell outside the scope of his decision.

“I do not comment on the merits of these claims regarding the involvement of [Multichain Foundation] And [Multichain Pte]”I am not convinced of the validity of these claims,” ​​he wrote.

Regardless, the Fantom Foundation has yet to find a definitive answer as to what happened.

“We’re not quite sure yet,” Kong said. “Some [crypto] “The movements were confusing.”

Aleks Gilbert is DL News“New York-based DeFi correspondent. Got a tip? You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

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We are the editorial team of Financial Block, where seriousness meets clarity in cryptocurrency analysis. With a robust team of finance and blockchain technology experts, we are dedicated to meticulously exploring complex crypto markets with detailed assessments and an unbiased approach. Our mission is to democratize access to knowledge of emerging financial technologies, ensuring they are understandable and accessible to all. In every article on Financial Block, we strive to provide content that not only educates, but also empowers our readers, facilitating their integration into the financial digital age.

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DeFi

Haust Network Partners with Gateway to Connect to AggLayer

Financial Block Staff

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Haust Network Partners with Gateway to Connect to AggLayer

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, August 1, 2024, Chainwire

Consumer adoption of cryptocurrencies is a snowball that is accelerating by the day. More and more people around the world are clamoring for access to DeFi. However, the user interface and user experience of cryptocurrencies still lag behind their fundamental utility, and users lack the simple and secure access they need to truly on-chain products.

Haust Network is a network and suite of products focused on changing this paradigm and bringing DeFi to the masses. To achieve this goal, Haust Network has announced its far-reaching partnership with bridgeseasoned veterans in rapidly delivering revolutionary blockchain utilities for projects. The Gateway team empowers blockchain developers to build DAOs, NFT platforms, payment services, and more. They drive adoption of crypto primitives for individuals and institutions around the world by helping everyone build their on-chain presence.

Gateway specializes in connecting sovereign blockchains to the Aggregation Layer (AggLayer). The AggLayer is a single unified contract that powers the Ethereum bridge of many disparate blockchains, allowing them all to connect to a single unified liquidity pool. The AggLayer abstracts away the complexities of cross-chain DeFi, making tedious multi-chain transactions as easy for the end user as a single click. It’s all about creating access to DeFi, and with Polygon’s technology and the help of Gateways, Haust is doing just that.

As part of their partnership, Gateway will build an advanced zkEVM blockchain for Haust Network, leveraging its extensive experience to deploy ultra-fast sovereign applications with unmatched security, and enabling Haust Network to deliver its products to its audience.

The recently announced launch of the Haust Wallet is a Telegram mini-app that provides users with access to DeFi directly through the Telegram interface. Users who deposit funds into the wallet will have access to all standard send/receive services and generate an automatic yield on their funds. The yield is generated by Haust Network’s interconnected network of smart contracts, Haustoria, which provides automated and passive DeFi yielding.

As part of this partnership, the Haust Network development team will work closely with Gateway developers to launch Haust Network. Gateway is an implementation provider for Polygon CDK and zkEVM technology, which the Haust wallet will leverage to deliver advanced DeFi tools directly to the wallet users’ fingertips. Haust’s partnership with Gateway comes shortly after the announcement of a high-profile alliance with the Polygon community. Together, the three will work to build Haust Network and connect its products to the AggLayer.

About Haust Network

Haust Network is an application-based absolute liquidity network and will be built to be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Haust aims to provide native yield to all users’ assets. In Telegram’s Haust Wallet, users can spend and collect their cryptocurrencies in one easy place, at the same time. Haust operates its network of self-balancing smart contracts that interact across multiple blockchains and then efficiently funnel what has been generated to Haust users.

About Gateway

bridge is a leading white-label blockchain provider that offers no-code protocol deployment. Users can launch custom blockchains in just ten minutes. They are an implementation provider for Polygon CDK and have already helped projects like Wirex, Gnosis Pay, and PalmNFT bring new utility to the crypto landscape.

About Polygon Labs

Polygon Laboratories Polygon Labs is a software development company building and developing a network of aggregated blockchains via the AggLayer, secured by Ethereum. As a public infrastructure, the AggLayer will aggregate the user bases and liquidity of any connected chain, and leverage Ethereum as the settlement layer. Polygon Labs has also contributed to the core development of several widely adopted scaling protocols and tools for launching blockchains, including Polygon PoS, Polygon zkEVM, and Polygon Miden, which is currently under development, as well as the Polygon CDK.

Contact

Lana Kovalski
haustnetwork@gmail.com

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DeFi

Ethena downplays danger of letting traders use USDe to back risky bets – DL News

Financial Block Staff

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Ethena downplays danger of letting traders use USDe to back risky bets – DL News
  • Ethena and ByBit will allow derivatives traders to use USDe as collateral.
  • There is a risk in letting traders use an asset partially backed by derivatives to place more bets.

Ethena has downplayed the dangers of a new feature, which will allow traders to put up its synthetic dollar USDe as collateral when trading derivatives, which are risky bets on the prices of crypto assets.

While allowing users to underwrite their trades with yield-bearing USDe is an attractive prospect, Ethena said there is potential risk in letting traders use an asset partially backed by derivatives to place even more derivatives bets.

“We have taken this risk into account and that is why Ethena operates across more than five different sites,” said Conor Ryder, head of research at Ethena Labs. DL News.

The move comes as competition in the stablecoin sector intensifies.

In recent weeks, PayPal grown up the amount of its stablecoin PYUSD in circulation 96%, while the MakerDAO cooperative plans a rebrandingaiming to increase the supply of its DAI stablecoin to 100 billion.

US dollar growth stagnates

It comes as Ethena has lost momentum after its blockbuster launch in December.

In early July, USDe reached a record level of 3.6 billion in circulation.

That figure has now fallen by 11% to around 3.2 billion.

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New uses for USDe could boost demand for Ethena’s products.

This is where the new plan, announcement Tuesday with ByBit, one of its partner exchanges, is coming.

Ethena users create USDe by depositing Bitcoin or Ether into the protocol.

Ethena then covers these deposits with short positions – bearish bets – on the corresponding asset.

This creates a stable support for USDe, unaffected by price fluctuations in Bitcoin or Ether.

Mitigate risks

While using USDe as collateral for derivatives trading is proving popular, it is unclear what the effects will be if the cryptocurrency market experiences major fluctuations.

Using derivatives as collateral to place more bets has already had disastrous effects.

In June 2022, Lido’s liquid staking token stETH broke its peg to Ether following the fallout from the Terra collapse.

Many traders who used looping leverage to increase their stETH staking yields were liquidated, creating a cascade that caused the price of Ether to drop by more than 43%.

Ethena Labs founder Guy Young said: DL News His office and his partners have taken many precautions.

Ethena spreads bearish bets supporting the USDe across the five exchanges it partners with.

According to Ethena, 48% of short positions supporting USDe are on Binance, 23% on ByBit, 20% on OKX, 5% on Deribit, and 1% on Bitget. website.

In doing so, Ethena aims to minimize the impact of an unforeseen event on a stock market.

The same theory applies to the distribution of risks across different supporting assets.

Fifty percent of USDe is backed by Bitcoin, 30% by Ether, 11% by Ether liquid staking tokens, and 8% by Tether’s USDT stablecoin.

Previous reviews

Ethena has already been criticised regarding the risks associated with USDe.

Some have compared USDe to TerraUSD, an undercollateralized stablecoin that collapsed in 2022.

“It’s not a good design for long-term stability,” said Austin Campbell, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School. said as the USDe launch approaches.

Young replied to critics, saying the industry needs to be more diligent and careful when “marketing products to users who might not understand them as well as we do.”

Ethena has since added a disclaimer on its website stating that USDe is not the same as a fiat stablecoin like USDC or USDT.

“This means that the risks involved are inherently different,” the project says on its website.

Tim Craig is DL News DeFi correspondent based in Edinburgh. Feel free to share your tips with us at tim@dlnews.com.

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DeFi

Cryptocurrency and defi firms lost $266 million to hackers in July

Financial Block Staff

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Crypto companies, defi lost $266m to hackers in July

In July 2024, the cryptocurrency industry suffered a series of devastating attacks, resulting in losses amounting to approximately $266 million.

Blockchain Research Firm Peck Shield revealed in an X post On August 1, attacks on decentralized protocols in July reached $266 million, a 51% increase from $176 million reported in June.

The most significant breach last month involved WazirX, one of India’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, which lost $230 million in what appears to be a highly sophisticated attack by North Korean hackers. The attack was a major blow to the stock market, leading to a break in withdrawals. Subsequently, WazirX launched a program in order to recover the funds.

Another notable incident involved Compound Finance, a decentralized lending protocol, which suffered a governance attack by a group known as the “Golden Boys,” who passed a proposal who allocated 499,000 COMP tokens – valued at $24 million – to a vault under their control.

The cross-chain liquidity aggregation protocol LI.FI also fell victim On July 16, a hack resulted in losses of $9.73 million. Additionally, Bittensor, a decentralized machine learning network, was one of the first protocols to suffer an exploit last month, loming $8 million on July 3 due to an attack targeting its staking mechanism.

Meanwhile, Rho Markets, a lending protocol, suffered a $7.6 million breach. However, in an interesting twist, the exploiters research to return the stolen funds, claiming the incident was not a hack.

July 31, reports The Terra blockchain protocol was also hacked, resulting in a loss of $6.8 million across multiple cryptocurrencies. As crypto.news reported, the attack exploited a reentrancy vulnerability that had been identified a few months ago.

Dough Finance, a liquidity protocol, lost $1.8 million in Ethereum (ETH) and USD Coin (USDC) to a flash loan attack on July 12. Similarly, Minterest, a lending and borrowing protocol, saw a loss of $1.4 million due to exchange rate manipulation in one of its markets.

Decentralized staking platform MonoSwap also reported a loss of $1.3 million following an attack that allowed the perpetrators to withdraw the liquidity staked on the protocol. Finally, Delta Prime, another decentralized finance platform, suffered a $1 million breach, although $900,000 of the stolen funds was later recovered.



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DeFi

The Rise of Bitcoin DeFi: Then and Now

Financial Block Staff

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The Rise of Bitcoin DeFi: Then and Now

The convergence of Bitcoin’s robust security and Layer 2 scaling solutions has catalyzed the emergence of a vibrant DeFi ecosystem.

By expanding Bitcoin’s utility beyond simple peer-to-peer payments, these advancements have opened up a new frontier of financial possibilities, allowing users to participate in decentralized lending, trading, and other complex smart contract operations on Bitcoin.

Read on to learn about the rise of Bitcoin-based decentralized finance and how the space has expanded to accommodate a new generation of native assets and features.

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What is DeFi?

Decentralized finance (DeFi) represents a paradigm shift in financial services, offering internet-based financial products such as trading, lending, and borrowing through the use of decentralized public blockchains.

By implementing blockchains, smart contracts, and digital assets, DeFi protocols provide financial services through a decentralized ecosystem, where participants do not have to deal with intermediaries when transacting.

What is Bitcoin DeFi?

The inherent limitations of the Bitcoin mainchain in supporting the intricacies of decentralized finance have created the need to develop smart contract-based Layer 2 solutions.

Additionally, the advent of the Ordinals protocol in 2023, which facilitated the emergence of fungible token standards such as BRC-20 and Runes, catalyzed the growth of DeFi on the Bitcoin blockchain.

This expansion in protocol diversity has broadened the applications of the world’s leading cryptocurrency network beyond the core base-layer use cases around value preservation and transactional capabilities.

Therefore, Bitcoin DeFi has become a nascent sector within the digital asset market, after previously being a missing essential part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Bitcoin DeFi in its early days

Integrating decentralized finance (DeFi) concepts into the Bitcoin ecosystem has been a journey of innovation and perseverance. Early attempts to bridge the gap between Bitcoin’s fundamental simplicity and DeFi’s complexities have spawned pioneering projects that, while laying essential foundations, have also encountered significant obstacles.

Colored coins

Colored coins represented an early foray into tokenizing real-world assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. By leveraging the existing network to track ownership of assets ranging from stocks to real estate, this approach highlighted Bitcoin’s potential as a platform beyond digital currency. However, scalability and practical implementation challenges have limited its widespread adoption.

Counterpart

Building on the colored coins, Counterparty has become a platform for creating and trading digital assets, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs), on Bitcoin.

The introduction of popular projects like Rare Pepe NFTs has demonstrated the growing appeal of digital collectibles. However, constraints around user experience and network efficiency have hampered its full potential.

These early experiments, while not fully realizing their ambitions, served as valuable stepping stones, informing Bitcoin DeFi’s subsequent developments. Their challenges highlighted the need for more sophisticated infrastructure and protocols to harness the full potential of decentralized finance on the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin DeFi Today

Today, building DeFi applications on Bitcoin is primarily done in the realm of Layer 2 (L2) networks. This architectural choice is motivated by the limitations of Bitcoin’s base layer in supporting complex programmable smart contracts.

Bitcoin’s original design prioritized security and decentralization over programmability, making it difficult to develop sophisticated DeFi protocols directly on its blockchain. However, the recent emergence of protocols like Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes, while not DeFi in their own right, has sparked possibilities for future DeFi-like applications on the main chain.

In contrast, L2 solutions offer a scalable and programmable environment built on Bitcoin, enabling the creation of various DeFi products.

By expanding Bitcoin’s capabilities without compromising its core principles, L2s have become the preferred platform for developers looking to build DeFi applications that encompass trading, lending, staking, and more.

Leading L2 networks such as Lightning Network, Rootstock, Stacks, and Build on Bitcoin provide the infrastructure for these efforts. Some of these L2s have even introduced their own native tokens to the network, further expanding Bitcoin’s DeFi ecosystem.

Essentially, while Bitcoin’s core layer presents challenges for DeFi development, its security and decentralization have provided a foundational layer for the innovative L2 landscape to thrive.

Bitcoin Layer 2 offers a promising path to building a robust and thriving Bitcoin-based DeFi ecosystem that offers trading, staking, lending, and borrowing. All you need is a DeFi Wallet like Xverse to access the new world of decentralized financial services secured by Bitcoin.

Conclusion

The integration of DeFi principles into the Bitcoin ecosystem, primarily facilitated by Layer 2 solutions, marks a significant evolution in the digital asset landscape.

Building on the foundational work of pioneers like Colored Coins and Counterparty, the industry has evolved into more sophisticated platforms like Rootstock, Stacks, and Build on Bitcoin to create a thriving Bitcoin-powered DeFi ecosystem.

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