Category: DeFi

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Banking Crypto News DeFi Stablecoins

$1 Trillion Banking Giant ING ‘Exploring’ Peer-To-Peer DeFi Lending

In the world of crypto, 2021 has been a watershed year – from bitcoin becoming legal tender to NFT mania and then, of course, the absolute explosion in DeFi. Traditional finance is scrambling to keep up with the pace of innovation. ING, the Dutch financial services giant, is the latest wanting to get in on the act.

ING Dips Toes into DeFi

ING, with US$1 trillion under management, made a presentation at the Singapore Fintech Festival where it announced that it was working on a trial of its DeFi, peer-to-peer lending protocol with the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets.

We are looking into peer-to-peer lending in a DeFi kind of setup. But then not on bitcoins. What is interesting to us is how you can probably create peer-to-peer lending or open up lending capabilities with different kinds of collateral. So with different ways of doing this rather than with volatile bitcoin.

Annerie Vreugdenhil, chief innovation officer, ING

In a white paper published earlier this year, ING outlined how lending protocol Aave, built atop the Ethereum blockchain, was one of the more promising examples of innovation in the industry. Leveraging smart contracts, Aave would enable borrowers to deposit crypto as collateral and take out stablecoin loans.

Despite recognising the benefits of DeFi (borderless payments, 24/7 operations and speed of transactions), the white paper noted several material drawbacks.

One main drawback highlighted by ING was that since borrowing and lending required collateral, it would not enable the creation of new money that could otherwise be used for financing entrepreneurial activities.

In short, ING’s objection appears to be that the very notion of DeFi runs counter to the foundation of fractional reserve banking, on which its entire business is founded. This concern from a legacy company is of course unsurprising, and time will tell how it reconciles current operations with DeFi.

DeFi Adoption Goes Parabolic in 2021

Since the beginning of the year, the total value locked in DeFi has increased more than tenfold. That said, there have been innumerable instances of hacks, leaks and breaches in 2021 – some of the higher-profile instances included Indexed Finance, Zabu Finance and C.R.E.A.M Finance.

While these hacks may serve to slow down adoption in the short run, traditional financial institutions would be well advised to keep their eye on the ball to ensure they are not left behind in the wake of unprecedented innovation.

As an example of an institution that doesn’t want to be left behind, consider Australia’s Commonwealth Bank, which last week announced that its customers would be able to buy crypto natively through its banking interface. If you can’t beat them, join them.

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Crypto News DeFi Hackers

DeFi Lender bZx Loses $55 Million in Private Key Leak

The bZx DeFi protocol has had funds drained from its Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Polygon contracts after one of the developers had his private key stolen in a phishing attack.

Late last week, Ethereum-based bZx was hacked for an estimated US$55 million. The project tweeted that “the private key controlling the Polygon and BSC deployments was compromised, leading to loss of funds”. This comes after bZx was hacked in 2020 for US$6 million and US$8 million on two separate occasions.

On the morning of November 5, the company received a series of notifications about suspicious activity, and a flagged wallet address behind the actions. The team later found that a hacker had used the stolen private key to access BZRX contracts on BSC and Polygon, as well as the developer team wallet. The code in the contracts was then updated to enable the extraction of tokens from any wallet that had granted token approvals to the affected contracts. Lastly, the hacker used all the funds as collateral to borrow against other funds on the protocol.

“Roughly 25 percent of this figure is personal losses from the team wallet that was compromised,” bZx said on Twitter. And according to a further breakdown by SlowMist, these funds are stored in seven separate addresses believed to be controlled by the hacker. However, bZx has claimed that it has the funds in its DAO treasury to cover the exploit.

Since the project’s Ethereum deployment is under the governance of a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), funds on that particular chain are reportedly safe from the incident.

Developer Targeted With Phishing Attack

The targeted bZx developer had their private key stolen through a phishing email, sent to his personal computer with a malicious script hidden in a Word document. Disguised as a legitimate email attachment, when opened the document ran a script which led to the developer’s personal mnemonic wallet phrase being compromised.

As soon as the team noticed, they notified Circle and Tether, requesting to freeze the stolen USDC/USDT in the hacker’s wallet, then contacted KuCoin to identify the hacker’s KuCoin account to pursue further action.

There’s Still Work to Do in DeFi

Last year, the protocol was caught off-guard by a margin-lending exploit, one of the first instances of a flash loan exploit – flash loans allow people to borrow huge sums of cryptocurrency to make an arbitrage trade, so long as they instantly pay back the funds. As the nascent DeFi industry evolves, there will be many growing pains for developers and investors alike.

In the past year there have been many hacks and exploits in the DeFi sector, including multimillion-dollar hacks of Indexed Finance, Zabu Finance and C.R.E.A.M Finance, to name a few.

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Crypto News DeFi Dogecoin Tokens

SHIB Recovers 50% in 24h after Massive Sell-off Last Week

SHIB, the Dogecoin-inspired Shiba Inu memecoin, experienced tumultuous price corrections last week, plunging more than -10 percent on Thursday, only to bounce back with a 50 percent rise over the weekend. 

SHIB Rallies 50% in 24 Hours

The price of SHIB went from its ATH last week of 0.00008616 to 0.0000583 at press time, a -30 percent price drop.

SHIB/USD chart. Source: Messari

SHIB currently has a market cap of US$32.02 billion, with a $2.88 billion 24hr trading volume, as per data from Messari.

The token dropped on November 4 amid a massive sell-off from one whale that triggered a price drop of 22 percent, its biggest since September 10 when it plunged over 85 percent.

The whale had around 40 trillion SHIB, worth roughly US$2.8 billion at the time. Many were wondering where the tokens would end up. At the time of writing, the token holder had relocated the funds to three wallets, where they remain.

SHIB Takes the Lead

The Shiba Inu memecoin is one of the riskiest tokens in the market due to its extreme volatility. It is also one with the biggest returns. During Q3, for example, SHIB had a three-month ROI of 704 percent.

The coin is famous for being the rival of Elon Musk’s beloved Dogecoin. Musk tweeted last month that he doesn’t hold any SHIB, which in itself caused the price to drop 20 percent. However, it seems the SHIB army doesn’t care one way or the other for Musk’s opinions and plans to move on despite his claims.

One of the biggest price boosts for SHIB came after the October auction of Shiboshis, a collection of NFTs inspired by the memecoin. They sold in just over 35 minutes, each piece snapped up for between US$350 and US$1050.

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Crypto News DeFi Solana Tokens

Solana Skyrockets to 4th-Largest Crypto Amid SOL-Based Web 3.0 Investment

Solana (SOL) has been thriving in the crypto market recently, reaching a new all-time high of US$248.45 on November 3, at around 9pm Eastern time.

SOL Overtakes ADA

SOL has risen in price by 23.56 percent in the past seven days, trading at US$246 at the time of writing. The token has had a surprising performance this year, up more than 17,000 percent since the first quarter of 2021. 

SOL/USD chart. Source: Messari.io

The token now holds a US$72.20 billion market cap, and 24hr trading volumes have skyrocketed to US$2.8 billion.

After the price surge, SOL flipped Cardano (ADA) to become the fourth-largest crypto by market cap. Meanwhile, Cardano has been struggling even after the release of its smart contracts, trading at US$1.98 at press time, down 11.17 percent in a month.

Solana Gaining Ground Amid Positive Newsflows

The price surge follows several promising DeFi projects and the integration with Crypto.com, which will allow users to deposit and withdraw USDC via Solana.

Another strong boost for Solana came after the announcement of a US$8 million seed round completed by Syndica, which is building the “next-generation blockchain infrastructure for the Solana ecosystem”.

Besides, two of Solana’s biggest DeFi projects are both decentralised exchanges with yield-generating features, and they hold around US$2 billion in total locked value (TLV) each.

The open interest for SOL has been high as well. On October 26, SOL’s derivatives market reached a record-high US$1.86 billion – spiking 123 percent in a month.

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Blockchain Crypto News DeFi Tokens

Upcoming Parachain Auction Sends Polkadot Soaring

Polkadot (DOT) has been rising lately, reaching new all-time highs after news of the upcoming launch of parachain auctions on the Polkadot platform.

DOT Reaches New ATH

Polkadot announced the developing of parachain auctions in early 2021. As Crypto News Australia reported last month, the protocol has released dates for the first set of parachain auctions, prompting an overnight DOT token price surge of more than 18 percent.

This week, the Polkadot team announced that a motion had been passed to Polkadot’s council. If approved, developers will be able to register their parachains from November 5 and seek crowdfunding.

The excitement surrounding the launch of parachain auctions is the force behind DOT’s bullish rally, which surged 16 percent this week, reaching an ATH of US$53.18 at press time, beating its previous ATH of $49.35 in May.

Parachains are blockchains integrated within the Polkadot network that can be customised and optimised for a wide range of specific use cases. Unlike Ethereum, Polkadot allows its developers to create their own independent chains and set specific parameters, such as transaction fees, block times, mining rewards, etc.

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DeFi Scams Tokens

Rug Pull: ‘Monkey Jizz’ DeFi Token Founders’ Alleged Exit with $300,000 of BNB

What could possibly go wrong with a new DeFi Token launch named Monkey Jizz, released on PancakeSwap (running on the Binance Smart Chain) by a team of unknown developers and a cartoon monkey with a peeled banana as the face of its branding? Answer: everything.

Warnings Came Too Late For Some Investors

Warnings about the MJIZZ scam were tweeted about but it was too late for some, as the “dickheads” behind the project pulled the rug, stealing 500 BNB in total of Monkey Jizz investors’ money, worth US$300,000.

Like most refined scams, the Monkey Jizz project went to added lengths to reassure the community that it was a real project and would not rug. The website (which is now unsurprisingly down) FAQ read: “We understand everyone’s concerns and have been victims of scams ourselves in the past; we get it“. A doxxed “monkey master” was even posted with a photo of a guy named Cal, purported to be a real person to reassure buyers the project was legitimate.

As it turns out, ‘Cal’ is some otherwise pseudonymous bald guy sitting on a beach in Thailand, his photo watermarked with the logo of a local nightclub. According to Reddit, some users had done some online detective work and matched the photo to a Facebook account.

Presale Listed on PinkSale

The Monkey Jizz Life crew had also invested a lot of time and energy on the marketing side. They had all the basics: Twitter address, Telegram page, website (all now inactive), as well as doing a live AMA on YouTube with crypto influencer Travladd Crypto. The crew also had a presale listed on token launch platform PinkSale:

Rug pulls are becoming increasingly commonplace in DeFi, especially on PancakeSwap because it runs on BSC (Binance Smart Chain), where the transaction fees are insanely low compared to UniSwap, which runs on ETH. Buyers beware. Just because a project seems legit, does AMAs with influencers, and even goes to the trouble to highlight that it has an “anti-rug” mechanism built into its tokenomics, do not fall for it.

A similarly sad outcome occurred earlier this month with the SQUID token, which rugged on investors who said they weren’t able to sell their tokens on PancakeSwap.

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Crypto News DeFi Scams Tokens

DeFi Investor Loses $470K as Dog-Themed Token AnubisDAO Drained of $60 Million

Investors looking for the next Dog-themed memecoin have found themselves on the backside of a rug pull, draining an estimated US$60 million from the project’s liquidity pool.

Participants in a brand-new project called AnubisDAO contributed ETH in exchange for ANKH-tokens that would have been distributed as soon as the sale ended. The sale started on October 28 and attracted considerable interest from investors, who contributed 13.6K ETH (US$60 million) in under 24 hours.

Even though the project didn’t have a website, investors still poured US$60 million into the initial token sale. Twenty hours into the sale, the ETH in the pool was sent to a different address before the smart contract was activated, leaving investors with ANKH tokens and no liquid market for them.

Since October 28, the Anubis official Twitter page has been silent, with no mention of the disappearance of millions of dollars.

Coins being transfered to multiple accounts: Etherescan

Phishing Attack or Elaborate Scheme?

Copper Launch was the token launch platform used by AnubisDAO and it stated in a post that “the launch was configured to last 24 hours, but before the launch finished, the token liquidity was pulled by the creator of the launch from the LBP smart contract that housed the funds”.

Later, @Beerus tweeted under an alternate account called @cryptofan777, attempting to clear the air. The tweeter claiming to be @Beerus said they had not personally drained the funds; they had probably been the victim of a phishing attack, and attached a screenshot of an email with a potentially malicious attachment from an emailer posing as 0xSisyphus.

In a later statement, Copper said that “other accounts on Twitter that are known to be AnubisDAO affiliates claim that the auction creator’s wallet account was either compromised or that they were a bad actor”.

At the time of writing, a Twitter account was under police investigation, though it’s too early to draw any conclusions as the situation is still developing. But the community hopes that the exploiter is identified, and the stolen funds returned soon.

The Importance of DYOR

One investor told CNBC that he lost US$450,000, though admitting that he didn’t investigate the project thoroughly prior to investing. “We, in crypto, tend to have a ‘buy first, do research later’ mentality,” he said:

One of the most important things to do before investing in a project is to do your own research (DYOR), investigate the website, Twitter, team members, and any other information available to verify the authenticity of a project. In June, Mark Cuban called for DeFi regulation after a DeFi token collapsed from US$65 to US$0.00000003 on him, with others taking a starker position:

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Crypto News DeFi Gaming Scams Tokens

SQUID Game Token Surged 110,000%, But Buyers Couldn’t Sell It Before Rug Pull?

The popular Korean Netflix TV series-inspired “play-to-earn” cryptocurrency Squid Game (SQUID) tanked almost 99 percent on November 1 in what is suspected to have been a rug pull. This happened after people who bought the cryptocurrency rained their complaints on the project as a scam, as they were not able to sell on PancakeSwap.

SQUID token price cliff collapse.

The SQUID token rose more than 110,000 percent since launching last week. Just like the original Squid Game drama, the whitepaper for the cryptocurrency project reads that players can participate in six online games, after which the winners will be rewarded with prizemoney. 

The more people join, the larger the reward pool will be […] 10 percent of the entry fee will be sent to the developer’s wallet, and the [remaining] 90 percent will be added to the reward pool for the last winner of the game.

Squid Game whitepaper

This project was not in any way related to Netflix or the producers behind the eponymous Korean TV series, which raised red flags against the SQUID crypto: 

Did SQUID Pull the Rug?

As many had warned, the SQUID crypto game was rug-pulled. The price of the token dropped nearly 100 percent from US$2,864 to US$0.005. The website for the crypto game was also taken down at the time of writing. Sadly, a lot of people who invested in the SQUID token are left head-scratching in regret as their funds vanished in a matter of minutes.

Before the crash, CoinMarketCap had warned that investors weren’t able to sell their tokens on PancakeSwap:

We have received multiple reports that the website and socials are no longer functional and the users are not able to sell this token in Pancakeswap […] This project, while clearly inspired by the Netflix show of the same name, is not affiliated with the official IP.

CoinMarketCap

Investors were trapped and some lost everything. The takeaway is to think twice before investing into new meme projects with no utility.

Categories
Crypto News DeFi Tokens

CRV Token Up 63% in a Week Amid Curve Becoming Second-Largest TVL in DeFi

Curve DAO (CRV), Curve Finance’s native token, has become one of the three best performing assets of the crypto market, surpassed only by Decentraland (MANA) and Shiba Inu (SHIB).

At the time of writing, CRV was trading at a price of US$4.64 – a 42.10 percent increase in the past seven days. The token is now the third-most traded asset, only behind MANA, which is trading at US$1.34 – up 68.45 percent in the same period – and SHIB, at $0.00007399 (164.43 percent in 7d).

Top 5 gainers in seven days. Source: CoinmarketCap

What’s Driving CRV’s Rally?

Curve Finance is an exchange liquidity platform built atop the Ethereum network. We can name a few developments and partnerships that are driving CRV’s rally.

Curve Finance doubled its TLV shortly after the launch of Convex Finance, a platform that provides CRV token holders and Curve liquidity providers additional interest rewards. After just five months, Convex Finance is seeing massive amounts of CRV tokens being locked up for yield farming.

And if that were not enough, Curve now has its own automated market maker (AMM) – called EpsilonDeFi – on the Kusama Network and Polkadot.

Another boost for the CRV token came with the integration of the Harmony protocol, which will allow Curve to use Harmony’s bridges to connect Ethereum and the Binance Smart Chain, enabling cross-chain swaps between the two networks.

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Crypto News DeFi Tokens

1inch Surges Over 100% in 24 Hours, Following Announcement of Exodus Wallet Integration

While Bitcoin (BTC) and other major altcoins struggled on the upside yesterday, DeFi token 1inch skyrocketed over 100 percent, which raised its market value to another record high, inclusive of market capitalisation and trading volume. 

Early on October 27,  the native cryptocurrency and governance token of DEX aggregator 1INCH spiked to another all-time high, raising the market cap to over US$1 billion while the trading volume across all exchanges spiked to +US$2 billion at the time. 

The rally follows the announcement that the 1inch protocol has integrated with Exodus wallet, which would make its offerings available through the decentralised wallet application. Adding to the euphoria was another announcement from leading South Korean exchange Upbit on its plan to list the 1inch token and two other DeFi tokens, Mask and AAVE. 

DeFi tokens are apt to increase in price upon listing on major platforms. Some months ago, Dexe token surged over 110 percent in a day following its trading support on the largest crypto exchange, Binance.  

1inch Sees a Spike in Network Activities

The DEX aggregator aims to provide users with the “best rates by discovering the most efficient swapping routes” across several decentralised trading platforms. According to data from DappRadar, about US$16 million worth of digital assets have been locked on the protocol, and recently it recorded a new high of US$700 million in the 24h trading volume. 

The number of users on the network has also increased to 800k. On the seven-day chart, 1inch ranked among the top-10 decentralised protocols on Binance Smart Chain in transaction volume, and also the fourth-largest protocol on Polygon in users. All of the bullish stats attest to the growing network activities and demand for the token, hence the recent increase in price.  

However, 1inch was down, trading at US$5.25 with a market capitalisation below US$1 billion at the time of writing.