Category: DeFi

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Blockchain DeFi Hackers Tokens

CREAM Finance Exploited Again, This Time for $130 Million

DeFi lending protocol Cream Finance has been attacked again, this time to the tune of US$130 million, in what is its third and biggest hack by far.

Flash Loan Attack on 68 Different Assets

As highlighted by blockchain security firm PeckShield, the attacker managed to exploit the platform through a flash loan attack that involved at least 68 different assets and cost around 9 ETH. Of the estimated US$130 million drained, at press time US$92 million was held in the attacker’s contract while US$22 million was held by the contract creator’s address. 

Cream Finance confirmed the event on October 27, revealing that the C.R.E.A.M. v1 marketplace on Ethereum had been attacked. The hacker took mostly Cream LP tokens and some other ERC-20 tokens: 

However, it appears that Yearn Finance, a group of DeFi protocols running on the Ethereum blockchain, had salvaged US$9.42 million from the hacker:

Third-Biggest Hack in DeFi History

A few months ago, Cream Finance suffered its second flash loan exploit in which it lost US$19 million. While the team promised to pay back its affected users, it’s unclear as to whether there’s going to be another compensation program.

This hack positions Cream Finance among the biggest DeFi hacks in history. And while Rekt’s leaderboard has not been updated, this attack relegates EasyFi’s US$59 million exploit to fourth spot, while Poly Network and Compound are at the top.

Compound has also been hit hard by malicious actors. As Crypto News Australia reported earlier this month, Compound Labs suffered its second major blow after another bug in the platform was found, putting US$162 million at risk.

DeFi hacks accounted for 76 percent of cyberattacks in 2021, causing users to lose more than US$470 million in DeFi platforms. This clearly suggests that while the space is an emerging ecosystem full of opportunities, there is cause for caution as it’s also a lucrative target for malicious actors.

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Blockchain Crypto News DeFi NFTs Solana

Solana Reclaims $200 Amid Soaring TVL in DeFi

In recent weeks Solana (SOL) has been climbing the ranks of market cap and total value locked (TVL) among the top 10 protocols. The public blockchain has seen a noticeable gain in price along with the surge of DeFi and NFT projects being built on the chain, bringing it closer to the top five cryptocurrencies.

SOL, the native token of Solana, a public blockchain backed by Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of crypto exchange FTX, hit a record US$218.90 on October 25, according to TradingView. In the past week, Solana has gained 35 percent, mostly driven by DeFi and NFT projects.

Last week’s results have seen the total crypto market capitalisation pass the US$2.5 trillion mark, a new milestone for the cryptocurrency industry, with SOL flipping Ripple (XRP) to become the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

SOL was a top performer over the last few months … [It’s] only natural for it to perform well during the next leg of the bull cycle.

Ashwath Balakrishnan, research associate, Delphi Digital

Solana’s Major Increase in TVL

One of the main factors pushing this ride up was the surge of DeFi, DAO and NFT projects on the Solana blockchain. Funds have been streaming into the decentralised finance (DeFi) economy, enabling users to loan funds, earn interest, swap tokens and generally make their money work for them.

According to DeFi data provider Defi Llama, TVL in Solana reached an all-time high of approximately US$14 billion on October 25. TVL is the US dollar value of the cryptocurrency committed to DeFi protocols.

Solana TVL: DeFi Llama

A handful of projects on the Solana blockchain have brought in billions for the chain, significantly increasing its TVL. The dominant project is Saber, an automated market maker (AMM) protocol that enables Solana users and applications to trade between stable pairs of assets and earns yields by providing liquidity, which has raked in US$2.05 billion.

Another four protocols – Radium (US$1.91 billion), Sunny (US$1.73 billion), Serum (US$1.69 billion) and Marinade Finance (US$1.63 billion) – have locked in over US$5 billion for the public blockchain.

Money Flows From Bitcoin to Other Layer 1 Platforms

Bitcoin (BTC) reached its new all-time high of US$66,974.77 last week as money flows from it to other Layer 1 solutions, resulting in an altcoin season. Layer 1 is the base layer, the main network on which a cryptocurrency such as bitcoin runs.

According to TradingView, the bitcoin dominance ratio, which measures bitcoin’s market capitalisation relative to the total crypto market cap, dropped to as low as 44.62 percent last weekend before returning to roughly 45 percent on October 25. That decrease in the dominance ratio indicated that at least part of bitcoin’s momentum had shifted to other tokens.

When bitcoin momentum slows down, Layer 1 tokens often perform better than any category […] Layer 1s have been the best-performing tokens since the June bottom – and, quite frankly, they boast the highest year-to-date returns, too.

Delphi Digital market report
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DeFi Ethereum Tokens

THORChain Token RUNE Up 70% Following Update Enabling ETH Trading

RUNE, THORChain’s native token, has been thriving in the DeFi market, up 70 percent following a network update that enabled Ether (ETH) trading.

As per a blog post from RUNEBase, THORChain has updated its network nodes and now allows ETH and ERC20 token trading. The update comes a few months after THORChain fell victim to several exploits, the most recent being an attack on the ETH router, which halted ETH trading and withdrawals.

The update has significantly boosted RUNE’s price, now trading at US$13.10 and with a 24-hour trading volume up to 85.91 percent as per data from Binance.

The price is the highest maximum reached by the token, surpassing last week’s maximum of $11.28 early on October 25.

Difficult Year For THORChain

THORChain suffered heavy losses after being attacked three times in Q2 2021, losses that amounted to around US$100 million.

Since then the protocol has been working behind closed curtains, developing new safety measures to avoid further attacks. Last week, THORChain announced the released of “two new critical features for node operators”.

The first feature, Make Pause, will allow node operators to pause the network for a period of one hour in the event of an attack. Trading and outbunds are halted, trapping attack transactions.

The second feature, called Make Relay, is a verified anonymous broadcasting service for nodes, broadcasting signed and verified messages into public channels.

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Blockchain DeFi NFTs Solana Tokens

Solana’s SOL Pumps 25% in Two Days, Driven by Surge in DeFi and NFTs

Solana’s SOL token has pushed higher by up to 25 percent on the back of numerous bullish developments this week.

By October 21, SOL was trading at its highest point in more than a month and was just 10 percent off its all-time high of US$214.36. Since then it has pulled back slightly, trading at US$201.85 at the time of writing.

Solana Runs With the Bulls

“Solana has moved into bull market territory,” notes Joe DiPasquale, CEO of cryptocurrency hedge fund manager BitBull Capital. “With this week’s jump from $160 to above $190, it placed a bullish flagpole in the chart.

Analysts will now wait to see if that pole leads to a bull flag, meaning a steadying of the price, which would signal further bullish moves and new support. If it consolidates around US$180, this could create a strong support flag leading to further gains.

Joe DiPasquale, CEO, BitBull Capital

The token has broken through some important resistance levels lately, which confirms that buyers are “not concerned about downward pressure”.

Nick Spanos, co-founder of Zap Protocol, concurs with DiPasquale’s view that SOL’s short-to-medium-term outlook looks “very bullish”.

We have seen SOL build momentum this month and it has attracted plenty of new buyers in the past few weeks, with the number of active token holders increasing considerably.

Traders will be keeping an eye on the RSI [relative strength index], but the price action is more important. In particular, the bulls will be looking for SOL to convincingly breach the US$188 resistance level before targeting a breakout through the token’s all-time high of $191.04, as this would pave the way for even stronger gains.

Nick Spanos, co-founder, Zap Protocol

Synchrony Raises $4.2 Million in Strategic Funding, MonkeyBall Makes $3M

Yesterday, Solana-native asset management protocol Synchrony closed US$4.2 million in a strategic funding round led by Sanctor Capital, with participation from Wintermute Trading, GBV Capital, HashKey Group, Magnus Capital and 0xVentures, among others.

This week also saw MonkeyBall, a crypto startup building a play-to-earn NFT soccer game based on Solana, raise US$3 million in a seed funding round. Investors included Jump Capital, CMS Holdings, Solana Capital, 6th Man Ventures and NFX.

Future looks bright for Solana after mixed fortunes in September.

Last month was one of mixed fortunes for Solana. On the one hand, the mass migration of content creators from Ethereum to Solana flagged its expansion in the NFT marketplace, with non-fungible tokens proliferating faster on Solana than in any other protocol.

But around the same time, resource exhaustion in the network caused Solana to suffer a DoS (Denial of Service) episode, which resulted in the SOL token taking a 15 percent tumble. Just two days earlier, Solana had recorded its first million-dollar NFT deal.

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Crypto News DeFi Ethereum NFTs

Polygon ‘Becoming Independent of Ethereum’ as dApps Grow 100x Over Past Year

Popular Layer-2 scaling solution Polygon is inarguably on a growth trajectory. The number of decentralisation applications (dApps) running on its scalable network has significantly risen in the past 12 months and most of those dApps were natively launched on the network, meaning Polygon is becoming less dependent on Ethereum, according to recent data from Alchemy. 

Polygon Growth 2x Ethereum

The data revealed the rate of adoption for Polygon is increasing 2x faster than Ethereum at a comparable time in its history. For context, the number of protocols launched on Polygon has increased to about 3,000, which represents 9,900 percent or 100x growth on the previous 30 recorded in October 2020. 

More interestingly, 62 percent of all the dApps are Polygon-native, meaning they are only hosted on top of Polygon. QuickSwap is one such platform, a fork of Uniswap that was natively launched on Polygon to harness its properties for quick and cheap trades. The remaining 38 percent, which includes SushiSwap, Curve, Aave, Balancer and others, exists on both Polygon and Ethereum. 

Growth Strategy Relies Less on Gas

Polygon employs several solutions to enable developers to scale their projects on Ethereum. The growing number of Polygon-native dApps simply points out that more developers are confident and are relying on the layer-2 network more than Ethereum, which suffers expensive gas prices following the frenzy in the non-fungible token (NFT) and Decentralised Finance (DeFi) markets.

We can expect the number to skyrocket from here, as Polygon recently announced plans to onboard the next 100 million users into its DeFi ecosystem. To achieve this, Polygon has committed about US$100 million to develop a decentralized autonomous organisation (DAO) to also improve the DeFi experience.

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Crypto News DeFi Gaming NFTs Tokens

Axie Infinity Continues to Soar, Up 86% in a Month

Axie Infinity has been leading the P2E (Play-to-Earn) movement by becoming the highest-revenue generating game in the market, with over 1.8 million daily active users worldwide. Data from Binance shows ASX, its native token, has surged over 80 percent in just one month, highlighting the interest from investors and gamers alike for blockchain-based games.

ASX Has Mooned 150,000% Since its Launch

ASX had an 86 percent price boost last month, trading at US$121.36 at the time of writing.

Daily chart of ASX/BTC

Additionally, analytics firm CoinGecko reported that ASX was the second-best performing asset of the market in Q3 2021, with a three-month best ROI (return of investment) of 965 percent, and YTD (Year to Date) gains of approximately 15,000 percent.

Two weeks ago, ASX surged above 100 percent following a massive airdrop of US$60 million to early users and a staking rewards feature, where token holders generated returns of up to 385 percent APY.

Controversial Updates

While Axie has been thriving in the DeFi and NFT markets, some recent updates have staggered its price surge. Recently, the team behind the game revealed the 1.1.0a update, which embedded three fundamental technical changes: to the Ronin Block Explorer, bug fixing and game dynamics, and game tokenomics.

The last one caused the prices of ASX and SLP to drop nearly 10 percent in a matter of hours. Normally, players sell their Axie characters with their respective levels and characteristics, but this update now automatically resets the monster’s level to 1. This has outraged the community. But what’s more is that players with less than 800 MMR are prohibited from receiving rewards for playing the adventure modes or daily quests.

Despite the setbacks, Axie continues to be the frontrunner of P2E video games when it comes to revenues. The ASX token is now one of the top 50 tokens in the crypto market, following a 50 percent price boost in just a week.

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Blockchain Crypto News DeFi Ethereum Gaming NFTs

DeFi Total Value Locked Has Exploded This Year, Up 10x Since January

The DeFi (decentralised finance) sector has been one of the hottest topics in the crypto community this year, mainly because of its fast-paced growth in a relatively short time. The TVL (Total Value Locked) across DeFi protocols is now at US$218 billion – a rise of over 850 percent from US$21.4 billion on January 1.

Ethereum Blockchain Takes the Lead with 69% Dominance in DeFi Market

DeFi TLV has exploded 10 times higher since the beginning of the year, surpassing the US$200 billion mark. According to data from DefiLlama, Ethereum is the blockchain that currently leads the market, with a TVL of US$151.15 billion.

Meanwhile, Curve – an exchange liquidity pool on Ethereum – is by far the largest TVL protocol with a dominance of 7.84 percent (7-day change) across various blockchains, including Avalanche, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain.

Source: DefiLlama

What’s Behind the Exponential Growth?

DeFi’s exponential growth can be attributed to numerous features and innovations within the sector. But there are two main drivers of the industry: the rise of blockchain video games with Play-2-Earn (P2E) mechanisms, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

P2E games have attracted numerous users across the globe, especially since the pandemic struck down economies worldwide and forced people to look for alternative means to make ends meet. Such was the case with Axie Infinity, a Pokemon-inspired, blockchain-based video game that allows users to play and earn SLP, the game’s native currency that can be traded for fiat money.

Axie hit a milestone by surpassing US$2 billion in trading volume by September, making it the first DApp to reach such a figure. There are other video-game DApps on other blockchains besides Ethereum, integrating P2E mechanisms and NFTs trading. Some of them are set to blow up in popularity in the future and take a slice of Ethereum’s dominance. One such example is Star Atlas, a metaverse real-time grand strategy game currently developing on the Solana blockchain.

NFTs Boosting the DeFi Market

NFTs are undoubtedly one of the hottest trends in the DeFi market, dragging artists, musicians and content creators across the globe to a digital ecosystem full of opportunities. Q3 saw a massive explosion for NFTs with a US$10 billion trading volume in August and September alone, inflating ETH’s price 20 percent amid a thriving NFT market.

DeFi is also taking off in Australia, which ranked 12th out of 154 nations to embrace and adopt DeFi and its numerous innovative DApps, most of them built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Some analysts even believe that NFTs and blockchain games will be future key foundations of the industry. Others like WallStreetBets (WSB) plan to “take over” traditional financial markets. As Crypto News Australia reported last month, the popular subreddit WSB has launched a DeFi protocol that allows trading of synthetic stocks backed by blockchain technology.

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Crypto News DeFi Hackers

Another Day, Another DeFi Hack: Indexed Finance ‘Incident’ Costs Users $16 Million

The decentralised finance (DeFi) platform Indexed Finance has suffered its first hack, bleeding two of its pools of an estimated US$16 million.

The platform announced on October 15 that there was something going on affecting the DEFI5 and CC10 pools.

Rebalancing Mechanism Exploited

After further inspection, it was found that hackers had exploited a weakness in one of the mechanisms used to balance pool token weightings. The attack affected the way index pools are rebalanced, with a more detailed description supplied in a post-mortem:

Security firm PeckShield reported that the attacker had stolen 15 ETH, 226.9K UNI, 7.5K AAVE, 6.4K COMP, 845.8K CRV, 516 MKR, 45.4K SNX, 33.2K LINK, 5.2K YFI, 17.8K UMA and 131.6K BAT, totalling around US$16 million. At the moment the $16M is sitting in the attacker’s account (0xba5ed1488be60ba2facc6b66c6d6f0befba22ebe) with security firms keeping an eye out for movement.

According to the bot on Discord, the two pools that are now inaccessible have been left with US$288,000 and US$2 million in TVL, respectively.

NDX Token Drops 28%

Unsurprisingly, the protocol’s native NDX token has dumped 28 percent from US$3.35 to US$2.34 where it currently trades according to CoinMarketCap. The coin was trading at an all-time high of US$27.71 in February and is down 90 percent since then.

Those who have lost everything live in hope that the situation might resolve the way August’s Poly Network hack played out, with the hacker returning the funds and highlighting a major vulnerability.

As for compensating people who lost funds, this is – so soon after the event – still up in the air […] The core team will be discussing with the community how best to handle this situation.

Indexed Finance statement

They’ll be talking to similarly affected protocols for insights into their own approaches. It is still unclear whether the incident is a tombstone for the DeFi project or whether there will be a way to recover the funds or compensate users and restart.

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Blockchain Crypto News DeFi

Fantom Token Up 64% in a Week After Announcing Aave Support

Fantom blockchain is continually gaining ground in the decentralised finance (DeFi) space, given more projects are launching on the network on account of its cheap and fast transaction processing time. This has sustained the market price of the native cryptocurrency FTM on the upside, even when the altcoin market seems to be in a lull. 

FTM Soared Over 64% After ATH

While Ether (ETH) and major altcoins lost out on Bitcoin price movements this past week, FTM soared over 64 percent to an all-time high of US$2.45 on October 8, a day after the announcement that analytics platform Nansen would include Fantom on its blockchain coverage.

After a brief correction from the ATH, FTM began soaring again as Fantom disclosed that one of the biggest Ethereum-based DeFi lending protocols, Aave, could launch on the network if it passes the governance proposal. The voting ended on October 11 and an overwhelming majority of voters (99.73 percent) supported the proposal.

Aave v2 will launch on Fantom Opera blockchain. In doing so, it extends its lending services to Fantom’s DeFi ecosystem and will, in turn, tap more TVL growth from the Fantom community.  

Fantom DeFi Now Worth +$5.7 Billion

In April, Fantom passed a milestone of three million transactions, with the daily record around 200,000. However, the numbers have grown to over 800,000 daily by dint of its inherent scalability property, which is drawing in more project launches on the network. Popular Ethereum protocols such as C.R.E.A.M., Curve, Yearn and SushiSwap have also launched on Fantom. 

As of October 13, the Fantom DeFi ecosystem had a combined TVL of US$5.06 billion. 

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Crypto News DeFi

DeFi Protocol Compound Finance Looks to Restore Confidence by Passing Repair Bug

Compound Finance (COMP), the fifth-largest DeFi pool, has applied Proposal 064 to fix a bug in the distribution mechanism that has been plaguing it for the past week.

Bug Takes Its Toll

The lending protocol had released Proposal 062 over that period, which caused a bug in the COMP distribution mechanism and lost it an estimated US$80 million in the process.

The protocol has since passed Proposal 064, titled “Fix COMP Accurial Bug”, that aims to “patch the bug introduced in Proposal 062 and pessimistically allow COMP reward withdrawals until the bad COMP accruals can be fixed”.

Voting by COMP community to pass Proposal 064.

But before the next patch could be applied, a malicious entity exploited the drip() functionality, transferring US$68.8m from the reservoir to the Comptroller, which increases the pool for incorrectly distributed COMP rewards, allowing the hacker to get away with some more COMP before the issue was resolved.

Long Governance Process Drags Out Fixing Time

Attempts to rectify the crisis were immediately instigated through Proposal 063, which took seven days to reach production due to the protocol’s governance procedure of reviewing, voting and time lock, which lasts seven days.

Proposal 063 by @Arr00c@tylerether and other community members “prevents further COMP from being distributed until the correct logic is restored, but causes issues for protocols that integrated with Compound and required the claim functionality”. Soon after, Proposal 064 followed:

No Rewards Until Issue Fully Resolved

Users who interacted with the cTUSD, cMKR, cSUSHI, cYFI, cAAVE, and cSAI markets while the bug was active will not be able to claim rewards from their entitled staked COMP tokens until after the issue is fully resolved.

The update also advised that “after this proposal passes, we’ll have a state where we’ll be able to compute an exhaustive list of users with bad COMP accrual values. From there, we’ll submit another proposal to fix the bad COMP accrual values and return everything to normal.”

Proposal 064 was expected to resolve Compound’s accrual issues by October 9 but the lost funds can only be reclaimed on an individual basis, meaning it’s a decision left to each user’s moral discretion whether or not to return the funds.