Category: Tokens

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Audius Hackers Illegal Tokens

Hacker Exploits ‘Audius’ for $1 Million in Malicious Governance Proposal

Decentralised music streaming platform Audius has announced that it lost around US$1 million to an unknown hacker early on July 24.

The hacker was able to gain the funds after the platform mistakenly passed a malicious governance proposal that saw more than US$6 million worth of the platform’s AUDIO tokens transferred:

The hacker was able to transfer 18 million AUDIO tokens from the community treasury, an action that was approved by the Audius community, then assigned himself as the sole guardian of the contract by calling the smart contract function “initialize()”.

Once the platform detected that attack, it paused smart contracts and AUDIO tokens initially to prevent further loss of funds but resumed smart contract functionality soon after. Funds in both the community and the foundation treasury are now said to be safe.

Slippage in AUDIO Price

The attacker sold the tokens on decentralised exchange Uniswap for US$1.08 million, triggering a slippage in the AUDIO price. Slippage refers to the difference between the expected price of a token and the price when the order executes, and is expressed as a percentage of a dollar amount.

According to a tweet from security analysis firm PeckShield, the fault is said to have been caused by inconsistencies discovered in the storage layout of Audius:

Audius Designed to Cut Out the Middleman

Audius was established to connect music fans with artists without having the need for an intermediary like a record label. Initially designed to be a blockchain version of SoundCloud, it is a place where artists can produce immutable songs that fans can listen to free of charge.

The platform gives artists the freedom to choose how they monetise their work and ensures that artists receive 90 percent of the revenues collected. The remaining 10 percent is issued to node operators. Audius has become so popular that popular music artists such as Katy Perry, Steve Aoki and the Chainsmokers have invested in the crypto-powered streaming platform.

Audius now has over six million monthly active users and is a community-owned and operated protocol. The platform recently introduced AUDIO Tipping, enabling fans to tip their favourite artists using the native AUDIO token.

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Audius Blockchain Crypto News DeFi NFTs Tokens

Now You Can Tip Your Favourite Musician Through Blockchain Streaming Service ‘Audius’

Blockchain-based music streaming service Audius is enabling fans to tip artists using $AUDIO token, the platform’s native cryptocurrency.

More Forms of Monetisation to Come

“We’re creating new ways for our seven million active monthly users to show their favourite artists how much they appreciate their work,” Audius co-founder and CEO Roneil Rumburg said in a statement. “But this is just the first piece of monetisation – in the coming weeks and months we look forward to expanding on monetisation with more options for fans and artists alike.”

The company also plans to introduce “ways to tip that do not require tokens”. The platform already offers fans the opportunity to bankroll their favourite artists by harnessing the power of DeFi. They can also benefit from music sales as part copyright owners, thanks to NFTs.

Launched in 2018, Audius hosts over 250,000 artists who have released a combined one million tracks on the platform. “A lot of experiments have been run over the years to evolve the music industry’s business model,” said Rumburg. “But we’ve yet to see a platform that strikes the right balance, improving the music experience for the parties that matter most – artists and their fans. 

Audius is laying the groundwork for a new era where artists reclaim control over their work and their earning potential, all the while giving fans a closer relationship to the music they love. Tipping is a small first step in this direction.

Roneil Rumburg, co-founder and CEO, Audius

Artists including Katy Perry, Nas, Jason Derulo, Pusha T, the Chainsmokers and Steve Aoki have all invested in Audius. “Everyone who uploads to Audius can be an owner; you can’t say that about any other music streaming platform,” says rapper/entrepreneur Nas.

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Crypto News Numeraire Tokens

Crypto Hedge Fund ‘Numeraire’ (NMR) Defies Market Downturn, Pumps 100% in a Week

Numeraire (NMR), the native token for Numerai, a San Francisco-based hedge fund built by a network of data scientists, has outperformed the ailing crypto market by skyrocketing over 100 percent in just over a week.

At the time of writing, NMR was ranked the 173rd crypto according to data from CoinMarketCap and was trading at US$17.93, up from US$9.22 just seven days ago. The token remains down more than 77 percent from its all-time high of US$93.15, which it hit in May 2021.

NMR 7-day price action. Source: CoinMarketCap

The NMR token is built atop the Ethereum blockchain and can be staked to power the Numerai Tournament, in which entrants compete to build machine learning models based on abstract financial data to predict the stock market.

According to the project website, the models also determine the hedge fund’s bets: “The staked models of Numerai are combined to form the Meta Model which controls the capital of the Numerai hedge fund across the global stock market.”

Reasons for Surge Remain Unclear

Numeraire also powers the staking protocol Erasure, which aims to increase trust in online information by requiring information sources to stake their offerings, as inaccurate information causes the stakes to be destroyed. It remains unclear what caused the token to surge to such heights, but developers did announce last week that the project had almost one million NMR stakes across the tournaments:

Obscure Projects Defy Crypto Odds

A couple of crypto projects have come out of nowhere to take the market by storm and have shown some serious growth. Earlier this week, Ethereum-based, decentralised blockchain platform Stratis witnessed its native token STRAX rocket 103 percent in a 24-hour period, cooling off from a rally that at one point had reached 160 percent. And last month it was reported that NuCypher (NU) token had soared 87 percent amid its merger with the Keep Network.

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Australia Crypto News Tokens

Move-to-Earn Token GST Drops After STEPN Hit With DDoS Attacks

Australian move-to-earn fitness application STEPN has reported multiple distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the wake of a major anti-cheating upgrade on its platform:

As mentioned in the above tweet, STEPN was expecting to secure and recover the servers in anywhere up to 12 hours but had not posted an update for 20 hours at the time of writing.

“Our engineers are working hard to fix the problems. We will announce here once recovery is complete. Thank you so much for everyone’s patience,” STEPN further tweeted.

The DDoS attacks occurred after the platform introduced “STEPN’s Model for Anti-Cheating” (SMAC) on June 3. The security-based system aims to eliminate fake users from the platform as well as prevent fraudulent motion data on the STEPN app.

Token Numbers Inflated by Bots and GPS Fudges

Launched last December, STEPN is an NFT game that allows users to earn tokens (either GST, the utility Green Satoshi Token, or GMT, STEPN’s governance token, aka the Green Metaverse Token) by exercising outdoors while wearing NFT sneakers. Apparently some players had been using bots and GPS fudging to inflate the number of tokens generated by using the application, hence STEPN’s SMAC system.

In the past 24 hours, both tokens recorded declines. GMT suffered a 6 percent slide with a 20.56 percent drop in trading volume, although increased distribution appeared to be under way at time of writing:

Source: CoinMarketCap

Just last week, GMT plunged almost 40 percent in 24 hours following news that mainland Chinese users would be barred from the service from July 15 this year. In April, STEPN reported that GMT’s value had increased five-fold over the previous month after securing a sneaker deal with Japanese brand Asics.

Meanwhile, the GST-SOL token recorded a 19.18 percent loss, though at time of writing volume was up 11.53 percent, consistent with a bear market correction.

Source: CoinMarketCap
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Crypto News DeFi Tokens Waves

WAVES Token Pumps 60% Amid DeFi Revival Plan and Airdrop

More positives for the Waves open-source blockchain, following the announcement of a DeFi revival plan, the WAVES token price increased by approximately 60 percent in the May 31 trading session, only to crash back down a couple of days later.

DeFi Revival Makes WAVES

The WAVES token jumped from US$6 at the beginning of the week to a US$10.15 intraday peak on May 31 and is now likely to hit its US$12.30 resistance, a point it has not reached since May 11.

The trouble for the WAVES token began at the beginning of April after a large sell-off of USDN. The knock-on effect was last month’s de-pegging of the stablecoin. This, combined with the Vires Finance liquidity crisis and the LUNA crash, meant an intense plunge for WAVES.

Anatomy of a ‘Master Plan’

There are several contributing factors to the 60 percent WAVES surge, the most notable being the Waves DeFi revival plan. The so-called “master plan”, according to a Waves Tech post, will look like this:

  • begin buying and locking CRV tokens with 45 percent of the WAVES staking profits from Neutrino, and vote to incentivise the USDN 3-pool, to improve demand for USDN;
  • liquidate large accounts, taking control of their collateral;
  • sell the collateral without de-pegging USDN to return liquidity to Vires Finance and reduce utilisation rate, enabling larger user withdrawals; and
  • improve Neutrino architecture with a new recap token that recapitalises Neutrino with new Waves Tokens when under-collateralised:

As part of the recapitalisation of Neutrino, the Waves protocol will be airdropping the new token via Tsunami Testnet, providing users meet eligibility conditions.

With the wider crypto market slowly turning green after a lengthy period of lows, along with the revival plan to be implemented, WAVES may continue its surge over coming weeks.

WAVES’ Recent Breaks

March was eventful for the Waves protocol as it managed to stay at the forefront of innovation via a partnership with Allbridge. A combination of this partnership and the protocol’s migration to Waves 2.0 caused the token to surge by 120 percent in just a week.

The back end of March saw the Waves protocol pump 70 percent following the news that it would be launching in the US. The US Waves Labs project was tasked with supercharging the protocol’s ecosystem upon its March 28 launch.

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Basic Attention Token Crypto News Privacy Solana Tokens

Brave Browser Update Expands Web3 Access to Solana

Privacy-focused browser Brave has partnered with Solana to facilitate Web3 for crypto newbies while also providing a robust suite of Web3 tools for advanced users.

Added Support for dApps

In what Brave describes as its first steps toward full integration with the Solana ecosystem, it will also offer support for Solana’s decentralised applications (dApps), allowing them to run natively within the browser.

Integration to be Completed by July

Addressing the Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, Portugal earlier this week, Brave CEO and co-founder Brendan Eich said the browser’s default support for Solana would help provide fast and affordable Web3 access and thus “pave the way for the next billion crypto users”, adding that he expected the integration process to be completed by the end of June.

The partnership brings the Solana blockchain to Brave’s 42 million monthly active users and 1.3 million verified creators. In return, Solana will implement Themis, a privacy-by-design advertising protocol considered a key milestone in the BAT 2.0 roadmap.

The BAT token powers Brave’s advertising ecosystem by allowing advertisers to purchase ad space. Last year, Brave launched its Brave Wallet, incorporating a rewards program that allows users to recoup 20 percent of their swap fees.

Over the past week, the Solana (SOL) token became the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, overtaking Cardano and stablecoin provider Tether.

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Australia Crypto News DeFi Terra Tokens

Australian Poll in March Predicted LUNA Would Top $143 This Year

Hindsight is a wonderful thing – in this case, the discovery of an Australian poll dating back to March that predicted the LUNA token would top US$143 this year.

‘LUNA Worth $390 by 2025’: Finder Survey

The crypto industry has proved its volatility lately as Terra fell and LUNA crashed. It was a crash, it seems, no one was expecting, not even the professionals. The Finder survey from March this year, for example, demonstrated the confidence that 36 fintech specialists had in Terra:

In late March to early April – prior to Terra (UST) losing its peg -Finder surveyed 36 fintech specialists for their thoughts on how LUNA [would] perform over the next decade. At the time, they thought Terra (LUNA) would be worth US$143 by the end of 2022 before rising to $390 by 2025.”

Finder.com

The biggest lesson to take out of this is that crypto is unfortunately still very unpredictable. While uncertainty still surrounds the future of LUNA and Terra, no token is exempt from the industry’s volatility and investors need to be smart, rather than taking predictions as gospel:

The LUNA Crash: Knock-On Effects

The LUNA collapse has had industry-wide knock-on effects. One of the most prominent outcomes has been significant falls across the DeFi market, as the crash was not restricted to the Terra ecosystem. With LUNA plummeting by 97 percent, there have now been approximately US$900 million worth of liquidations.

LUNA’s heartbroken founder, Do Kwon, has set to work on a revival plan, which is essentially a restart of the whole Terra blockchain. However, previous fans of LUNA are now struggling to trust the word of Kwon and are sceptical of the project’s return.

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Blockchain Cosmos Crypto News Tokens

Typo Sees $36 Million in Seized Whale JUNO Tokens Sent to Wrong Wallet

Typographical errors or a misplaced cut-and-paste are the stuff of nightmares in the journalistic profession, so imagine the horror for the Juno community when US$36 million worth of its tokens were sent to the wrong wallet address thanks to a programming mishap.

The community last week voted to seize the tokens from the wallet of a whale investor accused of gaming an airdrop. But instead of sending the funds to an address controlled by the Juno community, as originally intended, they were misdirected to another wallet because of a faulty software upgrade:

Juno Proposal 20, passed almost unanimously by the Juno community, was supposed to automatically run code to move funds “gamed” by Japanese whale Takumi Asano from his wallet into a “Unity” address controlled by the community.

Funds Wind Up in Blockchain Limbo

When the code was executed on May 4, a programming error moved three million revoked JUNO tokens to an erroneous address on the Cosmos-based blockchain to which neither Asano nor the Juno community had access.

Andrea Di Michele, a member of Juno’s developer team, attributed the glitch to a copy-paste error. “When I gave the [Proposal 20] developers the address of the [Unity] smart contract, I pasted the address of the smart contract and just underneath it put the transaction hash,” Di Michele said.

Developers then accidentally copied the transaction hash – which looked similar to the wallet address – rather than the address itself. As a result, the seized funds were moved to an unreachable sector of the Juno/Cosmos blockchain.

Of Juno’s more than 120 validators, none appeared to notice that the Unity address had been pasted incorrectly. One of them stated the obvious on behalf of the many: “We f..ked up big time.”

Asano Foreshadows Possible Legal Action

Asano has since indicated he may pursue legal action against the validators unless the confiscated funds are returned to his investors.

As mistakes go, this one is not quite in the league of the DeFi protocol bug that accidentally rewarded Compound users with US$80 million worth of COMP tokens last October. But it’s way bigger than the Mutant Ape NFT that sold for 17 USDC rather than 17 ETH in August 2021, the result of another unfortunate if equally amusing typo that in this case cost a mere US$54,000.

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Blockchain Crypto News Markets Tokens

New Move-to-Earn Token ‘FITFI’ Explodes Over 243% in Just Seven Days

The move-to-earn project Step App ($FITFI) has bucked the downward trend of crypto markets over the past week, posting gains in excess of 250 percent in the week since April 28. 

According to CoinGecko, the token was trading at US$0.24 on April 28 before starting its upward climb, recording its recent peak of US$0.67 on May 5 – a seven-day increase of approximately 275 percent. At the time of writing FITFI had retraced some of those gains but was still up significantly, trading at US$0.63.

Step App Lets Users Earn From Exercise

Step App allows users to monetise their fitness, compete with other users, collect NFTs and socialise with other crypto-minded exercise enthusiasts. According to the Step App website, it achieves this functionality by taking advantage of “the leading technology in metaverse, augmented reality and blockchain”.

Step App has a somewhat complicated economy, using three separate tokens – FITFI, KCAL and SNEAK: 

  • FITFI is the app’s governance token, which can be used for a variety of purposes including staking, conferring DAO voting rights and providing liquidity incentives; 
  • KCAL is the in-game currency users earn through exercise; and 
  • SNEAK are NFTs users can mint or buy using using either KCAL or FITFI tokens.

Move-To-Earn Is Latest Crypto Investing Trend

Step App is a part of the fitness finance (FitFi) trend to have recently emerged in crypto, where users can earn crypto rewards by exercising. It seems to be following a similar trajectory to the DeFi and GameFi trends before it: a few innovative projects create a new market segment, and then many similar projects emerge to iterate on the theme and capitalise on the hype.

The current leader in the FitFi space is the Australian-based move-to-earn project StepN, whose GMT token has increased in value more than 200x since the start of 2022.

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Crypto News Crypto.com Tokens

Crypto.com Restarts Staking Rewards Following Brutal Community Backlash

Crypto.com has had to restart its staking rewards program after the community reacted harshly to the company announcing it would discontinue it.

Native Token Crashes 11% Amid Backlash

Revisions to Crypto.com’s staking rewards sent its native token CRO tumbling 11 percent as the community expressed its dismay. The exchange announced it would be reducing rewards on the usage of its Visa-enabled cards based on the tiers offered.

In a blog post, Crypto.com said lower tiers such as Midnight Blue and Ruby Steel would get 0 percent, while Royal Indigo and Jade Green would receive 0.5 percent and Icy White and Frosted Rose Gold 1 percent, while Obsidian, the highest tier, would get a mere 2 percent.

Revised CRO card rewards. Source: Crypto.com

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the firm would continue to offer staking rewards to its card users just a day after eliminating the program. The decision has since been rescinded, with Marszalek subsequently tweeting:

Rewards are still less than those offered at the moment, to which the community reacted badly. Marszalek, however, said the changes were necessary to ensure “long-term sustainability” of yields offered on its card program:

Crypto.com had already slashed rates of returns offered on its token deposits this year. Cuts announced on March 26 reduced flexible returns offered by the firm on popular tokens such as Bitcoin and Ethereum to 0.5 percent from between 1.5 and 2 percent.

Crypto.com Gets Active in Sports Arena

Crypto.com is gaining increasing traction in the sports arena. Last year, the firm signed a US$35 million multi-year deal with renowned European football club Paris Saint-Germain. In January, it also clinched a five-year partnership worth A$25 million with the Australian Football League.