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- 🟣 The FUD abounds, some real, some imagined
🟣 The FUD abounds, some real, some imagined
Blast bust and inside Base(ball)
In a reminder of how centralized most current Ethereum layer-2 networks still are, a dapp on Blast was compromised for $62 million in ETH, but the attacker couldn’t move the funds, and they are now reportedly secured.
It’s a tale of points farming, and throwing caution to the wind, and it’s astounding that so many Blast users were comfortable chucking so much ether into a random GameFi project with evidently lax HR practices.
Exactly how Blast exercised its admin powers is not yet clear, but the most likely scenario is that the exploiter realized the futility of trying to hang onto the funds, and most likely cut a deal to limit the risk of prosecution after being identified.
Onchain sleuth ZachXBT claimed rather vociferously that the culprits were North Korean, but we don’t really know if that’s the case.
Armchair decentralization warriors were quick to point out that Coinbase’s optimistic rollup Base shares many of the same centralization traits that allowed Blast to step in, a point which Jesse “Base contributor #001” Pollack, moved to rebut.
Base is raking in the dough for its parent co. as its costs plummeted following the Ethereum Dencun upgrade just as meme-driven activity kicked into high gear.
Nevertheless, Coinbase, bitcoin and the broader crypto markets are trending lower today following an adverse, but relatively minor court ruling in Coinbase’s legal tussle with the SEC.
COIN fell 5% following the news, and BTC seems to be sliding around the $69k mark for a stretch. It won’t take much of a push from here to take a trip back down to retest the support at the $66-$67k level, and let the market reevaluate.
Total value locked on Bitcoin sidechains:
Source: @SDLerner / DefiLlama
First-mover advantage in Bitcoin scaling sees Rootstock (RSK) — the Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform that operates as a merge-mined sidechain of Bitcoin — clinging to a lead in terms of TVL. But Stacks (STX) has been gaining ground in recent months, and a slew of newcomers are just getting off the starting block.
The top 5 by TVL (in millions) are:
Rootstock — $203M
Stacks — $170M
Merlin — $16M
Interlay — $9M
MAP Protocol and Core, roughly neck and next at $5M
Interestingly, RSK designer Sergio Demian Lerner has called Stacks a “Remora chain” named after the fish, defined as “an independent blockchain that can transfer bitcoins internally and from/to the Bitcoin network only with the support of a money token different from Bitcoin.”
Parallel Colony is the first major implementation of AI agents in gaming in crypto. The incorporation of AI distinguishes it from other crypto games that have historically been more focused on farming simulators and derivatives of existing games.
Although Ondo Finance has experienced growth stagnation over the past few months, they remain a significant player in the tokenized security space, with their recent multichain expansion and their dive into broader tokenized assets through Ondo GM potentially revitalizing growth.
The Department of Justice and Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced back-to-back lawsuits against KuCoin Tuesday.
The DAO first voted on enabling SAFE transfers over a year ago
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The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.
