Either a rug pull or a hack drains at least $1.8 million from Bent Finance

Bent Finance informed its users of a "possible exploit", but soon after issued a statement that the exploit had originated from the Bent Finance project's own deployer. Because of this, some speculated that it may have been a rug pull. Bent said in a statement, "There are multiple members on this team and we will make this right. We recommend you withdraw all funds until it is clear." The platform hasn't revealed how much money was lost, though a crypto fraud investigator wrote that 440 ETH (equivalent to about $1.8 million) appeared to have been funneled out of the platform. The attack was discovered on December 20, but appeared to have been ongoing since at least December 12, and possibly longer.

Dozens of users report money disappearing from their El Salvadoran Chivo Wallet accounts

Tweet by @designnvt: "@chivowallet Van hacer algo o no ya es demasiado que clase de suporte tienen, son $16000 que ha sacado su sistema sin autorización, ya es demasiado tendré que llamar a una radio o televisión para que lo publiquen si no dan una respuesta." There is a screenshot of about a dozen transactions, each around $800One of the tweets reporting apparent theft (attribution)
A Twitter thread showed dozens of people reporting amounts from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars disappearing from their Chivo Wallets, the Bitcoin wallet backed by El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in September of this year, where it is used alongside the U.S. dollar.

Grim Finance is exploited for $30 million

Grim Finance, the "compounding yield optimizer" DeFi platform, was hacked. According to them, attackers exploited a bug in the platform to perform a reentrancy attack that netted them $30 million. Grim, indeed. A cryptocurrency watchdog group, RugDoc, opined that the exploit was possible because of very basic mistakes in implementation, and wrote, "Hopefully all projects can draw lessons from this incident that there is much knowledge most experienced solidity devs have at hand. If you haven't acquired this yet, don't build multi-million dollar projects. Don't get audits from companies which everyone knows are useless." This was apparently a dig at Solidity Finance, who had performed an audit several months prior to the hack and found that "ReentrancyGuard is used in relevant locations to preent[sic] reentrancy attacks."

Adidas learns the hard way that limiting the number of NFTs one person can buy is hard

Adidas NFT, a monkey wearing a tracksuitAdidas NFT (attribution)
Anticipating that buyers would try to hoard items from a big-name NFT drop, Adidas decided to try to limit their NFT drop to two per buyer. They apparently didn't realize that there is no guarantee that one address = one individual, and a crafty blockchain engineer created a smart contract that generated additional smart contracts, each with their own address. These contracts snapped up NFTs, then transferred them to the engineer's primary wallet and self-destructed. The engineer was able to snag 330 NFTs.

Prominent comics artist says continuous theft of his work for use as NFTs may force him to close his DeviantArt gallery

Screenshot of DeviantArt Protect, software which detects similar artwork being used off-site. In the screenshot, artwork depicting a minotaur has been directly copied with no apparent modifications and posted on an NFT marketplace.DeviantArt Protect software detecting stolen artwork (attribution)
Comics artist Liam Sharp wrote on Twitter that he would likely need to close his DeviantArt gallery, which he has maintained for fourteen years, because his artwork keeps being minted as NFTs without his permission. He wrote, "I can't - and shouldn't have to - report each one and make a case, which is consistently ignored. Sad and frustrating."

Multiple artists report OpenSea automatically closing their support tickets reporting stolen artwork; OpenSea removes ability to report

Artists going through the greuling process of reporting individual NFTs created without permission from their work reported tickets being automatically rejected. Artists were also required to provide personal information to OpenSea, who in some cases forwarded the personal information to the scammer behind the theft, opening the artist up to doxing and other harassment. Eventually, OpenSea disabled their contact form that had previously allowed artists to report stolen work.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 receives so much fan pushback on planned NFTs that the studio scraps the idea within a day

A gas-masked character from the STALKER 2 gameS.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 artwork (attribution)
Pushback from fans led S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 creators to quickly reverse their decision to add NFTs to the game. The studio announced their NFT plans on December 15, which involved collectible cards, in-game items, having one's name added to walls or other scenery in the game, and even the possibility to have an NPC added to the game that resembled the NFT buyer. In subsequent updates the studio stressed that the NFTs would not be mandatory for gameplay, and later downplayed them further by saying that the NPCs they would add to the game "aren't even involved in the story". Fans were incensed, and the next day the studio scrapped "anything NFT-related" that was planned for the game.

NFT collector who owns the NFT associated with the Bored Ape artwork used in this site header would like me to stop using "their" ape

Screenshot of a Twitter conversation: "Hello Molly Hope you are doing fine I believe you are using my ape on your website without my permission. Can you please prove you own this ape as I believe there is only one looking like this and it is mine"Screenshot of the messages (attribution)
The apparent owner of Bored Ape #5262, of which this site header is a derivative work, contacted me on Twitter to say "I believe you are using my ape on your website without my permission. Can you please prove you own this ape as I believe there is only one looking like this and it is mine" in an event that truly transcended parody. While this would be hilarious even if it was a prank, the Twitter account who DMed me does appear to belong to the person holding the NFT on OpenSea.

Melania Trump announces an NFT collection which will begin with a painting of her "cobalt blue eyes"

A watercolor painting of Melania Trump's eyes and eyebrows"Melania's Vision" NFT (attribution)
Lest it be mistaken for a grift, the press release was quick to say that Mrs. Trump had promised to donate a portion of the proceeds to children leaving foster care. The NFT platform is "powered by Parler", a far-right social network. Trump intends to release multiple NFTs, and the first will have a starting price of 1 SOL (approximately $150). Solana Labs was quick to clarify that the "project is not part of any Solana-led initiative".

Tweet from a crypto miner answers the question of where all the GPUs went

A tweet from Jaxson Davidson: "Here's is look inside building 1/4 of my mining farm. Almost all 3070s in this building. My new building will be all 170hx cards. Hoping to have it finished by EOY. #ETH #RVN #Mining" It includes an embedded video of racks upon racks of GPUs.The now-deleted tweet showing racks upon racks of GPUs (attribution)
Crypto miner Jaxson Davidson posted a video showing one of four buildings in his crypto mining farm, showing racks of thousands of GPUs — GPUs that gamers and other consumer buyers are finding painfully expensive, if available for sale at all. He said the GPUs were bought "under the table", for an average price of $1,200 per unit, and is using the farm to mine Ethereum and Ravencoin. Davidson deleted his Twitter account following some pretty fierce backlash from gamers feeling the GPU shortage, as well as crypto skeptics who were shocked at the display of energy expenditure.

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