El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as legal tender

Nayib BukeleEl Salvador's president Nayib Bukele (attribution)
Nayib Bukele unexpectedly announced that El Salvador would be adopting Bitcoin as legal tender, and the policy went into effect on September 7, 2021. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the decision came near the very top of the Bitcoin prices. Those who put money into Bitcoin at Bukele's urging have lost quite a lot of money.

So has El Salvador itself, assuming Bukele is telling the truth about his many claimed Bitcoin purchases. As of December 2022, Nayib Bukele has lost more than $67 million on those investments.

C.R.E.A.M. Finance exploited again, this time for $25 to $30 million

A vulnerability in C.R.E.A.M. Finance allowed a re-entrancy attack to steal somewhere between $25 and $30 million from C.R.E.A.M. finance in its second multimillion dollar hack of the year.

xToken loses another $4.5 million in second hack of the year

A vulnerability in xToken's xSNX product allowed hackers to use flash loans to empty $4.5 million from xToken. This hack followed an even larger hack in May, where the platform was exploited for around $25 million.

Scammers posing as Bored Ape Yacht Club founders scam NFT collector Sohrob Farudi out of $800,000

An illustration of a person in side profile, wearing a bright red baseball cap. They have dark grey skin and blue dreadlocks in a ponytail, and are wearing futuristic green glasses.ON1 #7253, one of the stolen NFTs (attribution)
The day after Nicholas lost almost $500,000 to NFT scammers, another collector was targeted for an even larger sum. "I've never felt more dumb, helpless, embarrassed or just plain sad in my entire life", Farudi wrote on Twitter. The scammers, who pretended to be the founders of the popular Bored Ape NFT collection, had tricked him into exposing his private key QR code to them in another Discord/OpenSea scam.

Scammers posing as OpenSea support staff steal $480,000 from NFT collector Jeff Nicholas

An illustration of a bright pink ape, wearing a captain's hat, with heart-shaped sunglasses, with eyes on its neck, and a gold jacket and chainBored Ape #648, one of the stolen NFTs (attribution)
After asking for help in the OpenSea Discord channel, Nicholas was successfully scammed by individuals posing as customer support. After convincing the investor to share his screen, allowing scammers to view his private key, they transferred all of his NFTs, worth almost $500,000, from his wallet in transactions that can't be reversed. Earlier that year, Nicholas had appeared as a guest on a podcast episode titled "How NFTs Will Change Everything".

Liquid Global cryptocurrency exchange hacked for $90 million

Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid Global suffered a hack that saw $90 million in various assets stolen. The exchange stated that the attack had targeted the company's MPC wallet.

A week after the hack, FTX extended a $120 million loan to the platform. In April 2022, FTX formally acquired Liquid for an undisclosed amount.

DAO Maker project exploited for more than $7.3 million

The DAO Maker project (not to be confused with the well-known MakerDAO) is a launchpad that claims to be "building the future of venture capital". Its website boasts that users who stake their $DAO can "earn up to 70% APY". The project suffered an exploit on June 3 in which attackers stole 7,376,245 USDC, a US dollar-pegged stablecoin. Although the project had been audited by three different auditing companies, hackers were able to exploit an issue in the claim portal for some tokens. According to the DAO Maker team, 5,521 users were affected, and lost an average of $1,250 each. Attackers immediately moved some of the funds to the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency tumbler, while some remained dormant for months before being moved.

$611 million is stolen from Poly Network in one of the largest cryptocurrency heists to date

Hackers stole approximately $611 million from the decentralized finance platform Poly Network in the largest cryptocurrency theft against a single platform to date. In a bizarre twist, the hacker returned the funds, and Poly Network offered them a position as a chief security advisor (though it is not clear if they accepted).

"Women-led" NFT project, "Fame Lady Squad", turns out to be a bunch of dudes

An illustration of a woman with bright green hair and red eyes with laser beams shooting out of them. She's sticking her tongue out and has a bright blue tattoo on her faceFame Lady #2269 (attribution)
The "Fame Lady Squad" NFT project touted itself as a woman-designed and -developed project that would give back to women in the space, drawing support from high-profile individuals like Gary Vaynerchuk, and ultimately around $1.5 million in investments. Problem is, the three women who were supposedly running the project were a group of Russian men, accused by one of the individuals who uncovered the lie of trying to profit off American social causes. The group had a history of creating NFT projects based on false stories. One of their other projects, "Cyber City Girls Club", was intended to campaign to stop hate against Asians, and also originally purported to be run only by women (it wasn't).

Poloniex settles with the SEC for more than $10.3 million

Poloniex, a cryptocurrency exchange, agreed to pay more than $10.3 million in a settlement with the SEC. The SEC had alleged that Poloniex had flouted securities laws from 2017 thorugh 2019 by operating an unregistered trading platform. In the settlement, Poloniex neither admitted nor denied the charges.

The US-based Poloniex was acquired in 2018 by Circle, then in late 2019 by an investment group that included Justin Sun. Sun moved Poloniex to the Seychelles and closed U.S. operations upon acquiring the platform.

No JavaScript? That's cool too! Check out the Web 1.0 version of the site to see more entries.