Web3 is Going Just Great

Galaxy Digital claims that BitGo failed to provide audited financial statements for 2021 by the deadline they had agreed upon, and for that reason they decided to end the deal.

BitGo claims they've still got time to provide the statements, and that Galaxy Digital owes them $100 million for breaking the deal, which they plan to pursue in court.

Galaxy Digital just reported a ~$555 million dollar loss in the second quarter, which may have contributed towards their choice to back out of the acquisition.

In June 2023, the Delaware Court of Chancery dismissed BitGo's complaint with prejudice, finding that Galaxy Digital had a "clean termination right" based on BitGo's failure to provide financial statements.

ASEC_APE had just purchased the four NFTs between July 15 and August 13 for a combined total of 326 ETH (~$532,000 based on ETH prices at the time of each purchase; ~$631,000 at the price on the day of the theft).

One of the stolen NFTs, Bored Ape 9012, had just been stolen a week before from Cameo CEO Steven Galanis when his wallet was compromised, as were a handful of other pricey NFTs. ASEC_APE had purchased it from the person who purchased it from the hacker shortly after the August 6 theft.

Acala paused the protocol shortly after the attack, and disabled the transfer functionality of the stolen aUSD and of Acala-based tokens the attacker had swapped for some of the aUSD. It's important to note that the attacker could not earn a profit anywhere near $1.2 billion USD from the erroneous creation of new, unbacked tokens — they likely made off with around $1.6 million. Acala subsequently burned most of the new tokens, which helped the aUSD token return to between $0.90 and $0.94 — much closer to its intended peg.

On August 13, Gabagool posted a long confession to his Twitter account, writing that he had stolen the $350,000, and had previously taken $56,000 over the course of two months, to try to "revenge trade" the money he had lost in the crypto crash. Explaining why he took the $350,000, he wrote, "I thought I could make the 56k back and return all of the funds, which was delusional". He also wrote that "the majority of the funds have been returned to the Velodrome team. The rest will be." Velodrome later confirmed they had recovered all of the stolen money.

Gabagool had become a somewhat prominent part of the crypto community, providing insights into various crypto happenings as someone who was adept at tracing blockchain transactions. In June, he was featured in a Vice documentary titled, "Is Everything in Crypto a Scam?". He spoke about, among other things, his October 2021 discovery that the crypto-focused venture capital firm Divergence Ventures was Sybil attacking airdrops to claim millions in rewards. That particular incident ended with Divergence returning the money they had gained from the strategy, and Ribbon awarding 5% of that amount — equivalent to about $545,000 at the time — to Gabagool as a "bounty".