Kickstarter's bizarre "pivot to blockchain" spurred by secret $100 million Andreessen Horowitz investment

March 11, 2024

Kickstarter's bizarre "pivot to blockchain" spurred by secret $100 million Andreessen Horowitz investment

Web3: a technology so promising you can't even pay a company $100 million to use it.

Crowdfunding website Kickstarter surprised and dismayed many of its users in December 2021 when they announced they would be moving the product to the blockchain in December 2021 for... reasons. That blockchain would just so happen to be the relatively unknown Andreessen Horowitz-backed Celo blockchain. "How this will actually work, beyond Kickstarter being able to yell 'blockchain' like a spell to summon investors ... is unclear," wrote Tom McKay at Gizmodo.

He probably didn't realize how right he was, but now it's been revealed that KickStarter was able to land a $100 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz with handwavy proclamations about the blockchain that its own COO didn't seem to quite understand.

The company seems to have since given up on its blockchain ambitions — in no small part thanks to user revolt. It seems that $100 million windfall didn't include any terms actually requiring Kickstarter to follow through.

"The untold story of Kickstarter’s crypto Hail Mary—and the secret $100 million a16z-led investment to save its fading brand", Fortune Crypto [archive]

March 10, 2024

Twitter phishers steal over $46 million from 57,000 victims in February

Scam Sniffer's February 2024 report describes 57,000 victims who collectively lost almost $47 million thanks to various phishing schemes on the Twitter platform. Many of the losses came from accounts designed to impersonate various popular cryptocurrency projects, who diverted users to scam websites resembling the real ones.

The largest individual loss was the phishing attack against kirilm.eth, who had over 180 million $BEAM tokens notionally worth over $5 million drained from their crypto wallet. The attacker sold the tokens for around $4.5 million.

The total amount stolen is down slightly from January, in which $55 million was taken. Altogether, scammers have stolen over $100 million via Twitter phishing alone in the first two months of 2024.

February 2024 Scam Sniffer Phishing Report, Dune dashboard [archive]
Tweet thread by Scam Sniffer [archive]

March 9, 2024

Crypto4Winners investment firm claims funds were stolen

(attribution)

A investment firm called Crypto4Winners announced in their Telegram channel that "Our investigations lead us to suspect an individual of committing fraudulent acts that may have compromised the integrity of assets. It is also possible that the current and historical data at our disposal has been tampered with, with a high degree of sophistication."

The company had paused withdrawals the previous day, and has not re-enabled them. They also have not disclosed the amount that was allegedly stolen.

Crypto4Winners claims it has earned 377% returns on customer investments since 2019, producing 3–20% monthly returns.

The company is co-owned by Luc Schiltz, who was sentenced to six years in prison in 2017 for defrauding victims of over $1.5 million through various investment frauds. He was released after two years, and quickly started the Crypto4Winners project after.

March 8, 2024

Unizen platform hacked for $2.1 million

(attribution)

The Unizen defi platform lost around $2.1 million in the Tether stablecoin in an attack that took advantage of a vulnerability an external call from the project smart contract.

The project team sent on-chain messages to the attacker, offering a 20% "bounty" for the return of the remaining funds.

March 5, 2024

WOOFi hacked for $8.75 million

(attribution)

An attacker was able to use a flash loan attack to manipulate an oracle on the WooFi DEX implementation on the Arbitrum network. By manipulating the price of $WOO, they were able to steal around $8.5 million.

Blockchain security firms detected the attack quickly, and the project team paused the project's smart contract within fifteen minutes, but not before the millions were stolen. They contacted the attacker via an on-chain message to offer a 10% "bounty", later threatening that they had a "strong lead that we think will soon reveal the identity of the exploiter".

Woofi, Rekt [archive]
"WOOFi sPMM exploit post-mortem", WOOFi [archive]

March 1, 2024

"The AI Protocol" burns tokens after holder suffers $4.3 million theft

(attribution)

Someone who held over 111.6 million ALI tokens from a project called The AI Protocol was phished by someone using a wallet drainer service using a permit phishing technique. The tokens were priced at around $4.3 million.

Blockchain sleuth zachxbt was able to coordinate with the project to organize a community governance vote to burn the stolen tokens before the attacker was able to cash out. Although this doesn't return the stolen funds to their original owner, it at least keeps the attacker from profiting.

February 28, 2024

Shido exploited for at least $3.3 million

(attribution)

The Shido blockchain suffered an exploit of their staking smart contract, in which an attacker was able to transfer ownership of the contract to another address and then upgrade the contract with a function that allowed them to withdraw staked tokens. Altogether, the attacker withdrew all 4.3 billion staked $SHIDO tokens — over half the entire circulating supply.

Although the stolen tokens were nominally priced at $35 million, the massive theft caused the price to plummet 94%. The attacker has converted the stolen tokens to around 956 ETH ($3.3 million).

The Shido team announced that they would be trying to offer a "bounty" to the hacker.

"Shido token plummets 94% as exploiter drains Ethereum staking contract", CoinTelegraph [archive]

February 28, 2024

Seneca Protocol bug enables at least $3 million in stolen user funds

(attribution)

A bug in Seneca Protocol's smart contract has allowed attackers to steal funds from users who had approved the contract. So far, around $3 million has been stolen across the Ethereum blockchain and Arbitrum layer-2.

Making things worse, although the project's smart contract inherits the Pausable module that should allow the Seneca team to halt the malfunctioning code, they never implemented the function, meaning there's no way for them to stop the thefts. Instead, individual users must each revoke access to the flawed contract.

February 27, 2024

"Crypto inheritence" project Serenity Shield hacked, token price plummets 99%

(attribution)

Serenity Shield, a project aiming to solve "crypto inheritence", has been hacked. Although the project prominently claims to help "ensur[e] your financial and personal security", they seem to have some trouble ensuring their own.

An attacker stole 6.9 SERSH tokens from a MetaMask wallet belonging to the project. Although the tokens were ostensibly priced at $5.6 million, the thief was only able to sell them for around $586,000.

Serenity Shield confirmed the breach, and encouraged people to stop trading $SERSH as they planned to relaunch the token. "Rest assured, we are deploying all necessary safety measures to ensure a foolproof system," they wrote. This time it will be secure, they promise.

The team also sent a message to the hacker, offering a 15% "bounty" and a promise not to pursue legal action in exchange for the return of the stolen funds.

According to crypto sleuth zachxbt, the attack seems to be linked to exploits of OKX (December 2023) and Concentric (January 2024).

Tweet by Serenity Shield [archive]
Zachxbt on Telegram [archive]
On-chain message by Serenity Shield to the hacker [archive]

February 27, 2024

Scammers hack Twitter account of late actor Matthew Perry, solicit "donations" for "substance abuse charity"

Matthew Perry (attribution)

There are evidently no lows to which crypto scammers will not sink.

Some scammers were able to compromise the Twitter account belonging to the Friends star Matthew Perry, who passed away in October 2023. He had spent much of his life battling addiction, and his death was drug-related.

The scammers took advantage of this to share crypto addresses that they claimed would funnel donations to the real Matthew Perry Foundation, which actually tries to help those battling addiction. However, in a post on Perry's other social media accounts, the Foundation clarified that they had nothing to do with the wallets or the Twitter posts, and described the website as "fraudulent".

"Late Friends star Matthew Perry’s X account hacked by crypto scammers", Protos [archive]

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