Meanwhile, the founder of the Nostr social media platform has accused Nostr Assets of being an "affinity scam" by falsely suggesting in their platform name and $NOSTR token naming they are affiliated with the Nostr project. Nostr Assets has described the allegations as "unfounded", saying that their use of the Nostr network means the name is "pertinent", and suggesting that Nostr's founder has no basis to dictate who can use the Nostr name as it is a decentralized and open source project.
Nostr Assets gets clogged up
The Nostr Assets bitcoin platform has had to ask people to stop depositing into their platform because it's all clogged up. The project uses the bitcoin Lightning Network, which itself is an attempt to overcome the slowness and high cost of the bitcoin network. However, it too has limited capacity, and Nostr Assets has announced that the "inbound capacity of lightning channels" was depleted.
Rob Robb robs victims of $1.2 million
If you're named Rob Robb, do you have any choice but go into a life of thievery?
Robb, also known as "pokerbrat2019", convinced at least 11 people to give him a total of $1.2 million, which he said he would use to develop various MEV bots. Instead of doing so, he pocketed the money, offering a litany of excuses for why the project was continually delayed.
Robb had previously been convicted of a $4 million scam in 2002 after soliciting funds for an online gambling platform, instead using the money to buy a car and fund his own gambling.
Ethereum projects scramble to address widespread smart contract vulnerability through ThirdWeb
Projects using the suite of pre-built smart contracts from crypto development platform ThirdWeb have been racing to migrate to patched versions as ThirdWeb has disclosed a vulnerability affecting dozens of its contracts. Although they claim no contracts containing the vulnerability have been exploited, they've urged projects using them to urgently migrate to updated versions without the flaw.
Projects relying on these pre-built smart contracts will have to lock the old contract and deploy new ones, then provide new versions of tokens via airdrop or a claim page — a fairly disruptive process.
Major NFT marketplace OpenSea issued a statement that they were working with ThirdWeb about a vulnerability "impacting some NFT collections". Rarible also stated that some NFT collections on their platform were affected, including some on the Polygon sidechain. Coinbase and Base also disclosed that some projects on their platforms were vulnerable. Projects by groups including Cool Cats and Mocaverse will need to be migrated.
Users of the Safe Wallet lose cumulative $2 million to address poisoning
Users of the (not so) Safe Wallet have lost $2.05 million altogether in the past week as they've been targeted by an attacker using an address poisoning attack. The same attacker was also behind such an attack on the Florence Finance real-world lending protocol, in which they stole $1.45 million.
According to research group ScamSniffer, the attacker has stolen at least $5 million from at least 21 victims in the past four months.
Florence Finance loses $1.45 million to address poisoning
An apparent address poisoning attack on the Florence Finance real-world asset lending protocol led to the loss of $1.45 million in the USDC stablecoin.
As of December 4, Florence Finance had not publicly acknowledged the theft.
DraftKings was secretly paid to run a Polygon network validator
In March 2022, Polygon boasted about how "The decision by DraftKings, a NASDAQ-listed company, to take an active role in day-to-day operations of a major network is an important adoption milestone for the blockchain industry." The company had agreed to run a validator on the network, and Polygon claimed in a press release at the time that DraftKings would be "an equal community member" among other validators.
However, it turns out that Polygon allocated tens of millions of tokens to the DraftKings validator — far more than they allocated to other validators — on which DraftKings earned a highly unusual 100% of staking rewards. Polygon also sent the company 2.5 million of their MATIC tokens (priced at just over $1.5 million at the time), and it's unclear if this was a purchase by DraftKings or a transfer as a part of the deal.
In October 2023, Polygon kicked DraftKings off the network as the validator had failed to maintain performance standards. Throughout the period that the DraftKings maintained the validator, they earned millions of dollars through the undisclosed partnership.
Crypto media outlet Forkast goes bust
The crypto media website Forkast has stopped publishing and laid off most of its editorial staff. The last post on the site is from November 22.
After raising $1.7 million in seed funding in 2021, the site seems to have run out of runway. It merged with the CryptoSlam data aggregator in January 2023, but that apparently didn't help it sustain operations. The company appears to be trying to rebrand as "Forkast Labs", and is offering crypto data feeds.
BitStable decides to burn most tokens after public sale goes wrong
BitStable launched their BSSB token in a public sale only to watch as all tokens sold out in one block. Four entities acquired the majority of the BSSB tokens, an outcome that the team had been hoping to avoid in the interest of "fairness and integrity". As a result, the team announced that they would burn 75% of the tokens.
Some applauded the decision, seeing the token hoarding as an unfair tactic that deprived others who wanted the tokens of their opportunity to buy any. However, some — particularly those who succeeded in buying tokens in the initial sale — worried that they were being "rugged" as the team threatened to destroy their tokens. Others objected based on the "code is law" ethos: "Basically we used ur platform and ur rules - u said ur selling at 500k mcap valuation and now changed it to 3m mcap valuation after it sold out - straight rug material u can't do that lmao", wrote one person on Twitter.
SoFi neobank ditches crypto
After entering the crypto sector in 2019, the neobank SoFi is jettisoning the blockchain portion of its business by mid-December. Customers are being given the option to move their accounts to Blockchain.com; otherwise their assets will be liquidated.
The move is likely tied to its bank charter, which was conditionally approved with a two-year period in which it was required to receive approval for its crypto business. SoFi had previously described discussions with the Federal Reserve "to determine whether there is a path to conform our crypto-related activities to the requirements of the Bank Holding Company Act" — this move suggests they decided there was not.
- "SoFi Is Exiting Crypto With Banking Regulators Stepping Up Scrutiny", Bloomberg [archive]
- SoFi Technologies, Inc. Form 10-K, filed with the SEC
Hounax crypto scam steals $19 million
A scam Hong Kong cryptocurrency platform called Hounax swindled its customers out of HK$148 million (US$19 million). The group drew in customers by offering financial expertise on social media and awarding prize money to those who signed up to the platform. While some customers successfully tested whether they could withdraw their funds earlier on, the platform later stopped allowing customers to withdraw, or told them they would need to pay additional fees to do so.
The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission added Hounax to its warning list on November 1, a move that victims have criticized as much too late to stop the damage.