QAN describes itself as a blockchain that helps "resist quantum attacks", though apparently not the types of bridge attacks that have become fairly common in the past year or so.
"Quantum-resistant" blockchain QAN suffers bridge attack
The $QANX token for the QAN project suddenly plummeted in value as an attacker stole more than 4 million QANX from the project. The attacker subsequently swapped the tokens for around 370 ETH ($707,000). In a video posted to Twitter, the project CEO stated that it was "definitely a bridge issue", and that they'd shut down the project's bridge. They also said they had contacted exchanges to freeze the wallets that had been involved in the "issue".
Class action lawsuits filed against Terra founders after crypto collapse
Following the collapse of the Terra ecosystem and its tokens TerraUSD and Luna, affected Korean investors have filed both criminal and civil lawsuits against the project's creator, Do Kwon. Represented by RKB & Partners, the lawsuit seeks to seize Kwon's assets and pursue fraud charges.
Another Korean group, calling themselves "Victims of Luna, UST coins", has amassed 1,500 members and reportedly plans to file a lawsuit against Kwon and Terraform Labs' other cofounder, Shin Hyun-Seong (who is also known as Daniel Shin, and is no longer with Terraform Labs).
This development may be particularly inconvenient for Kwon and Shin, given Terra's legal team quit the company the previous day.
On June 17, another investor filed a separate lawsuit against Terraform Labs, Kwon, and various others in a US court.
"Feminist Metaverse" token exploited for $533,000
The "Feminist Metaverse" ($FM) token suddenly plunged in value by 99.7% after an attacker stole 1,838 BNB ($533,000). The hacker quickly transferred the stolen funds to the Tornado Cash tumbler to help hide their tracks.
The project advertised on its website its plans to "Create Feminist economics in the form of a DAO to balance the male-dominated world." The project's whitepaper explains how the metaverse will apparently "greatly reduce the impacts on women's normal work and inequality in wages brought by their physiological differences and pregnancy. As a consequence, it helps eliminating a number of unresolved problems in the real world like gender discrimination, inequality in wages, sexual harassments, sexual assaults, trafficking of women and child marriage." It's not clear what specifically the "Feminist Metaverse" project was hoping to achieve.
Fake minting links distributed after several large NFT Discord servers are compromised
Members of several large NFT Discord servers began seeing suspicious-looking messages announcing supposed NFT mints that turned out to be fakes. Affected communities appeared to include Moonbirds/PROOF, Axie Infinity, RTFKT, Memeland, Alien Frens, and others. The attack appeared to involve a Discord bot called MEE6, though there was some confusion around whether there was a compromise of MEE6 itself or if it was simply used in the attack. The following day, MEE6 acknowledged that an employee account had been compromised.
Bot compromises have emerged as a wide attack vector in crypto and web3 communities, as widely-used bots can have elevated permissions across Discord channels used as official information sources across many communities.
Terraform Labs' legal team resigns
In what seems like a bad sign for Terraform Labs, the developer of the Terra blockchain and the TerraUSD (UST) and Luna cryptocurrencies, the three members of the company's legal team left the company. This came shortly after UST, Luna, and the entire Terra ecosystem dramatically collapsed after the stablecoin lost its peg last week.
Four pricey NFTs stolen from actor Seth Green, complicating his plans for an animated series
Actor Seth Green tweeted that he had been targeted with a phishing attack that resulted in the theft of four pricey NFTs: a Bored Ape, two Mutant Apes, and a Doodle. The thief quickly flipped three of the four NFTs for sale, netting 145.5 ETH (about $300,000).
The theft occurred on May 8, though Green only seemed to notice on May 17 when he tweeted, "Well frens it happened to me. Got phished and had 4NFT stolen."
The loss of the Bored Ape was later revealed to have put Green in a bit of a pickle, when he released the trailer for a new animated series he was developing that starred his pilfered primate. Given that BAYC ownership grants commercial usage rights (which are presumably transferred to the new owners when the NFT changes hands), the person who bought the NFT flipped by the phisher could have possibly brought a lawsuit against Green if he moved forward with the series.
Green ultimately spent about $300,000 to buy his ape back from the hacker.
American running "untraceable" service "designed to evade US sanctions" is charged after being traced
An unidentified US citizen transferred more than $10 million in Bitcoin to a cryptocurrency exchange in a "comprehensively sanctioned" country where they were running a payments platform. They advertised that transactions through the platform were untraceable, and described the platform as designed to evade U.S. sanctions. Despite this, law enforcement was able to obtain information from U.S. and foreign cryptocurrency exchanges — including KYC information provided by the individual — to help identify and trace the individual behind it.
Though the country is as yet unnamed, the limited number of countries sanctioned in the way described in the decision allow us to deduce that it was either Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia. This case marked the D.O.J.'s first criminal prosecution involving alleged use of crypto to evade sanctions.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui wrote in the opinion: "Virtual currency is traceable. Yet like Jason Voorhees the myth of virtual currency's anonymity refuses to die. See Friday the 13th (Paramount Pictures 1980)."
Scream lending protocol racks up $35 million in bad debt after hardcoding not-so-stablecoin prices to $1
The defi lending protocol Scream may have taken the "stable" in "stablecoin" a bit too literally when they hardcoded the prices of the Fantom USD (fUSD) and DEI stablecoins. In the past few weeks we've seen many stablecoins wobble, and when fUSD and DEI followed suit, Scream ended up in trouble. Users were able to take advantage of the inaccurately high price to borrow other stablecoins on the cheap, leaving Scream with $35 million in bad debt. The platform's reserves of other stablecoins were completely drained; meanwhile, Scream users holding fUSD or DEI can't withdraw.
CZ admits Binance held Luna and UST in bizarre tweet threads
On May 15, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (widely known as CZ) created a tweet thread in which he attempted to speak nonchalantly about questions that had "just occurred to [him]" about whether Binance held any UST. In the thread he attempted to distance himself from decisions or knowledge around such holdings, speaking cavalierly about how "we probably do have some". Former FBI agent James Harris wrote an interesting analysis of the thread, concluding, "If people weren't worried before, they will be now. If investigators weren't suspicious before, they should be now."
The following day, CZ tweeted, "Binance received 15,000,000 LUNA (at peak worth $1.6 billion USD, now not much) as part of the original ($3m) invest. 560x return at peak." In this tweet, "not much" glossed over the fact that these LUNA, obtained in return for a $3 million investment and at one point nominally worth $1.6 billion, are now worth $2,900.
He also wrote that Binance had 12,000,000 UST — worth $12 million when UST was properly pegged, and now worth $1.16 million (assuming liquidity exists to sell it at all).
Luna Foundation Guard reports what it did with its Bitcoin reserves, raising more questions
Many were eagerly awaiting a report from Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) on what happened to the several billion dollars' worth of Bitcoin reserves they once held, which they transferred during the UST collapse. The organization tweeted an explanation of the actions they took with those funds on May 16, describing how they began to convert Bitcoin to UST. They referred to transferring BTC and other reserves to "a counterparty", who traded them UST in exchange. They didn't name who these counterparties were.
More than a few people were unsatisfied with this reporting, asking more transparency around who these "counterparties" were. Ultimately, this action benefited the "counterparties", providing liquidity to these whales who were able to exit their now risky UST positions for a good price, and did not help most of the individuals holding UST.