Huobi and related people have been busy refuting the rumors, with Huobi's social media head dismissing them as "baseless malicious attacks". Huobi "advisor" Justin Sun tweeted "4".
Rumors swirl that Huobi executives have been arrested, exchange is insolvent
Hong Kong crypto news outlet Techub cited two insiders when reporting on August 5 that "at least three executives" at Huobi had been detained by Chinese police for investigation. The report sparked panic, and the exchange has seen net outflows of more than $73 million in the past week. Huobi's stablecoin balances are down 33% over the same period. Investor and crypto analyst Adam Cochran tweeted of "likely Huobi insolvency", citing Binance's bulk Tether sales, paused "audit" reports, and "weird balance shifts" at the exchange.
Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi raided by authorities
After Kenya shut down Worldcoin's operations in the country over data privacy concerns, police have raided a warehouse in Nairobi. Authorities reportedly took "machines they believe stores data gathered by the firm" as well as various documents, according to Kenyan newspaper Kahawa Tungu.
Kenya's Office of the Data Protection Commissioner has said that Worldcoin failed to accurately disclose its intentions with the project when corresponding with regulators.
Copytrader asks for "stolen" funds back after someone tricks their bot
After noticing someone set up a bot to copy his bids, NFT trader Hanwe Chang tricked the bot into purchasing multiple NFTs at hugely inflated prices. Chang purchased a large number of Azuki NFTs using an anonymous wallet, then placed an inflated 50 ETH (~$90,700) bid on one. The bot then came along and offered the same amount on the other NFTs, and Chang accepted the overpriced bids. Altogether, Chang made 800 ETH (~$1.45 million) from the scheme, draining the bot of its available funds. Azukis have been trading with a floor price of around 5 ETH (~$9,000).
The apparent operator of the bot tweeted at Chang, accusing him of theft: "We would like to discuss a bounty with you. We are offering a 10% bounty of any funds stolen from our bot, which are yours to keep if you return the remaining 90%." In other tweets they suggested they might try to take legal action against Chang for the "theft".
Revolut shuts down crypto business in the US
Revolut, a British fintech firm, has announced it will no longer offer cryptocurrency services to its US-based customer. As is becoming typical, they blamed US regulations and "crypto market uncertainty" for the decision.
Revolut had previously been one of the crypto platforms to limit US trading in Solana, Cardano, and Polygon tokens after the SEC identified those tokens as securities in lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase.
Web3 platform Nifty's shuts down
Nifty's was a web3 business backed by the likes of Mark Cuban, Joey Lubin, Coinbase, and Dapper Labs. In 2021, they raised a $10 million seed round, and launched as an NFT-focused company in July 2021 with a collection of Space Jam NFTs to accompany the widely panned box office disappointment, Space Jam: A New Legacy.
The platform later partnered with other companies to produce NFT collections for franchises including The Matrix and Game of Thrones, the latter of which featured hilariously bad artwork. The company then pivoted to a broader web3 focus as the NFT bubble collapse led the broader crypto downturn.
However, their promised web3 platform never materialized, and now the project has reached "the end of [its] runway".
Nifty's is not to be confused with Nifty Gateway, a separate NFT platform run by the embattled Gemini crypto platform.
Uwerx crypto-based freelancer platform exploited
Uwerx is a nascent project intending to build a blockchain-based freelancer marketplace, because what better concepts to combine than blockchains and the gig economy? Sadly for them, just after completing their token presale, it was hit with a flash loan exploit that enabled an attacker to siphon 176 ETH (~$324,000) from the platform.
The project was audited by SolidProof and InterFi. The project announced that they intended to relaunch the token, and asked the exploiter to consider returning 80% of the funds, keeping 20% as a "bug bounty".
LeetSwap exploited on Base
Although Coinbase's Base blockchain is at this stage intended for testing only, people have begun bridging substantial assets to the platform and using various services in anticipation of its official launch.
One such service is LeetSwap, which describes itself as the "The #1 DEX ecosystem for elite degens built on the leetest blockchains", and which recently launched its service on Base. On August 1, LeetSwap was exploited after an attacker discovered a function that allowed them to manipulate token prices on the project for a profit of around 342 ETH (~$624,000).
LeetSwap attempted to contact the hacker via social media, asking them to return all but 50 ETH (~$92,000, or around 15% of the stolen funds).
Phisher briefly snags $20 million before it's frozen by Tether
A zero-transfer attack, also called an address poisoning attack, occurs when a phisher creates a blockchain address very similar to that of a target victim's wallet, and sends zero-value token transactions to the victim's addresses from the phishing wallet in hopes that the victim will later mistake the phishing address for the real one and send funds to it. It sounds unlikely to work, but users often fail to verify every character of the destination address they're using, opting instead to copy it from their transaction histories, and this can profit scammers substantially.
Someone intending to transfer Tether stablecoins amounting to $20 million apparently didn't think it was important to double-check the address, and fell for such an attack.
However, only 51 minutes after the theft, the victim had managed to get Tether to add the thief's address to its blacklist, freezing the assets and thwarting the attack. The rapidity of the freeze led various people to question who the victim might be who could get Tether to intervene so quickly.
- "Tether Freezes $20 Million Linked To Phishing Scammer", CryptoPotato
BALD memecoin plunges after $25.6 million rug pull
A memecoin called $BALD, built on the Coinbase Base test network, appears to have rug pulled for at least $25.6 million. Although the Base network is meant to be used for developer testing, some people have tried to trade on the network before its official launch.
A pseudonymous crypto user called "Bald" announced that they would be selling $BALD tokens on the Base network, and the token — apparently named after the hairless Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong — quickly skyrocketed in price. However, the token deployer emptied tokens priced at around $25.6 million from the liquidity pool two days after launch in apparent rug pull. The token price quickly plunged by around 90%.
Conspiracy theories emerged that the Bald account was in fact operated by Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX who is on house arrest under strict supervision and without access to most websites as he awaits trial later this year.
SEC goes after Richard Heart and his projects Hex, PulseChain, and PulseX
The SEC filed charges against Richard Heart, the operator of Hex, PulseChain, and PulseX. Despite Heart's best attempts at evading securities laws — including by asking people to "sacrifice" tokens in exchange for PLS and PLSX to avoid using the term "invest" — the SEC says he's been conducting unregistered securities offerings amounting to more than $1 billion.
In addition to the unregistered offerings charge, the SEC alleges Heart and PulseChain misappropriated $12.1 million to fund Heart's lavish lifestyle. Among other things, he purchased a McLaren sports car, five luxury watches, and a $4.3 million 555-carat black diamond called "Enigma", allegedly using funds from the sale.