SEC files complaint against Dragonchain in relation to their 2017 ICO
Hodlnaut applies for creditor protection
They explained in a statement that they made the decision in order to try to avoid forced asset liquidation, "as it is a suboptimal solution that will require us to sell our users' cryptocurrencies at these current depressed asset prices".
Claims of racist imagery in Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project make it to court
Ripps is a part of a group of people who have vocally criticized the Bored Apes project for being racist and antisemitic, with what they believe are intentional hat-tips to 4chan culture. Ripps also created his own NFT project, called RR/BAYC, where he clones the Bored Ape NFTs and sells them in what he says is a "critique [of the] hateful imagery". Because Yuga Labs has never brought action against any of the many Bored Ape ripoff NFT collections, he and his lawyers are arguing this lawsuit is an attempt to silence his criticism.
Some of Ripps' and others' individual claims about dogwhistles in the project are more believable than others, but in their entirety they are pretty damning. Ripps is not the only one who has been outspoken about the issue, and is joined by people in and outside of the NFT world.
- "Court filing in Bored Apes lawsuit revives claims founders built NFT empire on Nazi ideology", Daily Dot
- Motion to dismiss
- "Bored Ape Yacht Club is Racist and Contains Nazi Dog Whistles", Ryder Ripps' website
- "BAYC (Bored Ape Yacht Club, the highest market cap NFT) is racist. All that remains to be answered is: why?", Fredrick Brennan
- "Yuga Labs—the author of the highest market cap NFT—is either racist or complicit in Kerem Atalay (one of its executives)’s indifference to racism.", Fredrick Brennan
BitGo plans to seek damages from Galaxy Digital after they called off their $1.2 billion acquisition
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.
Eqonex closes its crypto exchange
They announced that the exchange will stop trading on August 22, and customers have a month to withdraw their funds.
Collector loses four Bored Apes valued at over $500,000 to phishing attack
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.
Brazilian crypto lender BlueBenx halts customer withdrawals and lays off employees after $32 million "hack"
All 22,000 customers of BlueBenx suddenly found them unable to withdraw funds from the platform. The platform also reportedly laid off the majority of its employees.
Misconfiguration in the Acala stablecoin project allows attacker to steal 1.2 billion aUSD
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.
- Tweet thread by AcalaNetwork
- Acala Dollar on CoinMarketCap
Scammer trades fake ApeCoins for Bored Ape NFT
Team member admits to taking more than $400,000 from Velodrome to try to recoup personal losses
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".
- Tweet by Velodrome, August 13
- Tweet by Gabagool admitting to the theft, August 13 (alternate link)
- Tweet by Velodrome about the initial theft, August 4
- Tweet by Gabagool about the initial theft, August 4
- "Is Everything in Crypto a Scam?", Gabagool
- "Airdrop Ethics: VC Firm Draws Ire Following $2.5M Ribbon Finance Exploit", CoinDesk
- RGP-6: Divergence Whistleblower Bounty, Ribbon governance forum