WildWorks later split Cinder into a separate company, Cinder Studios. However, in early 2023, the studio shutdown, giving its employees no advance notice that they would soon be out of a job.
WildWorks angers its fans by announcing it will be moving into crypto gaming
WildWorks, a game company with a reputation for eco-friendliness, angered many of its fans when it announced it would be reusing the technology and assets from its partially-finished title Feral for a new metaverse game called Cinder. Some fans were upset to hear that the developers were apparently leaving Feral unfinished; many were angry about the developers' choice to embrace NFTs and crypto gaming — particularly after the company itself had decried the technology's impact on the environment, but also because of concerns about the unethical nature of many projects in the web3 space. Attempts to reassure fans with the fact that they will be using the Solana proof-of-stake blockchain, and purchasing carbon offsets, apparently did little to mollify fans, some of whom began cancelling subscriptions.
Coindesk writer Andrew Thurman says the quiet part out loud
Thurman began an article by writing, "Yes, it's a Ponzi scheme. But who cares? So are the dollars in your pocket." He was writing about OlympusDAO, a "decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol whose primary use case seems to be 'making people extremely angry.'"
Polygon loses $2 million to a vulnerability
Polygon lost a bit over $2 million after a hacker exploited a bug involving a lack of balance/allowance check in their MRC20 contract. Polygon had been in the process of releasing a patch for the vulnerability, which had been reported by a white-hat hacker, and released an emergency upgrade the following day. The silent, zero-warning hard fork raised some eyebrows, and Polygon didn't release details until several weeks later. Polygon ultimately paid about $3.5 million in bug bounties to two white-hat hackers who submitted reports, which was far less than the total value of Polygon's $MATIC tokens, all 9.2 billion of which (worth around $24 billion) could have been stolen by an attacker using this vulnerability.
Tether mints $3 billion in two weeks
Tether minted more than $3 billion in a two week span. This brings the total amount of USDT (which is pegged to the U.S. dollar) to 76 billion, and much of it was minted this year. If Tether actually had reserves to back this up, as they claim, they would be one of the largest banks. However, as the Financial Times reported, in March 2021 "the stablecoin that used to say it was 100 per cent backed by cash reserves is in fact... 2.9 per cent backed by cash reserves".
Hackers steal about $200 million from BitMart
BitMart, "the most trusted cryptocurrency trading platform", experienced a major breach in which attackers stole approximately $200 million of various cryptocurrencies. The CEO attributed the exploit to a stolen private key, and promised to compensate users who were impacted.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales angers some in the Wikimedia community by announcing he will be auctioning off an NFT representing the first ever edit
Wales announced he would be auctioning an NFT of a website representing the first edit to Wikipedia. This was not taken well by some in the Wikimedia communities — some felt he was misusing Wikipedia to advertise a commercial opportunity for himself that benefits the Wikimedia movement in no way, others felt that NFTs and the artificial scarcity intrinsic to the idea are antithetical to the Wikimedia ideology. Wales is also auctioning off a strawberry-colored iMac (pictured) he used to work on the site, and most people seem to agree that is pretty cool. The NFT ultimately sold for $750,000; the iMac went for $187,500.
SEC charges individual with two fraudulent crypto schemes
The SEC charged Latvian citizen Ivars Auzins with investment schemes he created using fake names and businesses. He allegedly created a fraudulent ICO for a coin that would back "Denaro", what he said was a debit card-like cryptocurrency wallet, but which never actually existed nor had a partnership with a credit card issuer as he claimed. In his second scheme, Auzins allegedly offered unregistered securities of Innovamine, which promised to mine cryptocurrencies on behalf of investors and give them a payout. According to the SEC, Auzins misappropriated nearly all assets he raised through his frauds — at least $7 million.
- "SEC Charges Latvian Citizen With Digital Asset Fraud", U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
CODEX, a decentralized publishing platform, aims to artificially constrain access to books
A platform called "CODEX" announced that they intend to "upgrade the digital book market industry to Web3". This, apparently, involves artificially limiting the number of copies of books that can be distributed, using technology that is definitely not just a worse version of DRM.
$120 million is stolen from BadgerDAO
A hacker was able to use a compromised Cloudflare API key to inject malicious code into the BadgerDAO platform via Cloudflare Workers. They then siphoned currency of various kinds, equivalent to approximately $120 million, out of user accounts over approximately two weeks before being discovered.
NFT collecter friesframe has a Bored Ape and several other valuable NFTs stolen
Although friesframe had transferred some of his valuable NFTs to cold storage (a crypto wallet not connected to the Internet), he had been waiting for gas fees to come down before transferring more. In that period, his hot wallet was hacked, and a Bored Ape NFT and several others were stolen.