Hello, as always, as we kick off this week’s Overbit Weekly Round Up.
We start with what is expected to be one of the largest cryptocurrency thefts ever, more than $600 million has been taken.
According to reports, a hacker or group of hackers took advantage of a flaw in Poly Network, a technology that aims to connect different blockchains so they may collaborate. Poly Network announced the hack on Twitter, requesting that the hackers communicate with them and “return the hacked assets.”
“The amount of money you hacked is the biggest in defi history,” Poly Network said in another tweet.
Once the hackers stole the money, they began to send it to various other cryptocurrency addresses. Poly Network urged cryptocurrency exchanges to “Blacklist tokens” coming from the addresses linked to the hackers. “We will take legal actions, and we urge the hackers to return the assets,” PolyNetwork said on Twitter.
SlowMist’s experts ‘grasped the attacker’s mailbox, IP, and device fingerprints and are “tracking possible identity clues related to the Poly Network attacker,” according to a tweet from the company.
From the start of the year until July, DeFi-related hacks totalled $361 million – an increase of nearly three times from the whole of 2020, according to cryptocurrency compliance company CipherTrace. This hack has almost doubled the cumulative amount of $360 million stolen from DeFi protocols.
Though, there was a silver lining amidst this hack. On Wednesday, August 11, the hacker posted a message to the Ethereum blockchain, indicating he was ready to return the funds. As of 7 a.m. London time, more than $4.8 million had been returned to the Poly Network addresses. By 11 a.m. ET, about $258 million had been sent back.
“I think this demonstrates that even if you can steal crypto-assets, laundering them and cashing out is extremely difficult, due to the transparency of the blockchain and the use of blockchain analytics,” Tom Robinson, chief scientist of blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, said via email. “In this case, the hacker concluded that the safest option was just to return the stolen assets.”
While news of a hack is never welcome for the cryptocurrency industry, it certainly seems that this hack, despite its magnitude, was a dodged bullet. Thankfully, such a sizable exploit should work to make other projects take their smart contract security more seriously.
To round up today’s episode of Overbit Round Up, we look at some favourable news from the equities sector, this time focusing on the Coinbase stock. Coinbase shares surged as much as 2.1 per cent in extended trading Tuesday after the company reported second-quarter revenue that exceeded analysts’ expectations. The company made $2.0 billion in net revenue, including $1.9 billion in transaction revenue and more than $100 million in subscription and services income.
While no formal guidance was provided, the company stated that trade volume would be lower in the third quarter than the second. Analysts polled by Refinitiv predict $7.76 per share on $6.29 billion in revenue for the entire year.
Excluding the after-hours transaction, Coinbase stock has plummeted about 29 per cent since the company’s public listing on April 14, while the Nasdaq has increased roughly 7 per cent in the same time frame. Coinbase can be used as a barometer of how well crypto is performing, and we will keep an eye on it. Thank you for reading this week’s Weekly Round Up from Overbit.com.