TL;DR#
- Telegram's co-founder proposes an NFT-style marketplace for usernames.
- Taco Bell and Decentraland are hosting a Metaverse wedding contest.
The hype surrounding NFTs has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue for some of the world's most iconic brands, highlighting the mass consumer appeal of digital collectibles. The number of people exploiting this industry are on the rise in-parallel. Scammers continue to use a variety of methods to defraud crypto users of their NFTs, including phishing attacks, marketplace exploits, and others. Multiple reports from blockchain security and risk management organizations indicate that scammers stole more than $100 million in NFTs starting in 2021. Elliptic, a risk management firm, reported that, despite the market downturn, scammers stole the most tokens in July 2022, estimated to be 4,647 assets, and the most value in May 2022, estimated to be $23.9 million.
Blockchain Hacks#
Sudoswap imitation disk Sudorare is presumed to have a rug-pull, with the $WETH and $XMON tokens in the contract address being moved to the perpetrator's address and then sold on Uniswap for ETH, making a total profit of about 519.5 ETH, or about $800,000 at the time the event happened. Multiple reports say that the initial deployment funds came from the exchange Kraken, and now neither the Sudorare website nor their Twitter account are accessible.
The KaoyaSwap, a BSC-chain decentralized transaction protocol based on AMM and exchange pools, was attacked, resulting in a loss of approximately 37,294 $BUSD and 271.2 $WBNB. The affected function considers the balance difference of the last pair before and after the swap as the amountOut, before transferring $BNB tokens to the user. This logic will not cause any issues if the last pair appears only once in the swap path. When the last pair only appears one or more times, it will miscalculate the amount that should be transferred to the user. As a result, the attacker devised a swap path that includes two self-constructed tokens, tokens A and B, with the swap path likely being [A, WBNB, B, A, WBNB], with the A and WBNB pair being included twice in this swap path. Later, the malicious actor borrows 1800 WBNB in a flash loan and adds liquidity to the [tokenA, WBNB] and [tokenB, WBNB] pairs. Then he gets 1019 WBNB after the swap and 1029 WBNB after the liquidity removal, leaving himself with the profit.
The Beijing municipal government announced a Metaverse innovation and development plan for the next two years, beginning in 2022 and mandating compliance with the recently issued Web3 innovation plan by all districts. Promoting the growth of Metaverse-related industries and assisting Beijing in becoming a digital economy benchmark city are the primary goals of the development action, which makes reference to the Metaverse as a new generation of information technology integration and innovation that would drive the growth of the Internet toward Web3. The action plan mandates that different parts of the city develop technical infrastructure and advocate for its usage in different sectors, such as education and tourism. Integration of technical methods such as 3D visualization and GIS would be part of the development program to create a digital platform for visualizing urban areas and making suitable progress toward the design of digital native intelligent infrastructure.
The popular cross-platform, cloud-based instant messaging service Telegram is considering incorporating NFT technology into its ecosystem. The creator of the encrypted messaging app has discussed the possibility of a marketplace for NFT-like smart contracts. The founder mentioned the marketplace's potential on his personal Telegram page, stating that it would create a new platform where username holders could transfer them to interested parties in protected deals, with ownership secured on the blockchain via NFT-like smart contracts. He also wrote about other aspects of the Telegram ecosystem that use NFT technology, such as channels, stickers, and emojis.
Decentralized exchange Uniswap is in discussions with seven different NFT lending protocols to address liquidity fragmentation and information asymmetry. According to a Tweet from the company's head of NFT product, this is the first step toward NFT financialization. Although the lending protocols under consideration are not yet public, the DEX team has demonstrated increased interest in the NFT sector through acquisitions and integration.
Taco Bell and Decentraland have collaborated on a first-of-its-kind contest in which couples from the United States can get married in the Decentraland Metaverse. The contest for engaged couples will run from August 25 to September 6, wherein they can apply for an opportunity to win the Taco Bell metaverse wedding package. The brand has created a virtual replica of its Las Vegas Wedding Chapel and Cantina in Decentraland for this purpose. The metaverse wedding, scheduled to take place this fall, will be completely customized to the needs of the lucky couple. It will include all of the traditional wedding elements, such as music, the first dance, food, toasts, the exchange of vows and rings, and more.
OnChain Insurance Industry News#
Sherlock Protocol has announced a partnership with Hook Protocol on their mainnet launch. Sherlock will aid users of Hook, an oracle-free, on-chain option protocol for NFTs, by conducting a comprehensive audit, giving $10 million in exploit coverage, awarding $1 million in bug bounties, doing interim reviews, and more.
Bridge Mutual has announced a strategic partnership with Linear Finance, a decentralized delta-one asset protocol that is cross-chain compatible. Members of the community can now both provide and receive coverage for Linear Finance activity.
