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Here’s How TRON’s Justin Sun Reacted To Cash Out Rumors

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The founder of the TRON blockchain Justin Sun clarified that the recent transfer of USDC with Circle is only “internal capital deployment and allocation,” shutting down rumors of cashing out.

These “in and out” moves according to Sun would be a routine affair, meaning as the business expands, the amount of related fund sorting and allocation will also increase simultaneously.

For the development of the industry is a good thing. We are highly optimistic about the blockchain, vigorously recruit, and continue to increase our holdings of TRX, HT and other TRON series of Domenico fiat currencies, and become a glorious fiat currency holder!

BlockBeats, a Chinese news website that first covered the news, cited on-chain statistics of Sun transferring a total of 2.36 billion USDC to Circle, since May 12 [after the crash of UST and LUNA].

The transfer raised eyebrows especially after Sun became a member of the newly formed Huobi Global’s advisory board, which last week outlined the cryptocurrency exchange’s future objectives, TronWeekly reported.  

The crypto entrepreneur also revealed in an interview with Bloomberg that he owns “tens of millions” of HT, the Huobi digital exchange’s native token.

TRON Founder-Backed HT Token Grew By 80%

Following that appearance, rumors about Sun’s alleged holdings started to spread. Chinese reporter named Colin Wu tweeted that 74 million had been transferred from Huobi’s official wallets to wallets linked to the founder of Tron.

The value of HT increased by an astounding 80% over the course of the week, nearly wiping out all losses it had experienced since the year’s beginning.

The founder of Tron further stated that he wants to concentrate on Huobi’s international growth and, if regulations permit, eventually bring the exchange back to China, where it was originally based before leaving last year amid a broader crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry.

Apart from that, the TRON ecosystem got a major boost by signing a crucial agreement with the Dominican Republic government to serve as its designated national blockchain infrastructure.

Following the Caribbean island nation’s approval of Virtual Asset Business legislation in May 2022, the cooperation was established.

The government of Dominica has given the go-ahead for TRON to release Dominica Coin [DMC], a blockchain-based fan token, to support the island nation’s efforts to promote awareness of its natural heritage and tourist attractions on a global scale.

Solana DeFi Exploiter Will Return “Bad Debt”… On One Condition

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Solana-powered decentralized finance [DeFi] lending protocol Mango Markets recently suffered a massive exploit to the tune of $100 million, where the attacker reportedly manipulated the oracle’s smart contract.

After the team offered a bounty in exchange for the return of the stolen assets, the hacker/s made a proposal on Mango Governance that they would send back those assets but under one condition and that was utilizing $70 million USDC from Mango’s treasury to repay the “bad debt” within the protocol.

The negotiation agreement also specified that once the tokens are returned, no criminal investigations would be opened.

By voting for this proposal, mango token holders agree to pay this bounty and pay off the bad debt with the treasury, and waive any potential claims against accounts with bad debt, and will not pursue any criminal investigations or freezing of funds once the tokens are sent back as described above.

For the uninitiated, this bad debt is the result of a rescue plan developed by Mango Markets and the competing Solana lending platform Solend for a major Solana whale with $207 million in debt dispersed across several lending platforms.

The whale had once borrowed 88% of the USDC that was available on Solend.

The rescue was put together because of concern that the whale’s bets would be liquidated if the SOL token fell another 20%, which would spread and have a negative influence on the Solana ecosystem.

Solana Exploiter May Have Rigged The Voting Proposal

At the time of writing this post, 32 million “yes” was garnered from the attacker’s proposal. Meanwhile, crypto Twitter is abuzz with the proposal’s absurdity amidst speculations that the voting process has been rigged by the exploiters to favor them.

That being said, online sleuths continue to dig deeper into the exploit. According to the blockchain auditing website OtterSec, the attacker addresses were funded 5.5 million via FTX. Not just Solana oracles, the attacker also appeared to exploit prices across all exchanges.

Mango Markets is a Solana-based platform for trading digital assets on the Sol blockchain for spot margin and trading perpetual futures. The protocol is governed by Mango DAO.

Following the latest incident, its native token MNGO token has shed its value by more than 40% in the last 24 hours.

The team behind the DeFi trading platform later updated that withdrawals are temporarily halted to prevent any further unnecessary losses. “To make sure depositors of the Mango protocol are made whole and to try and salvage some value in Mango DAO and protocol to rebuild from here”, it added.

Celsius bankruptcy saga opens new doors: Top 3 Execs cashed out $56M

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This year saw numerous bankruptcy cases in the crypto-verse. By immediately stopping withdrawals, Celsius and Three Arrows Capital shocked the market. Insolvency filings followed their users’ terror. Recent news about the departure of its leadership and the sale of its assets involves the cryptocurrency lender Celsius. In the midst of all of this, it was discovered that three of the company’s well-known executives had withdrew a staggering $56.12 million just before filing for bankruptcy.

According to a recent court document, Celsius’s former CEO Alex Mashinsky, former CSO Daniel Leon, and CTO Nuke Goldstein all made large financial withdrawals. These money were removed from custodial accounts and were represented by Bitcoin [BTC], CEL tokens [CEL], USDC, and Ethereum [ETH], according to the Statement of Financial Affairs.

It should be mentioned that Celsius ceased withdrawals in June and filed for bankruptcy in July. Between May and June 2022, the aforementioned monies were relocated.

According to a document, Celsius’ Series B shareholders requested their own own fiduciary. The stakeholders involved in the lawsuit were something that the attorneys defending a group of equity owners wanted to emphasize. A committee of unsecured creditors was charged with “maximizing value for the customers,” according to the document.

Mashinsky withdrew almost $10 million in cryptocurrency in May 2022. Celsius CSO Leon withdrew almost $7 million between May 27 and May 31 (with an additional $4 million in CEL identified as collateral). Goldstein borrowed approximately $13 million (plus an additional $7.8 million in CEL, sometimes known as collateral).

Many people, including the other executives, were shocked by this.

No major withdrawals by other Celsius execs

Both the community and the other executives were perplexed by the aforementioned information. Twelve additional executives, including the most recent CEO of the company, Chris Ferraro, were not listed as having made any sizable withdrawals at the time of the filing.

Others were also unharmed, including the chief compliance officer Oren Blonstein and the chief risk officer Rodney Sunada-Wong. Although the next hearing is set for October 7th, Celsius customers were undoubtedly upset by the most recent information.

DeFi Protocol Rolls Out “The Savings Vault”; Details

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DeFi platform Phuture released its new yield-farming product called “USV” [USDC Savings Vault] promising “guaranteed” premium returns, thanks to its tie-up with another leading decentralized protocol Notional.

According to information from Defi Llama, Notional has a total value locked [TVL] of $86.5 million.

Investors can earn interest on their holdings by using USV, an ERC-4626 compliant vault, which uses Circle’s USDC stablecoin as its underlying collateral, the blog stated.

In decentralized finance, a vault is a smart contract that automatically generates yield. The smart contract handles the searching for users instead of manually moving money between several projects in search of the highest yield.

“Think of the Savings Vault like a savings account at a traditional bank. Fiat currency is deposited on a savings bank account to earn interest. Similarly, the Savings Vault allows for crypto assets to be deposited into the vault, so users can passively earn returns. As with any on-chain, decentralised product from Phuture, users can withdraw their assets at any time.”

Using the Phuture app, investors can transfer USDC to USV and acquire vault shares in exchange for their investment. The yield that the vault forges determines how much the auto-compounding vault shares increase in value over time.

Thanks to the influx of significant cash in 2021, the cryptocurrency market saw a sharp rise in the total value locked across all DeFi systems. However, things appear to be changing in 2022.

DeFi TVL Fall Over 68% In 2022

According to data released on September 26 by cryptocurrency market data aggregation and analytics company CryptoRank, the TVL recorded in December 2021 stood at a staggering $303.8 billion but fell to $96.3 billion in September 2022, a loss of 68.3%.

The stats suggest that the TVL in DeFi has dropped from $106 billion, where it was a month ago, to the present $96.3 billion, a loss of 10% over the past 30 days. Notably, Ethereum [ETH] continues to dominate the DeFi market, accounting for $56.3 billion, or 58.46%, of the total DeFi TVL.

With $11.9 billion in TVL, Tron [TRX], BNB Chain [BNB], Avalanche [AVAX], $3.5 billion, and Solana [SOL] are all ahead of Ethereum in that order. In May 2022, Tron’s TVL in DeFi increased by 47% while Ethereum’s fell 35% during a bear market.

Cream Finance Hackers Swaps $1.75M ETH To BTC

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Hackers of the infamous Cream Finance heist reportedly exchanged roughly 1000 ETH which is worth $1.75 million for 80 RenBTC, blockchain security expert PechShield noted. RenBTC is an ERC-20 token that allows a decentralized representation of Bitcoin within Ethereum.

Twitter users reacted angrily with many questioning the platform’s competencies and its inability to prevent such attacks.

How many times Cream Finance be exploited until we admit people working on the project are imcompetent at least shouldn’t be working on financial products?

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Cream Finance Hackers Swaps $1.75M ETH To BTC 2

Flash loans have been known to be the most widely used by hackers to conduct exploits on decentralized finance [DeFi] systems. Such loans allow investors to borrow unsecured funds from lenders using smart contracts instead of third parties.

This year, another most outrageous flash loan attack was the Beanstalk heist. The stablecoin protocol was drained of $182 million. Next, in June, two more crypto platforms suffered similarly – Inverse Finance and Nirvana. But for Cream Finance, this wasn’t its first attack.

The Ethereum-based lending protocol was a target of multiple exploits but the most damaging of them was the $130 million attack in late 2021.

The incident caused a massive trust deficit for Cream Finance in the crypto circles which eventually made an impact on the token’s price leading to its near annihilation [ CREAM tokens plummeted by over 90%].

Cream Finance’s Third Hack

Prior to that, in Feb 2021, the DeFi protocol was attacked in a similar manner where bad actors stole $35 million. Cream Finance’s native token tanked by 30% in just one hour. 

Then in August, the platform suffered the second hack that resulted in the attacker looting more than 418 million in AMP, the Flexa Network’s native token, and approximately 1,300 Ethereum. 

Just recently, an Avalanche-based lending protocol Nereus Finance fell victim to a well-planned hack that saw hackers secure $371,000 worth of USD Coin [USDC] using a smart contract exploit.

After the incident, Nereus Finance released a detailed post-mortem of the incident explaining that the hacker was able to deploy a custom smart contract that utilized a $51 million flash loan from Aave to artificially inflate the Avalanche pool price for a single block.

The bad debt was reportedly paid off from the team’s treasury, as told by the Nereus in the report.

Is Binance A Chinese Company? Here’s What CZ Has To Say

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Binance’s Chief Executive Officer Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has responded to claims over being a Chinese firm. CZ penned down a detailed post offering a rebuttal to the allegations. The top executive criticized the media’s efforts to malign its reputation by portraying it as a company with connections to China.

One of the many strengths that our employees at Binance must possess is thick skin. After all, this industry is the subject of a lot of negative sentiment (much of it is unwarranted, but it’s the reality right now). In recent months, our thick skin has been tested by a noticeable increase in attacks on our company’s reputation.

He lamented that people would still insist on calling it a “Chinese company,” despite establishing itself as a global firm with diverse employee profiles similar to that of FTX, and Crypto.com.

Zhao also took a critical note of the negative campaigns orchestrated by crypto exchanges and projects to target competitors and said these types of attacks are becoming more sophisticated.

“And while it is tempting to launch counter-attacks on the industry’s bad actors who engage in these activities, we will not debase ourselves nor abandon our values,” he added.

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Is Binance A Chinese Company? Here's What CZ Has To Say 4

It is worth recalling that a self-proclaimed whistleblower CryptoLeaks recently published a report alleging Avalanche labs for exploiting litigation to cast doubt on rival blockchain projects. Binance too was served a legal notice at the behest of Ava labs, the report alleged.

“Binance Was Never Incorporated In China”

While Binance has at times shifted its corporate headquarters around the globe, CZ has maintained that the exchange was never incorporated in China.

He also stated that the firm has subsidiaries spread across the globe, including France, Spain, Italy, UAE, and Bahrain [to name a few].

“But we don’t have any legal entities in China, and we do not have plans to.”

According to CZ, it is incorrect to presume that the exchange is “secretly in the pocket of the Chinese government” simply because he is of Chinese ancestry and there are other ethnically Chinese employees.

He referred to Binance as a simple target for Western governments, as well as oppositional media and special interest groups.

Has Shiba Inu been reaching for the stars? Here’s what it means

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Shiba Inu has developed into an ecosystem that goes much beyond simple trade. The area of cryptocurrency development and adoption took centre stage. This year, the meme coin SHIB attracted a lot of attention. The network also increased its utilities, albeit initially it was due to its increasing prices.

As reported by TWJ earlier, the Singapore-based MEXC exchange, in partnership with Bone ShibaSwap (BONE), has announced a prize fund of 5,555 BONE to qualified users that participate in the “Sign up, Deposit & Trade” event , as posted on the official SHIB Twitter handle.

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Source: Twitter

MEXC Global, one of the first exchanges to offer the Shiba Inu ecosystem governance token, added BONE support in January of this year. By introducing a USDC pair, the leading cryptocurrency exchange recently increased support for SHIB. One of the first exchanges to add the Dogecoin-killer early was MEXC, which made the announcement that the canine token may now be traded on its platform in July 2021.

Less than 65,000 BONE are still available for farming, yet interest in the asset is still growing. When 230 million tokens were produced, the Shiba Inu community overwhelmingly decided to stop all BONE farming. This decision was made in June. Shibarium validators were supposed to receive the remaining 20 million tokens. There are still just 250 million BONE tokens available.

Big chunk Shiba Inu gets burned

According to Shibburn, a platform that tracks transactions that lower the amount of Shiba Inu dog tokens currently in circulation, the SHIB army has succeeded in burning more than a quarter of a billion SHIB during the past 24 hours.

Shiba tokens totaling 276,280,888 were transmitted to dead wallets in 22 transactions throughout the course of the previous day and night. A total of 160,549,026 SHIB worth of meme coins were also burnt in a single transfer by an unknown wallet, coming very close to the same sum.

The SHIB army burns Shiba Inu tokens every day in an effort to lower the current supply of tokens that are available on the market. Burning refers to moving tokens into “inferno” wallets, where they are effectively frozen and removed from circulation, increasing the scarcity of a coin. The SHIB army destroys its coinage with the anticipation that when they are in short supply, their value would increase.

Shiba Inu and MEXC Collaborate to Giveaway 5,555 BONE to Users

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Shiba Inu’s new collaboration with MEXC is good news to the users. The Singapore-based MEXC exchange, in partnership with Bone ShibaSwap (BONE), has revealed a prize pool of 5,555 BONE to qualified users who partake in the “Sign up, Deposit & Trade” event, as it was posted on the official SHIB Twitter handle.

MEXC Global, one of the first exchanges to offer the Shiba Inu ecosystem governance token, added BONE support in January of this year. According to the reports, the leading cryptocurrency exchange recently introduced a USDC pair in order to increase support for Shiba Inus.

One of the first exchanges to add Shiba Inu early was MEXC, which made the announcement that Shiba Inu may now be traded on its platform in July 2021.

Less than 65,000 BONE are still available for farming, yet interest in the asset is still growing. When 230 million tokens were produced, the Shiba Inu community largely decided to stop all BONE farming. This decision was made in June. Shibarium validators were supposed to receive the remaining 20 million tokens. There are still just 250 million BONE tokens available.

In contrast to other crypto assets, which traded in the red at press time due to the recent market selloff, BONE is still up 3.73% at $1.05 thanks to good news. Additionally, the BONE 24-hour trading volume is up 38.71%, demonstrating a return on investor interest.

Domain names payment can be made using Shiba Inu

According to a recent release, RightOfTheDot, an auctioneer and trader of digital assets like premium domain names and NFTs, now accepts SHIB and other cryptocurrencies supported by BitPay. In a similar vein, BitPay is now also accepted by 123Miners, a marketplace for cryptocurrency mining hardware, components, and hosting services.

SHIB is currently trading at $0.00001225, 9.5% down in the last 24 hours.

Ethereum Mining Or Staking On This German Server Amounts To Violation

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Ethereum is bearing the brunt of censorship after a leading cloud service provider Hetzner which powers roughly 15% of ETH nodes has categorically stated that it won’t allow its products to be used for either mining or staking for any application.

“Even if you just run one node, we consider it a violation of our ToS,” Hetzner wrote in a Reddit discussion.

The German-based cloud services firm was responding to a user’s inquiry about running a blockchain node on the web hosting platform. The firm sought to clear out any confusion and said that the ban is extended to trading as well.

While it is aware that many Ethereum users are using Hetzner, the firm is having discussions within its team to address this issue.

The development has caught many by surprise and even raised questions about how truly decentralized blockchain really is.

As per reports, the majority of the Ethereum ecosystem runs on Amazon.com, which hosts 54% of the total Eth nodes. Other well-known cloud providers include Oracle Cloud [4.1%], Alibaba [2.8%], and Google Cloud [2.7%].

Founder of Web3 infrastructure platform W3bCloud Maggie Love took to Twitter to express her disappointment saying, “Ethereum cannot be decentralized if the stack is not decentralized… “Where is the dialogue on this?”

The latest news also correlates with recent U.S. Treasury Department sanctions on Tornado Cash, an Ethereum-based utility that allows users to send and receive funds anonymously.

Ethereum Nodes Faces An Uncertain Future

The Tornado Cash situation has raised concerns in the Eth community on sanctions extending to nodes operating the network or the infrastructure powering them.

Last week, Ethermine, the largest Ethereum mining pool stopped processing blocks containing Tornado Cash transactions, one crypto analyst revealed. Circle too blacklisted USDC on the ETH network freezing all USDC tokens that had passed through the crypto mixer.

This sparked a huge debate on censorship resistance.

Vitalik Buterin was reportedly furious over the possibility that validators may have to comply with OFAC sanctions after the Merge.

He however agreed with the sentiment that actions that do not include Tornado Cash transactions should be considered “an attack on Ethereum and burn their stake via social consensus.”


Ethereum Merge gets backed up by Tether

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The Ethereum network wants to investigate the proof-of-stake [PoS] mechanism using “The Merge.” However, it appeared to be more difficult than anticipated to leave behind proof-of-work [PoW]. Nevertheless, a number of well-known networks have expressed their support for the Merge, which is anticipated to take place in September. Tether, the biggest stablecoin issuer, was the most recent to express support for the impending update.

The recent blog post “USD Supports ETH Proof-of-Stake Transition” was written by Tether [USDT]. The network said that it had no intention of perplexing or harming the ecology. The network would function accordingly with the impending Ethereum upgrade. The blog post further said,

“Tether believes that in order to avoid any disruption to the community, especially when using our tokens in DeFi projects and platforms, it’s important that the transition to POS is not weaponized to cause confusion and harm within the ecosystem.”

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Source: Twitter

Tether also emphasised how important a seamless transition was to maintaining the “long-term sustainability of the DeFi ecosystem and its platforms.”

It should also be noted that Circle Pay’s support for the Merge was revealed before this statement was made. Since Circle Pay is the creator of USD Coin (USDC), it is said that it competes with Tether. The Ethereum network has a stronghold over USDT and USDC, respectively.

Ethereum’s shift to POS drives a wedge

As was already mentioned, there is a major rift as a result of Ethereum’s switch to PoS. A hard fork is developing, led by famous miner Chandler Guo. Uncertainty surrounds the hard fork’s future, though. Nevertheless, support has already been provided by a number of exchanges, including Poloniex, BitMex, and others. The Tron Foundation’s founder, Justin Sun, seems to be growing more optimistic about the hard fork.

While Sun acknowledged that his exchange had previously shown a preference for Ethereum PoW, he promised that his stablecoin USDD will do the same. Speaking lately about USDD, he said,

“I think decentralized stablecoins, like [Tron stablecoin] USDD, [a] decentralized U.S. dollar, is still essential to our industry because, as we all know, all the components of [decentralized finance] today it’s all decentralized … except stablecoins.”

Tether didn’t mention the anticipated hard fork in its most recent blog post. Because USDD will be used in the ETHW chain, many people assumed that Tether might be reversing course.