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Harvest Finance Says Attacker Behind Hack -‘Well-Known in Community; Puts $100K Bounty

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Harvest Finance has been in the spotlight for quite some time, and not for good reasons. According to the latest reports that emerged in the early hours of Monday morning, the DeFi yield farm protocol has been drained by nearly $24 million from its pools and swapped for renBTC [rBTC].

Confirming the news of the hack, Harvest Finance revealed “working actively” on the issue of mitigating the economic attack on the stablecoin and BTC pools. The hacker reportedly used Tornado Cash, which happens to be a privacy tool for obfuscating the history of Ether.

Following which the hacker[s] reportedly sent back nearly $2.5 million to the deployer in the form of Tether [USDT] and USD Coin [USDC]. These, according to Harvest Finance will be distributed to the affected depositors pro-rata using a snapshot. Besides, the attack was made possible by manipulating stablecoin prices on another DeFi platform, Curve Finance.

The Harvest Finance team joined forces with Ren Protocol to locate Bitcoin addresses where the funds were transferred. Harvest Finance’s representatives had also asked major exchanges to freeze the allegedly stolen funds and block the addresses.

Bounty Hunt

Harvest Protocol further tweeted,

“We will release a post mortem report within the next 16 hours, and work on future risk-mitigation strategies against flashloan economic attacks, including evaluating insurance options, as well as reparation strategies. For the attacker: you’ve proven your point, if you can return the funds to the users, it would be greatly appreciated by the community, including many bystanders watching DeFi from afar”

Furthermore, Harvest Finance stated that there was a “significant amount of personally identifiable information on the attacker”, who is “well-known” in the crypto community. Additionally, the platform went on to say that it was putting out a 100k bounty for the first person or team to reach out to the attacker. It further tweeted,

“We are not interested in doxxing the attacker, your skill and ingenuity is respected, just return the funds to the users”

Harvest Finance is yet another DeFi protocol that seeks the highest-earning pools to farm, a concept very similar to Yearn Finance. The latest news comes just a day after popular DeFi analyst Chris Blec claimed that the platform held just one “admin key” that can potentially drain funds locked in the protocol’s contracts.

https://twitter.com/ChrisBlec/status/1320375400141328384

Binance’s Stablecoin hits a milestone of $500 Million Supply

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Stablecoin supply has now exceeded the whopping $200 billion mark. With this, the market noted more than 300% year-to-date rise for stablecoins. A sharp rise was first triggered by the significant decline in the price of cryptocurrencies following the Black Thursday market crash.

Interestingly, it is not just the big names such as Tether and USDC that saw a huge influx. Smaller and relatively newer stablecoins also considerable traction. In the latest development, Binance’s stablecoin BUSD was currently sitting at a market cap of $504 million. This was first observed by the Founder and CEO of the Malta-based crypto firm, CZ who tweeted,

https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1311514658914758656

Binance had partnered with Paxos Trust Company in September 2019 to launch a USD-denominated stablecoin, BUSD after receiving a green signal from the New York State Department of Financial Services [NYDFS].

skew main usdbacked stable coin contenders market cap usd

The rise of smaller cap stablecoins such as BUSD can also be directed to the increasing in user interest with DeFi. Generally, stablecoins are used by DeFi yield farmers to accept crypto stocks from various decentralized platforms such as Uniswap, Aave, and Curve which have been popping up in ever greater numbers this year. What has further added to the popularity is their offerings of larger and larger yields in the competition to attract locked funds.

Binance Chases DeFi

The cryptocurrency exchange has continued to grow its offerings in the DeFi space with new product launch almost every day. Hence, it is possible that BUSD may become a larger player in the stablecoin and the wider DeFi space which has largely been dominated by USDT.

Binance recently unveiled its new decentralized Binance Smart Chain which acts as a “bridge” between its DeFi and CeFi offerings. Since then the platform has continued to expand its footprint in the space. These developments were occasioned by huge BUSD inflows into Binance exchange over the past couple of weeks demonstrating a high potential buying power.

Binance’s Launchpool platform also provided a new venue allowing its users to farm assets such as BUSD. Additionally, first project on the platform was revealed to be Bella protocol where users will be able to stake their BNB, BUSD, and ARPA tokens.

Stablecoins Become First Crypto to Receive Regulatory Green Light from SEC, OCC

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A monumental turn of events took place on Monday for the digital asset space, as Stablecoins became the first cryptocurrencies to received guidelines from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency(OCC).

According to the official press release, a list of national guidelines were revealed on how fiat-backed cryptos can be treated under the law. Before the current announcement, there had been zero regulation clarity behind the functionality of stablecoins such as Tether and Circle’s USDC.

The press release stated,

“This letter addresses the authority of a national bank to hold deposits that serve as reserves for certain “stablecoins.” stablecoin issuers may desire to place assets in a reserve account with a national bank to provide assurance that the issuer has sufficient assets backing the stablecoin in situations where there is a hosted wallet.”

In addition, it was added that the bank offering services to hold stablecoins on behalf of crypto projects will need to comply with appropriate controls to ensure due diligence on the risks involved while maintaining an understanding with the stablecoin issuer. The banks should facilitate a proper understanding of th risks and issue a review for compliance under applicable laws and regulations, also with regards to the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and anti-money laundering.

From an adoption perspective, it is a huge deal as the OCC currently wanted the regulated banks to feel comfortable in providing services to stablecoin issuers.

Brian Brooks, Acting Comptroller of the Currency stated,

“National banks and federal savings associations currently engage in stablecoin related activities involving billions of dollars each day. This opinion provides greater regulatory certainty for banks within the federal banking system to provide those client services in a safe and sound manner.”

With respect to the SEC, the commission indicated that they did not consider certain stablecoins as securities under the federal law but advised issuers to work with the organization to avoid any misunderstanding.

Will more crypto-assets receive regulations now?

To be fair, not in the near future. It is important to note that stablecoins are the least volatile asset in the space, that are ear-marked 1:1 with fiat currency. The only reason the OCC and SEC have allowed stable assets to work under federal law is its association with the U.S dollar. However, it is definitely a start and over time, the paradigm might shift towards regulating more digital currencies in the space.

Binance On-Boards Uniswap’s UNI Token Minutes After Its Launch

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The DeFi fervor continues to take over the crypto-verse as new tokens enter the market. After prominent DeFi lending and borrowing platform Compound rolled out its COMP token, several others followed suit. The latest DeFi platform to jump the bandwagon is Decentralized Exchange [DEX], Uniswap.

UNI Governance Token

Earlier today, Uniswap, a platform that had been dominating the DeFi space for quite some time announced the launch of its native token, UNI. The decentralized exchange that facilitates swapping of Ethereum-based tokens shared a blog post elaborating on the creation of its latest token. A total of 1 billion UNI tokens have reportedly been minted and would be made available to the community over a period of 4 years. A total of 60% of these tokens would be going to the Uniswap community members while 21.51% would be given to the existing team members and the ones that would be a part of the platform in the future.

The investors of this token would also be benefited with this as they would receive a 17.80% while the advisors would garner 0.069% The post further read,

“UNI will vest to the governance treasury on a continuous basis according to the following schedule. Governance will have access to vested UNI starting October 18 2020 12:00am UTC.”

Capture 9

Furthermore, the liquidity mining programs will reportedly go live from 18 September up until 17 November primarily focusing on ETH/USDT, ETH/USDC, ETH/DAI, and ETH/WBTC. All these pools would be given 5 million UNI tokens.

Even though the project is out and about, holders of the tokens would be able to engage in voting for allocation, partnerships, and other initiatives only after a period of 30 days from today. Along with the aforementioned activities, the control of the treasury would be postponed until 17 October 2020.

Binance First To List UNI

Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has always been at the forefront of onboarding innovation on to its platform. The exchange was one of the first to list the UNI token. Binance revealed that UNI would be paired against Bitcoin [BTC], Binance Coin [BNB] as well as stablecoin Tether [USDT]. Trading for the above-mentioned pairs would commence from 3:00 AM [UTC] starting today.

However, as a disclaimer, the exchange noted that UNI would be subject to higher risk as it was a new token.

This announcement was further followed by another one where the exchange declared the launch of a UNI/USDT perpetual contract. Trading for this is said to begin post 7:00 AM [UTC] from 18 September. Customers would be allowed to choose between 1-50x leverage.

bZx Sustains iToken Duplication; Protocol Compromised for Third Time in a Year

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On the one hand, DeFi shows no signs of stopping, on the other hand, some popular projects are being hacked due to a number of internal vulnerabilities. One such protocol is the bZx, which had a very difficult year.

In a yet another fresh trouble, the popular DeFi lending protocol encountered bug exploitation. bZx’s official blog post claimed that the platform sustained a duplication incident with several of the iTokens. The incident caused the protocol insurance fund to transiently accrue a debt. Calling the incident “surmountable”, bZx revealed that the insurance fund was backstopped by both the token treasury in addition to protocol cash flows.

It was the steep drop in bZx’s TVL that caught the attention of the platform’s developers which was then followed by a tweet stating that it was “investigating” the reason behind it.

Marc Thalen, Lead Engineer at Bitcoin.com found an exploit after noticing a user capable of duplicating iTokens who then contacted the team. But by the time the team’s founders got the word, the attacker had drained substantial amounts of Dai and USDC. Thalen further stated that the entire pool could have been drained “if the attacker had a bit more time”.

Funds are SAFU

However, the platform confirmed that no funds were at risk. Furthermore, the duplication bug in question was patched up after it was audited by two prominent security firms – Peckshield and Certik. bZx stated,

“The protocol was heavily audited by top security firms Peckshield and Certik. The Peckshield audit was 12 person weeks. This is the same amount of time that Peckshield audited the Multi-collateral DAI [MCD] contracts for MakerDAO. The Certik audit was 7 person weeks. Additionally, we performed extensive automated testing. Unfortunately, audits are not silver bullets.”

This is not an isolated case wherein an entity was able to compromise bZx. The protocol was compromised for the first time on the 14th of February when the team was at the ETH Denver industry event. The second attack followed a couple of days later. The two hacks saw the protocol lose more than $954K.

Alabama and Texas Bans South African Firms After Crypto Credit Card Scam

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Securities watchdogs in both Alabama and Texas issued a cease and desist order following a crypto credit card scam promoted by South African firms. Accordance to a joint order issued by both the Texas State Securities Board (TSSB) and the Alabama Securities Commission (ASC), companies such as the South African Liquidity Gold Trust, Liquidity Gold Solution and Liquidity Global Card Solution and an individual named Lance Angus Jerrard have issued prohibition orders.

As per reports, the sanctioned firms and Jerrard advertised a fraudulent debit card, dubbed Liquidity Card on social networks and a radio station in Austin, Texas. The perpetrators wrongfully stated that there is a secure way for people to make money while staying at home amid the COVID-19 disaster.

Crypto credit card scam breakdown

The firms allegedly utilized their advertisements to claim that Liquid Card could help investors evade taxes by transacting in stablecoins such as TUSD, USDC and PAX coin. The fraudsters were to recruit and convince new users to commit a minimum of $1,150 in one portion or more of 8,400 parts in the crypto credit card scam. Furthermore, the investors claim that the debit card functions as a traditional debit card.

The project, which was scheduled to start in October, aimed to register over 8 million new users in 36 months. According to the joint order release, the firms mentioned above offer investors a written 100 percent cash back guarantee, which the order terms as fraudulent. Notably, the watchdogs also noted that they had disguised vital information; the risks posed by the project to potential cardholders, and how they make money from the capital employed.

Involved parties have 30 days to issue a response

According to the prohibition order, all the liquidity companies listed are under no obligation to sell securities in Texas or Alabama. Moreover, the firms allegedly used fake pictures to lure investors into the crypto credit card scam. The authorities have given all the involved firms a 30-days grace period to respond to the cease and desist order.

USDT Market Cap Reaches a New Milestone of $12 Billion

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Tether’s market capitalization has soared to new heights, after gaining $1 billion within seven days. Tether revealed on August 14 that the USDT market cap broke past the $12 billion marks, as the demand for stablecoins continues to grow.

Stablecoins like USDT have in the cryptocurrency space continued to gain momentum over time. The increased popularity in stablecoins can be attributed to the ability of coins, often associated with cryptocurrencies, to protect investors and traders against volatility. The dramatic rise in the USDT market cap corresponds to an increase of 140 percent, an additional $7 billion increase since March 2020.

USDT market cap skyrocketing

The swift growth in Tether’s market cap is the impetus behind the 12-months long stablecoins market growth. According to a study by Coin Metrics back in July, the entire stablecoins market took five years to hit $6 billion in market capitalization, but only took four months to increase from $6 billion to $12 billion.

At the time, the study consisted of the entire market for stablecoins. At present, USDT is worth $12 billion on its own. In fact, the other stablecoins on the market are not even close to reaching the milestones set by Tether. On the other hand, the USDC is the closest stablecoin with a total market capitalization of just over $1 billion, followed by the DAI at just under $420 million, and the Gemini Dollar follows the bundle with about $9 million.

Tethers growth impact on Bitcoin

Major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Bitfinex and Binance utilize USDT as an alternative to traditional currencies. Due to this fact, the majority of investors in crypto space depend on Tether to preserve funds in the sides.

Furthermore, USDT is frequently utilized as a hedge against the significant cryptos; it can be argued that Tether’s total supply portrays the capital kept on the sidelines. Some analysts argue the increasing supply of USDT, the weakening of the dollar, on top of institutional adoption; has resulted in a sentiment that the price of BTC could rise. Some of these analysts anticipate BTC to hit new milestones by next year.

Switzerland launched the World Stablecoin Association to Promote Global Stablecoins Development

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The stablecoin market is currently experiencing a massive surge, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem is establishing an international stablecoin organization in crypto-friendly Switzerland. The headquarters of the organization, the World Stablecoin Association (WSA), will be based in the city of Geneva.

According to reports, the association will be set up by the VirgoX Crypto Exchange Platform and the Global Digital Assets Company of Blockchain Capital Markets. The Chief Executive Officer of VirgoX, Adam Cai, noted that the main objective of the international stablecoin organization is to create a genuine, neutral universal organization consisting of all major stablecoin projects.

Besides, Cai noted that the WSA is already involved in discussions with key stablecoin schemes such as Tether (USDT), DAI, USDC, and HUSD; they aim to join the international stablecoin organization by the end of the year. Notably, WSA is currently supporting upcoming stablecoin startups. He stressed that the key issue facing the stablecoin sector is that the upcoming stablecoin initiatives are still short on adoption.

International stablecoin organization membership

During the launch of WSA, its membership consisted of the two founder companies, and blockchain-based smart contracts audit firm, BlockGeeks. The WSA also features global stablecoin such as the QCAD, which is backed by the Canadian dollar and Ren De-Fi protocol. 

Furthermore, Cai noted that the member firms would participate in monthly virtual conferences, and actual seminars in Geneva, Switzerland. The conferences’ primary agenda will be to discuss the development of stablecoins, providing, and examining networking and partnership possibilities. 

More members of the international stablecoin organization include projects such as CBRL, Peg Network, Stably, USDK, XDB, and entities like Nova Club, Alpha Sigma Capital, and Consensus Labs. The announcement also noted that WSA is open to allow various firms; such as businesses, government bodies, and other relevant entities in the stablecoin sector to join..

Stablecoin market surging rapidly

The establishment of an international stablecoin organization follows the explosion of the stablecoin industry in 2020. Over the last seven months, major stablecoin projects, Tether and USD Coin, have reached significant landmarks. Earlier this week, Tether hit a $10 billion amount, reaching a new all-time high in its market cap. On the other hand, USDC reached a significant landmark earlier this month, breaking past the $1 billion market cap threshold.

Ethereum based Address holding $100,000 blacklisted by CENTRE

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For the first time in the digital asset industry, a crypto address was blacklisted on the basis of a law enforcement request. According to the reports, CENTRE, an organization that issues USDC stablecoin at the top of the Ethereum blockchain, blacklisted an address worth USDC $100,000.

The request for a law enforcement application has yet to be disclosed, but CENTRE, an organization launched under Circle-Coinbase, has issued a statement. It’s said,

“Centre can confirm it blacklisted an address in response to a request from law enforcement. While we cannot comment on the specifics of law enforcement requests, Centre complies with binding court orders that have appropriate jurisdiction over the organization.”

Josh Hawkins, Circle Spokesperson, speaking on behalf of the incident, said that the blacklisting had taken place back in mid-June, but the representative failed to give any further input on the incident.

According to Etherscan.io, on 16 June a blacklist function was called to that particular “blacklist” address by 0x5dB0115f3B72d19cEa34dD697cf412Ff86dc7E1b, which was an entity owned by the parent organization, that is CENTRE.

According to a policy document shared by the media outlet, it has been stated that a blacklisted address will no longer function as a free address for receiving and transacting USDC and that the crypto assets under the address can not be transferred on-chain. The document referred to,

“To ensure effective Centre oversight of this Policy, Centre will regularly report publicly, the most up-to-date list of blacklisted addresses, amount of USDC tokens frozen, and corresponding fiat reserves that have been segregated. In addition, this information will be verified and publicly reported by the monthly attestation of the Centre’s outside accounting firm.”

The above incident has now brought into question the decentralization standards adhered to by CENTRE and USDC if the organization is easily able to blacklist an address without user consent, and Circle ‘s website has also indicated that blacklisted addresses could possibly be “totally and permanently unrecoverable.”

Such censorship was the result of a short reaction from the user of Reddi,

“Central government control and censorship are just going to get worse.”

Binance Talks all About Tron as Research Dives Deep into the Justin Sun Founded Cryptocurrency Network

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The cryptocurrency market and the communities involved in it have always been result-oriented. This has prompted several crypto organizations to release features that will stick for a long time and are numbers-driven.

Justin Sun led the Tron Foundation as one of the few organizations in the cryptoverse that has ties to almost all major digital asset sectors. In order to give investors and holders a better idea of what they’re diving into, Binance has released a report that talks about the Tron community’s nitti-gritties.

Binance’s latest research talked about how Tron was the second-largest blockchain for USDT, the largest stablecoin in the world. Tron controls more than 30 percent of the total USDT in circulation, which contributes to the $2.9 billion of stablecoins circulating on the TRX blockchain. At the moment, Tron is hosting two DEXs on its platform, which is doing fairly well. PoloniDEX and TronTrade have been two of the best performers this year, adding an average of 750 unique users.

The effect of Tron on the stablecoin industry has been undeniable, with the network beating the likes of Omni and USDC in a short time. At present, Tron has 377,659 addresses on its native network with a total supply of $2.88 billion. Binance ‘s research also dealt with the two different standards of tokens in the Tron ecosystem. The TRC-10 standard acts as a native utility token, while the TRC-20 is the most popular constructed token standard.

Justin Sun has assured proper popularity coverage through multiple partnerships with other crypto organizations. One of the most significant developments on the part of Tron was the creation of the Super Representatives Club. The SR Club is a select group of cryptocurrency companies in the Tron ecosystem who serve as guardian angels of the Tron blockchain. One of the most popular SRs is Tron Europe, a company that has dabbled in various aspects of the blockchain and Tron world.

The Binance research added:

“TRON has a popular ecosystem of decentralized applications. According to DApp.Review, TRON ranked the second blockchain per number of daily users, with a number of users superior to 25,000 users daily in June 2020. Instead, TRON’s community has focused on decentralized and distributed casino applications. Out of the top 10 dApps on TRON, 7 were casinos in June according to the average number of daily users.”

According to the details released by the Changpeng Zhao led Binance, Tron also offers multiple opportunities for investors to trade their holdings. While some are admittedly risky, groups like Cityuptake provide opportunities for users to leverage the SR system and track their capital. Factors such as a vibrant community and an increasing trading volume have made Tron one of the few blockchain networks to watch out for in the near future.