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The Avalanche Foundation will use up to $50 million to purchase assets tokenized on the Avalanche blockchain in a move meant to showcase the utility of creating on-chain digital representations of “real world” things.

Dubbed “Avalanche Vista,” the program will consider assets across the full liquidity spectrum including equity, credit, real estate and commodities.

“Asset tokenization isn’t just the future of capital markets, it’s a critical driver of the present,” Ava Labs president John Wu said in a statement. “The groundswell of momentum across institutions building on-chain has been astounding, and the Avalanche Foundations is taking a big leap forward with this initiative.”

The initiative follows recent milestones in the field, including Securitize’s tokenization of an interest in a flagship KKR fund, the Avalanche Foundation said, also pointing to the launch of a marketplace for asset-based securities called IntainMARKETS.  

Propelling the Avalanche ecosystem

“The $50 million allocation reflects the Avalanche Foundation’s commitment to driving forward a financial system that’s more accessible, efficient and cost-effective through the use of Avalanche’s novel consensus mechanism, unique Subnet architecture, and technical innovation,” the foundation said.

“It intends to accelerate the growth of tokenization and its role in on-chain finances by demonstrating the merits of applying blockchain rails to historically more manual and operationally intensive use cases, including asset issuance, settlement, transfer and administration,” it added.

Avalanche Vista is not the first fund designed to propel the blockchain’s ecosystem forward. In 2021, a $180 million DeFi investment program was launched alongside Aave and Curve to draw in more asset and decentralized applications onto the Avalanche blockchain. 

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Era Lend, a decentralized lending protocol operating on zkSync Layer 2, become the latest victim of a reentrancy attack that resulted in a loss of $3.4 million, as confirmed by security analysts at BlockSec.

The attack exploited a read-only reentrancy vulnerability that allowed the hacker to make repeated calls to a function within a single transaction, withdrawing more funds than they were entitled to. Taking advantage of a faulty price oracle that Era Lend relied upon, the attacker used the reentrancy exploit to further drain assets from the protocol.

Typically, view functions labeled as read-only are considered safe, often lacking reentrancy protection since they don’t change the contract’s state. The term “read-only” indicates that the function merely performs a view action, such as calculating a token balance based on a third-party pool’s supply. In this incident, the affected third-party was another decentralized exchange called SyncSwap. However, as this case demonstrates, these functions can be manipulated to siphon off substantial funds.

“The attacker altered the LP’s price during the burn/mint actions of SyncSwap, using its reserves to determine the LP price [on Era Lend],” Lei Wu, co-founder and CTO of BlockSec, told The Block. “All projects that utilize the SyncSwap code should remain alert.”

Era Lend responds

“We have detected and confirmed a cyber attack on our platform. We want to assure you that the attack has been contained, and the threat actor can no longer continue their actions,” Era Lend said in a statement on Discord. 

It clarified that only the USDC pool was compromised, while the security of assets other than USDC remains intact.

As a precautionary measure, the team advised users to refrain from depositing USDC for the time being. Additionally, borrowing operations on the platform have been temporarily halted, the team added.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Era Lend, the largest lending protocol on Ethereum scaling blockchain zkSync, has been hit by a $3.4 million reentrancy attack, according to blockchain security firm CertiK.

The latest price moves in bitcoin (BTC) and crypto markets in context for July 25, 2023. First Mover is CoinDesk’s daily newsletter that contextualizes the latest actions in the crypto markets.

Axie Infinity creator Sky Mavis announced a partnership with NFT collection CyberKongz which will include rewarding some of the web3 game’s players with digital assets.

CyberKongz is unveiling a new NFT collection called Genkai on July 27 with some of the tokens minted on Ronin, the Ethereum sidechain Sky Mavis uses for its popular crypto game Axie Infinity.

“Genkai is an anime-inspired art collection and the next edition” of the CyberKongz brand, the company said in a statement. The mint has a total supply of 20,000 tokens, 4,000 of which will be “made available on Ronin” via Sky Mavis’s in-house NFT marketplace called Mavis Market.

Sky Mavis said it “will reward each Mystic Axie holder with a Genkai NFT per Mystic Axie owned.” A Mystic Axie is an Axie Infinity NFT with rarer traits.

NFT price doldrums

Like even the most successful of NFT collections — including Bored Ape Yacht Club, which as a PFP collection has a similar aesthetic — CyberKongz tokens have seen their value and trading volumes crushed by the prolonged bear market. Since surpassing $48 million in sales volume during October 2021, when the average price of a CyberKongz shot to more than $64,000 according to CryptoSlam! data, the collection has fallen on harder times.

Last month, sales volume was about $315,000, with the average price of a CyberKongz NFT coming in at about $2,600. Although monthly sales volumes now register less than 1% of what they did at their height, Axie Infinity retains the title as the best-selling NFT collection of all-time with more than $4.2 billion in sales volume.

Outside of the 4,000 Genkai NFTs being minted on Sky Mavis’s Ronin chain, the other 16,000 tokens will be “made available on Ethereum Mainnet,” the company said. CyberKongz is also Ethereum based.

Incorporating Ronin with the new collection appears to be rooted in CyberKongz creators’ desire to expand more into gaming.

“CyberKongz will be working with Ronin to develop a game featuring Genkai,” CyberKongz founder Myoo said.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Larisa Barbu, COO of Exchange.art, told CoinDesk that the marketplace had planned to expand beyond the Solana ecosystem since its launch in 2021.

Ducati has announced the launch of its first-ever digital collectible on the XRP Ledger. The Bologna-based motorcycle manufacturer’s digital collectible will consist of a video sequence of Ducati logos on tanks of motorcycles produced since 1946.

Ducati’s CEO, Claudio Domenicali, affirmed the significance of web3 innovations in providing fans with an immersive brand experience. “Entering web3 is another way to get closer to the Ducatisti community by further extending the number of services offered to them. It also represents an opportunity to meet and make ourselves known to a new community of NFT enthusiasts, giving them the opportunity to live unique Ducati-style experiences and collect the digital assets that we will develop exclusively for this new dimension of the brand,” Domenicali added.

Users must sign up within seven days of the July 26 launch date. Those who receive the first collectible will gain access to subsequent project releases. The manufacturer said upcoming Ducati projects will be deployed using XRPL. “Over the coming months will see the creation of new digital aggregation spaces, NFT collections and opportunities to participate in the new activities typical of the web3 universe, already relevant in the cryptocurrency community”, the Ducati website said.

For the project, Ducati partnered with Web3 Pro. Ducati’s parent company, Lamborghini, also has brand engagement with Web3 Pro via an NFT collection called “The Epic Road Trip.”

XRP Ledger and NFTs

Ripple is a contributor to XRPL, running six of the 35 plus unique validator nodes on the network. The company said transactions on XRPL increased 9% to 116 million on Q1 of this year.

“NFTs continue to drive activity and over 1 million assets have been minted on the ledger since XLS-20 went live on mainnet,” the Ripple website noted.

The XLS-20 standard allows XRPL to support native NFTs.  The standard allows all essential NFT functionality on XRPL, including minting, trading, burning and automatic royalties.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Institutional-focused crypto exchange EDX Markets (EDXM) is integrating with Talos, an institutional trading technology provider for digital assets.

The collaboration sees Talos become the first Order and Execution Management System (OEMS) to integrate with EDXM, offering institutional investors access to a wider range of liquidity venues via its front-end interface and trading tools, according to a statement.

“This collaboration broadens our range of liquidity options for clients, reinforcing our commitment to delivering a comprehensive and robust trading experience for both traditional financial institutions and crypto-native firms,” EDX Markets CEO Jamil Nazarali said.

Talos will provide EDXM with access to its network of over 40 providers, including top-tier exchanges, custodians, OTC desks and market makers, the statement added. Genesis Trading, BlockTower and Abra are listed among Talos’ existing clients, according to its website.

“By integrating with our trading technology, EDX Markets expands its reach and enhances its offerings, bringing a secure, efficient and transparent trading experience to market participants,” Talos co-founder and CEO Anton Katz said. “This combination will strengthen our collective mission to drive institutional adoption and foster the convergence of traditional finance and digital assets.”

Big backers

Backed by major financial players Citadel Securities, Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab, EDXM was first announced in September. It also has support from Paradigm, Sequoia Capital and Virtu Financial.

Nazarali said the platform would learn from mistakes made by others who tried to attract Wall Street to digital assets in an interview with The Block at the time. “There seemed to be a void in the marketplace for a true exchange,” he said.

EDXM went live in June, offering trading in four crypto assets: bitcoin, ether, litecoin and bitcoin cash.

In contrast to existing crypto exchanges, EDXM said at launch it would draw on traditional finance standards but operate as a “non-custodial” exchange. As such, EDXM doesn’t directly manage users’ digital assets, serving as a platform that allows firms to execute trades between crypto and fiat currencies.

Designed to mitigate security risks and conflict of interest concerns over potential misuse of customer funds, actual transfers between parties take place outside of the platform. It expects retail brokerages to route their clients’ buy and sell orders to its platform, akin to how the stock market operates. While EDXM plans to launch a clearinghouse later this year to facilitate trade settlement, it intends to utilize third-party banks and a crypto custodian for holding customer assets, it said at the time.

Last month, the exchange also announced the closure of a second funding round, with investors including Miami International Holdings and affiliates of proprietary trading firms DV Trading, GTS, GSR and Hudson River Trading.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Concerns around privacy, security and reported connections to Sam Bankman-Fried and Three Arrows Capital have raised eyebrows in the crypto community.