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India’s CoinDCX, CoinSwitch, WazirX, BuyUCoin, ZebPay and Giottus all think they’ll survive the current bear market – here’s how.

ALSO: A Chinese governmental agency released a paper over the weekend that outlined suggestions for China’s Web3 policy, but it didn’t broach must new ground. Still, the paper represented progress for a country that is keen to write the next generation of technology standards.

A dormant wallet that purchased 8,000 ether ($14.8 million) in the Ethereum ICO in 2015 has woken up and transferred its funds to another address.

The wallet first made a test transaction with 1 ether ($1,845) before sending the remaining 7,999 ether to the address, as noticed by on-chain analysts Lookonchain.

When the owner participated in the Ethereum ICO, or initial coin offering, the funds were purchased for around $0.31 per token, or just shy of $2,500 in total. That means the owner is sitting on a 591,900% return on investment at current prices.

The funds have been moved to another wallet with limited transaction history. The only other movement in that wallet is a 207 ether ($380,000) inbound transaction that was made only a few minutes earlier. These funds were sent from a different wallet that hadn’t been active since 2017.

It’s unclear why this Ethereum ICO participant is consolidating some — or all — of their funds into one wallet. They don’t appear to have been sent to an exchange and haven’t been sold on-chain.

These types of movements have happened a few times in the past. In December, two addresses moved $27 million of ether, of which some funds were from the Ethereum ICO. In April, another ICO participant moved $4.4 million of funds.

© 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.

Crypto project Jimbos Protocol was exploited for 4,090 ETH ($7.5 million) just three days after its version 2 was launched.

The hack was enabled by the protocol’s lack of control over slippage for the tokens under its control, according to crypto analysts PeckShield. The exploiter made use of a $5.9 million flash loan — where tokens are borrowed and instantly repaid — to carry out the attack.

“We are aware of the exploit regarding our protocol and are actively in contact with law enforcement and security professionals. We will release further information when possible,” the protocol said on Twitter.

The Arbitrum-based Jimbos Protocol is an attempt to make a token with a semi-stable floor price, that’s backed by an amount of assets. It attempts to take some elements of the Olympus DAO project — which rose quickly in price before eventually collapsing — but with a few changes hoped to make it more sustainable. The core idea is to use the project’s own liquidity to support its price, in combination with taxes and incentives.

The project initially launched on May 16 but shortly after the launch, a smart contract bug stopped the protocol from working as expected. Users were told to not interact with version 1 and wait for version 2. Following today’s exploit of version 2, the token’s price has fallen from $0.24 to $0.18, down 25%.

On the project’s website, it notes that “these mechanisms are experimental, the contracts are unaudited, and that any amount of money you put into this protocol can be lost due to unforseen circumstances at any time.”

On May 25, popular crypto investor DCF God said he had bought some jimbo tokens, before realising it lacked the feature he had bought them for. Today he noted, “Oh and now I’m rugged.”

© 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.

The Stargate DAO is voting on a proposal to lower its exposure to a stablecoin created by the Multichain protocol — in light of its ongoing situation — and to isolate pools containing the asset from its other pools.

The Stargate DAO is the governance system for the Stargate bridge, a means of transferring assets from one blockchain to another using the LayerZero protocol. The bridge operates through pools of funds stored on each chain.

The Stargate bridge connects the Fantom blockchain to seven other blockchains. On each of these chains are pools of funds containing the anyUSDC stablecoin, which was issued by Multichain and is a commonly used stablecoin on Fantom. The proposal seeks to disconnect the Fantom pools from Stargate’s other pools and lower exposure to the stablecoin.

Currently, the proposal has 1.1 million vested stargate tokens in favor, with just 16,000 votes against. It is still yet to reach the 2 million quorum necessary for it to be carried out.

Silence from Multichain

The reasoning behind the proposal is to reduce exposure to any tokens connected with Multichain, another cross-chain protocol. Multichain has had ongoing issues for a week, with delayed transactions and three cross-chain routes still offline. The team initially said this was due to an upgrade that was getting fixed, but the explanation was changed on May 24 to an ambiguous “force majeure.”

On Twitter, unverified rumors have surfaced that the team was arrested in China. In a group Telegram message with the Multichain team, Multichain’s VP of Strategic Partnerships, who goes by Mog, replied that he didn’t know whether the leadership team had been detained by Chinese authorities. 

While the Fantom blockchain has a lot of exposure to Multichain, as many tokens on its network were issued through the protocol, Fantom Foundation Director Andre Cronje said he was not particularly concerned about this type of exposure. That said, the foundation removed liquidity — in the form of Multichain’s native MULTI token — it had been providing on the decentralized exchange SushiSwap due to the uncertainty.

Other crypto entities have also taken action to reduce exposure to Multichain, including Binance, Conflux, HashKey Group and Tron founder Justin Sun. 

© 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.

Tornado Cash governance token holders are set to resume control over the protocol’s operations, following an unexpected proposal by the person who attacked it.

The proposal to hand back control to the original governance holders passed on May 26, with 517,000 token votes in favor and zero against. It will be executed in a day’s time.

This may be a swift ending to a ruthless governance takeover that didn’t affect the protocol — although it could have done — but resulted in the theft of some governance tokens. According to Martin Lee, data journalist at crypto analytics site Nansen, the attacker stole 483,000 TORN tokens and swapped most of them for 485 ETH ($890,000), leaving 39,000 TORN ($160,000). Some of the ether was then routed through Tornado Cash, to obscure its origin.

The attacker took over the protocol’s governance system by managing to get a malicious proposal passed, which contained code giving them 1.2 million votes. They then used these votes to pass further proposals, handing themselves control over governance tokens that had been vested.

Tornado Cash is a mixing service on the Ethereum blockchain. It was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in August 2022 under allegations that the protocol was used for money laundering. Alexey Pertsev, one of the protocol’s developers, awaits trial in the Netherlands under allegations of money laundering.

© 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.

Former Bitmex CEO Arthur Hayes, who now runs a family office called Maelstrom, doesn’t see bitcoin breaking new highs this year — but is bullish from 2024 onward.

“I don’t think we get up to $70,000 this year, I think next year is when we cross that barrier, then we get the blow off top [2025], [2026] and then it’s Armageddon,” Hayes said on the What Bitcoin Did podcast, pointing toward bitcoin’s halving event in 2024 as a key event.

As for his comment on Armageddon, he explained that he’s referring to more of a societal change, such as a major war. He pointed to quantitative easing and social discontent as two factors that would lead to such an event.

“It doesn’t have to be too straightforward, we just have this situation, we have this tinderbox of too much money, no trust and people trying to eke out a living for themselves,” Hayes said. He added that bitcoin would go down too in this scenario.

Resolving the US debt ceiling

When asked about the U.S. debt ceiling, Hayes said that it will be resolved following the usual back and forth. But he argued that its timing could cause waves in the market, claiming that financial disruption events typically happen in the fall.

“With the banking crisis — and you have the federal government issuing trillions of dollars of debt because they need to fund themselves — you’re basically putting this powder keg together of a situation that’s going to be exploding in Q3/Q4 of this year and so why ultimately I think it could be quite good for bitcoin. It will be quite volatile on the upside and the downside,” he said.

As for Hayes’ own investment strategy during this time, he mentioned that Maelstrom was making some plays with respect to ether staking and that it was taking a hard look at the emergence of NFTs on Bitcoin, known as Ordinals.

© 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.

Beijing, China’s capital city, reportedly released a white paper this morning aimed at promoting innovation and development of the web3 industry.

Dubbed the “Web3 Innovation and Development White Paper (2023),” the document states that web3 technology is an “inevitable trend for future Internet industry development,” according to a report from local news outlet The Paper. The Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission, also known as the Administrative Commission of Zhongguancun Science Park, released the white paper at the Zhongguancun Forum.

The commission aims to construct Beijing as a global innovation hub for the digital economy. To that end, the city’s Chaoyang district will spend at least 100 million yuan (around $14 million) every year until 2025, Yang Hongfu, director of the Zhongguancun Chaoyang Park management committee, reportedly said at the forum. Zhongguancun is often referred to as China’s Silicon Valley.

The white paper reportedly states that Beijing aims to strengthen policy support and accelerate technological breakthroughs to promote the web3 industry.

Timing of the release is ‘interesting’

The timing of the white paper release is “interesting,” according to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who noted that Hong Kong’s crypto rules kick off on June 1.

Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission released a new rulebook for the crypto industry last week, stating that retail investors can start trading crypto from June 1, when a new licensing regime for crypto platforms begins.

Hong Kong’s attempt to attract crypto firms in the region comes at the same time as a regulatory crackdown on crypto in the U.S. As for China, it prohibited the use of cryptocurrencies in 2021. But with the release of the web3 white paper, it appears to be opening up to the industry in some form.

Earlier this week, state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) broadcast a segment about cryptocurrencies that featured the Bitcoin logo, which was a “big deal,” according to Binance’s Zhao, as “Historically, coverages like these led to bull runs.”

The segment featured what appeared to be a Bitcoin ATM in Hong Kong. Besides a large blue Bitcoin logo, an option that said “Buy Bitcoins” was visible. NFTs were also highlighted in the segment. But the segment has since then been taken down.

© 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.

A core developer team at MakerDAO, the decentralized platform responsible for the Dai stablecoin, is proposing to raise the savings rate for the collateral-backed cryptocurrency to 3.33% amid a surging interest rate environment as the U.S. Federal Reserve seeks to combat persistent inflation. 

“Brace yourself, DAI holders, for a DSR at 3.33%,” MakerDAO said on Twitter, adding that the change had been put forth by DeFi risk management firm Block Analitica.

Know as DSR, the DAI Savings Rate can be “adjusted often to deal with short-term changes in market conditions of the Dai economy,” according to MakerDAO.

It’s funded by the Stability Fee on the network and paid when DAI is locked into a DSR contract. 

Raising the DSR to 1% last year led to more than 35 million DAI being deposited in a month, MakerDAO said in February. The proposal, which noted that the yield on a 3-month U.S. Treasury Bill is currently around 5.29%, would need to go through a formal vote process by the decentralized autonomous organization.

The average yield of other cash stablecoins mentioned in the proposal is currently 0.97%.

MakerDAO member sees ‘huge tailwind’ for Defi ecosystem

“Think this could be a huge tailwind for the entire defi ecosystem,” a MakerDAO community member with Block Analitica named Monet Supply said Friday on Twitter, telling one user that the move should drive DAI circulation up and not down. “Logic is market will grow more efficient eventually, better to be a first mover.”

“DSR increases demand for holding DAI which will increase the market cap as people switch in from non-yield bearing stables,” Sam MacPherson, the co-founder of Phoenix Labs, wrote on Twitter. “Borrow rates at your favorite lending platforms are about to jump to ~4.5% as Maker drastically raises the cost of capital.”

Primoz Kordez, the founder of Block Analitica, said the proposal would increase rates across the entire DeFi landscape. 

“DAI in DSR is the benchmark for safest DeFi stablecoin yield,” he wrote. 

© 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.