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Multichain, a cross-chain protocol, promised to compensate users that are being affected by a “force majeure” that has left some cross-chain routes unavailable.

“The time for service to resume is unknown,” the Multichain team said in a post on Twitter, adding that most cross-chain routes were still functioning well. “After service is restored, pending transactions will be credited automatically.”

The team said it would announce details of the compensation plan at a later date. It first acknowledged the problem in an operational update yesterday when it said an upgrade to a back-end node was taking longer than expected. 

Some users have been complaining about stuck transactions since as early as May 21, The Block reported earlier. Multichain’s MULTI token has fallen 23.6%  over the past day to $5.41, according to data from CoinGecko.

The issues have led to at least three large crypto entities taking action in response, with Fantom Foundation withdrawing $2.4 million in liquidity of the protocol’s native MULTI tokens on the decentralized exchange SushiSwap. Chinese crypto investment firm HashKey Group moved $250,000 to crypto exchange Gate.io, while Tron founder Justin Sun withdrew 470,000 USDD, a stablecoin, from the protocol itself.

© 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.

When Washington, D.C. lawmakers tune into their favorite Sunday morning political shows this week, they’ll also get a dose of crypto messaging, thanks to a Coinbase (COIN) campaign that’s part of the next stage in the industry’s attempt to influence U.S. policy.

Gods Unchained is the top web3 title in the world when ranked with blockchain-enabled games by trading volume of digital assets. It’s now preparing for a release on both Apple and Android mobile devices later this year that could result in exponential growth. 

“The mobile dev team has already begun working in the background and we’re on track to bring the game to all (Android and iOS) mobile devices with a soft launch later this year,” game makers said in a blog post on Tuesday.

Created by Immutable and launched in 2018, Gods Unchained is a blockchain based digital-trading card game akin to the immensely popular physical trading-card game Hearthstone, according to the title’s game director Chris Clay, who previously oversaw the development team for Magic: The Gathering Arena.

Penetrating the mobile gaming market has become paramount to blockchain gaming companies and seen as the clearest path to onboarding enough gamers to make the buying and selling of in-app digital assets (NFTs) a mainstream consumer habit.

“Getting a good slice of the pie on mobile, even though it’s highly competitive, the pie is really, really big,” said executive producer of Gods Unchained Daniel Paez, who previously worked for traditional gaming powerhouses like Activision and Blizzard Entertainment. “And it’s a different kind of player [compared to PC and console gaming]. You have a wider range of players you can target.”

Last year was monumental for crypto gaming companies, as venture capitalists poured billions of dollars into blockchain-powered games as they hoped to hit the jackpot by backing the crypto version of a blockbuster mobile video game like Pokémon GO or Clash of Clans. Combined, investors put more than $5 billion into blockchain-based games, gaming studios, metaverse applications and sports betting related apps, according to The Block Research.

In 2023, crypto-game developers are attempting to rise to that challenge, and getting their titles into the hands of billions of mobile gamers all around the world will be pivotal. 

Apple has affluent customer base

There are considerably more Android users playing mobile games, but Apple’s often affluent customer base is an attractive and lucrative segment of the market that developers prioritize. Being allowed on Apple’s App Store has historically been tough, although recent news suggests the company is easing restrictions.

Gamefied web3 apps like Axie Infinity and Stepn both recently announced they’d finally gained Apple’s authorization to list the titles on the tech giant’s App Store. For now, Axie Infinity is only available on Apple iOS devices in select countries, but it hopes to complete its global launch soon.

Another game, Mythical Games’ football title NFL Rivals, also recently launched on both Android and Apple devices.

“There is no written playbook to get on mobile,” said Paez, who added that while dealing with Android is easier, Apple has become “a lot more forthright in terms of their policies.”

Gods Unchained looks toward ‘new, jargon-free, era in crypto gaming’

Gods Unchained’s Clay said he’s looking forward to a new, jargon-free, era in crypto gaming where gamers don’t think twice about the fact they are trading NFTs or what blockchain their favorite title is on. He also said that after last year’s tumult, which helped separate some of the wheat from the chaff, 2023 is all about eliminating the obstacles keeping blockchain gaming from going mainstream.

Gamers won’t even care about the blockchain elements a game possesses if they are “solving problems they have in the games they’re playing that let them progress in the ways that they want, look the way they want, play they want, without the immense friction that exists,” said Clay.

The need for digital wallets, or not being able to easily access a game’s marketplace to buy and sell assets — as is the case with Axie Infinity and NFL Rivals’ iOS versions — can make the gaming experience cumbersome.

“If there is a general term for this current era, it’s friction,” said Clay. “We need to solve the friction if we’re really going to take blockchain gaming to that next step. The need for a great game is always there, but the friction is the challenge.”

© 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.

Two decentralized finance projects are butting heads over a governance proposal that could see the recovery of 40 ETH stolen in Sushiswap’s April hack.

Cybersecurity startup Unciphered claims it was able to hack into the popular Trezor T model hardware crypto wallet manufactured by Satoshi Labs.

In a YouTube demonstration, Unciphered showcased the apparent extraction of the wallet’s mnemonic seed phrase, or private key, exploiting a hardware vulnerability that relies on physical possession of the device.

This is not the first time Unciphered has seemingly managed to retrieve seed phrases from hardware wallets. In February, the company demonstrated a similar hack on a wallet manufactured by Hong Kong-based OneKey.

Hardware wallets, which store private keys offline and are designed to protect crypto assets, are generally considered highly secure. Unciphered said, however, that the hardware security mechanisms of the Trezor T model can be theoretically bypassed if a hacker had a T wallet in possession.

The type of exploit depicted by Unciphered would only be feasible if the attacker had physical access to the hardware wallet.

In the video, the Unciphered team said it developed an “in-house exploit” that allowed them to extract the wallet’s firmware. Eric Michaud, co-founder of Unciphered, claimed that by leveraging specialized GPU chips, they were eventually able to crack the device’s pin seed phrase.

Physical possession required for exploit to succeed

“We uploaded the firmware we extracted onto our high-performance computing cracking clusters,” Michaud explaineded in the video. “We have about 10 GPUs, and after some time, we extracted the keys.”

Michaud further claimed that fixing this exploit for Trezor T would require a recall of all their products.

Trezor did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Block.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Trezor acknowledged that Unciphered’s demonstration had similarities with the Read Protection Downgrade (RDP) vulnerability discovered by Kraken Security Labs researchers that affected both the Trezor One and Trezor Model T. This implies that the vulnerability is not new.

Trezor further clarified that such attacks would require physical theft of the hardware wallet device.

© 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.

While $3.6 billion worth of bitcoin and ethereum option contracts are set to expire this Friday on Deribit, the impact could be minimal as the market is enjoying one of its lowest levels of volatility all year.

About 85,000 bitcoin options contracts valued at $2.3 billion are set to expire on Friday. With a put call ratio of 0.38, there are likely more than two and half more calls outstanding than puts, according to Luuk Strijers, the chief commercial officer of the crypto futures and options exchange.

There are roughly 700,000 contracts for ethereum options valued at $1.3 billion that are also set to expire, he added.

The dollar amount of the options set to expire is sizable, but that doesn’t mean the market has a reason to panic, said Strijers.

“Implied volume remains at rock bottom level with DVOL trading at 50 for bitcoin and ethereum and shorter-dated even lower but climbing slightly,” he said. “Bitcoin and ethereum levels are the same which is historically rare.”

“We saw a similar rock bottom IV situation in January this year followed by a big spike afterwards,” Strijers 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.

Strike, Coinbase and others have intimated they may leave the United States due to regulatory pressure. But those may be empty threats.

After a video went viral of what appears to be a hardware wallet getting smashed with a hammer and then blow-torched into a charred mass, Ledger (and all of the crypto industry) got a searing reminder on the importance of managing expectations.

Celer, a cross-chain interoperability protocol, said Wednesday that it patched a vulnerability first disclosed by Jump’s crypto arm. 

In blog posts published by Celer and Jump Crypto, the disclosure detailed a vulnerability in Celer’s State Guardian Network (SGN), a proof-of-stake blockchain that Celer utilizes for securely authorizing transactions between different networks. If executed, the vulnerability could have allowed a malicious validator node to submit enough fraudulent “votes” about the state of the network to alter it potentially.

Celer stressed that no funds were lost due to the bug’s existence. “The vulnerability was not publicly accessible, and no funds were at immediate risk at the time of discovery,” the team wrote.

Celer said that it would propose funding a bug bounty grant to Jump Crypto as a result of the discovery.

“Though the discovery is not covered by the existing bug bounty programs, we plan to raise a community proposal to grant the Jump Crypto team a retrospective bounty reward once we include the SGN codebase in the bug bounty programs in the coming months. Onward and forward,” the team wrote in its blog post. 

Vulnerabilities are common in the DeFi world, as perhaps befits an ecosystem of experimental projects and protocols. So, too, are the inherent dangers; last weekend, a malicious attack resulted in the takeover of Tornado Cash’s governance DAO. 

According to The Block Research, some $2.73 billion has been stolen from DeFi projects by malicious hackers.

© 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.

Hardware wallet maker said full open sourcing is not an option as it needs to protect the security of its chip design.