Market Summary

Bitcoin Price: US$ 22,818.37 (-0.74%)
Ethereum Price: US$ 1,618.16(-0.78%) 

Lifinity’s Market Maker Rewards, Umami’s Stablecoin Vault

• This week’s airdrops include rumours from the Aptos ecosystem, Ethereum hard forks and Stargate liquidity mining rewards.
• Lifinity Protocol is rewarding veLFNTY stakers with non-native tokens from protocol-owned liquidity.
• Lifinity Protocol is a decentralized exchange powered by a proactive market maker designed to offer better capital efficiency and reduced impermanent losses. The protocol automatically concentrates liquidity around the market price, and shifts liquidity to favor trades that move the pool towards the 50:50 equilibrium. The protocol uses price data from Pyth’s oracles instead of relying on arbitragers to adjust the balance of assets in these pools.
• Umami has launched a USDC vault generating yield in ETH by leveraging GMX and Tracer.
• Umami creates strategy vaults that generate sustainable, risk-hedged yields on core crypto assets including USDC, BTC and ETH. All of its vaults source yield from reliable on-chain revenue streams, and not inflationary native token emissions. They safeguard against market volatility using hedging derivatives from Tracer DAO that can’t be liquidated. 
• DeFiLlama has introduced a feature where users can see protocols that may potentially airdrop tokens.
• Ethereum may be hard forked by miners in retaliation to the Merge. ETH holders may be airdropped tokens on the new chain.

Contagion only hit firms with ‘poor balance sheet management’ — Kraken Aus boss

• The crypto contagion sparked by Terra’s infamous implosion this year only spread to companies and protocols with “poor balance sheet management” and not the underlying blockchain technology, says Kraken Australia’s managing director Jonathon Miller.
• Speaking with Cointelegraph, the Australian crypto exchange head argued that sectors such as Ethereum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) revealed its fundamental strength this year by weathering severe market conditions:
• “Some of the contagion that we saw across some of the lending models in the space, [was in] this traditional finance kind of lending model sitting on top of crypto. But what we didn’t see is a kind of catastrophic failure of the underlying protocols. And I think that’s been recognized by a lot of people.”
• “Platforms like Ethereum did not fail when the volatility hit. You saw decentralized markets, decentralized lending models, DeFi in general, not fall over. There was no contagion there. What you saw was poor balance sheet management from closed shop trade fee lenders,” he added.

Contributors piling into Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana since 2018: Report

• Despite crypto market turbulence, active contributors across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana’s top projects have increased by an average of 71.6% per year since January 2018, according to a new report.
• The findings come from a Tuesday report sent to Cointelegraph by technology investment firm Telstra Ventures, which found that Solana had the most significant annual increase in monthly-active contributors, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 173% since January 1, 2018.
• Contributors are developers who push updates to code on GitHub, a code repository for computer programs.
• Ethereum was second with a 24.9% compound annual growth of monthly contributors since 2018 and Bitcoin was third with a “slow and steady” 17.1% yearly increase.
• Telstra Ventures also noted that it found Ethereum to have the “largest and strongest” developer community out of the three blockchains. The network had nearly 2,500 monthly active contributors in April, which fell to over 2,000 contributors in July, coinciding with a fall in the crypto price.

Solana wallets ‘compromised and abandoned’ as users warned of scam solutions

• Solana users have been urged to move their funds to cold storage and be alert to possible scams after a major exploit of thousands of wallets sees more than $8 million stolen.
• The cryptocurrency ecosystem has been rocked by a widespread exploit targeting Solana wallets that have been ongoing since Wednesday. Phantom and Slope, two Solana-based wallet services, initially flagged the attack on their social media platforms, alongside a host of cryptocurrency influencers, blockchain analytic and security firms and victims of the hack as it continued to unfold.
• A handful of commentators noted that attackers had gained access to user private keys, as transactions were signed on the chain legitimately. Ava Labs CEO and founder Emin Gun Sirer estimated that more than 7,000 wallets had been affected, a number cited by various other individuals and firms online.
• As investigations begin to unpack the root cause that allowed an attacker to pillage thousands of wallets, affected users are being warned not to accept help from individuals online purporting to have solutions to the hack. Heidi Chakos, the host of the YouTube channel Crypto Tips, stressed that scammers would be looking to exploit the ongoing situation.
• Solana Status has been providing updates since the exploit began and noted that 7,767 wallets had been affected at 5:00 am UTC on Wednesday. Several wallets were affected across mobile and browser extensions.

Nomad reportedly ignored security vulnerability that led to $190M exploit

• The Nomad token bridge hack on Aug. 3 was the fourth largest crypto hack in history, seeing nearly $200 million worth of crypto assets drained from the platform. However, more than the hack, the methodology behind it garnered widespread attention.
• The exploit took place due to a smart contract vulnerability that saw hundreds of users other than the hacker getting involved and taking away as much as they could by simply copy-pasting the transaction data used by the initial hacker and changing the wallet address to theirs. The event was later deemed as a decentralized robbery by many due to the involvement of normal community members.
• Later, the Nomad team revealed to Cointelegraph that some of the people who took funds were acting benevolently to protect the crypto from getting into the wrong hands.
• In the aftermath of the hack, the crypto analysis group BestBrokers found that the first exploit took place on Aug. 1, which drained 400 Bitcoin (BTC) in four different transactions. The hackers later diverted all 22,880 Ether (ETH), then moved on to the over $107 million worth of stablecoins and finally started diverting the altcoins supported by the project.

Lido DAO: Ethereum’s biggest Merge staker just jumped 30% — will LDO rally into September?

• Lido DAO (LDO) price edged higher on Aug. 3, primarily due to similar upside moves elsewhere in the crypto market and a rising euphoria around Ethereum’s network upgrade in September.
• On the daily chart, LDO’s price reached an intraday high of $2.40 a day after bottoming out locally at $1.84. The sharp upside reversal amounted to nearly 30% gains in a day, suggesting traders’ strengthening bullish bias for Lido DAO.
• Lido DAO, the biggest Merge staking serve provider, has benefited from the craze simultaneously, with LDO, its governance token, rallying nearly 500% in the same period.

GitHub faces widespread malware attacks affecting projects, including crypto

• Major developer platform GitHub faced a widespread malware attack and reported 35,000 “code hits” on a day that saw thousands of Solana-based wallets drained for millions of dollars.
• The widespread attack was highlighted by GitHub developer Stephen Lucy, who first reported the incident earlier on Wednesday. The developer came across the issue while reviewing a project he found on a Google search.
• So far, various projects — from crypto, Golang, Python, JavaScript, Bash, Docker and Kubernetes — have been found to be affected by the attack. The malware attack is targeted at the docker images, install docs and NPM script, which is a convenient way to bundle common shell commands for a project.
• To dupe developers and access critical data, the attacker first creates a fake repository (a repository contains all of the project’s files and each file’s revision history) and pushes clones of legit projects to GitHub. For example, the following two snapshots show this legit crypto miner project and its clone.

Hackers might be responsible for removing $4.8M from crypto exchange ZB.com: PeckShield

• Blockchain investigator PeckShield has reported roughly $4.8 million in crypto moved from ZB.com amid the exchange announcing the suspension of withdrawals.
• In a Wednesday tweet, PeckShield speculated that hackers might be responsible for transferring 21 types of tokens off of the exchange starting on Monday, including Tether (USDT), Shiba Inu (SHIB), and Tesra (TSR). According to the blockchain investigator, the funds totaled roughly $4.8 million at the time of publication.
• The suspected hack followed ZB.com announcing the suspension of deposits and withdrawals on Tuesday in response to the “sudden failure of some core applications.” The exchange warned users not to “deposit any digital currency before recovery.”

Victorian police to get ‘greater power’ to seize crypto assets from criminals

• Victorian Police in Australia will soon be granted new powers to seize cryptocurrency and digital assets from criminals, as well as compel platforms to hand over information about suspects.
• According to a statement released by Victorian premier Daniel Andrews on Aug. 2, new laws were introduced to parliament on Tuesday under the Major Crime and Community Safety Legislation Amendment Bill 2022, with the aim of cracking down on organized crime in the state.
• The new bill is expected to give authorities “greater power” to identify and seize digital assets, in response to the growing use of digital cryptocurrencies by organized crime.
• The laws will uphold also require crypto exchanges disclose information to assist with criminal investigations in the same way that banks would.
• “They will be able to compel cryptocurrency platforms to hand over information about suspects like banks currently must, and seize digital ‘wallets’.”
• It will also give police greater search powers to obtain electronic data when executing search warrants and make the criminal’s “forfeited property” more easily available to compensate victims of the crime.