🪲 Hackers Wanted: $1M Bounties Entice White Hats to Hunt for DeFi Bugs

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we are covering today,

News

• Token Thieves Mint Hundreds of Illicit NFTs in Radical Heist
• Solana DEX Mango Markets Raised $70M in Token Sale
• Rarible Shakes Up NFT Race with New Protocol
• There’s Now an App for Bribing Curve Token Holders

Weekend Read

• Hackers Wanted: $1M Bounties Entice White Hats to Hunt for DeFi Bugs

Video

• Livestream: US Crypto Regulation

Links

• I Joined a Penguin NFT Club Because Apparently That’s What We Do Now: New York Times
• DAOs, VCs Put $6M Behind Governance Startup Tally: CoinDesk
• Binance Spot Trading System Upgrade Complete (2021-08-13): Binance
• SushiSwap is becoming DeFi’s most powerful DEX platform: DeFi Pulse Farmer

Podcast

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

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Heist

🦹🏻‍♂️ Token Thieves Mint Hundreds of Illicit NFTs in Radical Heist

TLDR There’s been an art theft of NFTs! An attacker stole tokens from a DAO called Bright Moments and used them to mint the remaining 309 NFTs involved in the organization’s flagship project, CryptoVenetians. The project announced on Discord that one of its members fell victim to a phishing attack which exposed their private key.

#827 was one of the NFTs that emerged from the heist.

MINT In response to the hack, the CryptoVenetian team recommended that no one purchase the NFTs beyond the last legitimate mint, number 691, saying that the stolen assets will not be included in the project’s roadmap.

VENICE The project had an emphasis on the physical world. CryptoVenetians were supposed to be minted only by visiting the Bright Moments gallery in Venice, California. Visitors would receive Bright Moments BRT tokens, which they could then use to mint their NFT on the ArtBlocks platform.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Governance

🪙 There’s Now an App for Bribing Curve Token Holders

NEWS Curve Finance, the decentralized automated market maker (AMM) focused on stablecoin swaps, continues to cement its position as one of the cornerstones of DeFi and holders of its veCRV governance token continue to reap the rewards.

VOTES On Aug. 12, Yearn founder Andre Cronje released a tool that allows DeFi projects to bribe veCRV holders with token rewards in exchange for their votes.

YIELDS Curve conducts a weekly governance vote to determine the allocation of CRV rewards to the various liquidity pools on its platform. It’s these votes that the DeFi protocols are after since they directly impact the yields they can offer to their users.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

DEXs

🥭 Solana DEX Mango Markets Raised $70M in Token Sale

TLDR Mango Markets, a decentralized exchange (DEX) on Solana, raised $70M from the sale of its governance token $MNGO. Over a two-day sale period ending on August 11, buyers claimed 500M $MNGO tokens, in what the team called a “fair launch.”

STAKED Mango tokens give holders entry to the Mango DAO that governs the Mango Markets protocol. Anyone with at least 0.1% of Mango tokens staked can propose governance actions and protocol upgrades. The maximum $MNGO supply is 10B, with 1B currently in circulation.

LAUNCH The entire $70M raised from the token launch will go to Mango DAO’s insurance fund to provide cushion for Mango Protocol lenders in the event of extreme volatility causing excess losses in the system, according to the protocol’s Litepaper. Mango Markets offers margin trading and perpetual futures, with a focus on low latency, low transaction costs and full decentralization.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

NFTs

🖼 Rarible Shakes Up NFT Race with New Protocol

NEWS Rarible is lowering the barrier to entry for developers looking to launch NFTs projects. On August 12, the NFT platform launched Rarible Protocol, an open-source toolkit for developers to create custom NFT storefronts and marketplaces. The tech stack includes contracts, standards, and APIs for minting, exchanging and indexing NFTs.

ACCESSIBLE Rarible is one of the most accessible NFT platforms. Rarible allows every user to mint and sell their own NFTs rather than require artists to be invited, a feature of rivals such as Foundation and SuperRare.

MARKETS “The Protocol does almost all the work, so developers can now proliferate the type of front-end NFT project they dream of across markets, without all of the back-end heavy lifting,” said Rarible co-founder and head of product, Alexander Salnikov.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Weekend Read

🪲 Hackers Wanted: $1M Bounties Entice White Hats to Hunt for DeFi Bugs

In this week’s feature, Bailey Reutzel delves into the wild world of bug bounties and the push by a new player, Immunefi, to help protocols defend themselves from exploits.

THE SCENE: Should I just steal the money?

There’s a vulnerability in the code… Of a DeFi protocol with $3B in TVL. I was just looking at the open-source code for fun. But now, it’s serious. There’s a bug bounty, a reward that pays out $10K to anyone who finds a major weakness. But exploiting this vulnerability would let me siphon off $2M in user funds. Seems pretty critical. $10K? Over $2M? It’s either rob or get robbed, right?

SO WHAT That’s the temptation hackers must wrestle with when they find vulnerabilities in crypto code. While there are bug bounty programs that recognize and compensate hackers who report bugs in project’s code, they typically don’t offer rewards that seem appropriate for the potential damage if the bugs were exploited. Plus, hackers, even white hats, can be treated like a nuisance or a threat, and some are outright dismissed.

BADLAND Immunefi is a nine-month old platform that’s jumped right into the middle of this dilemma. It connects crypto protocols with hackers and is aiming to professionalize a lawless badland in cybersecurity — DeFi. The reason is obvious: There’s a lot of money at risk right now. Sensational exploits like this week’s $600M hack of Poly Network — and the perpetrator’s decision to return much of the loot — are making headlines all the time.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

SPONSORED POST

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Video

📺 Livestream: US Crypto Regulation

Links

🔗 I Joined a Penguin NFT Club Because Apparently That’s What We Do Now: New York Times

Earlier this week, I got attacked by penguins. Not real ones, mind you. These were Pudgy Penguins — a flock of Twitter accounts with cartoon penguins as their avatars, which descended on me with messages like “Welcome to club pengu!” and “Enjoy the huddle!” As the replies flooded past, I saw penguins with sunglasses and penguins wearing sombreros, penguins with bow ties and penguins with mohawks.

🔗 DAOs, VCs Put $6M Behind Governance Startup Tally: CoinDesk

Tally, a platform that builds governance infrastructure for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), announced Thursday it raised $6 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital and Placeholder. But the round wasn’t entirely funded by venture capital.

🔗 Binance Spot Trading System Upgrade Complete (2021-08-13): Binance

Binance has completed the scheduled spot trading system upgrade and will resume all trading activity at 2021-08-13 06:30 AM (UTC). Withdrawals will be opened within 2.5 hours of trading being resumed.

🔗 SushiSwap is becoming DeFi’s most powerful DEX platform: DeFi Pulse Farmer

SushiSwap started in August 2020 as a fork of the popular DEX platform Uniswap by an anonymous developer with an additional mechanism meant to incentivize Uniswap volume to migrate to the new platform.

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🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Brady Dale, Dan Kahan and Owen Fernau, and edited by Camila Russo, Bailey Reutzel and Edward Robinson. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access, while free signups get only part of the content. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button above ($15/mo, $150/yr).