🥷 Bridges Ransacked By Hackers: DeFi Week of July 2

Happy weekend Defiers!

The web3 markets cooled following last week’s bullish momentum. Despite most top crypto assets losing up to 4% this week, research from DappRadar showed ETH and BTC outperformed all global benchmark assets by at least 100% during the first six months of 2023.

The slight market retracement came as hackers exploited two popular cross-chain bridging protocols during the week.Poly Network, which is known for suffering the second-largest DeFi exploit on record, was exploited again last Sunday when a hacker minted trillions of tokens from thin air via the protocol. Despite liquidity restraints for selling all of the loot, the attacker realized more than $10M from the exploit.

Blockchain sleuths then identified suspicious transfers from Multichain on Wednesday, with the project’s team later confirming $121M worth of transfers from the protocol were unauthorized. The incident comes after Multichain’s CEO went missing in May.

Coincidentally, Ethereum developers proposed the ERC-7265 token standard allowing devs to configure a “circuit breaker” mechanism that halts asset outflows if a chosen withdrawal threshold is exceeded. While ERC-7265 was designed to prevent hackers from emptying exploited protocols, critics fear the feature could be abused by malicious developers.

In other Ethereum news, a contract associated with Xen allowing users to burn ETH in exchange for VMPX tokens charged to the top of the network’s gas-guzzling rankings. The activity has pushed Ethereum’s fees to its highest level since memecoins exploded in May.

Bitcoin devs proposed BRC-69, a modified version of the recently surging BRC-20 standard. The team behind BRC-69 said their recursive inscription techniques drive a 90% reduction in the blockspace usage with Ordinals. The news follows Bitcoin’s transaction fees soaring to new all-time highs two months ago.

Bitcoin now ranks as the second-most popular network for NFT trading after hosting $96.4M worth of activity in June. However, the broader NFT sector continues to struggle, with the number of active traders dropping 44% last month amid a 17% slump in trade volume.

And in this week’s podcast, ConsenSys’ chief marketing officer, takes us through the Ethereum software development company’s decision to rebrand and strategic vision moving forward.

Enjoy!