Another Day Another Hack
This week in web3 wednesdays:
- BNB Chain exploited for $570 million, over $100 remains unsecured
- Reserve Bank of India to launch CBDC pilot project soon
- Lido is now on Layer-2 🏝️
- Celsius’ bankruptcy filing reveals full legal name of all the customers
- Polygon’s zkEVM public testnet goes live
BNB Chain exploited for $570 million, over $100 remains unsecured
Last week, an attacker stole 2 million BNB (~$566M USD) from the Binance Bridge. Subsequently, the chain was halted for a couple of hours (muh decentralization!) while the team behind BNB started working on recovering the funds.
As per a post-exploit ecosystem updated by BNB Chain, the exploit was through a sophisticated forging of the low-level proof into one common library. As of now, over $100 million still remains unsecured as hackers were able to move these funds off the BNB chain.
Reserve Bank of India to launch CBDC pilot project soon
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday released its concept note for central bank digital currency (CBDC). The RBI clarified that the concept note aims to create awareness about CBDC and features of the digital rupee (eâ‚ą). It explains the objectives, choices, benefits, risks of CBDCs in India.
Interestingly, the RBI is still pondering on the technology architecture options among DLT (distributed ledger technology, same as permissionless blockchain networks such as Bitcoin or Ethereum) and non-DLT. Quoting from the Concept Note, it says, “DLT could be considered for the indirect or hybrid CBDC architecture. Further, it may also be possible that some layers of the CBDC tech stack can be on centralized systems and remain on distributed networks.”
Lido is now on Layer-2
Last week, Lido Finance, the biggest staked-ETH derivative platform, enabled the bridging of staked-ETH to Layer-2 protocols.
With this announcement, Lido is now flooding Arbitrum and Optimism, Ethereum’s most popular scaling protocols, with its staked ETH tokens. And it’s set aside half a million dollars in incentives to do so.
To bridge your stETH to Arbitrum or Optimisim, refer to Lido’s guide on bridging staked assets at: https://help.lido.fi/en/collections/3641672-lido-on-l2
FTX and Visa expands global partnership to launch crypto debit card in 40 new countries
Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange FTX has teamed up with Visa to roll out crypto debit cards across 40 new countries. FTX, which first introduced a Visa debit card for customers in the US earlier this year, will now focus on countries in Latin America, Europe and Asia in the initial phases of the rollout.
FTX Visa debit cards will be linked directly to the holder's FTX account, allowing them to seamlessly convert and pay for goods and services with the crypto balance in their FTX wallets.
Celsius’ bankruptcy filing reveals full legal name of all the customers
The CeFi lending platform that went bankrupt earlier this year following the Terra Collapse has now infuriated the crypto community by revealing the full legal name of all its customers in its bankruptcy filing. The document included hundreds of thousands of names, as well as those users’ token deposits and withdrawals.
Even though Celsius argued that disclosure of names and addresses would endanger its customers and make it possible for competitors to poach those customers, hobbling its comeback attempt. Chief Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn, of the Southern District of New York, denied Celsius’ request to redact customer names and filed the 14,000 page document Wednesday.
Polygon’s zkEVM public testnet goes live
Polygon has announced the launch of public testnet for its zkEVM scaling solution. As per company’s earlier announcement in ETHCC earlier this year, it was aiming for a public testnet this summer and mainnet launch by early 2023.
As of now zkEVM race is being fought between Polygon, Scroll, and zkSync. All three contenders have separately declared that they were building the world's first truly EVM-equivalent zkEVM. The separate declarations have been interpreted as a race, a healthy competitive environment for true innovation to thrive.
Check out the complete guide on zkEVM here.