Curve Offers $1.85M Bounty For Exploiter

Check out the biggest breaking crypto market updates for today: 

Curve Offering $1.85 Million Bounty For Exploiter’s Identity (& Conviction)

DeFi protocol Curve Finance is reportedly extending the bug bounty previously offered to the hacker to the general public. Thus far, the platform has recouped roughly 73% of stolen funds. Anyone who is able to identify the expliter responsible for draining the Curve pools will reportedly be entitled to receive $1.85 million. 

Curve public comment in an Ethereum transaction’s input data, states, 

“The deadline for the voluntary return of funds in the Curve exploit passed at 0800 UTC. We now extend the bounty to the public, and offer a reward valued at 10% of the remaining exploited funds (currently $1.85M USD) to the person who is able to identify the exploiter in a way that leads to a conviction in the courts. If the exploiter chooses to return the funds in full, we will not pursue this further” 

The deadline, which was set for August 6 at 8am UTC, had been issued via a similar on-chain message from Curve and two other DeFi teams – MetronomeDAO and Alchemix Finance – who also suffered losses. 

OPn that occasion, the trio appeared to be in negotiations with the attacker for a voluntary reimbursement, though to no avail. They had also announced that they were preparing legal action against the culprit. 

Yesterday’s deadline expiry sparked a flurry of comments on Crypto Twitter, with some skeptical it would help recoup some, if any, of the stolen funds. 

“This is the state of the crypto justice system,” tweeted one user, adding, “this is the fault of blockchains not having governance and defense in depth built directly into the blockchain protocol level.” 

Others speculated that the attack could be yet another from the North Korean hacker cell Lazarus group, which made headlines last week with another million-dollar exploit. 

Curve Finance and several protocols that focked their code suffered extensive exploits last week due to a vulnerability discovered in the programming language, Vyper. 

The most affected, however, was Curve, one of the largest decentralized exchanges on Ethereum, with an estimated $73 million drained from its network – $52 million of which have been returned as of today.

Huobi’s Stablecoin Reserves Down 30% Amid Reports of Executive Arrests

According to data from Nansen.ai, crypto exchange Huobi’s stablecoin exchange balances have dipped by 33% in the last week.

The dip comes shortly after local news outlets in Hong Kong reported that several executives at Huobi had been taken away by police in China. The reports also claim the crypto exchange is facing solvency issues. However, a Huobi spokesperson has denied the claims made in these reports. 

Data from DeFi Llama shows that Huobi currently has a balance of approximately $2.5 billion. This balance is down from $3.1 billion at the start of the year. 

On-chain data also shows that some of the exchange’s largest holdings are from tokens connected to the Justin Sun universe of companies and protocols. 

Data shows that 26.5% of the exchange’s holdings are in TRX, TRON’s token, and 20.32% of the holdings are in HT, its exchange token. 

Huobi has roughly $1 billion in highly liquid assets, including $886.92 million in bitcoin, $48.27 million in USDT, and $5.41 million in USDC, according to DeFi Llama data. 

While it doesn’t have any ETH, it does have $119.4 million in stETH and $21.8 million in wETH. 

Late last year, analytics from CryptoQuant had flagged concerns over the quality of Huobi’s reserves. 

Huobi’s HT token is flat on the news, trading at $2.66.

CoinGecko Now Has An Index For Crypto Tokens Alleged As Securities

Crypto price aggregator CoinGecko has reportedly launched a new index that tracks the tokens deemed as securities by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. 

THe “Top Alleged Securities Coins” page sorts the selection of crypto assets by market capitalization, placing BNB at the top of the list, followed by Cardano, Solana, and TRON. 

A CoinGecko spokesperson said that the index was launched in the first week of August and was constructed by compiling a selection of the most notable tokens that had been deemed securities by the SEC in past lawsuits. 

In its most recent lawsuits against crypto exchange giants Coinbase and Binance, the financial regulator brought the number of tokens it views as securities up to a brand total of 68 – while CoinGecko only lists 24. 

According to CoinGecko’s page, the top tokens included in the SEC’s litigated remit of the crypto space cover at least $84.9 billion of the entire market, approximately 7.5% of the $1.21 trillion total crypto market capitalization. 

Meanwhile, SEC Chair Gary Gensler has gone to great lengths to clarify that the overwhelming majority of crypto assets should be considered securities, having previously claimed that “everything other than Bitcoin” is a security, and thus falls under the agency’s remit. 

If Gensler is correct, it would mean that almost every last one of the approximately 25,500 cryptocurrencies listed on crypto data platform CoinMarketCap would be regulated by the SEC.

Luke Baldwin

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