Centuries Collective is a Web3 collective focused on educating, learning, and building in Web3. We focus on emerging sectors in Web3.
Centuries Collective is a Web3 collective focused on educating, learning, and building in Web3. We focus on emerging sectors in Web3.
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This is a new weekly format keeping you up to date with all things Tokens, Protocols, Culture, and more.
The fourth week of January was shaped by general uncertainty around markets, volatility, and the state of the global economy. Nevertheless, the world of crypto and NFTs saw a lot of big events and news that kept everyone glued to their chairs. From a raging NFT bull market that saw floor prices soar to scandals about Opensea and secretly crawled IPs and a Defi dream turning into a feverish nightmare, January ended with a bang.
This week started off with an almost overnight rug of Time Wonderland which was started by FTX pulling out liquidity sending the price plummeting. This caused a mass wave of liquidations which raised some serious concerns and questions by Frog Nation into Daniele Esesta the mastermind behind Time, ICE, and MIM. As if this was not enough the community was rocked again just shortly later when insider messages exposed that 0xSifu, one of Daniele’s partners, was the infamous QuadrigaCX scammer Michael Patryn. Patryn who is convicted of multiple financial crimes including fraud was one of the co-founders of QuadrigaCX a Canadian Crypto-Exchange that went bankrupt in 2018 after one of the other Co-founders mysteriously passed causing over 130 million USD in losses for 70.000 Investors.
This revelation saw the price of Time further plummet which had a rippling effect far past the Time ecosystem. Next to Time both Ice, Abracadabra, and MIM saw tremendous selloffs which eventually even hit the Terra Luna Ecosystem. Terra is still down more than 30% since the beginning of the week.
On Thursday VICE published an article in collaboration with Convex Labs, in which Nick Bax head of research at Convex Labs explained how they found out that they could load HTTPS pages as NFTs on Opensea which could be used for a variety of cross-site scripting attacks.
“Some new NFTs are being used to harvest viewers’ IP addresses, though, in a demonstration of how NFT marketplaces like OpenSea allow vendors, or attackers, to load custom code when someone simply views an NFT listing.
“We've been researching a lot of problems in the NFT space (with more of a focus on fraud) and one of the things we were playing around with was different XSS attacks on websites that display NFTs which is when I realized we could get OpenSea to load HTML pages,” Nick Bax, head of research at NFT organization Convex Labs, told Motherboard in an online chat. XSS refers to cross site scripting attacks, one of several different kinds of attack that someone could use an NFT for.
Bax and a team of engineers and contributors are working on multiple NFTs that harvest peoples’ IP addresses. One, which includes a Simpsons and South Park crossover image, surreptitiously collects the viewer’s IP address and stores it in a panel for Bax to view later.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgdvaz/nft-steal-ip-address-opensea
The implications of this discovery are far more wide-reaching than just NFTs harvesting people’s IP addresses. It also entails that Opensea themselves have probably been harvesting IP addresses and other browser-related cookies opening up further questions about the site’s security and data collection methods.
After many months SyndicateDAO has finally launched their highly awaited protocol which lets anyone create an Investment Syndicate with just a few clicks. The protocol allows users to pool funds, display investments, set different kinds of access for members as well as legal resources, and support to help facilitate venture investments and equity.
The Syndicate team has made clear that this is just the beginning and they plan to make investing and syndicates accessible to everyone.
https://syndicate.mirror.xyz/4p6a0nKpBYMSxoAfN6KpjcUwJSD2t68Dq7zgoliB4pk
This week Starknet, the developers of Starknet the turing ready ZK-Rollup, published an article on Fractal Scaling and privacy focus ZK Rollups that sit on top of L2-Scaling Solutions like Starknet. In their, article Starkware describes the concept as a privacy-preserving and/or use case-specific L3s that could enable:
Hyper-scalability: leveraging the multiplicative effect of recursive proving. Better control by the app designer of the technology stack: a. More deterministic performance and cost, b. Customized data availability models (e.g., Validium-based or app-specific compression of on-chain data), c. Faster feature and technological velocity (e.g., introducing new functionality not yet ready for general availability). 3. Privacy: e.g., Zero Knowledge Proofs applied to privacy-preserving transactions over a public L2. 4. Cheaper/simpler L2-L3 interoperability: On/off-ramping flows currently used between L1 and L2 are notoriously expensive. In contrast, due to the cost effectiveness of L2, these flows, when applied to L3, become not only extremely attractive, but also straightforward to implement. While the latency of moving assets between L2 and L3 may be longer than between applications deployed on the same L2, the cost and throughput is comparable. 5. Cheaper/simpler L3-L3 interoperability: Independent L3s will interoperate via L2, not L1. L2 is obviously expected to be cheaper than its L1. Absent L3, these would all function as L2s, and as such, would have to interoperate via the considerably more expensive L1. 6. L3 as a “Canary” network for L2: New innovations may be put to test on L3 prior to being made available to the general public on L2 or L3 (much like the role Kusama plays for Polkadot).
(Credit:
https://medium.com/starkware/fractal-scaling-from-l2-to-l3-7fe238ecfb4f
This is a new weekly format keeping you up to date with all things Tokens, Protocols, Culture, and more.
The fourth week of January was shaped by general uncertainty around markets, volatility, and the state of the global economy. Nevertheless, the world of crypto and NFTs saw a lot of big events and news that kept everyone glued to their chairs. From a raging NFT bull market that saw floor prices soar to scandals about Opensea and secretly crawled IPs and a Defi dream turning into a feverish nightmare, January ended with a bang.
This week started off with an almost overnight rug of Time Wonderland which was started by FTX pulling out liquidity sending the price plummeting. This caused a mass wave of liquidations which raised some serious concerns and questions by Frog Nation into Daniele Esesta the mastermind behind Time, ICE, and MIM. As if this was not enough the community was rocked again just shortly later when insider messages exposed that 0xSifu, one of Daniele’s partners, was the infamous QuadrigaCX scammer Michael Patryn. Patryn who is convicted of multiple financial crimes including fraud was one of the co-founders of QuadrigaCX a Canadian Crypto-Exchange that went bankrupt in 2018 after one of the other Co-founders mysteriously passed causing over 130 million USD in losses for 70.000 Investors.
This revelation saw the price of Time further plummet which had a rippling effect far past the Time ecosystem. Next to Time both Ice, Abracadabra, and MIM saw tremendous selloffs which eventually even hit the Terra Luna Ecosystem. Terra is still down more than 30% since the beginning of the week.
On Thursday VICE published an article in collaboration with Convex Labs, in which Nick Bax head of research at Convex Labs explained how they found out that they could load HTTPS pages as NFTs on Opensea which could be used for a variety of cross-site scripting attacks.
“Some new NFTs are being used to harvest viewers’ IP addresses, though, in a demonstration of how NFT marketplaces like OpenSea allow vendors, or attackers, to load custom code when someone simply views an NFT listing.
“We've been researching a lot of problems in the NFT space (with more of a focus on fraud) and one of the things we were playing around with was different XSS attacks on websites that display NFTs which is when I realized we could get OpenSea to load HTML pages,” Nick Bax, head of research at NFT organization Convex Labs, told Motherboard in an online chat. XSS refers to cross site scripting attacks, one of several different kinds of attack that someone could use an NFT for.
Bax and a team of engineers and contributors are working on multiple NFTs that harvest peoples’ IP addresses. One, which includes a Simpsons and South Park crossover image, surreptitiously collects the viewer’s IP address and stores it in a panel for Bax to view later.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgdvaz/nft-steal-ip-address-opensea
The implications of this discovery are far more wide-reaching than just NFTs harvesting people’s IP addresses. It also entails that Opensea themselves have probably been harvesting IP addresses and other browser-related cookies opening up further questions about the site’s security and data collection methods.
After many months SyndicateDAO has finally launched their highly awaited protocol which lets anyone create an Investment Syndicate with just a few clicks. The protocol allows users to pool funds, display investments, set different kinds of access for members as well as legal resources, and support to help facilitate venture investments and equity.
The Syndicate team has made clear that this is just the beginning and they plan to make investing and syndicates accessible to everyone.
https://syndicate.mirror.xyz/4p6a0nKpBYMSxoAfN6KpjcUwJSD2t68Dq7zgoliB4pk
This week Starknet, the developers of Starknet the turing ready ZK-Rollup, published an article on Fractal Scaling and privacy focus ZK Rollups that sit on top of L2-Scaling Solutions like Starknet. In their, article Starkware describes the concept as a privacy-preserving and/or use case-specific L3s that could enable:
Hyper-scalability: leveraging the multiplicative effect of recursive proving. Better control by the app designer of the technology stack: a. More deterministic performance and cost, b. Customized data availability models (e.g., Validium-based or app-specific compression of on-chain data), c. Faster feature and technological velocity (e.g., introducing new functionality not yet ready for general availability). 3. Privacy: e.g., Zero Knowledge Proofs applied to privacy-preserving transactions over a public L2. 4. Cheaper/simpler L2-L3 interoperability: On/off-ramping flows currently used between L1 and L2 are notoriously expensive. In contrast, due to the cost effectiveness of L2, these flows, when applied to L3, become not only extremely attractive, but also straightforward to implement. While the latency of moving assets between L2 and L3 may be longer than between applications deployed on the same L2, the cost and throughput is comparable. 5. Cheaper/simpler L3-L3 interoperability: Independent L3s will interoperate via L2, not L1. L2 is obviously expected to be cheaper than its L1. Absent L3, these would all function as L2s, and as such, would have to interoperate via the considerably more expensive L1. 6. L3 as a “Canary” network for L2: New innovations may be put to test on L3 prior to being made available to the general public on L2 or L3 (much like the role Kusama plays for Polkadot).
(Credit:
https://medium.com/starkware/fractal-scaling-from-l2-to-l3-7fe238ecfb4f
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