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Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have taken a step back as other chains have taken the spotlight for the moment. In particular, the excitement around Solana continued, peaking with a Coinbase listing of Memecoin $BONK and the almost forgotten Solana phone unexpectedly selling out overnight and re-selling for multiple thousands on eBay.

Since the weekend things have cooled down somewhat after a series of sobering hacks hit the Ethereum ecosystem.

First a vulnerability was pushed out to users of a service called Ledger Connect which turned out to be almost every EVM dApp. This led to scam pop-ups asking for signatures on many trusted websites. The advice was to simply not sign anything until resolved.

While this is OK advice for non-essential transactions, it is less than helpful for those with time sensitive transactions on a network that is supposed to be the future of finance. Luckily the issue was resolved in less than 24 hours and the fallout seemed to be relatively small considering the breadth of websites affected.

However, less than 2 days later another hack was making headlines. This time the source was a smart contract. It seems that anyone who had left approvals open on a website called NFT Trader (which was once popular for OTC NFT trades) was vulnerable. In a matter of minutes millions of dollars worth of NFTs were transferred away, before other started piling on.

Luckily, an anon developer found a way to pause the contract and stop the on-chain heist in its tracks. And another smart contract dev found a way to counter hack and retrieve a small number of the stolen assets.

Less than 24 hours later, a similar vulnerability was discovered in the new platform Flooring Protocol. Here, the founder offered their NFTs as a bounty to the hacker but it appears many of these assets are simply lost.

This serves as a stark reminder that there is a lot of work to do before smart contracts can be relied upon at a societal level. And in the short term, it’s important to manage your approvals, even with apps you trust. If you no longer use a service, you should consider revoking approvals with a tool like revoke.cash.

Onwards...

- @nuconomist

Native Bitcoin Staking on Ethereum and Solana Could Soon Be a Reality - Decrypt

Babylon is a startup working on a method to enabled Bitcoin to be used as staking collateral on third party chains. This could potentially increase the security of those chains while also providing a way to generate yield with native bitcoin. This article mentions that Polygon are one chain in talks about potentially making use of this innovation.

Ethereum Scaler Arbitrum Suffers Outage - And Inscriptions Are to Blame - Decrypt

With Ordinals inscriptions making waves in the Bitcoin community, many have taken the idea to other cheaper. However, the lower costs and higher throughput has led to serious backlogs, high fees, and in the case of Arbitrum a crash of the sequencer.

NFT Market Cap (ETH): Ξ 6.9 Million 🔼 | $15.39 Billion (+0.9%)

Weekly NFT Volume (ETH): 70936 🔽 -17.94%

Weekly NFT Traders: 50478 🔽 -2.78%

Weekly NFT Loan Volume (USD): $93.8 Million 🔽 -37.61%

Weekly NFT Deposited as Collateral:
Deprecated metic, will aim to start tracking unique borrowers.

Bored Ape Yacht Club: Floor: 27.44 ETH 🔽 | Volume: 5977 ETH 🔽

Bitcoin NFT Hysteria Comes to Sotheby's as Super Mario Style mushroom Character Tops $200k - CoinDesk

The BitcoinShrooms are the first Bitcoin ordinals collection and there has been much speculation about how they would be released. The answer appears to be kicking things off with an established auction house for a 200k sale. The breadth of cultural references in the collection is truly impressive. There are hardware and software wallets, Bitcoin faucets, Dorian Nakamoto, OpenDime, Miners, the Bitcoin Volcano, Bitcoin Magazine and many more.

NFT Trader Contract Compromise Leads to Millions in NFTs Drained - Decrypt

This was the big story of the weekend and led to many high profile losses. The full story is worth a read to see how the event unfolded. It is also a timely reminder to always revoke contract permissions if you no longer use a service. Revoke.cash is the most popular service for this, although you can also use Etherscan.

As far back as The DAO hack on Ethereum in 2016, there has been a long on-chain history of white hat (good) hackers fighting back against black hat (malicious) hackers. It is great to see pseudonymous Ethereum developers still fighting the good fight and helping people get back stolen assets. And not only that, but sharing the knowledge gained to make the whole ecosystem stronger.

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