Welcome back to another round-up of the biggest news events that took place this week in the cryptocurrency space. It was another action-packed week in the crypto space made up of a $50-million-dollar exploit, an exciting $1.5b fund raise, the launch of a new protocol, regulatory action from two different countries on two completely opposite ends of the spectrum, and Consensys founder announces a decentralized future for Metamask. Let’s dive deeper.
$50 million hack on Solana
On the 23rd of March, Cashio App on Solana was exploited for $50 million. Cashio is a stablecoin protocol that was recently released. Users can deposit crypto-collateral and mint the stablecoin CASH in return. The early success of the protocol was quickly stifled after they fell victim to a fake-account attack. Put simply, the attacker was able to forge a chain of fake accounts and then exploit a function in the contract code which allowed them to exploit the protocol. This is the second biggest exploit on Solana after the recent Wormhole exploit where $300m+ was lost. For a more detailed explanation of how the exploit went down, check this tweet.
Haun Ventures $1.5b Raise
Katie Haun is a former partner at A16z ventures and on the board of crypto-companies such as Coinbase and Opensea. She recently opened her own venture firm named Haun Ventures. Given the expertise of Katie Haun, she was able to raise $1.5 billion from A16z and their partners, individual investors, university endowments, and charitable foundations.
The ultimate purpose of the fund is to be invested in all layers of the web3 tech stack. To do this, the firm will be divided into two funds. $500 million will be allocated to the early-stage fund and the remaining $1 billion will be allocated to the acceleration fund. This is amongst the highest raises the crypto space has seen, especially by an individual.
Regulatory action from Thailand and El Salvador
Thailand and El Salvador both had regulatory actions but on opposite ends of the spectrum. Thailand Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that they will implement a complete ban on the use of cryptocurrencies as a form of payment effective from April 1st. The
primary concern of the Thai SEC was the ease of money laundering that crypto enables and the lack of control the central bank has in stopping it. This decision came on the back of a plan that has been in the works since January. The government is making an effort to regulate crypto within their borders. It is important to note that this ban is specifically for crypto in payment systems, this ban is not on the trading of cryptocurrencies which has become a very popular activity in Thailand over the last two years. https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Cryptocurrencies/Thailand-bans-bitcoin-other-crypto-payments-starting-in-April
El Salvador on the other hand has been working on Bitcoin bond to be launched by the government at some point in the coming weeks. We are yet to hear the final verdict on whether the bond will be launched and the nature of how it will be designed. But, president of El Salvador Nayib Bukele has invited the CEO of Binance Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, to the country to advise the government on how they should go about developing a bitcoin bond and ensuring it gets adoption.
Launch of Stargate
LayerZero launched 2 weeks back with the aim to change the cross-chain bridging game. They approached the problem through a different lens. Rather than being a bridge or a middleware chain, they chose to approach cross-chain transfers through creating a messaging protocol which allows very easy native-to-native asset swaps from one chain to another.
Stargate is the first cross-chain protocol to launch on LayerZero. It has been a tremendous success as it attracted $2 billion in TVL in less than a week. This success also reflected in their native token STG. STG price rose more than 350% in less than a week and continues to show strength. In a tweet, CEO of Alameda Sam Trabucco announced that they bought all the tokens that were available in the early investment rounds.
MetaMask DAO
Metamask Is the biggest crypto wallet service provider recently crossing 30 million monthly users. Metamask is a portfolio company of Consensys. In a recent interview with Decrypt, the founder of Consensys Joseph Lubin stated that Metamask has a decentralized future. This means a potential DAO and token? Wen Airdrop?
When asked for more detail, he simply said the DAO will not be used to govern Metamask which begs the question what role the DAO is going to fulfil and what role will the token play if it’s not a governance token. It will be interesting to see the developments with Metamask. https://decrypt.co/95039/metamask-consensys-30-million-users