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What The Hack. The Scoop Newsletter is here!

October 12, 2022

Hey ,

Welcome to another edition of The Scoop. The Scoop is that feeling of relief you get when you spent the entire day worrying about losing your smartphone, only to realize it was on your coffee table at home the entire day! 😏

The Big Scoop

Remember this Big Scoop for the rest of your Web3 lovin’ life. Whenever you put an influencer, founder, platform, or token on a pedestal, you are giving them your trust. Whenever you forget to be the owner of your own data, assets, and destiny, that destiny is in their hands, not yours.

ALWAYS MAINTAIN CONTROL OVER YOUR OWN VALUE.

We’re telling you this in light of the fact that in the past week, Binance’s Binance Bridge was hacked for over $570 million.

Binance is easily one of the most popular brands in all of crypto. We normally don’t like to cover hacks in The Scoop, but many HODLers of Web3 tokens are undoubtedly affected by this.

Driving the things-aren’t-always-what-they-appear-to-be message home. Did you know that there is a metaverse token with a $1.2 billion market cap even though it only has 38 ACTIVE USERS!?!😲

Yup! It’s Decentraland!

Here’s the thing, both Decentraland and The Sandbox say that the original report on the lack of Daily Active Users interacting with both platforms came from a DappRadar report that provided false information. Still, question marks are swirling around the two metaverse stalwarts at the moment.

Lastly, the founder of Solana believes a permanent solution to the recent outages the blockchain is experiencing is coming soon. Solana and its NFT marketplace Magic Eden are gaining in popularity because it’s so much cheaper to trade NFTs on ME versus any other platform focused on Ethereum-formatted assets.

A better Solana is better Web3 space. Read more details in the news👀

The News

Binance's BNB Chain Subjected to a $570 Million Hack

Last week, Binance's BNB Chain was hit by a $570 million hack.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, stated that the tokens were stolen from a blockchain bridge used in the BNB Chain. The hacker stole around $100 million in crypto through the chain, and a total of 2 million of the Binance Coin (BNB)–worth around $570 million–was withdrawn by the hacker.

Most of the BNB remained in the hacker's digital wallet address, while around $100 million has yet to be recovered.

Following the attack, BNB Chain suspended its blockchain for several hours.

In response to the attack, the 26 active validators on the BSC chain acted and prevented what could’ve amounted to a much more detrimental hack.

BNB Chain validators have announced the steps they will take moving forward to avoid a similar incident. The validators plan to hold a series of on-chain governance votes to decide if the hacked funds should be frozen and if a bug bounty reward system should be implemented to prevent future hacks.

Blockchain bridges have unfortunately become a prime target for hackers, with around $2 billion stolen in 13 different hacks–most of them occurring this year. 

In March, approximately $615 million was stolen by hackers on the Ronin Bridge–one of the largest crypto heists on record.

Bridges have become a sore spot in the space as they are seemingly very vulnerable to attacks. However, they are necessary for liquidity and interoperability. More caution is needed in the backend of bridges to maintain the sense of security the space is so determined to keep.

Solana and Coinbase Fall Victim to Power Outages Over The Weekend

According to a report by data aggregator DappRadar, the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland only had 38 active users within a single day last week, while competitor The Sandbox had 522 active users in that same time.

The data collected by DappRadar consists of users in the metaverses that have purchased in-game assets with the project’s native token, but the metaverse projects disagree with that criteria.

The metaverse projects have argued that the metric used to measure each platform’s daily active users (DAU) was ‘misinformation.’

This all started when data originating from DappRadar suggested that the Decentraland metaverse sees 30 DAU despite having over $1.2 billion in market cap.

Decentraland came forward on October 8th and said that “some websites are tracking only specific smart contract transactions but reporting them as daily active users–which is inaccurate.”

Sandbox’s CEO Arthur Madrid also commented on the report on October 10th: “On-chain transactions does not mean Users” and that NFT owners “invest in an asset that will grow in value over time-based Utilities.”

Decentraland pointed to DCL Metrics, a data aggregator custom-built for Decentraland, which provides “better data” and measures DAUs by the number of “people who login and then move out of a parcel.”

This is a massive distinction, as Decentraland’s September data shows 56,700 Monthly Active Users, while only 1,074, or 1.89% of those users, interacted with Decentraland’s smart contracts.

Sandbox also refuted the data suggesting low DAUs, and stated that it has 201,000 Monthly Active Users.

Still, the report has caused a steep drop in token prices even with the refuted misinformation, with both of the platform's tokens, MANA and SAND, down more than 5% over the last 24

Chart.

If you aspired to be President of The Audio Visual Club in high school, you’ll appreciate the chart section of The Scoop. Here we feature a simple, yet thoughtful chart of the top 7-day trends in crypto.👀

Fundraising In Web3.

Last week we saw over $200 million in funding get poured into crypto and blockchain projects. This week that number is around $150 million plus! It’s clear that big-time investors still see the long-term value in the brightest new projects in crypto and Web3.

Here’s a breakdown of who got some new capital flowing into their ideas💸💵💰:

Education.

Web3 class is in session!🤓

Unlike other things you’ve studied in your life, the Study Space is going to make you not only smarter but also wealthier. Not because prices of tokens go up and down, but because certain tokens get you paid for the time you spend online.

This week’s Study Space content covers a project you know very well. We’re talking about Cirus of course!

More specifically, we break down the utility of the $CIRUS token, explaining why there is a token in the first place and breakdown how $Cirus can benefit YOU and other ecosystem participants!

If you want to learn more about other basic and advanced Web3 topics, feel free to browse through the entire Study Space.

Scoop Meme

It’s meme time!

Here’s some more good-humoured to make you smile more than Sam Bankman-Freid after buying yet another company for pennies on the dollar (or Satoshis on the Bitcoin perhaps?!)

The Final Scoop

No matter the weather in crypto (whether it’s Crypto Winter or the mother of all bull runs) ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT WEB3 ENABLES YOU TO BE YOUR OWN BANK, AND BE YOUR OWN DATA CENTER.

Binance will undoubtedly continue to serve customers on a global scale, and maybe Solana fixes its issues with constant outages and becomes the go-to blockchain for the most scalable, fast, and affordable transactions NFT collectors and the Web3 space have ever seen. But at the end of the day, the whole reason Bitcoin was invented was to make you the boss.

No matter how many more crypto projects come after it and how many buzzwords (yes, including the phrase Web3) we use to describe what’s happening, that’s what this whole movement is supposed to be about.

Share The Scoop

We bet you didn’t know that Canada’s Thanksgiving Day was this past Monday. It just so happens that some of the people creating The Scoop are Canadian.

We would be so thankful if you would share The Scoop with everyone you know:https://cirusfoundation.com/thescoop/optin/

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

Gobble Gobble🦃