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Following a relatively quiet period, a trio of crypto hacks has hit the sector. Over the past 24 hours, lending platform Sonne Finance lost $20 million to a well-known attack vector, the bridge to ‘Bitcoin Layer 2’ ALEXLab was drained for $4.3 million, and crypto investment firm BlockTower Capital was found to have been hacked for an undisclosed sum. Sonne Finance hit via ’empty market’ bug Sonne Finance was hacked on Ethereum L2 Optimism via the ‘empty market’ bug in new markets — in this case, soVELO. The attack is ongoing and much bigger, an additional $17 million has been stolen and the total value loss is more than $20 million. @SonneFinance please take immediate action. https://t.co/k39W09J8Bd — Cyvers Alerts (@CyversAlerts) May 14, 2024 Read more: Compound Finance upgrade bug freezes $830M in crypto Sonne uses forked code from Compound, one of the first decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocols. ‘Forking,’ or reusing, code from established projects is a common pr

The most important stablecoin, Tether, has officially breached the symbolically important barrier of a $100 billion market capitalization.  It’s now nearly four times the size of its next competitor, USDC, and much larger than historically important funds like the $65 billion Reserve Primary Fund, which infamously broke the buck during the financial crisis. Throughout Tether’s near-decade-long ascendancy, it’s grown and matured from a firm that promised that USDT was “always backed 1-to-1, by traditional currency held in our reserves” and “subject to frequent professional audits” to a firm that now holds billions in yield-generating reserves that have never been audited . Tether’s road to $100 billion started in 2014 Self-described ‘doula for creation’ Brock Pierce and a number of colleagues founded Tether in 2014. Many, including Reeve Collins, Craig Sellars, William Quigley, and Jonathan Yantis, claimed to be there when it was formed under the name Realcoin. However, this histo

Tether reported an all-time-high increase in USDT’s excess reserves and recorded net profit s in the last quarter of 2023.  According to a Q4 attestation, stablecoin operator Tether (USDT) made $2.8 billion in net profit s from price appreciations tied to its Bitcoin (BTC) and gold reserves. U.S. Treasury bills secured the digital payments firm $1 billion in net operation profit s, lifting excess reserves to $5.4 billion.  This marked a $2.2 billion increase from the previous quarter. Some of this profit was put to work funding BTC mining, AI development, P2P communications, and other project investment endeavors.  BDO, Tether’s chosen audit provider, attested the firm’s excess reserves fully covered its $4.8 billion in outstanding unsecured loans, which partly back its USDT stablecoin. The firm generated a net profit of $6.2 billion for the whole of last year. Tether’s Q4 attestation underscores our commitment to transparency, stability, and responsible financial management. A

In September 2023, Tether also invested an undisclosed amount in Northern Data in a move backing AI initiatives. Tether (USDT) stablecoin issuer is raising the bet on Bitcoin (BTC) mining by issuing a major debt facility to German-based BTC mining company Northern Data AG. Northern Data AG has secured a 575 million euro ($610 million) debt financing facility from Tether to drive further investments across its businesses, according to an announcement on Nov. 2. The debt capital specifically aims to enable Northern Data Group to invest in its three business lines including its artificial intelligence cloud service provider Taiga Cloud, Ardent Data Centers and Peak Mining, the company’s mining business. The focus of these investments will be on the acquisition of additional hardware and scaling Bitcoin mining operations with liquid-cooling mining technology, the announcement notes. According to the announcement, the debt facility is unsecured, at standard market conditions and has a ter

Binance Futures is set to introduce USDⓈ-M POLYX and GAS perpetual contract s on Oct. 25, providing traders with up to 50x leverage, a development that warrants a careful Analysis of its potential benefits and inherent risks. Today, Binance Futures is poised to release USDⓈ-M POLYX and GAS Perpetual Contracts, providing an option for up to 50x leverage. While this introduces additional tools for traders, it also provides potential risks and implications of these financial instruments. Perpetual contracts, differing from standard futures contracts, do not have an expiry date, allowing positions to be held indefinitely. This could potentially lead to prolonged exposure to market volatility. The settlement for these contract s will be conducted in USDT, with POLYX and GAS featuring tick sizes of 0.0001 and 0.001 respectively. While this precision allows for granular trading strategies, the 24-hour per day, 7 days per week availability of these contract s necessitates constant market

According to an Oct. 10 press release by the Nanchang People’s Court, the plaintiff was required to prove that Tether is a legal ly issued fiat currency to bring a necessary cause of action for judicial relief. The decision from the court becomes the second in China to decide that crypto lending is an activity outside the protection of the country’s legal system. Filing a lawsuit The press release states that Xiao Ming, an alias, alleged that in April 2021, Xiaogang, another alias, borrowed money from Ming, citing intentions to speculate in USDT coins. Xiaogang committed to repaying the loan to Ming within six months. Xiao Ming then converted over 550,000 yuan into more than 80,000 USDT coins, providing them as a loan to Xiaogang. However, upon the expiration of the agreed-upon timeframe, Xiaogang failed to fulfill the repayment terms, prompting Ming to initiate a legal action by filing a lawsuit in court . You might also like: China to establish regulatory standards for

If you’re old enough, it isn’t difficult to grasp why Michael Lewis got it so wrong in his book about Sam Bankman-Fried , called Going Infinite . It’s worth rehashing a very specific moment in time from two decades ago to get a deeper understanding. When the US made the decision to invade Iraq for… reasons — mostly imagined — there was a set of operating procedures for many US journalists: either you embed with US troops, or you’re on your own, and if you get killed, well, then I guess that’s that. It set an unfortunate precedent for journalism in a war zone: one couldn’t even attempt to report what the enemy was saying without putting oneself in grave danger and the end result was an obedient press corp. This is to say that most journalists weren’t about to report atrocities or discuss the severe character flaws of certain individuals if they were forced to rely on them for survival. The belief that the fifth estate would fall in line was correct, and coverage of the Iraq War, at

Tether Transitions from Stablecoin Variants Tether gave the announcement in a release, stating that it would cease the issuance or “minting” of USDT tokens on the Omni which houses the BTC variant, Kusama, and Bitcoin Cash Simple Ledger Protocol (BCH-SLP) blockchains beginning from August 17. advertisement Despite the cessation of minting, Tether said it is committed to maintaining its redemption mechanism for USDT-Omni, USDT-Kusama, and USDT-BCHSLP for a minimum period of 12 months.  This means that users holding these stablecoin variants can still redeem them for their underlying assets through the specified channels. Tether’s strategic transition is driven by an ardent belief in the transformative potential of blockchain technology and decentralized exchanges.  While the present circumstances have led to the decision to discontinue support for certain blockchains, Tether remains optimistic about the future. The organization said it is open to reevaluating

After 16 consecutive months of decline, the stablecoin market dominance has fallen to 10.3% of the total crypto market capitalization. The market capitalization of stablecoins has hit the lowest level since August 2021 coming on the back of 16 consecutive months of decline, a new report says. Cryptocurrency analytics platform CCData released a report on July 20 saying the stablecoin market cap fell 0.82% from the start of the month until July 17, taking the sector's market cap to $127 billion. Stablecoin market dominance took a slight fall and is currently at 10.3%, dropping from 10.5% in June. Our latest Stablecoins & CBDCs Report is now live! Key Highlights: ️16-month fall in stablecoin market cap, now at $127bn ️ $USDT at $0.73, $USDC at $0.82 on #Binance.US ️ $USDP's largest cap drop since 2020, now at $593mn Full Report https://t.co/A9rFx6pbJx — CCData (@CCData_io) July 20, 2023 Of the top ten stablecoins, Pax Dollar (USDP) was hit hardest, falling 43.1% to $563