Daily Bullets 💊: Tin Foil Hat Time: Wintermute $160M Hack an Inside Job?

💊 M6 Daily Bullets 💊 Tuesday, September 27th

The Crypto markets saw a lil’ bit of a pop today with Bitcoin jumping back above $20k and ETH in the high $1300s before losing momentum, falling again and retracing the entire move. The macro date we need to keep in mind this month is CPI on October 13. This space is always filled with something scammy — today’s gossip is that last week’s Wintermute hack was an inside job. Then what about the mass exodus of Crypto CEOs leaving the space. What if…?

⛓ Crypto News:

• Last week’s $160M hack on algorithmic market maker Wintermute was an inside job according to a crypto sleuth
• South Korean authorities look to freeze $67M Bitcoin tied to Terra’s Do Kwon
• Celsius Network CEO Alex Mashinsky has submitted his letter of resignation
• FTX has won the auction for bankrupt lender Voyager Digital and its assets with a bid of about $1.4B
• 8 states including California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation issued a cease and desist against crypto lender Nexo over its crypto interest-bearing accounts
• Robinhood is releasing the beta version of its Polygon-based Web3 wallet, allowing users to swap assets on its non-custodial wallet
• Binance is launching a global law enforcement training program to better prepare government agencies around the world to catch crypto crimes
• Brett Harrison is stepping down as President of FTX US. Over the next few months he’ll be transferring responsibilities and moving into an advisory role at the company.
• Financial services firm Galaxy Digital has teamed up with Chainlink Labs to bring crypto pricing data to blockchains
• Nexo acquires a stake in the holding company that owns Summit National Bank, a US chartered bank, to expand its financial product offerings in the United States
• Thailand’s SEC has sued five entities for creating artificial volume on crypto exchanges Bitkub and Satang Corporation. Wash trading is an illegal practice that is used to lure traders into investing under the guise that a certain asset is more popular that it actually is
• The Japanese government to introduce new rules for remittances directed at stopping criminals from using crypto exchanges to launder money by requiring exchanges to share customer information
• French Central Bank CBDC projects aim to manage defi liquidity, settle tokenized assets
• Polkadot latest roadmap includes: Asynchronous Backing, Parathreads/Next-Generation Scheduling, XCMv3, FRAME: Weights V2, Governance Overhaul, Collectives Parachain, Nomination Pools & Fast Unstake, Staking Dashboard, Disputes Slashing
• Acala Network resumes operations after burning 2.7B in aUSD stablecoin
• Bancor proposes burning 1 million BNT tokens to support prices
• Wormhole bug bounty pre-release program with top-end payouts of $10,000,000 USDC
• Gearbox V2 roadmap — LM, $GEAR transferability, the possible auction
• Cross-chain DeFi protocol Umee is stepping into TradFi by creating an institutional lending DAO, called UDX, to help facilitate the transition of bond markets into DeFi lending
• HashKey Group launches EPotter, Asia’s first institutional-grade proof-of-stake liquid validation service, and debuts liquid staking token epETH
• Ethos launching an early version of Chrome extension crypto wallet built on Sui

📊 Data:

TL;DR: Money today flowing into WETH, Compound DAI and WBTC while the vast majority of it is flowing out of USDC. Weekly showing a flow into Compound DAI, USDC and flowing out of Compound USDC and USDT.

• Nansen Smart Money Holdings Token Inflow and Outflows: Tracking what the whales are up to…

- Inflow (1D): WETH ($15.4M), cDAI ($4.3M), WBTC ($4M), USDT ($957k), MATIC ($925k)

- Outflow (1D): USDC ($134.6M), RPL ($1.3M), stETH ($995k), EURT ($995k), MKR ($672k)

Weekly:

- Inflow (7D): cDAI ($44.4M), USDC ($42.3M), cETH ($31.8M), aUSDC ($28M), WETH ($10M)

- Outflow (7D): cUSDC ($13.6M), USDT ($11.2M), MIM ($7.7M), YFI ($5.3M), COMP ($2.8M)

• Nansen NFT Hot Contracts:

• Otherdeed: 596 ETH
• CryptoPunks: 581 ETH
• BAYC: 571 ETH
• CloneX: 415 ETH
• Dodoor NFT: 405 ETH

🎓 Research:

• Analysis of the Wintermute Hack: An Inside Job — source
• Wu Blockchain — Opinion: Forecast Market Bottom Appear Time According to the Macro — source
• Insights on Token Design — Case Study: Axie Infinity — source
• Glassnode — The Great Detox — source
• Web3 VC Database // 2022 — source
• Aave: The Crypto Conglomerate — source
• A Hedge Against Getting Pegged — Manage your risk or risk manages you — source
• Exploring Low-Resolution Dynamics of Uniswap Fee Performance — source
• Understanding Attestation Misses — source

🖼 NFTs/ Metaverse News:

• Walmart has joined the list of companies seeking new ways to market their brands via the metaverse with the launch of two new experiences in Roblox. Will let users take part in several new experiences and games, collect in-game coins and tokens, prizes and “verch” (virtual merch)
• The Art Blocks NFT creation platform is winding down its Curated Series Sets, with Series 8 set to be the final curated series project, plans branding refresh
• Cryptocurrency and fiat exchange hi has launched a debit card powered by Mastercard that users can customize with their own NFT avatars
• Pixelmon, a Web3 game project that raised $70M from primary NFT sales, has announced new leadership and development plans
• Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu thinks that GameFi has the biggest opportunity for growth in Asia, as gamers there don’t hold the same vitriol toward NFTs as they do in the West

📈 Fundraises:

• London-based asset manager Fasanara Capital has established a new $350M VC fund focused on fintech and Web3
• Bitmain Founder Jihan Wu setting up $250M fund to buy distressed Bitcoin mining assets
• Bitcoin Lightning Network leader Strike raises $80M funding round to revolutionize payments for merchants and consumers globally
• Crypto derivatives exchange Deribit raised around $40M from existing shareholders at a $400M valuation
• Tech venture studio MPCH Labs has raised $40M in a Series A round to develop the next generation of multi-party computation (MPC) technology
• Space and Time raised $20M in strategic funding from investors like Microsoft’s M12 fund, the venture capital arm of Microsoft, Avalanche and Polygon to bring SQL to web3
• Tactic raised $11M to simplify financial operations for businesses in web3 led by FTX Ventures
• Binance Labs led a $8.5M seed funding round for Bitquery, a blockchain data company
• Solar-powered Bitcoin miner Aspen Creek raises $8M led by Galaxy Digital and Polychain Capital
• Krypton, a new DEX, announced a seed round raise of $7M in investment led by venture capital company Framework Ventures, Samsung Next
• Billionaire Fosun International co-founder Liang Xinjun led a $6M funding round for open-source software company Smart Token Labs’s Tokenscript project
• Splinterlands raises $5M in under two minutes with the launch of its Riftwatchers card pack edition
• Harpie, an on-chain firewall provider, has raised $4.5M to prevent theft on Ethereum wallets backed by Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures
• Institutional DeFi lending platform dAMM Finance has completed a private token sale round of $2M
• Egypt gaming platform InGame Sports raises $1M

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