Every Monday we’ll drop a roundup of Web3 news, tweets and vibes from the last 7 days.
Your Web3 briefing 📝
Kick-start your week with a roundup of the biggest Web3 headlines over the last 7 days
Tweets of the week 🐦
We spend time on CT, so you don’t have to
Web3 101: Tokens 💡
Essential Web3 concepts, simply explained
Roundup of the biggest Web3 headlines over the last 7 days
Yeah they really caught a lucky break. Just days after spending an estimated $14m on their Super Bowl ad, they only had to part with another $250k this week - this time for a bug bounty, after a pseudonymous researcher tipped them off about a “market nuking” bug.
Wait - “market nuking”?! Damn - those are two words you really don’t want to hear.
But they’re probably not too much of an exaggeration when you consider the fact that the bug, with Coinbase’s new trading feature, was effectively a magic money printer.
If you want to go deep, this thread summarises how it all went down:
Tree of Alpha@Tree_of_Alpha
Coinbase's "largest-ever bug bounty" How a flaw in the new Advanced Trading feature would have allowed a malicious user to sell BTC or any other coin without owning them, and how Coinbase's reaction speed on a Super Bowl Friday averted a possible crisis. Bounty: $250,000
12:38 PM · Feb 19, 2022
2.22K Reposts · 10.1K Likes
In terms of the bug - as @Tree_of_Alpha put it:
“We will never know what exactly could have happened should a black-hat hacker try to exploit it, and it is better this way.”
That’s probably true - although whether it would have been market nuking is up for debate. Coinbase were quick to play it down in their retrospective - saying:
“There were mitigating factors that would have limited the impact of this flaw had it been exploited at scale.”
Either way - we expect a lot of those 2,000 new hires at Coinbase will be focused on security!
In other news over the last week - OpenSea weren’t so lucky…
Ok sorry that was a bad pun. Especially if you were one of the people who had their prized NFTs stolen as a result of what appears to be a social engineering attack.
The situation is still evolving - but it appears $1.7m in NFTs were stolen
There’s still some debate as to whether this was in fact a social exploit (phishing attack) or a hack via some flaw in their code.
OpenSea are maintaining this was not connected to their website. Here’s what the CEO is saying:
Devin Finzer (dfinzer.eth)@dfinzer
This attack did not originate on opensea.io.
7:42 AM · Feb 20, 2022
11 Reposts · 126 Likes
All this to say - one thing is clear. Wallet security is still a really big problem for the whole web3 / blockchain ecosystem. Especially when you consider onboarding millions of non-technical ‘mainstream’ users to the space.
Are you worried all this scary security related news might tank the market (even more)? Here’s some advice, just be more like Vitalik 👇
In an interview with Bloomberg, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin says some crypto people ‘welcome’ another winter. Why? So we can have less:
“short-term speculative attention”
and instead, be able to see:
“which projects are actually long-term sustainable”
Reading between the lines, Vitalik just wants to buidl.
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) wants to be an NFT Marketplace - with a trademark filing showing plans to offer digital assets
Suits are coming to the Metaverse as JP Morgan opens a “lounge” in Decentraland
The WSJ explores El Salvador’s ongoing work to turn Bitcoin into a National Currency
Charlie Munger, the 98 year old vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway calls Crypto a Disease. This is after his buddy Warren Buffet famously called Bitcoin “rat poison”. These guys don’t mince their words!
Snoop Dogg sold over $45m worth of his “Stash Box” NFTs in just 5 days
Twitter lets you add an Ethereum Wallet to support tipping in ETH. Twitter already supports Bitcoin tips
Sequoia is launching a $500-600 million crypto fund to invest in tokens
We spend time on CT, so you don’t have to. Some of our favourite recent tweets:
OpenSea put out an official announcement. Don’t worry, Greg’s got your back 🙏
greg@greg16676935420
@opensea Yeah I’m not clicking that link nice try opensea
1:45 AM · Feb 20, 2022
410 Reposts · 8.91K Likes
Someone in the replies said let’s swap GM for “GM how are devs doing” and we’re all for it. They’re the 🐐s
𝗻𝗶𝗿.𝗲𝘁𝗵 ∴ 🏔@nir_III
it’s always can devs do something? and never how are devs doing?
11:12 PM · Feb 19, 2022
39 Reposts · 291 Likes
Before we go mainstream we need to fix this
xuannu.eth@xuannu_eth
the problem with saying “you don’t have to trust people, you just have to trust code” is that i absolutely do not code is sus af
4:19 PM · Feb 20, 2022
26 Reposts · 440 Likes
Important thread on what’s happening in Canada, and whether governments should be able to financially cut-off people who disagree with them
6529@punk6529
1/ There are no other constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact Being meaning to write this for 6 months, but the Canadian response to the trucker protests is illustrating this so vividly, that today is the day.
10:52 PM · Feb 17, 2022
10.9K Reposts · 31.8K Likes
Each week we’ll cover an essential Web3 concept in simple terms - this week we’re looking at Tokens ✨
Tokens power the world of web3 and what some are hailing as a new ‘ownership’ or ‘tokenised’ economy. But what are they?
Let’s keep it simple. A token is a record of ownership of an asset.
And these tokens can be fungible, or non fungible. If you’re sick of seeing the word “fungible” everywhere, just think interchangeable.
So fungible tokens include Ether (and most other cryptocurrencies) because they’re interchangeable. Loads of people can own Ether and that’s fine.
A non fungible token (NFT) however is unique - so only one person can own it at a given time.
Blockchains make the exchange of token ownership (without a middleman) and therefore all of web3 possible! But more on that next time.
One of our team has been teasing our upcoming v1 release 👀
krishnerkar.eth (🛠️, 🇮🇳)@krishnerkar
v1 coming soon 👀
krishnerkar.eth (🛠️, 🇮🇳) @krishnerkar
things moving fast @layer3xyz 👀✨ https://t.co/jsMYHJb1bj
7:48 AM · Feb 18, 2022
1 Repost · 29 Likes
Oh, and pls go watch this video of Vitalik being serenaded at ETH Denver
That’s all for today! We’ll be building and improving this weekly newsletter in public, so let us know what you thought of the new format!
Yahya - at Layer3
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