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

💊 M6 Daily Bullets 💊 Tuesday, September 27th

Sep 27, 2022

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…?

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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

What’s your take on today’s news? Anything interesting that you have to say about these stories? Did we miss anything that should’ve been included?

📊 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

What is the Data telling you? See anything that sticks out to you?

🎓 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

Have you seen our institutional-quality research?

M6 Research

🖼 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

🌍 Crypto Twitterverse:

guleid @riddle245

1. Might do a longer thread but figured I would quickly break down the biggest changes in ATOM 2.0. They revolve around 3 main components which is an Interchain scheduler to funnel crosschain MEV to ATOM, new issuance schedule and an interchain allocator for funding new projs

McKenna @Crypto_McKenna

$DXY has gone parabolic. I believe this is the start of accelerationism which will ultimately result in the final capitulation of risk-on assets. Time to pay attention.

Cathie Wood @CathieDWood

The yield curve “suggests” that US monetary policy has not been this restrictive since the ‘80s. As measured by the 2-year Treasury yield relative to the 10-year Treasury yield, it has inverted by 50 basis points, the 10-year yield at 3.75% compared to the two-year at 4.25%.

Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) @adamscochran

Yeah, CEO's usually mass step down right before a bull run, right? When there is a ton of money to be made on equity they cash out at the bottom, right? ... 😬

Will Clemente @WClementeIII

Kraken CEO stepped down FTX US President stepped down Alameda co-CEO stepped down Microstrategy CEO stepped down Celsius CEO stepped down Who's next?

Patrick Collins 🌪 @PatrickAlphaC

🔚 The "Succession Problem" in crypto is an under-emphasized issue when building web3 applications. If you're in web3, it's something you've definitely felt, but never been able to articulate. What is the "Succession Problem", and why it's important in web3 👇

FatMan @FatManTerra

Korean prosecutors allege that Do Kwon tried cashing out over 3,313 BTC through KuCoin and OKX shortly after a warrant for his arrest was released. They allege that these funds came from the LFG reserves, which Do Kwon previously claimed had been deployed to defend the UST peg.

polynya @apolynya

The case for monolithic blockchains: - They are simple, the tech is already there - People don't care about security, a lot of low-value usecases don't need it - Validity proofs will solve cost-of-verification later - We don't need much scale, demand for "web3" is very limited

Teej (🫘 ≠ 🥩) @Lempheter

Real World Assets are a productive BOOM that pull us from the speculative 🐻 market... ..but what have we gotten wrong? How do RWAs scale to trillions? 💸 After an epic quest through the warrens 🦊 of RWAs, we present: An Unreal Primer, the industry’s 1st comprehensive guide 🧵

📈 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

Did we miss anything or is there anything you want to discuss? We’d Love to hear your feedback and engage with the community! Feel free to leave a comment and let us know your thoughts on the Crypto market!