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Crypto && Coffee 131

Breaking News:
South Korean news agency Yonhap announced that the offices of Bithumb were raided on Thursday, January 26, 2023 as part of an investigation into the price manipulation of an unidentified coin listed on the South Korean crypto exchange. Bithumb Chairman Kang Jong-Hyun and two other executives – including his younger sister, Kang Ji-Yeon, the CEO of two publicly traded Bithumb affiliates, Inbiogen and Bucket Studio – were charged by the Seoul Southern District Prosecutor’s Office with embezzlement, breach of trust and fraudulent illegal transactions earlier this week.

In addition, Park Mo, Vice President of Vidente, the largest shareholder of South Korean Cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb, was being investigated by South Korean prosecutors for embezzlement and stock price manipulation before being found dead on December 30th in front of his home. 

The Seoul Southern District Prosecutor’s Office launched a full-fledged investigation into the case last year and raided three firms allegedly connected to Bithumb: Vidente, Inbiogen, and Bucket Studio.  Vidente previously said it held discussions about selling its stake in Bithumb to FTX but had reached no deal. The collapsed crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy in November. 

Stay tuned for further developments on this story.


Technology Recap:

Bitcoin:

  • Lightning Labs publishes how emerging markets are powering Lightning growth.

  • James O’Beirne posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list regarding a proposal for a soft fork to add two new opcodes, OP_VAULT and OP_UNVAULT. These would accept various parameters regarding creating a vault to protect funds and send. 

  • Anthony Towns posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list an analysis comparing the recent ephemeral anchors proposal to an older SIGHASH_GROUP proposal. The SIGHASH_GROUP proposal allows an input to specify different outputs as long as they don’t overlap. 

Ethereum:

  • Tim Beiko shares the latest from the most recent AllCoreDevs calls. The call focused around the upcoming Shanghai updates as well as further threads on other network upgrades. 

  • Vitalik Buterin publishes an article on stealth addresses and their potential impact to Ethereum. 

  • Erigon updates their roadmap for 2023 with focus solely on Ethereum with BNB Smart Chain and Polygon support going to external contributors. 

Other Chains: 

  • Aave Protocol V3 is now live on Ethereum mainnet

  • zkSync is integrating Espresso Systems technology to enable private transactions. 

  • Uniswap shares how DeFi Can Cut Costs & Boost Transparency in Foreign Exchange Markets

  • Euler Labs shares that cbETH is now a collateral asset on Euler. This makes it the only place in DeFi to integrate Coinbase’s liquid staking derivative token. 

  • Fleek announces that their CLI Beta is now live! The CLI contains two services which allow for IPFS pinning and IPNS mapping. 

  • StarkWare announces a partnership with Node Guardians to provide StarkNet developers with the best possible educational challenges. 

  • Cosmos DEX, Osmosis, conducted their v14.0.0 upgrade termed “Neon” which aims to expand product integrations and make cross-chain trading more advantageous to traders. 

  • MakerDAO has decided to deploy 100M USDC into Yearn with 71.56% in support.

  • Gyroscope Protocol, a guarded version of the Gyroscope stablecoin, is now live for testing on Polygon. 

  • dYdX announces that they have delayed the unlock of their native DYDX token for investors until the fourth quarter. 

  • StarkWare releases Cairo v1.0-alpha2 with focus on dictionaries, events, and mapping of storage variables. With this, it is now possible to implement an ERC-20 contract. 

  • Contract Secured Revenue is now enabled on Canto. 


Hacks | Vulnerabilities | Exploits:

  • On January 16, 2023, OMNI Real Estate lost $70K on BSC due to a reward manipulation bug. 

  • On January 16, 2023, 520 Token lost $11K on BSC in a price oracle manipulation attack.

  • On January 17, 2023, Upswing lost $35K on Ethereum in a price oracle manipulation attack

  • On January 19, 2023, Thoreum Finance lost $580K on BSC by incorrectly implementing a Transfer function which allowed an attacker to exploit it and increase their balance without any repercussion. 


Mainstream Recap:

  • Crypto lender Genesis files for bankruptcy, owing creditors at least $3.4B.

  • Flashbots, an Ethereum infrastructure service, is seeking up to $50M funding with a $1B valuation. 

  • CoinDesk reports that Binance has been named as one of the counterparties against Bitzlato, who is accused of laundering $700M by U.S. authorities. 

  • Paradigm publishes the second write-up on using On-Chain Data for Policy Research

  • Coinbase shares how they identify bad actors and aim to keep the ecosystem safe. 

  • Blockstream raises $125M to boost Bitcoin mining colocation services. 

  • The full 116 page unredacted FTX creditor list has been released

  • Coinbase has been fined $3.6M by the Dutch central bank for offering crypto services without registering in the Netherlands. 


This Week’s Cup of Coffee:

This week, we are headed to Saint Frank Coffee in San Francisco, CA for a cup of Brother Sun. This blend of Colombian and Kenyan coffees yields bright flavors of stonefruit and citrus which works perfectly as a breakfast coffee. Sip up and enjoy!!

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