Acala Hacked
On Aug 14, 2022 Acala was attacked by hackers who issued more than 1.2 billion AUSD. AUSD broke off and once fell by 70%.
Acala said a configuration issue of the Honzon protocol which affects aUSD and passed an urgent vote to pause operations.
The issue was a misconfiguration of the iBTC / aUSD liquidity pool that resulted in error mints of a significant amount of aUSD. These erroneously minted aUSD remaining on Acala parachain have been transfer disabled.
Meanwhile functions including swap, xcm, honzon-related ect on Acala have been paused via urgent government votes until further notice; the oracle pallet has also been paused so that users do not need to concern liquidations in between time.
Acala is a decentralized finance network powering the aUSD ecosystem. At the time of this writing Acala’s market cap is $130M, with token traded at $0.26
Netherlands Arrests Developer of Tornado Cash
Recently, the Governments are paying “extra attention” to decentralized autonomous organizations that may facilitate money laundering. A 29-year-old developer was arrested in Amsterdam on Friday, according to a statement from the Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD). He was suspected to be involved in the Tornado Cash protocol that's been sanctioned by the US, adding that suspect that FIOD is looking at DAOs
Tornado Cash is an Ethereum blockchain-based crypto mixing service that allows users to gain a cloak of anonymity when transferring crypto assets. On Monday (15-Aug), the service was sanctioned by the U.S. government for assisting criminals in laundering stolen money.
Heathen on Twitter: "5 reasons why young people should work in crypto” / Twitter
In the past, the most viable path to pursue in life was supposed to get proper education with college, good grades, and work a decent job until retirement with saving and buying assets along the way. However, due to inflation and over-saturation, more and more people nowadays are forced to be "wage slaves" and work in profitable fields that they are not into. While STEM is not suitable for everyone, finance seems to be the most obvious choice that pays well and gives "options," but the lack of purpose while working in finance frustrates people.
This thread shows why people should consider working in crypto instead of finance for a "much more interesting and meaningful work environment":
- The Technology: Crypto is the technology frontier with all the latest innovations.
- Accessibility: Crypto is a true meritocracy where only knowledge and portfolio matter. People don't have to "graduate from that college," "have that internship," or "know that person" to work in crypto.
- Upward mobility: While finance pays great, it is still as it used to be years ago. Working in crypto offers you a chance to have the vision and shape the future, as long as you work hard enough.
- Variety of Study: Working in crypto forces you to know more about everything (computer science, economics, politics, philosophy, history, writing, marketing, community building, etc.), not just your sole professions like law or finance.
- Worldly impact: Since crypto is the latest move against authoritarianism and government mismanagement (and might be the last one), anyone who works in crypto will have a huge potential to change the world toward sovereignty.
To sum up, the thread also gives some suggestions for people who want to get involved in the crypto world:
- Learn more and more: Learn as hard as possible since it is the only way to be better than others in a meritocracy like crypto. Any tweets, articles, Telegram, and Discord groups are helpful.
- Start investing: It will teach you and, more importantly, motivate you.
- Build a portfolio: Your abilities are best shown by what you have done.
- Build a Twitter following: A better Twitter profile means higher credibility, better networking, and more attractive potential hire.
- Get involved: start small, or better, start anything. Take the first chance to prove yourself.
What’s changed in GameFi in the last month?
GameFi project count grew less than 2%, and new project growth in BNB lagged
Less than 80 GameFi projects were launched 3 consecutive months up to July 31. As evident in the chart, all chains saw stagnant growth (although Polygon and WAX are slightly up.)
GameFi Web3 category accounts for 98% of GameFi’s total funding
Compared to June, GameFi financing activity gradually recovered in July, increasing by 17%. In terms of funding categories, with the development of blockchain technology, more and more investment funds are injected into Web3-type GameFi, among which Web3-type funding accounts for 98%.
Recently, Animoca Brands announced the completion of $75.32 million in financing. It is the second tranche of funding announced following $358.8 million on Jan. 18. With a strong focus on Web3, the company aims to address existing interoperability issues in the metaverse industry to realize its vision of an open metaverse.
A total of 22 projects received financing in July, generally following market fluctuations. Investment rounds are still active at the seed stage for many months, supplemented by other rounds.
Splinterlands gamers make up the majority of Hive users
Footprint Analytics shows that the total number of monthly users is 1.19 million, of which 483,000 are new users and 710,000 are old users.
The overall subscriber base has decreased from 3.59 million players in January to 1.19 million in July (-69%). Here are the pain points of GameFi:
- Lack of originality, with an economic model mainly based on mining, output and reproduction.
- Some games require players to invest in game tokens before they can play, and users have a strong demand for capital recovery.
- Infinite inflation model, affected by the bear market, governance token and in-game token prices bring down; their games cannot get rid of the death spiral
Axie infinity’s fortunes are turning
From GameFi’s monthly trading volume change, only the period of October-November last year was a period of incremental trading, and after December, the overall trading volume gradually declined until the lowest value in July.
