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Web3 is going just great

Dozens of users report money disappearing from their El Salvadoran Chivo Wallet accounts

A Twitter thread showed dozens of people reporting amounts from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars disappearing from their Chivo Wallets, the bitcoin wallet backed by El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in September of this year, where it is used alongside the U.S. dollar.

chivowallet
grim

Grim Finance is exploited for $30 million

Grim Finance, the “compounding yield optimizer” DeFi platform, was hacked. According to them, attackers exploited a bug in the platform to perform a reentrancy attack that netted them $30 million. Grim, indeed. A cryptocurrency watchdog group, RugDoc, opined that the exploit was possible because of very basic mistakes in implementation, and wrote, “Hopefully all projects can draw lessons from this incident that there is much knowledge most experienced solidity devs have at hand. If you haven’t acquired this yet, don’t build multi-million dollar projects. Don’t get audits from companies which everyone knows are useless.” This was apparently a dig at Solidity Finance, who had performed an audit several months prior to the hack and found that “ReentrancyGuard is used in relevant locations to preent[sic] reentrancy attacks.”

Grim Finance is exploited for $30 million

Grim Finance, the “compounding yield optimizer” DeFi platform, was hacked. According to them, attackers exploited a bug in the platform to perform a reentrancy attack that netted them $30 million. Grim, indeed. A cryptocurrency watchdog group, RugDoc, opined that the exploit was possible because of very basic mistakes in implementation, and wrote, “Hopefully all projects can draw lessons from this incident that there is much knowledge most experienced solidity devs have at hand. If you haven’t acquired this yet, don’t build multi-million dollar projects. Don’t get audits from companies which everyone knows are useless.” This was apparently a dig at Solidity Finance, who had performed an audit several months prior to the hack and found that “ReentrancyGuard is used in relevant locations to preent[sic] reentrancy attacks.”

grim

Adidas learns the hard way that limiting the number of NFTs one person can buy is hard

Anticipating that buyers would try to hoard items from a big-name NFT drop, Adidas decided to try to limit their NFT drop to two per buyer. They apparently didn’t realize that there is no guarantee that one address = one individual, and a crafty blockchain engineer, Montana Wong, created a smart contract that generated additional smart contracts, each with their own address. These contracts snapped up NFTs, then transferred them to the engineer’s primary wallet and self-destructed. Wong was able to snag 330 NFTs.

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liamsharp

Prominent comics artist says continuous theft of his work for use as NFTs may force him to close his DeviantArt gallery

Comics artist Liam Sharp wrote on Twitter that he would likely need to close his DeviantArt gallery, which he has maintained for fourteen years, because his artwork keeps being minted as NFTs without his permission. He wrote, “I can’t – and shouldn’t have to – report each one and make a case, which is consistently ignored. Sad and frustrating.”

Prominent comics artist says continuous theft of his work for use as NFTs may force him to close his DeviantArt gallery

Comics artist Liam Sharp wrote on Twitter that he would likely need to close his DeviantArt gallery, which he has maintained for fourteen years, because his artwork keeps being minted as NFTs without his permission. He wrote, “I can’t – and shouldn’t have to – report each one and make a case, which is consistently ignored. Sad and frustrating.”

liamsharp

Traders hoping to get in on the "Monkey Kingdom" NFT collection are duped by a scam link in the project's official Discord

An NFT trader hoping to get in on the “Monkey Kingdom” NFT collection was duped by a scam link in the project’s official Discord channel, and sent 650 SOL (about $116,000) to a scammer. “It is important money to my family: my wife, my son”, they wrote on Twitter. Another person replied to his tweet to say they too had been duped by the Discord scammer, to the tune of about 19.5 SOL (about $3,500). The scam was apparently made possible by a compromise of the “Grape Protocol” Discord tools, and also targeted users of the Fractal project’s Discord that same day.

  • Tweet by commenstar
  • Tweet by MonkeyKingdom_
  • Tweet by grapeprotocol

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 receives so much fan pushback on planned NFTs that the studio scraps the idea within a day

Pushback from fans led S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 creators to quickly reverse their decision to add NFTs to the game. The studio announced their NFT plans on December 15, which involved collectible cards, in-game items, having one’s name added to walls or other scenery in the game, and even the possibility to have an NPC added to the game that resembled the NFT buyer. In subsequent updates the studio urged that the NFTs would not be mandatory for gameplay, and later downplayed them further by saying that the NPCs they would add to the game “aren’t even involved in the story”. Fans were incensed, and the next day the studio scrapped “anything NFT-related” that was planned for the game.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 receives so much fan pushback on planned NFTs that the studio scraps the idea within a day

Pushback from fans led S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 creators to quickly reverse their decision to add NFTs to the game. The studio announced their NFT plans on December 15, which involved collectible cards, in-game items, having one’s name added to walls or other scenery in the game, and even the possibility to have an NPC added to the game that resembled the NFT buyer. In subsequent updates the studio urged that the NFTs would not be mandatory for gameplay, and later downplayed them further by saying that the NPCs they would add to the game “aren’t even involved in the story”. Fans were incensed, and the next day the studio scrapped “anything NFT-related” that was planned for the game.

NFT collector who owns the NFT associated with the Bored Ape artwork used in this site header would like me to stop using "their" ape

The apparent owner of Bored Ape #5262, of which this site header is a derivative work, contacted me on Twitter to say “I believe you are using my ape on your website without my permission. Can you please prove you own this ape as I believe there is only one looking like this and it is mine” in an event that truly transcended parody. While this would be hilarious even if it was a prank, the Twitter account that DMed me does appear to belong to the person holding the NFT on OpenSea.

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melania-nft

Melania Trump announces an NFT collection which will begin with a painting of her "cobalt blue eyes"

Lest it be mistaken for a grift, the press release was quick to say that Mrs. Trump had promised to donate a portion of the proceeds to children leaving foster care. The NFT platform is “powered by Parler”, a far-right social network. Trump intends to release multiple NFTs, and the first will have a starting price of 1 SOL (approximately $150). Solana Labs was quick to clarify that the “project is not part of any Solana-led initiative”.

Melania Trump announces an NFT collection which will begin with a painting of her "cobalt blue eyes"

Lest it be mistaken for a grift, the press release was quick to say that Mrs. Trump had promised to donate a portion of the proceeds to children leaving foster care. The NFT platform is “powered by Parler”, a far-right social network. Trump intends to release multiple NFTs, and the first will have a starting price of 1 SOL (approximately $150). Solana Labs was quick to clarify that the “project is not part of any Solana-led initiative”.

melania-nft

Tweet from a crypto-miner answers the question of where all the GPUs went

Crypto miner Jaxson Davidson posted a video showing one of four buildings in his crypto mining farm, showing racks of thousands of GPUs—GPUs that gamers and other consumer buyers are finding painfully expensive, if available for sale at all. He said the GPUs were bought “under the table”, for an average price of $1,200 per unit, and is using the farm to mine Ethereum and Ravencoin. Davidson deleted his Twitter account following some pretty fierce backlash from gamers feeling the GPU shortage, as well as crypto skeptics who were shocked at the energy usage.

miningfarm

Another typing error proves costly to an NFT collector

A misplaced decimal point caused an NFT trader to sell their “beloved” Doodle NFT for 0.37 ETH (about $1,500) instead of their intended 3.7 ETH (about $15,000). The trader tried begging on Twitter to buy back the NFT, then to get back “maybe the ETH i lost.. minus all royalties and such..”. Two days later they posted, “well, i don’t think i’ll ever get back what i lost.. had to take a break yesterday to not go crazy over this. 3.7 ETH is a lot of money to lose for me.” This happened two days after a different trader made a similar, $300,000 mistake.

doodle
doodle

Another typing error proves costly to an NFT collector

A misplaced decimal point caused an NFT trader to sell their “beloved” Doodle NFT for 0.37 ETH (about $1,500) instead of their intended 3.7 ETH (about $15,000). The trader tried begging on Twitter to buy back the NFT, then to get back “maybe the ETH i lost.. minus all royalties and such..”. Two days later they posted, “well, i don’t think i’ll ever get back what i lost.. had to take a break yesterday to not go crazy over this. 3.7 ETH is a lot of money to lose for me.” This happened two days after a different trader made a similar, $300,000 mistake.