The Last Fortnight in Crypto - August (Part 2)
LATEST NEWS
Market Hot Streak Continues
The bear market rally continues, with Bitcoin up 14.8% and Ethereum up 39.8% on the monthly at the time of publishing. According to reports this is due to the FED's inflation numbers (CPI) coming in lower than expected at 8.5%. Ethereum also had a successful Ethereum testnet ahead of the merge scheduled for September.
Blackrock to Offer Access to Crypto via Partnership with Coinbase
It's a major push into crypto-assets for the world's largest asset manager, explaining their "institutional clients are increasingly interested in gaining exposure to digital asset markets". It follows a Tuesday announcement that Coinbase Prime will also offer Ethereum staking for U.S. institutional clients.
We are proud to announce a partnership with @BlackRock. BlackRock’s Aladdin clients will now have direct access to crypto markets through Coinbase Prime.
— Coinbase (@coinbase) August 4, 2022
Read more 👇https://t.co/LA3XeYYbvs
450 Million USD Web3 Fund
Another week, another half a billion dollar crypto venture fund, with Variant raising a new $450M fund to back Web3 and DeFi Projects. So far, crypto venture funding is -26% on the year, but there remains plenty of new funds raised through the bear market—this week, technology-focused venture capital firm Aglaé Ventures also announced a €100M dedicated crypto fund.
Ethereum's Final Testnet Merge Successful
Ethereum's Goerli testnet successfully switched to Proof-of-Stake—the final test before a mainnet date is agreed. Tentative dates center around September 15 as per Ethereum developer discussions.
Ethereum merge to Proof-of-Stake progress:
— pedrouid.eth 📲 (@pedrouid) August 11, 2022
✅ lots of devnets
✅ Ropsten testnet
✅ Sepolia testnet
✅ Goerli testnet
☑️ Ethereum mainnet
It’s happening! 🚀💪 https://t.co/w9FjTyhpp5
Hacks Grip Defi and Web 3; Solana Wallets Exploited
It's been another horror week for crypto security—with cross-chain bridge Nomad exploited for ~$190M and Solana web wallets targeted in an $8M exploit. Users who held funds in Solana web wallets such as Phantom, Trust Wallet or Slope were drained without users' knowledge or permission.
The Solana team attributed the exploit to a software issue with wallet provider Slop compared to a problem with the Solana network. There have been >$1.5B in DeFi or wallet hacks this year.
1/ Phantom has reason to believe that the reported exploits are due to complications related to importing accounts to and from @slope_finance.
— Phantom (@phantom) August 3, 2022
We are still actively working to identify whether there may have been other vulnerabilities that contributed to this incident. https://t.co/W5B19gbMJX
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