Island Fintech Weekly (7 Nov)

Thailand's oldest bank acquires majority stake in crypto exchange, US Treasury Department publishes a report on stablecoins, yet another DeFi project suffers a hack.

Nov 07, 2021

Greetings Islanders,

What a crazy month October has been! Bitcoin made a new ATH at $67,276.79, with Ethereum and the rest of the altcoins following suit.

We saw some cray pump and dumps too - most notably $SQUID, which quite honestly already felt quite fishy to me from the start. In other news - we’re seeing some crypto news coming from SEA (exciting!) - definitely much more coming in the next editions!

If you would like to chat about crypto, reach out to me on Twitter! DMs always open :)

🐠 Dips

Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), Thailand’s oldest bank, announced that it acquired a 51% stake in local digital asset exchange Bitkub for 17.85 billion baht - about $500m. The deal is expected to be complete by Q1 2022. Other Thai banks and financial companies are following suit foraying into the digital assets space.
ENS Domains recently announced that it plans to issue a token ($ENS) and form a DAO. A snapshot of .eth addresses was taken on 31st October, and 25% of all $ENS supply will be airdropped to all holders of the addresses, with allocation formulas found here. Do you have an ENS domain? I almost bought 0xjoyce.eth but did not end up doing so, I’m ngmi 🥲
side note: Vinay just asked me what ngmi means - he’s ngmi.
On November 1st, the US Treasury Department published a report on stablecoins. If it is too long for you to read, here’s my best attempt at a TLDR; the Report recommends that only bank-like institutions should be allowed to issue stablecoins, and federal oversight should be required for custodial wallet providers. There seems to be concern over regulatory gaps relating to stablecoins and DeFi.
Coinbase announced in a blog post that they will be launching an NFT marketplace, where users can create, buy and sell NFTs. Within a week, over a million users signed up for the platform waitlist. They are not the first exchange to launch an NFT marketplace - Binance, FTX and Crypto.com have all launched their own.

🐋 Dives

Anubis DAO raises $60m in a day, then loses it all.

3,3 (explanation here).

Today on DeFi news I am reporting on yet another DeFi hack, this time on an Olympus DAO fork, Anubis DAO. According to the site, Anubis Dao is ‘a unique protocol built on KCC.’ KCC is a decentralized public chain built by the fans of KCS and KuCoin's fan communities.

Anubis DAO launched a token sale on Copper, raising over $60m. Then it all vanished.

About 13,556 $ETH was sent to a single address - view the transaction details here.

So what really happened?

The co-creator, which goes by the username beerus on Twitter, seems to be the main suspect here. Another founding member of the team, Sisyphus, tweeted that they are fairly certain that this was in fact not a rug pull, but a doing of someone on the team.

There were two main reasons for this suspicion:

beerus deleted his Twitter account after the exploit happened (at time of writing it is still up, but the account does not seem to have been active since 29th October, the day of the ‘hack’).
beerus’ own wallet was unaffected at all during this hack.

However, Twitter user cryptofan777, which is apparently beerus’ alt account, tweeted that he/she had been hacked by opening an email with malware, which resulted in the loss of all funds (my best guess is the private keys to the wallet was stolen).

Is the saga over? In the most recent tweet published by cryptofan777 on 31st October, he/she is currently complying with all investigations with the police and has handed over their computer.

This may be the first time I have heard of the police being involved in a DeFi hack - will beerus / cryptofan777 be able to clear their name? Will the stolen $ETH ever be returned? Hopefully we’ll soon see a resolution to this, and I could write about it in the Dips section of the next crypto edition.