Web3 is Going Just Great

Ribbon has announced it will cover $400,000 of the lost funds with its own assets. However, Ribbon is also offering users a lower-than-expected haircut on their assets by assuming that some of the largest affected accounts will not withdraw their assets, having been dormant for several years. While this plan may benefit active users, it seems like it could get very messy if those dormant users do wish to withdraw their assets and discover they've been used to pay others.

Binance publicly acknowledged that an employee had been suspended for misconduct over the incident. "These actions constitute abuse of their position for personal gain and violate our policies and code of professional conduct," Binance tweeted from its BinanceFutures account. After this announcement, the memecoin token price spiked even further.

Earlier this year, Binance fired another employee after discovering they had used inside information to profit from a token sale event.

$2.4 million of the stolen assets, which were denominated in pxETH, a liquid staking token issued by Redacted Cartel, were recovered after the issuer burned the stolen tokens and reissued them to the team's wallet — essentially, removing the tokens from the hacker's wallet. However, the hacker routed the remaining funds through the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer, which makes recovery substantially more challenging.

This is the third time Yearn Finance has been hacked, following an $11 million exploit in 2023 and another $11 million exploit in 2021. Yearn also suffered around $1.4 million in losses in 2023 in connection to the Euler Finance attack.

Upbit reimbursed users who had lost funds from company reserves. The exchange was able to freeze around $1.77 million of the stolen assets.

This theft occurred exactly six years after Upbit suffered a theft of 342,000 ETH (priced at around $50 million at the time).

This is the second time such an attack has happened to these same platforms, with another DNS hijacking incident occurring almost exactly two years ago. In that instance, users lost around $100,000 when submitting transactions via the scam websites.

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, responded with a tweet boasting about how quickly the chain recovered from the catastrophic split, then accused the person of acting maliciously. "It was absolutely personal", Hoskinson wrote, adding that the person's public version of events was merely him "trying to walk it back because he knows the FBI is already involved". Hoskinson added, "There was a premeditated attack from a disgruntled [single pool operator] who spent months in the Fake Fred discord actively looking at ways to harm the brand and reputation of IOG. He targeted my personal pool and it resulted in disruption of the entire cardano network."

Hoskinson's decision to involve the FBI horrified some onlookers, including one other engineer at the company who publicly quit after the incident. They wrote, "I've fucked up pen testing in a major way once. I've seen my colleagues do the same. I didn't realize there was a risk of getting raided by the authorities because of that + saying mean things on the Internet."

The theft was first observed by crypto sleuth zachxbt. Not long after, the project acknowledged on its Twitter account that "GANA's interaction contract has been targeted by an external attack, resulting in unauthorized asset theft."

The company had previously raised several rounds of financing, with a $2.3 million seed round in 2019 and a $5 million Series A in 2021.