Bean $80M REKT! Moonbirds pump but can it sustain? Milady winning the Floor Wars! And more!
In this first edition of Cow's comfy readings we will explore a lot of the recent news in the crypto world.
Welcome to Cow’s comfy readings, for the sake of a streamlined reading experience cow will go out of her way to stop referring to itself and focus on the matter at hand uhum uhum yes yes ser, lets do this! I hope you enjoy this newsletter as I have enjoyed writing it, without further ado…
The Beanstalk farm was hacked for over $80M
The @peckshield reports, according to the initial investigation, the hack is made possible due to the flash loan-assisted (immediate) pass of BIP18, which was submitted one day ago (https://etherscan.io/tx/0x68cdec0ac76454c3b0f7af0b8a3895db00adf6daaf3b50a99716858c4fa54c6f…).
The BIP18 leads to the crafted code execution with the governance privilege to drain the pool fund. What is concerning in this attack is that it’s not a hack but instead, a governance take-over highlighting the dangers of fully on-chain governance - more on this later.
To illustrate, we use the hack tx and show the key steps below
The initial funds to launch the hack are withdrawn from @SynapseProtocol and most of the result gains are deposited to @TornadoCash. Currently, 15,154 ETH still stays in the hacker’s account. Note the hacker donates 250k USDC to Ukraine Crypto Donation (ohhhh so human).
Thanks, PeckShield Inc. for the detailed investigation and images. Highly recommend taking a look at the thread as it contains some explanation of the code that I will not go through here.
For those who are new to DAO hacks like this, this one is the second one I have seen. This is possible because the protocol was built to accept changes directly from the DAO proposals, imagine it has a mechanism that automatically passes smart contracts to the protocol if they have a majority vote. The hacker simply created a proposal, passed it, using flash loan funds, and had the smart contract in the proposal send all the tokens to her address. Because these decisions are made on-chain there was no way to stop them.
To have access to this amount of crypto the hacker used a flash-loan and after the successful hack the flash-loan is repaid, all in one transaction, leaving her with an $80M profit.
This brings me to the opinions I have about fully on-chain DAOs. First of all, there is no intrinsic need to have a DAO deploy smart contracts directly into the protocol. it’s a complete overkill mechanism that ignores several security issues that might come in hand with it. It’s understandable that DAOs might want to feel completely decentralized to the point they will give away their power completely to the voting mechanism, but the Bean case really shows how dangerous it can be. A bootstrapped project with no VC funds that lost all the user-base money. Any DAO that works fully on-chain is open to attacks like this. To avoid this I propose that DAOs start to create a few off-chain steps before changes in the protocol are made. MakerDAO is a good example of this as they have a few steps that need to be done before a vote is put into the on-chain mechanism. A simple curation method would have stopped the Bean hack completely. Code is dangerous and must be reviewed by multiple parties before putting it into work, especially when dealing with finances and other people’s money, hence the need for off-chain curation steps, which in this case could be as simple as a forum post that needed to be reviewed by the community.
Moonbirds rise in the NFT space with sales up to 100E and the current 13E floor
Cow is not a Moonbirds holder.
Yesterday, Saturday 16 the Moonbirds collection by Proof was launched. Cow was aware of it but is too poor to buy - hence why I have a newsletter uhum uhum.
The project has had its moments on CT with impressive price pumps, doubtful bots and some drama here and there.
According to @zachxbt one of the biggest NFT investigators on CT the project had over 400 accounts Sybil attacking the project, this means that these accounts belonged to a single entity that was purposely pumping the price.
An account was able to purchase a Moonbird for 30E and sell it for 90E with a net profit of 60E, this story is now doing rounds on Twitter as soyboys dream of the “perfect flip”… Very cringe to watch BAYC holders repeatedly post about this as the “GOAT flip”. Yes yes Cow is aware of how cringe the NFT space can be.
In 24h the project has a volume of 51.7K ETH, which puts it above many big projects such as Gutter Cats, CyberKongz VX, & Cool Pets.
In Cow’s opinion, this collection made an impressive first round in CT, time will tell if it will retain this floor. I personally find it difficult as I do not think the art and the project itself are particularly impressive. Curious to know how this floor holds in a week to a month. Those who purchased the NFT for 100ETH are now the ones that might end up holding a big heavy bag. Have in mind that in less than 24h people were purchasing this NFT for over 100ETH each at a 13ETH flor price as of this writing. For me, that is a very bad deal. Let’s see what happens.
Cool Cats raise royalties for devs to 5% and the floor dumps hard
Cool Cats used to be one of the blue-chips of the NFT space but something is going really wrong with it lately, reaching floor prices of up to 15ETH and beyond the project is known for shipping quality products. Currently one of the NFTs with most utilities, but the team decided to up their royalties to 5% and people were not happy with it, creating a spiral of bad word of mouth the floor was quickly savaged.
This brings me to think about NFT utilities. Cool Cats is no doubt one of the best teams in the space able to ship qualities products and anyone who knows the project knows how many options you have to make a lot of money by holding these NFTs. Why would people panic sell? It’s clear that the NFT community is still compromised of newbies and speculators that only know two actions, buy high and sell low. 🤨
Milady hostile take-over of crypto Twitter and FloorDAO bet against Tubbies
You heard of the Curve Wars, but have you heard of the Floor Wars?
Yes sers, the new NFT war is brewing very publicly as Tubby and Milady fought in a very tight vote to get FlooDAO to sweep their floors.
First, let’s talk about NFTX. Think of NFTX as a way to create liquidity for NFTs. How it works: • Take your Crypto Punk • Plug it into NFTX • You get 1 'PUNK' ERC-20 Token Now, you can trade your Punk on a DEX as you would with any other token.
FloorDAO is an OHM fork that hopes to become the first decentralized market maker for NFTs. Basically, their goal is to create permanent liquidity for certain NFT collections. They do this by accepting certain NFT assets into their treasury.
It works like this: 1. Create an (accepted) NFTX LP with an NFT Floor DAO wants 2. Lock in your NFTX LP to FloorDAO 3. Get $FLOOR tokens You get discounted $FLOOR tokens, they get yield-earning treasury assets. It's a win-win.
FLOOR token holders are voting for the NFT collections they hold. And, because inclusion in the treasury could potentially mean millions of dollars of buying pressure, the prices for the two leaders (Milady and Tubby Cats) are going insane.
After Milady successfully won their first battle for the NFT culture wars in this interesting Floor War battle we have seen a big influx of Milady posters. Currently, at a 1.6E floor price, the collection is gaining grassroots traction and we can tell that this collection is going to keep growing, the popularity has attracted developers and other types of personalities and is capturing the momentum in crypto Twitter. Due to the low price of entrance it is still early to get into this community. What other NFT project do you think will fight the floor wars next?
My journey into Urbit!
Cow is not a complete noob when it comes to crypto and coding, but cow never got to look closely into Urbit. Yesterday cow watched a video about Urbit on youtube and it brought tears to her eyes…
Urbit is true to the free thought and cyberpunk spirit that Satoshi first introduced with his white paper, a beautiful and complex solution. I recommend watching the videos and trying it out, unfortunately, the free version is quite slow so Cow is currently waiting for her planet to be set up. Subscribe and follow twitter to follow my journey into Urbit.
Subscribe to the newsletter paid or free to help Cow in her hustle to buy a Milady, yes yes, Cow will try to post at least once a week but probably will post more. Follow Cow on Twitter @0xbluecow and thanks for reading the first issue of Cow’s comfy readings! Bye-bye! see you soon! yes yes! uhum uhum!