a $150m decentralised hack 🥴

Magic ETHen's beta, Nomad down bad, a case of 1984

Author

Lili (QueenBao)
August 03, 2022

GM Baos.

Today is a sizzlin' news day. Queue one of the craziest decentralised hacks crypto has ever seen, followed by another one that is still a mystery :c

Today we cover:

  • Magic ETHen teases launch

  • Nomad’s treasury is drained

  • 1984 got done

The new marketplace on the block

Magic Eden is launching Ethereum NFTs!

They begin their multi-chain conquest with the project EZU, a profile picture project by Psychedelics Anonymous. It will be the first ever project thats cross-chain mintable with ETH and SOL.

Magic Ethen (😆) will begin rolling out features for ETH NFTs this month. Early testing will include cross-currency trading tests enabling NFT purchases with SOL, ETH or credit cards.

They’ll then release their own launchpad (projects can mint on Magic Ethen), allowlist tool, and a drop calendar for notable NFT launches.

I can’t take this name seriously right now but it’ll grow on me I think. I am definitely excited about this launch though 😆

You can join ME’s Discord to get a chance at testing their private beta!

Nomad is down $150M in the most frenzied hack ever

Yikes.

You would expect a hack of this scale to be executed in a calculated and precise manner, but this was a chaotic mess over the course of an hour.

It begins with bitliq.eth, bridging 0.01 WBTC on Moonbeam and receiving 100 WBTC back on Ethereum (aka bitliq.eth paid $300 worth of bitcoin for ~$3m 😅).

Here’s what happened

  • Nomad pushed an update for its smart contracts that made it easy for users to spoof transactions

  • Users could send funds from one blockchain to another without Nomad checking the amount

  • Users could withdraw funds that didn’t belong to them ☠️

  • Any unsophisticated attacker could exploit this by changing the address of the recipient and similarly withdraw 100BTC

  • Around 41 unique addresses participated over the course of an hour until Nomad’s total value locked reached as low as $4k

This is insane 🤯 A professional attacker would have been able forge a message and drain Nomad’s treasury in a single transaction per asset. Check @samczsun’s tweet, head of security at Paradigm, for a more technical breakdown.

It’s truly unfortunate this happened only days after Nomad publicised its $22 million seed round…

1984 Team Breakup

Sit down Baos, we have some tea for y’all.

1984 is a pre-launch NFT project that's made a name for themselves with their colourful art on billboards.

Their founding team included Conde.eth and Alex Lin with Hichamhabchi as their main artist - carving the identity of 1984.

It's an unfortunate situation where founders can't see eye-to-eye, artists that want more involvement get denied, the whole story gets publicized on Twitter, and the NFT project that had good merit blows up (sounds like à la Weather Report right?) ☠️

Who kicked it off? 1984 went in for that first punch. 👊🏼

Alex came and smashed anything that came his way with his side of the story and how the leading artist was removed from the project.

But LITTLE did we (and Conde.eth 👀) know that there were going to be some wild cards that came into this. The leading artist, supporting artists, the smart contract developers, the community manager were validating the experience and/or resigning from project 1984.

Let this be a lesson learned in Web3:

  1. Conflict resolution is a great soft skill

  2. Reactionary actions don’t belong in business

  3. Negotiations take time, compromise is key

Is this the end of 1984?

Bao-sized news

Things that made my abs grow ever so stronger

We have KangarWu to thank for this section's new title 😉

We all know there’s at least one person in your Web3 group… If there isn’t anyone, it’s you.

The real winner when there's a lottery, gg IRS. 

Work by Asian Creators

Happy hump day, keep chugging along Baos 🥟

–Lili