Proofanity

What is this? Probably Nothing. Every week we showcase growing trends in web3 and crypto.

With the merge this month we are doing a 2 part special edition! Back to your weekly scheduled programming next week.

What's on the block:

🪙 Binance chain hacked for over $500m👾 Axie-con causes controversy 🍎 Apple to allow NFT purchases ❄️ The biggest crypto hack you missed🤑 Top funding rounds⤴ Why distribution in web3 matters 🛠 A new semi-fungible standard for web3 gaming

Binance gets hacked for $566m  

It sadly seems like a theme that every month a bridge gets compromised. This could have been the third biggest hack in crypto history but Binance asked validators to pause the chain which also brings up questions of decentralisation, not that anyone considered it a decentralised chain anyway. The hacker did manage to get $100m out of the ecosystem before this happened.

How did this happen? I'm going to tap into our CT sleuth CZ here that can summarise it way better than I can.

Probably Nothing?

• This is definitely something, it's one of the largest bridges in crypto.

• The type of attack vector hasn't been confirmed as exclusive to Binance either.

• It's probably going to take a while to patch the COMPUTEHASH and get the chain live again

First Ever Axie-Con

Despite this being slightly old news, I thought it was important to cover. The first ever axie-con took place in Barcelona last month.

Probably Nothing?

• It featured several championships with $1m in AXS in prize money

• While AXS market cap is down nearly 10x from its all-time high (ATH)

Apple takes bite in-app transactions for crypto and NFTs

Apple has approved the selling of NFT's as in-app purchases, the catch is they will be taking the standard 30% cut on any sale. The second kicker is the transactions have to be done in USD. This won't be a problem for applications like Veve which we talked about previously that have already generated over $100m in sales on app stores with this approach. But trading marketplaces like Magic Eden seem less impressed by apple's efforts.

Probably Nothing?

• Gabe Leydon of digidaikus makes a strong point here. What is the cost of acquisition? Paying 30% to get a wallet on over 1 billion devices doesn't seem a bad trade off

• The 30% cut has been a topic of discussion way before the NFT boom. Epic Games still has an ongoing lawsuit with apple since it removed Fortnite from the app store in 2020

Profanity costs $160m

Profanity was a project spun up by GitHub user johguse that allowed you to spin up vanity wallet addresses. To some, this made prettier addresses to use or for developers, the 0's in addresses saved space in contracts.

The problem with this code was the cryptography in generating the private keys was not up to the expected standards. Allowing it to be brute-forced with modern computing.

Probably Nothing?

• Due to this lapse, the hacker was able to brute force the private keys of vanity addresses of private wallets used to control Wintermute's proprietary trading business.

• This didn't just affect Wintermute it also means any wallet that used the generator is also permanently compromised, several smaller hacks we're identified here, totalling around $3.3m

• Profanity has been actively abandoned by its creator for the last couple of years however people still used the service regardless of it never being fully audited

Asset Manager Giant GoldenTree invests $5.2m in Sushiswap

GoldenTree is one of the largest hedge funds in the world managing $47b and it's deployed $5.2m in the $Sushi token a trivial amount for the hedge fund. This comes after a big shake-up in leadership for Sushi over the last couple of months.

Probably Nothing?

• Too early to say if it's a long-term play for hedge funds buying in at an AMM level

• $sushi moved 14% in 24 hours since the announcement

Horizon Raises $40m for NFT tools

Horizon announced it has raised $40m in a Series A round from the likes of Ubisoft and Take-Two Games. Alongside a raft of other founders like Bitkraft, Initialized Capital & Morgan Creek Digital. Horizon describes itself as an all-in-one developer platform and smart wallet that makes building web3 games and applications easy. It does this through its new tool Sequence.

You may not have heard of Horizon before but you've probably heard of one of their games Skyweaver. It was one of the first NFT games to be released to the mass public and to this day probably one of the most fully featured back in 2017.

Probably Nothing?

• Horizon has a take record of understanding web3 and being an early mover although some say that a 3-year headstart hasn't converted to as many users as hoped

• If they can take their learnings to help others deploy faster and adapt web2 games with web3 integrations it could probably be something

Space & Time raises $20m from Microsoft

Space & Time (SxT) is a decentralised data warehouse that uses Chainlinks price oracle to get information about Dapps. Microsoft's M12 led the round with Polygon and Avax also participating.Using Chainlink you can pull data using the APIs provided and then store and sort using SxT data warehouse infrastructure.

Probably Nothing?

• One of the biggest use cases SxT describes is off-chain telemetry. Allowing large data sets to be stored off-chain and then quickly processed and put on chain

• It's one of Microsoft's first investments into web3 infrastructure

• Polygon has a growing presence in Seattle a core Microsoft hub

ERC3525 a new token standard for Gaming

ERC3525 is a combination of ERC20 and ERC721 this allows contracts to create assets that are unique but also fungible. How is this different from ERC1155 though? ERC1155 describes that things that are not exactly the same, must be different. ERC3525 allows things that are not the same can still have similar properties but they are also allowed to have non-critical properties that are different.

Imagine 2 identical head armors in a video game.

• If they were ERC1155's they would need separate NFTs for every asset that gets rolled

• As ERC3525 items could also be bound on equip or soul bound. These items could still be the same asset in a contract but the item's secondary traits could still be randomised

• These items that the same item code and are minted from the same contract, but are different items in a game sense

To break it down further this is that each token allows as a variable.

ERC20 - Value ERC721 - ID ERC1155 - Value + ID ERC3525 - Value + ID + SLOTSLOT = A key attribute. Two NFTs remain fungible if they both share a SLOT. ERC3525 enjoys descriptive features of a non-fungible token (NFT) and the quantitative attributes of a fungible token (like an ERC20 token).You can read more about the EIP here.

this newsletter is probably nothing, but subscribe and send it to a friend... in case it's something.Not financial advice.

Cover photo prompt: profanity in a cyberpunk world, hyper-realistic, neon