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2024-04-30

Popular crypto exchanges(2023 Update) 2024-04-30
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According to L2BEAT data, Arbitrum is also the largest layer-2 network in terms of total value as more than $5.7 billion worth of crypto locked in it, representing a 54.4% market share among other rollups. Despite the surge of activity, the total value locked in decentralized finance (defi) protocols has been steadily declining since March 2023. As per DefiLlama, defi protocols currently have around $37.6 billion in liquidity, a level last seen in February 2021. The analyst thinks that the last quarter of 2023 will be an upward quarter. Compare and Find the Best Cryptocurrency Exchange For YOUSource: AerodromeDecentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Velodrome has launched Aerodrome, a new decentralized exchange (DEX) built for Coinbase’s layer 2 blockchain Base.The new DEX promises to allow traders to swap tokens with “minimal slippage” and low fees, while also rewarding users with governance tokens that can be used for voting and at the same time potentially increase in value.On its website, Aerodrome is described as a “next-generation [automated market maker] designed to serve as Base's central liquidity hub, combining a powerful liquidity incentive engine, vote-lock governance model, and friendly user experience.”‘The DeFi era on Base has begun’Announcing the launch of Aerodrome, the team declared in a post on social media platform X that “the DeFi era on [Base] has begun”:Details about how Aerodrome works and the role the DEX’s governance token AERO were also shared in a separate thread on X.To incentivize users of the DEX, Aerodrome will conduct an airdrop of its AERO token to existing users who hold veVELO tokens, or locked Velodrome (VELO) tokens.According to the project, 40% of the AERO supply will be airdropped to veVELO holders.The new DEX will leverage the so-called liquidity flywheel, a feedback loop in DeFi where more users lead to deeper liquidity, which leads to lower slippage, which in turn attracts even more users.According to data from DeFi tracking site DefiLlama, Velodrome has more than $193 million (118 ETH) of total value locked (TVL), while Aerodrome so far has just under $1 million (562 ETH) in TVL.Aerodrome TVL. Source: DefiLlamaPrivacy Breach at Friend.tech: Wallet Addresses and Usernames of 101,000 Users Exposed “It is probably too optimistic to expect that improvements in hardware and software efficiencies will fully offset any long-term changes in AI-related electricity consumption,” de Vries wrote. “These advancements can trigger a rebound effect whereby increasing efficiency leads to increased demand for AI, escalating rather than reducing total resource use.”

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The next day, Wang and Bankman-Friend transferred another tranche of $500 million to wallets supplied by crypto custodian BitGo. These steps ultimately helped the firm save over $1 billion that could have otherwise been lost. Wyatt reflects on the success of games he describes as “pay-to-win” in traditional gaming, such as Diablo Immortals and a variety of mobile card games. “Crypto attracts those categories, but I don’t like that. I don’t think that’s where the interest is best fit.” Cryptocurrency exchange license in SingaporeHere, the mining process starts when miners start mining new blocks quickly with higher computational power. This is similar to the process in PoW. When a new block is found, the system changes to PoS and the newly created block contains only a header and reward address of the miner. Caption: S&P 500 one-day chart for 10-10-2023. Source: MSN Money.

In July, the U.S. Department of Justice charged engineer Shakeeb Ahmed with defrauding an unnamed decentralized exchange and allegedly stealing $9 million in crypto in 2022. In August, RocketSwap—the second-largest decentralized exchange by trading volume on Base—was hacked for around $866,500 after a private key was compromised on their servers. COZ brought non-fungible item technology to the DENVER WALLS festival, which ran from Sep. 22 through Oct. 3. Denver’s River North neighborhood, a district already well known for its vibrant murals and street art scenery, was ground zero for the event, which demonstrated a potential future where blockchain technology can amplify public art experiences. How to Buy Cryptocurrency in South Africa: A Complete ...Ardana’s rise and fallArdana was first announced in the summer of 2021, and by October 2021, it had raised $10 million from venture capital firms CFund, Three Arrows Capital (3AC) and Ascensive Assets. Thanks to its successful fundraise and the prominence of its backers, some investors came to believe that Ardana’s upcoming token, DANA, would deliver outsized market gains.The following month, Ardana announced that it was also partnering with Near Protocol to create an asset bridge between Cardano and Near.However, no Ardana stablecoin platform or bridge was ever launched, and the protocol closed down in November 2022 without a functioning product. The development team stated that the closure was due to “funding and project timeline uncertainty.” The closure happened amid the collapse of FTX, which had made it difficult for many projects to raise funds. One of Ardana’s backers, 3AC, had also gone bankrupt a few months earlier. Given this background, many didn’t question the official story.However, blockchain data and analysis by Xerberus show that Ardana’s failure may have had less to do with a lack of funding and more to do with risky asset management practices by Ardana Labs’ officers. A trail of questionable money Xerberus co-founders Simon Peters and Noah Detwiler told Cointelegraph they identified the Ethereum wallet Ardana Labs used to collect funds from the DANA initial coin offering (ICO) in November 2021. They stated that links to the address were included in the ICO platform Tokensoft’s web pages relating to the token. In addition, they claim to have identified a $1 million transaction from 3AC into this address at a time when 3AC had announced its Ardana investment.According to blockchain data, the first transaction to this account occurred on Sept. 2, 2021, when approximately 0.46 Ether (ETH) ($1,747 at the time) was sent into it. This was approximately two weeks after the Aug. 15 start date for the first round of Ardana fundraising. Beginning on Sept. 15, the account received multiple USD Coin (USDC) transfers that eventually added up to millions of dollars worth of stablecoins.Caption: USDC transfers into alleged Ardana fundraising wallet. Source: Etherscan.Once the funds were raised, they were moved into other wallets through a series of intermediate steps, Xerberus claims.As told by Peters and Detwiler, approximately $3.2 million worth of stablecoins was moved from the fundraiser wallet to a “Target Wallet” through two intermediate addresses. This amount is approximately 30% of the total funds raised. First, the fundraiser account sent the funds to what they refer to as “Proxy Wallet 1.”Diagram of Ardana fund flows. Source: XerberusAfter receiving the funds, Proxy Wallet 1 swapped all of the stablecoins for CVX, a utility token used to receive fees from the Convex Finance platform. Blockchain data shows that decentralized exchange (DEX) SushiSwap was used to make this swap.From there, the funds were sent to what the Xerberus founders claim is an old personal wallet (“Old Address”) of Ardana founder Motovu. According to them, Motovu declared that he made money in the previous bull market of 2017. They found that “between $200,000 and $400,000” was in this wallet before the Ardana ICO, but the bulk of the funds it later held were from Ardana.“When this project went under and when it failed, [Motovu] went onto a live Space and said, ‘A lot of my personal money that I had earned over the previous bull market in 2017’ […] is the money he made out of this old wallet,” Detwiler explained. “It sums up to something around $200,000 to $400,000, nothing more.”Blockchain data shows that approximately four minutes after the CVX tokens were sent to the Old Address, it transferred them to the Target Wallet. It is this wallet that they claim was used to purchase a variety of cryptocurrencies, ultimately causing Ardana’s funds to be lost in bad investments.CeFi exchanges join the trailIn addition to the amount moved on-chain to the Target Wallet, another $4 million was sent through centralized exchanges first, then transferred to the Target Wallet, according to the Xerberus co-founders.They claim to have identified the Kraken, Coinbase and Gate.io deposit addresses used by the Ardana team. To find these, they looked for addresses that received funds from the fundraising wallet and sent funds to a known exchange address. For example, one address in particular received funds from the fundraising wallet and only sent funds to the Coinbase 6 and Coinbase: Miscellaneous wallet addresses.Once funds were sent to a centralized exchange, determining what happened to them became more difficult. However, the team used a variety of techniques to determine with a degree of certainty where the funds went.In some cases, the team was able to identify funds that were sent to Kraken and then immediately sent out to another address, as Kraken often uses the same address to send and receive funds for each user, especially if the time between transactions is short. In other cases, Kraken sent the deposited funds to another of its wallets, making it no longer obvious what the user did with the funds. Deposits sent to Coinbase and Gate.io are always sent to other wallets and pooled with other users’ tokens. So, with transactions involving these exchanges, the team could not determine what happened as easily.However, they analyzed all outgoing transactions made by each exchange within an hour of the fundraising wallet depositing to it. They found that many outgoing transactions were for the exact same amount as the deposits. For example, the fundraising wallet would deposit $220,000 worth of Tether (USDT) to Gate.io. Then, 40 minutes later, the exchange would send exactly $220,000 in USDT out to a different wallet. Ultimately, much of these funds ended up in the Target Wallet, providing what Xerberus sees as solid evidence that the same user made the outgoing transactions.Peters and Detwiler cautioned that this process does not prove with certainty that the transactions were made by Motovu or a member of the Ardana team. “This is not a UTXO [unspent transaction output] trail or a ledger trail. This is not a blockchain exact trail. […] However, the time frames and amounts do correlate with each other,” Detwiler stated. According to them, a total of $4 million was sent to the Target Wallet through these methods, bringing the total amount of funds sent into it to $7.2 million.Some funds remain, while some were spent on developmentResearch conducted by the Xerberus team shows that approximately $1.82 million worth of Ardana’s funds were spent on development costs associated with the project, including team member’s salaries. They contacted a person they referred to as “the main contractor for the project,” who gave Xerberus their wallet address. This address showed payments totaling $1.82 million, which is approximately 20% of the funds raised.In addition, they claim that approximately $1.4 million worth of USDC has not been lost and still remains in the possession of the project in a wallet they refer to as the “Treasure Chest” account. This account’s first transaction was an incoming transfer of 0.3 ETH, worth $562.29 at the time, which was sent to it from the Target Wallet.Related: Multichain victims search for answers in $1.5B exploit as new evidence emergesNearly $4 million lost in bad tradesAccording to Xerberus’ Sept. 6 report on Ardana, nearly $4 million of the Target Wallet’s token balance was lost through bad trades. The wallet owner transferred most of the funds to two Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe) multisignature accounts. These funds were used to make trades on DEXs PancakeSwap, Uniswap, SushiSwap and GMX, resulting in near-total losses. The Target Wallet also made its own losing trades.Blockchain data shows that the Target Wallet made over 1,000 transactions, most of which were interactions with DEX contracts.Transactions of the account identified as “target wallet” by Xerberus. Source: Etherscan.Ardana’s liquidation and closureXerberus claims that the on-chain behavior of the Ardana team began to change in March 2022, when the team’s wallets began “dumping” their assets onto DEXs. They continued to sell all remaining assets until November 2022, at which point the project officially announced it was closing. The funds obtained from these sales still remain in the treasury wallet.The firm says it created an early warning system that can help alert investors when a project is engaging in risky behavior that may lead to a closure. Xerberus calls this “Blockchain Native Risk Ratings based on verifiable mathematics,” and it says investigations like the Ardana one are used to “fine-tune” its risk model, which it expects to “transform crypto markets, making them the safe alternative to traditional financial markets.”Cointelegraph attempted to contact Ardana’s Motovu through LinkedIn, hoping to receive his side of the story. A reply was not received within the two weeks leading up to publication.Many Ardana investors were firm believers in the Cardano ecosystem. They expected Ardana to be the project that would finally get Cardano the attention they felt it deserved. Instead, over $10 million in capital was sucked out of the Cardano community, with virtually nothing left to show for it in the end.The Ardana story is a sober reminder of the risks of investing in new Web3 startups with no functioning product. Although these projects can lead to outsized gains, they can also lead to catastrophic losses. Investors may want to take a close look at a project’s on-chain behavior when considering whether to invest in these types of projects.Cointelegraph editor Zhiyuan Sun contributed to this story. Related: Binance’s indecision to freeze wallets drew controversy in this $11M rug pull Lil’ Pudgys are baby penguins with a variety of different outfits. When 3AC owned these particular NFTs, it never claimed them.

Likewise, Binance now views BNB as the token for a larger ecosystem, encompassing the Binance Chain and BSC, resulting from the token’s rise on BSC. The crypto titan is making this step as part of its aim to expand outside Binance. This means that a computation system will be able to derive knowledge from encrypted data without ever revealing what the information inside is. Although there are similarities between confidential computing and zero-knowledge proofs, Fan notes that there are differences. Crypto For Kids: What You Need to Know“[The Speaker’s race] paralyzes the House on nearly every front legislatively,” said the Blockchain Association director of government relations Ron Hammond in an Oct. 10 X thread. “If it drags out over another week then a lot of things can happen including potential new speaker candidates coming forward. For crypto though, McHenry is still the person to watch. He wants votes on crypto ASAP.” Both Binance and FTX entities have been under SEC investigation for alleged violations of federal securities laws.

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