Last week, we saw massive crashes on Bitcoin and the rest of the market, especially with Mt Gox and the German government's selling.
The crypto space witnessed over 20 hacks in June, with the Ethereum Foundation itself being targeted by a phishing scam.
The OpenTensor Foundation was forced to shut down the Bittensor network after a hack led to $8 million in stolen tokens.
Tron founder Justin Sun boldly offered to buy the German government's entire Bitcoin holdings to "minimize market impact".
A massive $2.7 billion Bitcoin transfer from Mt. Gox sparked a mid-week crash, taking Bitcoin down by up to 10% to the $54,000 zone.
Last week was a rollercoaster for crypto in every sense of the word.
We had a series of crashes on Bitcoin and the rest of the market, brought on by selling from Germany and a certain large-scale Bitcoin movement from Mt Gox, worth a staggering $2.71 billion.
A certain tech founder even made a bold offer to the German government to buy its entire stack of nearly $2.5 billion worth of Bitcoin during the week.
We had a report from PeckShield, which showed that June alone saw more than 20 brutal hacks, along with another exploit on the Ethereum Foundation itself, in which scam emails were sent to tens of thousands of subscribers.
Here are some of the most interesting stories in crypto from the past week:
According to recent insights from PeckShield alerts, June 2024 alone saw hacks that drained the market of around $176.2 million.
PeckShield Alerts reported that these hacks came from over 20 hacks on both DeFi and CeFi platforms during the month.
However, despite this amount of money stolen and the higher frequency of hacks, the previous month (May) saw the industry’s bad actors bag a staggering $385 million from thefts.
This makes June’s attacks more frequent, but around 54.2% lower than the previous month, in terms of amount lost.
Some of June’s most notable hacks included the BtcTurk and Lykke exchanges, with only $1.3 million recovered from the $176.2 million total.
According to a blog update from the Ethereum Foundation this week, hackers gained access to its “update” email account ([email protected] ) on 23 June.
The hackers used this account to promote a phishing scam, sending a staggering 35,794 emails to subscribers worldwide.
This comes amid the growing state of hacks on several celebrities and entities, particularly in the second quarter of the year.
These emails sent claimed that the Ethereum Foundation was partnering with the Lido DAO to offer users an impressive 6.8% APY on their staked Ether (stETH), Wrapped Ether (WETH), or Ether (ETH) deposits.
The scam emails
The scam emails went further to claim that staking would be "Protected and Verified by The Ethereum Foundation" and came with a "Begin Staking" button that led users to a wallet drainer designed to look like a "Staking Launchpad."
The fake launchpad
Fortunately, no victims have come forward, and the Ethereum Foundation has blocked the attacker from sending more emails.
During the week, the Openτensor Foundaτion reported that Bittensor got hit with a massive hack at 7:06 P.M. UTC on 2 July.
This hack saw hackers steal around $8 million worth of $TAO tokens (or 32,000 $TAO at the time of the hack), forcing the network to shut down between 2 July and 3 July.
According to details from Const, a BitTensor developer, the hacker(s) carried out the attack with a leaked private key that allowed them to drain these assets from users' wallets.
Twenty-five minutes after the hack started, the abnormal transfer volume triggered alerts all over the network. Validators were put behind a firewall, and safe mode was activated to stem the hack, which lasted until around 7:41 P.M. UTC.
Around 35 minutes all through.
TAO crashed by around 15% after the hack, hitting $227—its lowest point in the last six months.
In response, the OpenTensor Foundation (OTF) plans to burn around 10% of the TAO supply.
Last week, we saw a bold move from Tron founder Justin Sun.
After weeks of endless selling by the German government, Sun offered to buy the entire stack of German Bitcoin holdings, worth over $2.3 billion, to "minimize the market impact."
Keep in mind that the German government, labelled as “German Government (BKA),” on Arkham has been selling Bitcoin relentlessly since June, when it first transferred 6,500 BTC (worth over $425 million) on 19 June 19.
Even before this, the German government held around 50,000 Bitcoins since seizing them from the operators of Movie2k, a movie piracy website.
In a post to his 3.5 million followers on Twitter, Sun said:
“I am willing to negotiate with the German government to purchase all BTC off-market in order to minimize the impact on the market.”
Even though Arkham’s profile on Justin Sun shows that he only holds around $1 billion worth of crypto.
One major reason for the mid-week crash might have been a large-scale Bitcoin transfer from Mt Gox, the crashed Japanese crypto exchange.
According to reports, Mt Gox transferred a staggering 47,229 Bitcoin, worth around $2.71 billion at the time of the transfer, to a new unidentified wallet.
This transaction happened on 5 July, marking the exchange’s first major Bitcoin move since May.
Data from Arkham shows that the Bitcoin was moved from “cold storage,” which means that this Bitcoin had been dormant for quite a while.
Which also explains the crash that followed.
By the end of the week, Bitcoin had crashed by around 10% from over $61,000 to the $54,000 zone, in line with Mt Gox’s plan to repay its creditors upwards of $9 billion worth of Bitcoin.
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