Pink Drainer, a group known for stealing crypto, fell victim to an address poisoning scam last week and lost 10 ETH.
Messi and Ronaldinho endorsed "Water" on Solana, sparking skepticism due to their past involvement with crypto scams.
Compound Finance and other protocols had their websites hacked by a phishing scam.
After three weeks of constant selling, Germany finally depleted nearly 50,000 seized Bitcoin reserves.
The US spot Bitcoin ETF market received $310 million on 12 July, led by BlackRock and Fidelity.
Last week saw its usual share of interesting events, ranging from the usual memecoin drama, hacks and scams on both web2 and web3 infrastructure, and the typical whale movement.
The last seven days in crypto have seen Germany, once one of the biggest governmental Bitcoin holders, sell off its entire stash.
We saw one of the most notorious wallet drainers get hit by another scammer and a notable comeback in the Bitcoin ETF market.
Here are some of the most interesting events in crypto from the past week:
One of last week's most interesting events is the news of the notorious Pink Drainer falling victim to a scam.
Pink Drainer is known for being one of the most prominent wallet-draining groups.
According to this Dune Analytics dashboard, 21,131 people fell victim to a series of scams from Pink Drainer, worth over $85 million in stolen funds, before the service's retirement in May this year.
The Pink Drainer hacks
Last week, however, MistTrack, a crypto compliance platform, announced that the wallet drainer lost around 10 ETH to an address-poisoning scam.
MistTrack noted that the scammers managed to trick Pink Drainer into sending funds to a wallet address that was almost identical to Pink Drainer’s previous wallet.
This is highly ironic, given Pink Drainer's notorious reputation for assisting scammers in stealing funds from crypto owners.
Last week, two football/soccer legends, Lionel Messi and Ronaldinho, took things to Instagram and endorsed a new Solana-based memecoin called "Water".
These moves from both athletes sparked a massive wave of speculation within the crypto community, considering their history with crypto scams within the last five years.
Lionel Messi was the first to endorse the memecoin on 8 July after sharing an Instagram story with the Water mascot in it.
The post also included a link to the Water Instagram page, causing the price of the memecoin to jump from $0.00032 to $0.00146 in less than two hours—a staggering 356% increase.
Soon after this, Ronaldinho showed up with his own post, causing another spike in the cryptocurrency's price.
Other athletes like Luiz Suarez have also jumped on the Water Train, leading to speculation about Messi and Ronaldinho’s history of scam memecoin involvement.
While some see Water as a legitimate project, others are skeptical, considering that over 30% of the WATER token holdings are controlled by insiders.
Last week, the frontend website of Defi protocol, Compound Finance, got hit with a massive phishing scam.
Last week, on 11 July, the defi protocol's domain was hijacked, and it began directing users to a phishing site designed to drain wallets.
This hack was first reported by independent investigator Zach XBT in a telegram post.
The compound finance hack
However, despite the website hack, only users who connected their wallets and interacted with the scam page were at risk.
No smart contracts were directly affected.
The same thing happened to Celer Finance as well, and 0xngmi, a developer at DefiLlama, speculated that the issue might have been from Squarespace.
This domain registrar hosted over a hundred protocols, including PolyMarket, LooksRare, dYdX, Satoshi and Pendle Finance.
According to insights from Arkham Intelligence, the German government finally depleted its stack of nearly 50,000 Bitcoin after three weeks of constant selling last week.
The German government started selling its Bitcoin holdings in June of this year after seizing them from the movie piracy website Movie2k operators.
Within three weeks, at the rate of around $1 billion in sell-offs per week, the German government sold it all, including one instance in which they sold a staggering 16,000 BTC in a single day.
Bitcoin suffered through the sell-off, falling by nearly 13% to a low of $53,000 during the week.
However, the storm has now passed, and Germany has no further influence on the price of Bitcoin—save for other massive Bitcoin liquidators like Mt Gox and Gemini.
The spot Bitcoin ETFs in the US recorded their highest intra-day inflows last week after more than a week of constant reds.
This inflow day happened on 12 July and saw the market take in a combined inflow of $310 million.
Along with marking the highest intra-day inflows for the week, 12 July also saw the highest inflows since 5 June.
We saw BlackRock's IBIT take charge with $120 million in inflows, followed by Fidelity's FBTC with $115.1 million.
Other top gainers included the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF with $28.4 million and even Grayscale's Bitcoin ETF, which saw a rare day of green with around $23 million in inflows.
Disclaimer: Voice of Crypto aims to deliver accurate and up-to-date information but will not be responsible for any missing facts or inaccurate information. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile financial assets, so research and make your own financial decisions.