Quick Take
Lending protocol Cream Finance suffered a flash loan attack, losing 462m AMP and 2,804 ETH.
Arbitrum, a layer 2 scaling solution by Offchain Labs, has officially launched on mainnet.
Larva Labs, the company behind CryptoPunks, signed a licensing deal with United Talent Agency.
Loot Project text-only NFTs hit a floor price of 6.7 ETH.
Cream Finance Exploited For $30 Million
DeFi lending protocol Cream Finance has been hacked of roughly $30m in a flash loan attack. Cream Finance posted the announcement on Twitter, saying the hack occurred on Tuesday, August 31st at noon UTC. The protocol was exploited for 462,079,976 AMP tokens and 2,804.96 ETH tokens. According to the company, the root cause of the incident was lending of AMP tokens.
AMP token contracts allowed for a reentrancy attack, the same type of exploit used in the 2016 DAO hack. The project claims they will replace the stolen tokens by committing to allocating 20% of all protocol fees toward repayment until the debt is fully paid. Sadly, this is not the first hack experienced by the project. Cream Finance lost $37m in an attack earlier this year.
Arbitrum Layer 2 Solution Launches on Mainnet
Arbitrum, a layer 2 scaling solution by Offchain Labs, has officially launched on mainnet. The application is now open for public use and is live on Uniswap V3, Sushiswap, and Balancer. Arbitrum uses Optimistic Rollups to process transactions and then settles them in batches to the main Ethereum network.
The application is starting out with a set speed limit of 80,000 arbgas per second, which is roughly equivalent to the current capacity of mainnet Ethereum. The speed limit will be increased over time as the system stabilizes. Transactions on Arbitrum are significantly cheaper than Ethereum L1, but can still reach L1 fee levels if the network is congested and capacity is reached.
Arbitrum says that although it’s live on mainnet, the application is still in a beta and recommends that fast bridging solutions limit their liquidity until full decentralization is achieved. The company claims they have the ability to and may indeed pause the network amid a potential security incident. Like all Optimistic Rollups, withdrawals on Arbitrum will take roughly 7 days to be confirmed, which the project says works to their advantage in the event of a hack.
The company has since announced a $1 million bug bounty program managed by Immunefi and a $120 million Series B funding round that included Pantera, Polychain, and Mark Cuban among others. Offchain Labs has raised a total $124 million across three funding rounds, with the latest round valuing the company at $1.2 billion. Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, says they intend to use the funding to build out the team.
CryptoPunks Signs Licensing Deal
Larva Labs, the company behind CryptoPunks, has signed an exclusive deal with one of Hollywood’s top four major talent agencies. United Talent Agency (or UTA) will represent CryptoPunks across film, TV, video games, publishing, and licensing. Meebits and Autoglyphs, two other crypto-art projects by Larva Labs were also included in the deal.
UTA has a dedicated team to represent the new form of IP. The talent agency launched a division dedicated to digital assets in March. It marks one of the first opportunities for a crypto-based IP to enter the mainstream entertainment space.
UTA also announced in August it would represent social token platform Rally.
Larva Labs launched CryptoPunks in 2017, which were originally given out for free. The company later launched Autoglyphs in 2019, and Meebits earlier this year. The CryptoPunks collection is currently valued at more than $3 billion.
Loot Project NFTs Go Live
Loot Project NFTs hit a new all time high floor price of 6.7 ETH. The text-only NFTs show a randomized set of adventure words on a black canvas. Images and functionality are intentionally omitted from the NFT to enable holders to decide what to do with them.
The Loot Project was created by Dom Hofmann and was publicly released via Twitter on August 27th. Loop NFTs were given out for free and could only be minted directly from the smart contract on Etherscan. The idea behind Loot is value creation through a bottom-up approach, leaving it up to the holders to decide what to build.
Since the release of Loot, the Loot community has created AI-generated pixel art, loot characters, and rarity tools. Dom Hofmann is more widely known for being the co-founder of social media app Vine. He is also the creator of other NTF projects including Blitmap, Sugar The Game, and Superdrive.
MetaMask Surpasses 10 Million Users
MetaMask now has more than 10 million monthly active users, making it the world’s largest non-custodial wallet. The wallet provider has grown by nearly 20 fold over the past year, with just over half a million active users in July 2020 to more than 10 million today.
MetaMask was first launched in 2016 as a browser wallet for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain. The launch of the mobile version in September 2020 led to a rapid growth in new users from emerging markets. MetaMask later launched mobile token swaps in March 2021. Today, MetaMask enables users to interact with nearly 17,000 unique Web3 domains and supports any Ethereum-compatible network including Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. MetaMask is hosting a celebratory party in Decentraland on September 2nd.