Quick Take

• Hacker steals 88 ETH in a mint scam targeting members of the CreatureToadz NFT Discord channel.

• Andrew Yang reveals a 1-of-1 NFT drop for his Forward Party campaign.

• Animoca Brands raises $65 million in new funding at a $2.2 billion valuation.

• WalletConnect releases WalletConnect Cloud, a new portal for developers to register APIs.

Listen to Podcast

Ethereum Hits $4k Amid Bitcoin All-Time-High

Ethereum has surpassed the $4,000 mark as Bitcoin jumped past its all time high of $64,800. The total cryptocurrency market cap is now more than $2.6 trillion. Ethereum is currently $4,126 at the time of this recording, just a couple hundred dollars less from it's all time high of $4,350 reached in May. The bull run is likely due to the release of Bitcoin’s first ever futures exchange-traded earlier this month.

Hacker Steals 87Ξ From NFT Discords

An attacker stole more than $300k worth of Ethereum from members of the CreatureToadz NFT Discord channel. The attacker eventually returned the funds after he was identified on Twitter. The attacker took control of the CreatureToadz Discord channel through the use of webhooks. He then posted false announcements about an NFT drop, which lured users onto a scam website.

Users were told they could mint their NFT, however, the website scammed victims out of their ETH. Instead of calling a mint function, users were tricked into signing a transaction that would send ETH to the attacker. Many users fell for the attack as they were anticipating a mint drop from CreatureToadz just one day later.

After discovering that he had been identified, the attacker transferred all the funds back to the creator of CreatureToadz, claiming that he executed the attack because he was bored and planned to return the funds in the first place. The attack follows similar hacks on other Discord channels including NBA Topshot NFTs.

Andrew Yang Reveals Forward Campaign NFT 

Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang has revealed the drop of a 1-of-1 NFT for his Forward Party campaign. The ethereum-based NFT is currently listed on NFT marketplace Zora and will be open for bidding until October 21st. All proceeds from the sale will be donated to the Forward Party, an alternative political party to the current Democratic vs. Republican duopoly.

In an interview with the Bankless podcast, Yang said he wants to make the case to legislators that crypto communities are a force for progress and innovation and a massive provider of jobs. He added on to say that he wants to make the Forward Party the ‘crypto party’ because he feels the two are strongly aligned. The forward party NFT currently holds a bid for 3 ETH at the time of this recording.

Animoca Brands Raises $65M

Animoca Brands has raised a new $65 million funding round at a valuation of $2.2 billion, a doubling from its $1 billion valuation during its last raise in July. The round included participation from Ubisoft, the game publisher behind Assassin’s Creed and Just Dance.

Animoca will work with Ubisoft on future NFT-centric projects. Interest in blockchain-based games has skyrocketed after Ethereum-based Axie Infinity generated over $2 billion worth of NFT trading volume in recent months. Animoca Brands is a Hong Kong based game publisher behind upcoming metaverse game The Sandbox.

WalletConnect Releases WalletConnect Cloud

WalletConnect has released WalletConnect Cloud, a new portal for developers to register APIs, view developer dashboards, and manage keys for their dapps. WalletConnect is a web3 standard for connecting blockchain wallets to decentralized applications.

The protocol enables developers to run on self-hosted infrastructure. It’s recent upgrade to v2.0 introduced the use of Waku decentralized messaging, enabling messages to be relayed between self-hosted and cloud-hosted servers. WalletConnect will eventually drop support for its v1.0 infrastructure six months after the.new version has been adopted by the majority of developers.

It’s Swift and Kotlin SDKs will be ready for alpha releases in the coming weeks, enabling support on both iOS and Android. The project also changed their domain from .org to walletconnect.com as part of a website refresh.