This week in crypto we’ve seen Solana wallets hacked, a football club accepting Bitcoin payments, Craig Wright ‘winning’ a legal case, a class action lawsuit against exchanges, and more. But which stories were the cherries on the crypto cake? Let’s find out…
No. 3 – Tiffany to Make Cryptopunk Pendants
After its Executive Vice President of Product and Communications, Alexandre Arnault, displayed one on Twitter in April, jewellery maker Tiffany & Co. this week offered Cryptopunk NFT holders the chance to get their punk immortalised as a physical pendant.
Cryptopunk holders will need to buy an NFTiff for 30 ETH, which will trigger the creation of a physical version of their punk, with at least 30 gemstones/diamonds used to create the custom designs, including sapphires, amethyst and spinel. Buyers of an NFTiff will also receive an NFT digital artwork that resembles the final pendant design.
Only 250 NFTiff passes will be available for purchase and each customer can order a maximum of three NFTiffs.
No. 2 – Craig Wright Wins £1 in Peter McCormack Libel Case
Bitcoin non-creator Craig Wright was awarded just £1 by a judge this week in his ‘victory’ over Peter McCormack for a libel case dating back to 2019. Wright was found to have submitted a “deliberately false case and evidence” after pretending he had been disinvited to academic conferences on the back of a series of defamatory tweets by McCormack, when in fact he had been rejected based on the atrocious quality of the papers he submitted to speak at them – many of which were rejected before the first tweets.
Justice Chamberlain castigated Wright for relying on a lie for the length of the case, and suggested that Wright will be open to footing the bill for most, if not all, of the costs, as well as
facing a potential perjury charge from McCormack.
No.1 – Slope Wallet Hack Sees $4 Million Stolen
This week’s top story is the hack on the Solana network, with some 8,000 wallets on the network compromised and SOL, USDC (in the form of SLP tokens) and other shitcoins stolen, to the value of some $4million.
It was soon revealed that the common denominator was Slope Wallet, a mobile wallet on the Solana network, and suggestions soon emerged that Slope hadn’t handled user data particularly well. This was proved correct on Thursday when it was revealed that Slope’s mobile app sent wallet seed phrases to their centralised Sentry server via TLS, where they were kept in plain, unencrypted text.
This cardinal sin meant that a hacker could just reach in and grab the seed phrases, which they did, although only 15% of the wallets were hacked in this manner. The vector of attack for the other 75% is still being investigated at the time of writing.
Honourable Mentions
Other cakes from the crypto bakery worth tasting this week include:
- BSV holders are launching a class action lawsuit for £9.9 billion against a number of exchanges that delisted the coin in 2019
- Coinflex has halved its workforce as it prepares to battle Roger Ver to reclaim $84 million it says it is owed
- Oxford City football team is accepting Bitcoin payments through a contactless Lightning Network card starting this weekend
We’ll be back next week for another review of the week’s top crypto news.
