Layer 1 blockchain company, Aptos Foundation, announced on Oct 18 that it had rewarded its early network participants with free APT tokens. 1/ The Aptos Foundation has provided early network participants with APT tokens. If you are eligible to claim, you will receive an email from [email protected] in the next few hours. — Aptos (@AptosFoundation) October 18, 2022 The foundation shared that it had allocated an estimated 20 million APT tokens, representing 2% of its initial total supply of 1 billion APT, to about 110,235 eligible participants. The airdropped tokens had an estimated value of about $200-$260 million USD based …

Crypto exchange Binance is now the second-largest entity by voting power in the Uniswap DAO, sitting just behind the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, according to the on-chain list of delegates. On Oct. 18, Binance delegated 13.2 million UNI tokens from its own books, which represents 5.9% of the voting power — a percentage of tokens delegated to the exchange. Compared to the total supply of UNI, the amount delegated represents 1.3%. The move will allow Binance to propose governance votes, as it exceeds a threshold of 0.25%, but it's still below the 4% quorum requirement to pass votes. …

The past eighty days have been moderately bearish for cryptocurrencies as the altcoin market capitalization declined by 16%. The downside movement can be partially explained by the U.S. Federal Reserve’s quantitative tightening, rising interest rates and halting of asset purchases. Although they are aimed at curbing inflationary pressure, the policy also increases the borrowing costs for consumers and businesses. Solana's (SOL) downfall has been even more brutal, with the altcoin facing a 29% correction since August. The smart contract network focuses on low fees and speed, but the frequent outages highlight a centralization issue. The latest setback occurred on Sept. …

Reducing the amount of hacking by improving cybersecurity should be considered a top priority for the crypto industry, said Kim Grauer, director of research of blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis. As pointed out by the firm, this year could outpace 2021 in terms of crypto stolen through hacks. The vast majority of these exploits have been targeting the field of decentralized finance. “This can't go on in the industry because people are going to lose faith in investing in DeFi platforms”, Grauer said in an interview with Cointelegraph. Unlike centralized exchanges, which have improved their resiliency to crypto hacks, decentralized protocols …

An attacker has returned just over 93% of the more than $9 million worth of cryptocurrencies they exploited from the Celo (CELO) blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Moola Market. At around 6PM UTC on Oct. 18 the Moola Market team tweeted it was investigating an incident and had paused all activity, adding it had contacted authorities and offered a bug bounty to the exploiter if funds were returned within 24 hours. Analysis of the exploit by Web3 security company Hacken shows the attacker manipulated the price of the protocols’ low-liquidity native MOO token by initially purchasing around $45,000 worth …

Over the past few years, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have introduced a clear paradigm shift in blockchain governance. With their community decision-making and adherence to hardcoded rules, they have challenged the role of hierarchy and central authority that are present in modern organizations, especially as it pertains to business. Ideologically, DAOs have a lot in common with democracies: individuals holding an amount of a DAO’s specific token can allocate those tokens as votes on governance proposals. Once voting has concluded, the final outcome is executed autonomously by smart contracts. In functional democracies, however, citizens elect representatives to legislate laws and …

The $117 million Mango Markets exploiter has defended that their actions were ‘legal,’ but a lawyer suggests that they could still face consequences. Self-described digital art dealer Avraham Eisenberg, outed himself as the exploiter in a series of tweets on Oct. 15 claiming he and a team undertook a “highly profitable trading strategy” and that it was “legal open market actions, using the protocol as designed.” I believe all of our actions were legal open market actions, using the protocol as designed, even if the development team did not fully anticipate all the consequences of setting parameters the way they …

The future of how we socialize online is being defined as we speak, and it’s far too important to leave things to the likes of Meta and other mega social companies. Just a surface-level look at Meta’s history is enough to understand its tendency to severely miss the mark. Some companies like to use Web3 principles to right the wrongs of Web2. And as a poster child for large, centralized organizations, Meta offers us some of the most useful examples of those wrongs. Let’s touch on three times that Meta fell short of building the future of online social experiences. …

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) first appeared in the cryptocurrency industry in 2014, allowing users to trade a wide number of assets peer-to-peer. However, the first iterations of these platforms could be difficult to use. But, since their inception, developers have worked to make them easier and more accessible for users. Decentralized exchanges work by using smart contracts to fulfill orders placed by traders, allowing users to trade directly with each other instead of relying on a centralized platform. Unlike a centralized exchange (CEX), when traders engage with a DEX, their funds are not stored on the exchange. Instead, users initiate trades …

According to data from programming repository GitHub, Polkadot recognized more than 500 contributions each day in September — an all-time high for the multichain protocol. Simultaneously, data from Polkadot's cross-consensus interoperability standard XCM show that a record 26,258 messages were sent between its parachains. In total, 14,930 developers' contributions were recorded on Polkadot's GitHub in the month of August. As told by project developers, 66 blockchains are now live on Polkadot and its parachain startup network Kusama. Since its inception, over 140,000 messages have been exchanged between chains via 135 messaging channels. Together, the Polkadot and Kusama Treasuries have cumulatively …

Solana-based Magic Eden has become the latest NFT marketplace to shift to an optional royalties model, following in the footsteps of X2Y2 in August, albeit reluctantly. Under the optional royalties model, buyers are given the power to set the royalties they want to contribute to an NFT project, meaning there is a chance that some creators may not receive royalties when their artworks are sold. In an Oct. 14 post, the NFT marketplace noted that the decision came after "difficult reflection and discussions with many creators” and came as the “market has been shifting towards optional creator royalties for awhile.” …

Japan’s national police have pinned North Korean hacking group, Lazarus, as the organization behind several years of crypto-related cyber attacks. In the public advisory statement sent out on Oct. 14, Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA) and Financial Services Agency (FSA) sent a warning to the country's crypto-asset businesses, asking them to stay vigilant of “phishing” attacks by the hacking groupaimed at stealing crypto assets. The advisory statement is known as “public attribution,” and according to local reports, is the fifth time in history that the government has issued such a warning. The statement warns that the hacking group uses social …