Brian Newar
The funds from Harmony’s Horizon Bridge have begun to move into the Tornado Cash Ethererum mixer, signaling that the attacker has no intention of accepting the $1 million bounty offered.
The decision to obfuscate the ill-gotten gains answers questions about whether the Harmony team’s offer of just 1% of the $100 million in crypto funds stolen on Friday would be enough to convince the exploiter to return them.
A total of 18,036.3 Ether (ETH), worth about $21 million, was moved out of the Horizon Bridge exploiter’s primary wallet at 03:10 am EST on Tuesday. These funds were then divided equally three ways and sent to three different addresses in single transactions, respectively, over the next 10 hours.
Tornado Cash supports mixing a maximum of 100 ETH at a time, which means large sums can easily take several hours to mix. Mixing ETH is a privacy measure designed to obfuscate the transaction path of coins so they cannot be traced back to previous transactions.
The first and second wallets that received ETH from the exploiter’s primary wallet have completed mixing the coins and are now left with about 16.3 ETH collectively, an amount likely too small to bother with.
The third wallet was busy sending batches of 100 ETH to Tornado in eight-minute intervals and still had 2,800 coins remaining as of the time of writing.
Cointelegraph has not received a reply from the Harmony team on what it plans to do to replace the stolen funds in the bridge.
The project’s Twitter account reaffirmed on Monday that the team was working with “two highly reputable blockchain tracing and analysis partners,” along with the United State Federal Bureau of Investigation, to investigate the hack.
About $80 million in ETH is still in the explorer’s primary wallet. They could possibly return a portion of the stolen funds to Horizon, or they may be taking a break as it has taken the exploiter over 13 hours to mix just $21 million.
Although the initial haul was valued at about $100 million at the time, positive ETH price fluctuations have increased the dollar value to $101.5 million.
Stephen Tse, founder of Harmony, confirmed on Saturday that the exploiter took control of the required two Horizon Bridge signees for the multisignature address used to secure funds. He noted that the Ethereum side of the bridge affected by the exploit was moved to a more secure multisig wallet that required four signees.
Horizon is the latest in a growing list of token bridges that have been attacked. The largest token bridge to be hacked was Poly Network in 2021, which lost $610 million that was almost entirely returned.
In total, over $1 billion has been extracted from the Meter, Wormhole, Ronin and now Horizon token bridges through nefarious means in 2022 so far.
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Brian Quarmby
Members of the crypto community on Twitter have been left bewildered by the beleaguered Celsius Network continuing to pay weekly rewards despite pausing withdrawals two weeks ago.
As previously reported, crypto lending platform Celsius paused withdrawals on June 13 after citing extreme market conditions amid the current bear market. Reports soon followed that the firm was undergoing liquidity issues and may be heading toward insolvency, potentially putting users’ funds at risk.
Figures such as Simon Dixon, Bitcoin (BTC) OG and CEO and co-founder of online investment platform BnkToTheFuture, tweeted his bewilderment to his 59,300 followers on Monday over receiving nearly $4,000 worth of crypto rewards but being unable to withdraw them.
Upon searching “Celsius still paying” on Twitter, there are countless users raising questions over the lending platform, with some such as CryptoStylesUSA calling it “insulting” that Celsius continues to pay weekly rewards while keeping their “crypto hostage.”
According to Celsius’ website — which is currently undergoing revamp due to the liquidity issues — the company is still advertising annual percentage yields (APYs) of up to 18.63% on crypto deposits, which many have argued is unsustainable.
Synthetix (SNX), the native token from the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Synthetix, is the only asset this promotion offers at the time of writing. The top tier stablecoins on Celsius have roughly a 9% APY listed, while Polkadot (DOT) and Polygon (MATIC) have offered APYs as high as 11.87% and 9.52% apiece.
Celsius also appears to be still offering 10% rewards on first deposits up to $250,000, despite currently not allowing users to withdraw from the platform.
While it is still uncertain what the exact fate of funds belonging to Celsius users will be, the firm reportedly onboarded advisers from a management consulting firm in advance of the company possibly facing bankruptcy. Celsius also hired lawyers on June 14 to help restructure the company amid its financial woes.
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Sam Bourgi
Shares of Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN) have been downgraded by analysts at Goldman Sachs after plunging cryptocurrency prices affected the exchange’s underlying business, underscoring the challenges posed by the bear market.
The reason for the downgrade stems from the “continued downdraft in crypto prices,” Goldman analyst William Nance said in a note that was obtained by Bloomberg. The analyst said Coinbase “will need to make substantial reductions in its cost base in order to stem the resulting cash burn as retail trading activity dries up.”
According to Bloomberg, Coinbase still has 20 buy recommendations, 6 holds and 5 sell ratings as of June 27. Stocks with a buy rating are on analysts’ recommended list. Stocks with hold ratings are expected to perform roughly on par with the broader market and sell recommendations are calls to liquidate an asset.
Coinbase began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange in April 2021 and quickly exceeded its pre-listing reference price, eventually reaching $381. At those price levels, COIN had a fully diluted market capitalization of nearly $100 billion. However, since November, COIN has been on a downward spiral, plunging 84% to less than $58 a share. The stock was down 8% on Monday, dragging its market cap below $15 billion.
The selloff in Coinbase stock has occurred in lockstep with plunging crypto prices. Since peaking at around $69,000 in November 2021, Bitcoin (BTC) is down almost 70%.
In addition to its collapsing share price, Coinbase has been forced to lay off around a fifth of its staff and has even gone as far as rescinding job offers. CEO Brian Armstrong said the likelihood of recession could prolong the so-called “crypto winter” and lead to an extended period of adverse market conditions.
As Cointelegraph reported, credit rating agency Moody’s recently downgraded Coinbase’s Corporating Family Rating to Ba3 from Ba2. As Moody’s noted, Coinbase’s revenue model is tied to trading volumes, which have dried up in recent months due to the mass exodus of retail traders.
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This Daily Dose was brought to you by Cointelegraph.
