Press Releases TheBitTimes.com

Chinese police may have busted Multichain in a money laundering investigation, but many questions remain, including its CEO’s alleged fake ID. On July 14, developers of the $1.5-billion Chinese cross-chain protocol Multichain confirmed users’ worst fears. The protocol’s CEO, identified only as “Zhaojun He,” was arrested by Chinese authorities in Kunming on May 21 after months of repeated denials on official communication channels. Also allegedly arrested was Multichain’s core team, which was operating in Shanghai.  It was never disclosed why Zhaojun had been arrested or what the charges were. However, evidence suggests that Multichain funds may have been seized as part of an anti-money laundering operation in the context of a greater crackdown on crypto by Chinese authorities. In addition, an alleged fake ID used by the CEO to register Multichain’s operations only draws more questions.  Multichain co-founder Alfred Xu assured that the development team was doing “just fine” on May 24...

The Curve emergency DAO removed CRV rewards for alETH, msETH, pETH, crvCRVETH, Arbitrum Tricrypto and multiBTC pools. The Curve Finance lending protocol has terminated governance token rewards for select liquidity pools affected by the July 30 Curve exploit and July 6 Multichain exploit, according to an Aug. 2 social media post from a member of the protocol’s governing body.  The ending of rewards was carried out by the Curve emergency decentralized autonomous organization (Curve E-DAO), a committee made up of select members of the Curve DAO governing body. It affected pools for alETH+ETH, msETH-ETH, pETH-ETH, crvCRVETH, Arbitrum Tricrypto and multibtc3CRV, according to the announcement. The decision can be overridden in the future by a full vote of the Curve DAO. The change was announced by Curve E-DAO member Gabriel Shapiro. ATTENTION, FROM A CURVE E-DAO SIGNER: The @CurveFinance emergency multisig has terminated CRV rewards (gauges) to the liquidity pools affected by recent expl...

The $29 million TVL lending platform is shutting down because its oracles are misreporting Multichain token values after the exploit. Lending protocol Geist Finance is shutting down permanently due to losses from the Multichain exploit, according to a July 14 social media post from the app’s development team. Geist contracts were been paused on July 6, then resumed in “withdraw and repay only” mode on July 9. The latest post confirms the team does not plan to reopen lending and borrowing on Geist. 1/2 After confirmation from Multichain that the funds will not be recovered, we are announcing that Geist will not reopen. Because Chainlink oracles are tracking the value of real USDC, USDT, WBTC or ETH, they are not aware of the real value of Multichain assets. — Geist Finance (@GeistFinance) July 14, 2023 Geist is a lending protocol running on the Fantom network. It had over $29 million worth of crypto assets locked in its contracts before the Multichain hack. Before the hack, Gei...

Attackers of this kind are supposedly "big game hunting” large-scale organizations with deep pockets to extract ”the most money possible” out of these firms. Cryptocurrency scams have fallen a massive 77% from $3.3 billion to $1.1 billion over the first six months of 2023, according to a recent report by blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis. The catch, though, is that ransom attacks are back in trend, with perpetrators pocketing 62.4% more revenue than the first six months of 2022. On July 12, Chainalysis released its Mid Year Crypto Crime report, noting it’s the second consecutive year that scam revenue has trended downwards. The firm observed that historically, scam revenue increases in bull markets — but that hasn’t been the case so far in 2023: “Usually, positive price movements translate to higher scam revenue, likely because increased market exuberance and FOMO make victims more susceptible to scammers’ pitches. But 2023’s drastic scam decline bucks that long-standing ...

Ice phishing is a type of scam that exists only in Web3 and is a “considerable threat” to the crypto community, said the firm. Blockchain Security company CertiK has reminded the crypto community to stay alert over “ice phishing ” Scams — a unique type of phishing scam targeting Web3 users — first identified by Microsoft earlier this year.  In a Dec. 20 analysis report, CertiK described ice phishing scams as an attack that tricks Web3 users into signing permissions which end up allowing a scammer to spend their tokens. This differs from traditional phishing attacks which attempt to access confidential information such as private keys or passwords, such as the fake websites set up which claimed to help FTX investors recover funds lost on the exchange. #CertiKSkynetAlert 1/ Ice phishing is a considerable threat to the Web3 community Instead of gaining accessing to your private key, scammers trick you into signing permissions to spend your assets. We’ll outline below what to look out f...