The CoinGeek Pulse Episode 56: $600M digital token heist, US Senate approves $1T Infrastructure Bill, Calvin Ayre funds Crime Bounty program

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In what appears to be one of the largest digital currency heists in history, decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Poly Network lost an estimated US$600 million in digital tokens in a hack attack earlier this week.

Poly Network announced the incident on Twitter and posted a letter urging the hacker—who they call “Mr. White Hat”—to return the assets of tens of thousands of its affected users. As of this writing, Poly Network confirmed that “all the remaining user assets on Ethereum (except for the frozen USDT) had been transferred to the multisig wallet controlled by Mr. White Hat and Poly Network team.”

pic.twitter.com/aBRUvanLuL

— Poly Network (@PolyNetwork2) August 12, 2021

After the group’s initial probe, Poly Network tweeted that the hacker exploited a vulnerability between contract calls. The group warned the hackers, “Law enforcement in any country will regard this as a major economic crime and you will be pursued.”

CipherTrace, an anti-money laundering and blockchain intelligence group, reported that the DeFi sector lost $471 million from fraud in the first seven months of this year alone. With this latest hack, it puts the total at over US$1 billion and the number could still grow before the year ends.

The Poly Network incident is not the first cyberheist that shook the industry and the world. In 2018, over $530 million in digital currency were stolen from Coincheck and half a billion dollars in BTC were lost in 2014’s hacking of cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Senate approved its Infrastructure Bill that could potentially tighten future regulation of digital currencies and the industry.

The Senate approved the US$1 trillion Infrastructure Bill last Tuesday after months of negotiations. The bill that aims to rebuild the country’s roads and other infrastructure would require ‘brokers’ in the digital currency industry to report customers’ tax obligations to the government, like how stockbrokers report to the IRS their customers’ sales. Brokers include validators, developers, DeFi lending platforms and more.

This did not sit well with many cryptocurrency advocates. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Square CEO Jack Dorsey warned their followers of the consequences of the new proposals.

On Twitter, they unsuccessfully urged their followers to ask their Senators to back the Wyden-Lummis-Toomey amendment that would exempt a much wider group of miners, validators, and developers from the proposed obligations. However, the Senate rejected the compromise tax amendment, and the bill has now moved to the House of Representatives.

Still in the U.S., the State Department has recently offered rewards for those who can help identify cybercriminals involved in ransomware attacks that plagued the country a few months ago. In a similar move, CoinGeek founder Calvin Ayre is personally funding a new CoinGeek Crime Bounty Program that promises hefty rewards for information that result in convictions for crimes committed in the BSV ecosystem including the series of BSV blockchain attacks recently. The bounty is negotiable depending on how good the tip is. Ayre is expected to give millions in bounties in the years ahead. Individuals with any info that sheds light on the BSV network attacks are urged to submit their info to our contact us page, and don’t forget to select the “Report Crime” topic in the form.

In a more exciting news, the BSV blockchain has set another world record for the largest blocks ever mined on a public blockchain. On August 6, Bitcoin Association confirmed that two 1GB blocks were successfully mined by TAAL Distributed Information Technologies Inc. (CSE:TAAL | FWB:9SQ1 | OTC: TAALF) on the BSV network. The record breaking 1GB block contained over 10,000 transactions, including a significant number of image files by users of MetaID—a blockchain-based identity protocol built on BSV.

This new world record highlights how powerful the BSV blockchain is as the only public blockchain in the world that can handle and process large amounts of data that can be utilized by enterprises and governments for real-world use cases.