WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - June 29

Welcome back to this week's edition of our WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter!

The reason BTC is bouncing

Mt. Gox, a major Bitcoin exchange that went bankrupt after a massive hack in 2014, is finally repaying its customers starting in July 2024. They could distribute up to 140,000 BTC, worth nearly $9 billion. This has some Bitcoin investors worried that the higher supply of coins might lower Bitcoin's price. The repayment includes BTC and Bitcoin Cash, due to the hardfork in 2017. Despite the market impact fears, many of the investors may have moved on so there may not be a massive selloff. On Friday, a significant amount of BTC and ETH options trades expired so that’s helping feed the bullishness.

Learn more here.

Solana ZK compression controversy

Solana's new scaling method, ZK Compression, lowers on-chain costs by using zero-knowledge proofs to minimize data storage. It promises huge savings but has sparked controversy; some Ethereum fans argue it goes against Solana’s anti-layer 2 stance, but Solana supporters praise it for solving storage cost issues without traditional Layer 2 drawbacks such as external sequencers and bridging between chains.

Learn more here.

Auditing company Certik faces backlash

Following up from last week’s news about Certik and Kraken, more projects are coming out claiming that Certik’s audits are not top quality. Despite receiving more than $140 million in venture capital funding, and audited more than 5000 smart contracts, a few projects that were audited by them have been hacked anyway. Not to mention, possible front-running. This is a good reminder that when you’re DYORing (doing your own research), projects that have been audited by more than one auditing firm are probably safer than those audited by just one.

Learn more here.

Solana winks at us… or something

Solana has introduced "Blinks" and "Actions," two new features allowing users to trade crypto without needing to be on the blockchain, such as through websites, social media and QR codes. With "Blinks," users can send crypto as easily as sending a message. "Actions" enable in-app trading, allowing you to manage and trade your crypto without leaving the app. This is part of Solana’s effort to make crypto more accessible and user-friendly.

Learn more here.

Cardano wins against hacker

Cardano thwarted a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in an unexpected way. Instead of the attack disrupting the network, it ended up contributing to network improvements. The attacker, attempting to flood the network with requests, inadvertently funded the Cardano network's treasury due to the way transaction fees are structured. He spent 0.9 ADA per transaction, and tried to overwhelm 194 smart contracts with multiple requests each.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore