WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Mar 30

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

Decrypt Newsletter Hacked

We’ve probably all seen the scams claiming various crypto news services or dapps are releasing airdrops, but it’s usually pretty easy to tell it’s from a scammer since they come from new X accounts or obviously fake email addresses. This week, the Decrypt news site’s newsletter email service was hacked and the same phishing email was sent out from the legitimate email address to the users. Always be very cautious before clicking links in emails, especially if they are claiming to offer free things!

Learn more here.

SBF Sentenced to 25 Years

Sam Bankman-Fried, of the defunct FTX exchange, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for “one of the largest financial frauds in history”. He was also ordered to forfeit $11 billion in assets. Of course, he’s going to appeal the sentence, but this is a win. The NY Times put out an article comparing this charge to other similar criminal cases, which is paywalled but interesting if you can access it.

Learn more here.

GameFi App Hacked…kind of?

There’s a game called Munchables built on the Blast ecosystem and it was “compromised” by an insider early this week. But, two things occurred that make this unusual (which is why we want to include it here): 1) the hacker made a typo that meant they withdrew a fraction of the amount they planned to, and 2) because the project was centralized, they were able to freeze the funds and the wallet address within less than 10 minutes. There are many other interesting and odd things about this particular story, such as the culprit having multiple dev identities all hired separately to the team. So, sometimes a bit of centralization might not be a bad thing because it can be more efficient. We have to remember that when we pick any one of the blockchain trilemma (security, scalability, decentralization), we are making certain compromises to achieve it. The more decentralized something is, the less secure it is.

Learn more here.

Apple Hardware Security Flaw

Apple products released powerful new technology in their M-series chips in the past five or so years. Unfortunately, researchers at various universities in the US found out that there’s a vulnerability in the way these chips deal with processing caches that makes it possible for malware to steal people’s cryptographic keys—including crypto wallets. The M3 series chips released in October 2023 have a fix for this, but it’s up to the software developers to implement a patch to protect their users. It’s unclear if there is a fix for earlier M-series chips or not. If you have one of the earlier chip products, the best option is to get a hardware wallet and perform transactions on it instead of the device directly, but if that’s not an option, it’s best to keep your assets spread across multiple wallets and platforms so if one is compromised, you don’t lose everything.

Learn more here.

Solana NFTs Get a Facelift

Metaplex, the creators of the first Solana NFT standard, have created an upgrade to programmable NFTs that they are calling Core. Core reduces the cost of minting NFTs by 87%, simplifies the developer experience, and introduces plugins/SDKs that expand the functionality. Core is live on Devnet, so if you are a dev and want to try it out, you can!

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore