Polygon Covertly Patched $20B Vulnerability

The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day

Dec. 30, 2021

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HARD FORK HARD KNOCKS: A hacker who helped Polygon avert a multibillion-dollar disaster in early December won a $2.2 million bug bounty, the blockchain network said Wednesday. The so-called "white hat," known as "Leon Spacewalker" on Twitter and GitHub, reported an exploit in a critical Polygon smart contract that held more than 9 billion MATIC tokens on Dec. 3, then worth around $20.2 billion. Although core developers rushed a fix by Dec. 5, some community members have criticized the lack of transparency regarding the hard fork needed to address the vulnerability.

DIGITAL DINERO: The Central Bank of Mexico (Banxico) plans to launch a CBDC by 2024, the Mexican government confirmed in a tweet on Wednesday evening. Banxico joins the central banks of Brazil and Peru in Latin American countries developing a CBDC. Referring to the digital currency as "state-of-the-art payment infrastructure," a Banxico official said a CBDC might improve "financial inclusion" in the 15th-largest economy in the world.

MACRO STRATEGY: MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR), the business-intelligence software company that's taken to accumulating bitcoin, said it bought another 1,914 bitcoins between Dec. 9 and Wednesday for about $94.2 million in cash. The company paid an average price of $49,229 per bitcoin, it said in a statement, increasing its stockpile to 124,391 BTC. It raised funds for the purchase by selling shares.

TOKEN INCENTIVES: Tokens of Algorand (ALGO) have added as much as 10% in the past 24 hours, becoming one of the few gainers on Thursday morning as the broader crypto market extended its decline. The move came hours after the Algorand Foundation, which oversees development on Algorand, announced a $3 million incentive program for Algofi, a DeFi lending platform backed by Union Square Ventures, Arrington XRP Capital and others.

DECENTRALAND BALL DROP: Jamestown, the owner of One Times Square, is recreating the 26-story tower at the heart of New York's New Year's Eve ball drop in Decentraland. The company announced the plan Wednesday as a partnership with Digital Currency Group (DCG), the longtime Decentraland backer with major holdings in the platform's MANA and LAND tokens. (DCG is the parent company of an editorially independent CoinDesk, which will be at the event.) The celebration, dubbed "MetaFest 2022," will include non-fungible token (NFT) art galleries, rooftop VIP lounges and virtual music performances.

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What others are writing...

Off-Chain Signals

BlockbusterDAO Wants to Raise $5 Million in NFT Sales to Buy the Defunct Video Brand (Decrypt)
The world's largest crypto exchange Binance is trying to woo France (CNBC)
All you should know about Astroport–AMM built to become Terra ecosystem's DeFi liquidity hub (Crypto Slate)
Bullish Bitcoin events that helped push it to record highs this year (Protos)

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