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Thank you for being a part of the Cypherock family. Come rain, hail or storm, we are heads-down building the best possible product to keep your digital assets safe!
Over the next 8-10 minutes, we will be talking about hacks that caught our eye, DApps that we found interesting and our picks from Twitter and Reddit that we enjoyed.
If you loved the newsletter, message us! If you hated the newsletter, message us! We’re always looking for fresh perspective on things to cover and feedback to make your experience better!
Have an awesome week ahead!
Team Cypherock
Security Digest
Why flash loans are a bullet to the knee for DeFi
Before diving into the latest DeFi attack on Nirvana Finance, please observe a moment of silence for $ANA holders. Moving on, on July 28, Nirvana Finance was hacked for $3.49M. This attack was carried out through a flash loan the attacker received on Solend - a crypto borrowing and lending platform based on Solana. In a thread outlining the attack, FA2 explains that the attacker borrowed $10M from the main pool on Solend, used the funds received from Solend to manipulate the price of $ANA (Nirvana Finance’s token) from $8 to $24, swapped $ANA for USDT and bagged $3.49M. If all of that sounded like gibberish, don’t worry. We are going to break down what a flash loan is, how it can manipulate DeFi markets and destabilize trading.
A flash loan is a type of unsecured loan. An unsecured loan is a loan taken out without putting up any collateral. How this works in crypto is that, for an investor to receive a flash loan, the borrowed amount has to be paid back to the lender in the same transaction. In theory, this sounds really safe right? It can be, but attackers use flash loans to purchase the native token of the DeFi platform affecting overall price due to slippage. A slippage is the price difference between the quoted price, and trade executed price. It occurs when the overall liquidity of the market is affected. The slippage in the Nirvana Finance protocol inflated the price of the $ANA token allowing the attacker to take profits from the manipulated price and eventually convert the $ANA to ETH/USDC and transfer funds to their wallet, while repaying the initial flash loan.
The Nirvana Finance attack drained the protocol of its liquidity, plummeting the price of the $ANA token from ~$9 to ~$1 as of July 30, 2022. Investors are being advised to trade Niravana Finance tokens cautiously as they have lost their collateral, thereby not having any exchange value. One transaction has affected hundreds of people’s holdings with no signs of recovery at the moment. Decentralization does have its benefits - like the uncovering of this attack, and immediate action that can be taken to inform investors, but recovery of funds in the case of a DeFi hack seems impossible since attackers preserve anonymity and retrieval of money is purely dependant on whether the attacker wants to give back the funds to the protocol.
So, you want to be a DeFi degen, but also want to keep your funds safe. How do you do it? Avoid major portfolio exposure. DeFi is in its infancy, and there are major infrastructural improvements yet to be made. Keeping this in mind, if you want to explore what interacting with these platforms is like, don’t dump all your money into one platform Keep learning about the space, and how it is evolving. Luckily, Team Cypherock has a great early resource to get you started.
Dapp News
Turn your Discord server into a Tweeting army
Imagine this. You’re a Discord server admin for a DAO. Your DAO doesn’t have a lot of members. You want to engage your DAO members, and also increase your reach on Twitter.
CHORUS was designed for this very reason. With CHORUS you can have your DAO community vote on tweets to post from one unified account from within your Discord.
The CHORUS bot allows any message in a specified channel to be upvoted and posted automatically to any connected Twitter account. Any comment in your community’s Discord can automatically be tweeted from a group Twitter account if it gets a minimum number of emoji votes. Here is how you setup CHORUS:
- Create a Discord Bot
- Connect a Twitter account
- Collect the ID of the Discord channel(s) you want your community to Tweet from.
- Choose an emoji to use as your voting mechanism via message reactions
- Specify the minimum number of emoji reactions needed for your bot to automatically post a message to Twitter This allows for tens or even hundreds of members to tweet from the same account in one unified voice. You can download CHORUS from here.
Twitter Tales
You’ve heard of Ethereum. But do you know what goes on behind the scenes to make Ethereum work? Luckily, we have a thread that covers the inner workings of Ethereum, and what to look for to keep you ETH safe
Reddit Reads
In an effort to increase digital payments, Israel is fining citizens as well as tourists for cash transactions above $1800. The idea here is to be able to monitor transactions more easily. Splitting payments are a punishable offence with upto 3 years of jail time. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Crypto?
Cash transactions above $1800 to become illegal in Israel from August 1 from r/CryptoCurrency
Updates from Cypherock
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