Here are some of the major developments from the world of crypto over the past few days
A breach on the Solana-based gaming ecosystem Aurory on December 17, 2023 led to a drop of nearly 80 per cent in liquidity of the AURY-USDC pool on the decentralised exchange (DEX) Camelot. According to unconfirmed reports on X (formerly Twitter), the exploit targeted Aurory’s SyncSpace bridge on Arbitrum’s native DEX Camelot around 13:00 UTC, reducing the liquidity of the AURY-USDC pool to roughly $312,000 from $1.5 million.
SyncSpace acts as Aurory’s bridge, allowing users to switch items between on-chain and off-chain with a single transaction. It enables assets earned in-game that are initially off-chain to be moved to the Blockchain when the user chooses to DeSync them.
In a thread on X, Aurory’s team member Tim said that the tokens belonging to the team were stolen and immediately sold. “We’ve been buying back the tokens as we’re investigating what happened,” he said, adding that a post-mortem would be released after an audit is completed.
Previously, in a blog post in October 2022, Aurory’s team had said that a cross-SyncSpace hack was impossible since the technology required signatures to Sync/DeSync assets.
In the three months ending October 31, 2023, defunct crypto exchange FTX has been burning through approximately $53,000 every hour on bankruptcy lawyers and advisers, according to the latest compensation filings.
Court filings from December 5-16, 2023 show that the bankruptcy lawyers have charged at least $118.1 million between August 1, 2023 and October 31, 2023. Over the 92 days, this amounts to $1.3 million per day or $53,300 per hour.
The largest bill came from the management consulting firm Alvarez and Marshall, which charged $35.8 million for its services for the three months, according to Cointelegraph.com.
Blockchain-based lending has regained momentum in 2023, with the value of active tokenised private credit now sitting at $582 million — a staggering 128 per cent increase from 2022, according to latest data from real-world asset loan tracker RWA.xyz.
While it is still far from its peak of $1.5 billion in June 2022, the resurgence could signal that loan-seekers are looking for Blockchain-based alternatives to traditional financiers amid a recent rise in interest rates, say analysts.
The current average percentage rate is 9.64 per cent for Blockchain-based credit protocols, while financiers have been offering small business bank loan interest rates between 5.75 per cent and 11.91 per cent, according to a December 1, 2023 report by NerdWallet.
The loans being taken out aren’t small either. RWA.xyz has tracked $4.5 billion in Blockchain-based loans across 1,804 deals, which means the average loan comes out at about $2.5 million. One of the most noteworthy loan-seekers of late is UK-based asset management firm Fasanara Capital, which took out a $38.3 million loan from Clearpool at a sub-7 per cent base annual percentage yield (APY). Brazilian bank Divibank is another financial institution participating in the market.