This Week In DeFi – August 5

This week, Solana and Nomad see major exploits, Aave goes ahead with its GHO stablecoin and Ethereum PoW supporters rise ahead of the Merge.

Aug 5, 2022

To the DeFi community,

This week, panic spread across the Solana network this week as almost 8,000 wallets were affected by an exploit, which saw both SOL and SPL tokens drained. It was eventually discovered that the exploit arose from an issue associated with mobile wallet, Slope – likely a “supply chain attack” on iOS wallets. Users have been recommended to create a new wallet and shift their assets, with a full post-mortem to be published soon.

SMS aey.sol, 🇺🇸 @aeyakovenko

If you have ever imported a seed phrase into slope, consider it compromized. Move all the assets to a new non slope wallet. Even if the attack didn't claim those tokens yet, the phrase is leaked. Just a matter of time https://t.co/pCBx8jRwcO

Austin Federa | sms @Austin_Federa

The last 24 hours saw developers, security firms, and individual contributors from across Solana, Ethereum, and cross-chain wallets come together to investigate what at first appeared to be a massive supply-chain hack, impacting Solana and Ethereum

Cross-chain bridge Nomad suffered a $190 million hack – with more than 300 participating exploiters joining the “feeding frenzy”. A primary attacker took $95 million for themselves, while hundreds of additional addresses copied the attacker’s code to sweep the remaining vulnerable funds. The bug responsible for the attack came during a smart contract update, which was unaudited.

FatMan @FatManTerra

Messages popping up in public Discord servers of random people grabbing $3K-$20K from the Nomad bridge - all one had to do was copy the first hacker's transaction and change the address, then hit send through Etherscan. In true crypto fashion - the first decentralized robbery.

foobar @0xfoobar

Nomad bridge getting actively hacked. WETH and WBTC being taken out in million-dollar increments. Withdraw all funds if you can, still $126m remaining in the contract that's likely at risk https://t.co/oDo7oT1glW

Aave governance has passed the proposal for its new yield-generating stablecoin, GHO. 99% of votes were in favor of launching the stablecoin, which will allow users to mint GHO tokens against supplied collateral assets. The GHO code will now be audited, while the community votes upon a starting interest rate for GHO and discount rate for AAVE stakers minting GHO.

Aave @AaveAave

The community has given the greenlight 🟢 for GHO 👻 The next step is voting on the genesis parameters of GHO, look out for a proposal next week on the governance forum

Aave @AaveAave

Voting is now open, ready set GHO https://t.co/HCbFLZ3O4G https://t.co/9HvdY3nFJh

Proof-of-Work (PoW) maximalists within the Ethereum ecosystem are gearing up to launch their own hard-forks of the network, as the formal transition (“The Merge”) to Proof-of-Stake nears. It has been reported that multiple PoW forks will emerge once The Merge is put into motion, with some worried about potential damage from such a split.

Poloniex Exchange @Poloniex

📢 The Ethereum Merge is expected to be in September 2022. Poloniex was the world's first exchange to list #ETH and now the first one to support potential forking of ETH with listing of two potential forked ETH tokens: #ETHS & #ETHW. support.poloniex.com/hc/en-us/artic…

As “The Merge” continues to draw closer for the Ethereum network, proponents of the Proof-of-Work (PoW) chain are beginning to express their differences in ideology with the Proof-of-Stake Ethereum community.

At least six PoW forks have reportedly been planned by groups within the ecosystem, however the amount of traction that any of these forks may obtain may not be highly significant.

Why? Well, in contrast to the original Ethereum fork that resulted in Ethereum Classic and the Ethereum we know and use today, the current ecosystem hosts the marvel of several stablecoins and DeFi protocols.

Following a chain split, the entire state of the blockchain will be copied – including all stablecoin balances and DeFi positions. Of course, these projects cannot honor redemptions and positions on both chains simultaneously – so they must choose their preferred singular chain to support.

To a certain degree, it is these entities that have the final word on which chain is to be the primary one. Although arguments for a PoW network are strong, it appears that it may become very difficult for an Ethereum fork to thrive given today’s conditions. A fragmentation between multiple PoW forks will also weaken the likelihood of success of any individual one.

How much of a market share can an Ethereum PoW fork really capture? How viable is it for an Ethereum project to tear away from the rest of the ecosystem, with which it currently coexists? Do all Ethereum-based projects have an incentive to stick together in their decisions?

September will tell all.