August 2022 Web3 News Round-up

Over 50 Web3, Metaverse, Crypto news that made up August 2022.

Sep 1, 2022

August 2022 is over and we are entering September (Obviously), and now there are only 4 months until 2023? Not sure about you, but I still haven’t come out of 2020.

Nevertheless, time moves on. And since you have been kind enough to give me a few minutes of your time today, I want to make sure you get the most out of it.

Today’s letter is a recap of almost all the things that happened in August 2022 in our industry. There is so much to cover. Let’s focus on some of the important stuff from August 2022.

Metaverse News:

Nvidia's real-time graphics collaboration platform Omniverse now gets a series of new tools for creators and developers to make a realistic metaverse.
Data compiled from WeMeta shows that 6 major metaverse projects built on Ethereum saw the average price per parcel of virtual land, fall by 85% from $17000 in January to around $2500 in August. Sales volume across metaverse projects also fell from $1 billion in November 2021 to $157 million in August 2022.
The World Economic Forum has raised concerns over crime in the metaverse. A report predicts by 2026, 25% of the world population will spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse. People are already duped by phishing scams, theft of wallet keys, and deep fake technology.
After Shanghai, the Chinese local government body announced a two-year plan for embracing web3 innovation for Beijing. All districts of Beijing will come under the Beijing Sub-Urban Metaverse Innovation and Development Action Plan (2022-2024).
Mark Zuckerberg posted a selfie from Horizon Worlds, their metaverse property launched in France and it got a lot of attention but for all the wrong reasons. Zuckerberg’s avatar was a laughing stock on the internet as “it has a baby face and weird eyes”.

Investing in blockchain technology is benefiting Nike in leaps and bounds. A new report by Dune Analytics has revealed that the sportswear giant has made $185 million in revenue from the sale of its NFTs, outperforming other fashion brands by a heavy margin.

Metaverse rules the stage at MTV VMAs, hip-hop rock stars Eminem and Snoop Dogg performed live and as Bored Ape avatars in the metaverse, MTV VMA also added a new category 'Best Metaverse Performance' in the awards distribution.

Platforms, Protocols & Digital currencies:

Tornado Cash Sanctions: The US Department of Treasury sanctioned virtual currency mixer Tornado Cash. The OFAC claims that the mixer helped hackers launder over $7 billion worth of virtual currency since 2019. Following the sanctions,
- USDC provider Circle decided to freeze ~75000 USDC in 38 wallets.
- Alexy Pertsev, one of the developers associated with Tornado Cash has been sent to jail for an additional 90 days by a judge in the Netherlands.
- Several protocols like Uniswap and Aave also blocked access of their front ends to the sanction list and addresses that interacted with Tornado Cash. The list was created by TRM labs.
- Crypto exchange dYdX and DeFi platform Oasis.app have also blocked wallet addresses linked to sanctioned crypto mixer Tornado Cash.
- Tether Holdings Limited announced on August 24, 2022, that it will not be freezing any “Tornado Cash Addresses” in response to sanctions imposed by OFAC.
- MakerDAO founder, Rune Christensen stated that the organization will consider taking steps to de-peg its native stablecoin DAI from USD and add Ethereum to the reserves following Circle’s decision to freeze USDC on addresses that used Tornado Cash.
Stable Coins are all the rage:
- Aave DAO voters have approved the creation of a new algorithmic stablecoin GHO.
- Algorithmic stablecoin protocol Beanstalk has relaunched its protocol to mark its one-year anniversary on the Ethereum mainnet. The launch comes 4 months after the protocol was hacked for $180 million on April 17, 2022.
- Polkadot’s DeFi hub Acala suffered a significant hack on its new liquidity pool that allowed hackers to mint more than $3 billion aUSD, Acala’s stablecoin. The aUSD stablecoin broke its peg, falling to $0.58 before recovering to trade at $0.8973.
- PicPay, a Brazilian payments application has partnered with Paxos enabling its 30 million users to buy, sell and store BTC and ETH on its application using Paxos-oriented USD-stablecoin (USDP).
Ethereum Merge: The merge of Ethereum PoW and PoS Beacon Chain is tentatively to occur on September 15. Ethereum will move to PoS consensus thereby reducing the power requirement for running Ethereum by 99.5%.
- There are serious concerns around multiple developers and organizations who want to continue the PoW chain, hence they will be forking it. Developers behind the proposed Ethereum hard fork “ETHPoW” have successfully dismantled the “difficulty bomb” that would stop the creation of new ETH on the PoW chain.
- Million-dollar Bounty – The Ethereum Foundation in a blog post stated that all “Merge-related bounties for vulnerabilities” will be quadrupled for white hats testing the network. Identifying “critical bugs” that have a high impact or likelihood of a high impact on the blockchain will be worth up to $1 million.
Arbitrum: The Ethereum Layer 2 network successfully migrated the existing Arbitrum One network to Arbitrum Nitro Wednesday, exactly one year after the network’s mainnet first went live. Offchain Labs, the company developing Arbitrum, announced the completion of the upgrade.
Central Bank Digital Currency:
- The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) will develop a “limited-scale” pilot project. The pilot project will explore the use cases and potential economic benefits of central bank digital currency (CBDC).
- Russia has planned to launch the digital ruble by 2024 according to the monetary policy update released by the Bank of Russia.
- Columbia plans to launch its own digital currency to prevent illicit financial activity such as tax evasion and improve user experience according to the head of Columbia’s Tax and Customs National Authority, Luis Carlos Reyes.
- China will allow commuters to use its CBDC (e-CNY) to pay for public transport across multiple cities as it expands the utility of CBDC.
FTX Exchange partnered with Reddit enabling Redditors to use their earned community points to carry out on-chain transactions. Users will be able to use FTX pay to purchase Ethereum and pay gas fees for transactions with their earned community tokens across any platform that supports Reddit applications.
Ian and Dylan Macalinao, the founders of Solana’s leading cross-chain stablecoin exchange Saber Protocol created multiple 11 identities and built many projects enabling them to create a web of web of interlocking DeFi projects that helped them project $7.8 billion in TVL on the Saber Protocol.
Polygon: Decentralized applications (Dapps) on Polygon (Matic) blockchain have surpassed 37,000, a 400% increase since the beginning of 2022.
The Uniswap community has voted in favour of establishing the $74 million Uniswap Foundation which aims to support open-source development and community governance within the protocol.
Canadian Crypto exchanges Bitbuy and Newton limit user exposure to “restricted coins” to CAD 30,000 annually.
WazirX: Following the ED raids on WazirX, Binance boss CZ tweeted that Binance although has been said to have acquired WazirX, the acquisition never went through. WazirX CEO Nischal Shetty countered saying the former holds control of the domain, servers and Crypto-to-Crypto markets.
Coinbase: A study by the University of Technology Sydney found that insider trading at coinbase occurred on 10% to 25% of all new listings between September 2018 and May 2022 generating over $1.5 million in profits.
Binance was granted preliminary approval by the Astana Financial Services Authority (AFSA) to offer its trading and custody services within Kazakhstan.
Samsung Securities, Mirae Asset Consulting, KB securities, Shinhan Financial Investments and NH Investment & Securities have applied to the government to create a virtual asset exchange.
Liquidations, insolvency:
- Singapore-based crypto lender and borrower, Hodlnaut became the latest company in the lending space to suspend withdrawals, deposits and swaps.
- German startup crypto bank Nuri, which has over 500,000 users filed for insolvency on August 9, 2022. The company mentioned the recent crypto sell-offs and insolvency of other crypto-funds as a reason for the move.
- Bluebenx, a crypto investment platform based in Brazil suspended withdrawals for the next six months due to an alleged hack that resulted in the company losing more than $31 million dollars.
- Crypto trading and lending firm Genesis Global Trading which had lent $2.4 billion to Three Arrow Capital (3AC) announced that its CEO Michael Moro will be stepping down from his position and will remain as an advisor. The company also announced that it will lay off 20% of its 260-person workforce amidst the current market drawdown.
- Celsius Network LLC has countersued James Stone and his company Key Fi Inc of “gross negligence” and “extraordinarily inept” crypto investing. The crypto lender also called out Custodian Prime Trust for failing to return $17 million in Crypto assets in June 2021 after the relationship between the two firms was terminated.
- A federal Judge has allowed bankrupt crypto lender Voyager Digital to pay 30 employees a collective $1.6 million as a “retention” award.
- Bitcoin maximalist and co-founder of MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor, is stepping down as a CEO after the company reported its second-quarter earnings. According to the company's financial statements, it lost $1.062 billion mostly due to impairment charges of $917 million related to its Bitcoin holdings.
Hacks
- Deemed the first ever Decentralized robbery, Nomad Bridge lost around $190 Million to a hack which exploited an old vulnerability.
- Near Protocol’s Rainbow Bridge witnessed a failed hacking attempt. The attack was blocked by the project automatically within 31 seconds and resulted in the hacker losing 5 ETH.
- The team behind NFT marketplace SudoRare have stolen 519 ETH worth $815,000 from crypto investors in the latest crypto scam. The funds were drained and transferred to 3 separate wallets and any trace of the project has been removed.
- Blockchain Developer and researcher BliteZero in his report stated that the $625 million in cryptocurrency stolen from the Ronin Bridge hack in March is currently on the Bitcoin Network. He also stated that the hackers are using Blender/ChipMixer to hide their transactions.

Unlikely Adoption:

Iran made its first import order worth $10 million using cryptocurrency. This was the first step taken by the country in its attempt to bypass sanctions imposed by the United States.
Iran also formally approved use of Digital assets in the economy and for imports on August 29, 2022.

Crack Downs:

Uzbekistan cracks down on foreign companies providing crypto-related services which are not registered within the country or have the necessary licenses.
Authorities in Gunpo, a small South Korean town near Seoul seized crypto funds from exchange accounts of individuals with delinquent traffic fines.
The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) announced Monday that crypto trading platforms will be expected to provide a pre-registration undertaking to their principal regulators as they take steps to comply fully with securities regulations.
The Afghanistan Government has shut down at least 16 trading platforms that offered trading in digital currencies. The government cited the rise of scams as one of the main reasons for their decision.
The Iranian Government has confiscated over 9,400 mining rigs over the past 5 months after it imposed restrictions on crypto mining due to rolling power blackouts witnessed across the country.
Malaysia Securities Commission (SC) has blacklisted crypto exchange Huobi and its associated brands in the country as they are carrying out unlicensed capital market activities within the country.
Several prominent Crypto Exchanges in India were raided by Authorities as fake loan app providers used these platforms to buy crypto and send it outside India violating several laws of the land. About $8 Million of WazirX Exchange were frozen and $41 Million worth of Crypto and INR were frozen for the Vauld Lending Platform.

The list doesn’t end here. There is a lot happening in the space every day and it is by far impossible to cover everything in a newsletter/email. Please leave a comment below and let me know what did we miss of significance, will make sure we cover it in future letters.

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