Morning Coinheads!

There’s a wee bit of carnage out there in the crypto market, lots of the major digital assets leaving a bit of a blood trail – even top dawg Bitcoin looks like heading back down US$40k street.

It’s Tuesday in Cryptoland. Let’s begin.

 

What are blockchain bridges, why do they keep getting hacked, and can we stop it?

The Verge: Late last month the Ronin blockchain network underlying the popular NFT-driven game Axie Infinity was hit with a hack that saw the attackers walk away with an eye-popping US$625 million in cryptocurrency.

The Ronin hack was the largest amount of money that had ever been stolen from the type of service called a “bridge,” which connects one blockchain to another so that value can be sent between them. Unfortunately, it was far from the only hack to hit a bridge: less than two months previously, another bridge platform called Wormhole was exploited for close to US$325 million, and about six months before that, more than US$600 million was stolen from another cross-chain bridge called Poly.

(In a surprising twist, the hacker later returned Poly’s stolen funds.) So…what’s a Bridge, and why are they vulnerable?

 

DeFi giant Uniswap launches venture arm to invest in other crypto companies

The Block: Uniswap Labs, the main developer of the Uniswap decentralised exchange protocol, has launched a new venture unit.

Uniswap Labs Ventures will invest in web3 projects across categories, focusing on startups building blockchain infrastructure, developer tools and consumer-facing applications.

The Block doesn’t know the size of Uniswap Ventures’ kitty, but Matteo Leibowitz, the firm’s ventures lead, said investments will be made directly from the Uniswap Labs balance sheet.

 

He’s no Badman, but ex BitMex boss says ‘crypto carnage’ is coming

Badman: Meanwhile, former CEO of BitMEX, Arthur Hayes, is also spreading the short-to-midterm highly bearish view today, which seems to be grabbing a fair amount of attention.

In a blog post today, Hayes wrote that he thinks a continued dip in the Nasdaq 100 is the likely course, along with “crypto carnage” including a correlated Bitcoin slump to about US$30k before the end of June and a US$2.5k ETH.

(Ed: Actually, as a matter of fact, a judge did decree Hayes was something of a bad man not long after this Crypto Espresso report was published. Hayes was sentenced in May to two years’ probation with six months’ home detention after pleading guilty to a lack of anti-money laundering compliance at BitMEX.)