Good morning Coinheads, and welcome to the final Mooners and Shakers for 2022 – a year that quite a number of us won’t be sad to see the back of.

I’d like to take this quick opportunity to publicly acknowledge the excellent work that Rob “You’ve Reached the Voicemail of Rob” Badman has done all year, and I know that if it was him writing this last M&S for 2022, he’d want to thank you all for lending us your eyeballs every morning, and thank me for standing in for him when he couldn’t be arsed showing up at work. You’re welcome.

As far as how things are looking in crypto this morning, the past 24 hours have seen most of the majors (BTC, ETH… that sort of thing) broadly up, except for XRP, which has been broadly crap.

At the time of writing, BTC is up 0.5%, ETH up 0.7% and BNB up 0.8%, while XRP is feeling the pain this morning after falling off a cliff around midday yesterday, limping its way to the edge of another one just in time to throw itself off into the void again. It’s was down around 5.5% for the past 24 hours, but has since rallied to still be awful, down 4.6% or thereabouts.

Making massive gains over the past 24 hours was BitDAO, up ~20% on no readily apparent news, while yesterday’s bleeder Solana has dropped another 3.7% as it steadily works its way into a deep, dark hole.

Let’s take a look to see what sort of stuff is making the news for the last column for the year – what exciting stuff is there to write about today?

… oh look. It’s FTX, stolen money and yet another crypto hack.

Thanks a bunch, 2022. You’ve been great…

 

Hackers pinch the keys to the 3Commas kingdom

Crypto trading service 3Commas has confirmed that an “anonymous Twitter user” has, indeed, got their hands on tens of thousands of its users’ API keys.

This is a Bad Thing. An API (Application Programming Interface) key, is the software code that identifies a user, and if someone is able to get their hands on a bunch of them, they can use them to – for example – execute a bunch of transactions on someone else’s account.

And that’s precisely what a group of about 50 3Commas users are claiming, according to Coindesk, which is reporting that those users have been making noises about unauthorised transactions since mid-October – which 3Commas had, up until now, been insisting were due to “phishing attacks”.

Welp… turns out that was a wrong guess on 3Commas’ part – and the hacker(z) that have the API keys are claiming to have at least 100,000 of them, which they’re going to dump on the internet “full [sic] randomly in the upcoming days”.’

3Commas says it has informed everyone who needs to know that the API keys have been stolen and not to accept the tainted keys, should anyone attempt to use them – but it’s somewhere between US$6 million and US$12 million too late, because that’s how much funds have been syphoned off since the weirdness began a few months ago.

 

And somebody definitely has their hands in the Alameda till…

We mentioned yesterday that there were Strange Things afoot among some of the wallets belonging to Alameda Research – the former FTX offshoot formerly managed by the former girlfriend of former crypto-genius Sam Bankfiend or whatever his name is.

Keen-eyed crypto sleuth “ZachXBT” – aka the On-Chain Detective – is reporting that not only has more than US$1 million been moved out of Alameda-related wallets, but it’s also being put through what amounts to a digital laundromat.

 


It was hard to imagine how whatever has gone on at FTX / Alameda / The Bahama Mama Sex House could look any dodgier – yet, here we are. Someone’s prised the lid off one of the Alameda cookie jars and is frantically trying to anonymise whatever they’re clearly stealing.

Meanwhile, prosecutors are busy building their case against SBF, who remains imprisoned in the most brutal conditions imaginable: At home, with his parents who are reportedly “not angry…  just very, very disappointed” about what’s happened.

To make matters worse for SBF, several witnesses have reportedly rolled over – including one shadowy figure who was central to the entire operation, described only by investigators familiar with the case as “a bespectacled turtle in a dirty Weird Al Yankovic wig”.

We reached out to several turtles we know for comment, but they’ve been a bit slow returning our calls.

… I’ll show myself out.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$831 Billion, up 0.6% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

 

crypto news Top 10
Chart via coingecko.com

 

DAILY PUMPERS

  • BitDAO (BIT), (market cap: US$361 million) +19.7%
  • Toncoin (TON), (mc: US$3.12 billion) +8.4%
  • Trust Wallet (TWT), (mc: US$555 million) +6.9%
  • Ethereum Classic (ETC), (mc: US$2.19 billion) +4.5%
  • Bitcoin SV (BSV), (mc: US$813 million) +4.1%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

  • XRP (XRP), (market cap: US$17.3 billion) -3.6%
  • Gate (GT), (market cap: US$455 million) -3.5%
  • Theta Network (THETA), (mc: US$727 million) -3.2%
  • Hedera (HBAR), (mc: US$988 million) -3.3%
  • Deventraland (MANA), (mc: US$537 million) -3.3%

(Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

 

And that’s it from the Crypto News desk at Stockhead for 2022. See you next year, for more Crazy Crypto Adventures!

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