Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s Decentralized Finance Bulletin.
A week full of positive developments in DeFi, including nine-digit fundraising, successful product launches and high token prices, was somewhat overshadowed by news of two major security breaches. Read on for the full weekly development update.
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Unlimited Capital launches $500 million to support the Algorand ecosystem
Venture capital firm Borderless Capital announced this week the launch of ALGO Fund II, an initiative that has raised $500 million to support the creation of digital asset projects on the Algorand blockchain.
As announced on the Algorand Foundation blog, the capital will focus specifically on decentralized applications and services that specialize in cash mining, lending, loans, and agriculture that are returnable and non-fungible tokens.
Algorand is an open source decentralized blockchain that is best valued for its speed, efficiency, security, and position as a potential competitor to Ethereum’s dominance.
Launched in November 2018, Borderless Capital has already invested more than $400 million in blockchain-related projects through its first ALGO fund, including Tinyman, Yieldly, Opulous, and Flare Network, among others, and has developed successful accelerators across three major industrial continents. …
Iota is preparing to launch a decentralized smart contract platform
Iota’s distributed ledger platform announced the launch of a decentralized Tier 1 smart contract network architecture and its associated ASMB token this week.
Assembly will strive to leverage smart contract services and foster an environment for creators, developers, and community advocates who advance the expansion of the Iota ecosystem into the Web 3.0 sectors, including the metaverse.
Expected to be launched in 2022, the aggregation will run in parallel with Iota and take advantage of the existing network infrastructure, especially a directed acyclic graph architecture, to act as an interoperable and self-sustaining bridge that takes advantage of scalability and security, among other things.
DApp developers will be able to build their own smart contract chains and set custom parameters for low execution fees – a feature that will also allow service providers to issue on-chain stablecoin assets to incentivize validators.
In a recent post on Twitter, Iota announced that at the launch of the network, players could earn rewards in both Shimmer (SMR) tokens and ASMB tokens, noting that “for every 1 MIOTA they wager, users receive 1 SMR dollar and 4 microASMB each 10 seconds.. 90 days deal started.”
MonoX and BadgerDAO used DeFi projects worth $150 million.
Decentralized projects MonoX and BadgerDAO fell victim to some sophisticated protocol hacks this week, resulting in more than $150 million in losses.
MonoX was hit by a minor cyberattack on Tuesday when a bug in the smart contract exchange contract allowed the price of MONO tokens, an asset that had just been listed on the Huobi exchange a few days ago, to manually manipulate the price of MONO tokens.
After the MONO token was raised to what the team described as “sky high,” the hackers exchanged money for other assets on the platform and reaped lucrative profits.
A few days after the hack, the MonoX team confirmed a loss of about $31 million, and also released an unfortunate statement, in essence:
“Days like yesterday are horrible, there is no sugar cap, the harsh reality is that the contract is being taken advantage of and people are losing money. Our supporters trusted a new project like ours, and we suffered from them yesterday.”
Likewise, but not related to others, BadgerDAO was also financially exploited this week. While community members on Discord raised concerns about a suspicious increase in the bounty a few days ago, officials did not view it as a threat, as indicated in this tweet from 0xMoves.
According to the blockchain analytics service PeckShield, losses from BadgerDAO amounted to $120 million at the time of writing, including 2,078.76 bitcoins (BTC), 30.27 bitcoins of interest, and 151.32 ether (ETH).
