GM 👋
This is the Smoothie Newsletter - delivering blockchain news & trends daily.
Many of you wrote back to us that the newsletter has got better.
Muchas gracias! 🙇 Merci beaucoup! 🙏 Thanks a bunch! 💯
Our goal is to share one analysis or news to help you understand blockchain better.
Tell us one web3 mystery you’d like us to uncover.
Another scam in crypto resulted in millions of dollars lost.
This sucks, obviously.
I’m sure if you’re working with the tech behind the network architecture, every vulnerability is a learning opportunity.
But I think, even for non-technical people, there’s a lot to learn from such attacks.
Let’s look at this one.
Mixin Network confirmed a loss of $200 million in crypto assets over the weekend.
The culprit?
A compromised cloud service provider.
Yes, the weak link was a centralized cloud service.
Mixin is a public distributed ledger to allow any public distributed ledger to gain
In simple terms, it’s a free and lightning-fast peer-to-peer transactional network for digital assets.
The hack exposes a critical vulnerability in Mixin's infrastructure, particularly since the platform champions itself as decentralized.
They also claim to be safe for moving digital assets against different possible attack vectors.
As mentioned by a user, most web3 services use a centralized cloud operator for customers’ data storage.
Even though it’s not clear yet how the attack happened, it’s clear that this will force a re-evaluation of the security of other protocols.
We’ll have to re-examine if decentralization is even more important at the network level.
Mixin's founder, Feng Xiaodong, stated in a livestream that they can currently secure only half of the stolen assets.
As a result, Mixin has temporarily suspended all deposits and withdrawals to address vulnerabilities.
The native token of Mixin, XIN, plummeted by 8.6% following the news.
The hack is a significant setback for a platform that had amassed over $1 billion in total value since its 2017 launch.
The crypto gaming studio Proof of Play raised $33M in a seed round, with investors including a16z crypto, Greenoaks, Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant.
This is a special newsletter. Every week, we deconstruct the best crypto trends and share those insights with you.