Welcome, this is The Crypto Explorer, your crypto tour guide.

How was your weekend, we hope you had a blast.

Here’s what we got for you today:

• 🤯 $24M Cryptocurrency Heist Rocks DeFi Projects!

• 📈 Coinbase's BASE Trading Volume Surges!

• 🧱 Around The Block: Republican Congressman George Santos Faces Charges in 'Nigerian Prince' Crypto Scam.

🤯 $24M Cryptocurrency Heist Rocks DeFi Projects!

Several decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols suffered attacks on Sunday, resulting in over $24 million worth of cryptocurrency theft.

Here’s how it happened:

The attackers exploited a vulnerability in liquidity pools on Curve, the automated market maker platform.

Upon further investigation, Curve confirmed that the vulnerability was traced back to Vyper, an alternative third-party programming language for Ethereum smart contracts.

Among the affected projects was JPEG’d, an NFT lending protocol, which suffered losses totaling $11 million in cryptocurrency, as reported by Decurity.

This has caused the protocol’s governance token JPEG to go down 23%, reaching an all-time low of $0.000347, according to data from CoinGecko.

Other protocols like Alchemix and Metronome DAO also suffered losses, totaling $13.6 million and $1.6 million, respectively.

So, how did Curve respond to all this?

They initially described the vulnerability as a run-of-the-mill read-only "re-entrance" attack that could’ve been avoided.🙄

However, they later clarified that their initial assessment was incorrect.

It was a "whoopsie-daisy" moment for sure!😒

You can read the full story here for a detailed account of the entire incident.

 📈 Coinbase's BASE Trading Volume Surges!

Coinbase’s layer-2 blockchain trading volume, called "Base" has exceeded $200 million!

According to Dex Screeners, there were more than 536,000 transactions within the past 24 hours, sparking widespread discussions about Base across the crypto community.

Why the sudden uptick?

It can be attributed to the introduction of several new tokens, including BALD, OPTISM, COIN, and BASED.

Despite the scheduled launch of the bridge on August 9, 2023, opportunistic traders jumped ahead and started buying the newly launched tokens through decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like LeetSwap and RocketSwap.

LeetSwap alone witnessed a trading volume of $233 million, while RocketSwap saw $4.5 million in trading volume.

Remarkably, some traders managed to make substantial profits.

A user named cheatcoiner on Twitter invested $500 in the BALD token when it had a market capitalization of less than $50,000 and saw an incredible return, with the investment growing to $500,000 in under 24 hours.

But this exponential growth did come with some challenges.

The sudden spike in network activity led to certain users encountering issues while swapping leading tokens like BALD, giving rise to rumors of foul play.

However, LeetSwap assured its users that no project was being rugged and that the issues stemmed from many users using the same congested RPC node.

🧱 Around The Block: Republican Congressman George Santos Faces Charges in 'Nigerian Prince' Crypto Scam.

• Republican Congressman George Santos Faces Charges in 'Nigerian Prince' Crypto Scam.

• SEC asked Coinbase to halt trading in everything except bitcoin, CEO says.

• SonicWall Report: Cryptojacking Attacks Skyrocketed by 400% in H1 2023.

• UK Court Slaps Telecoin Crypto Scam Masterminds With 6-Year Jail Terms.

That's all we've got for you today.

Please don't forget to rate today's email and let us know what you like about it.

In any case, see you tomorrow, or on Twitter, if you're there: @danielakpobare

DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell assets or make financial decisions. Please be NEW”