The $4M theft — What went wrong?

Plus, Tether’s record-breaking $5.2B profit.

Author

Daniel Akpobare
August 01, 2024

GM Explorer,

Hacker Alert: Terra Blockchain just experienced a significant breach, resulting in a $4 million loss!

Here’s what we got for you today:

  • 🤯 Terra Blockchain got hit big time!

  • 🤑 Tether's stellar financial results for H1 2024!

  • 🧱 Around The Block: Fed holds interest rate steady at 23-year high, possible rate cut coming September.

🤯 Terra Blockchain Got Hit Big Time!

On Wednesday, Terra Blockchain faced a massive reentrancy attack, leading to a jaw-dropping $4 million theft!

How did it happen? Well, Security firm Beosin got the answer!

According to them, the attackers exploited a vulnerability in the IBC-hooks timeout callback, sweeping:

  • $3.5 million in USDC stablecoin

  • $500,000 in USDT stablecoin

  • 2.7 bitcoins (BTC)

  • 60 million ASTRO tokens!

It turns out bugs like this allow exploiters to trick a smart contract into repeatedly calling a protocol to steal assets.

Essentially, it gives the smart contract address the green light to interact with a user’s wallet address.

Terra didn’t deny it—in fact, they admitted that the IBC vulnerability allowed the attackers to mint several tokens on the Terra chain, including ASTRO. Yikes!

As a result, the network was temporarily halted at block height 11430400 to implement an emergency patch.

The fix was wrapped up by 04:19 UTC, and with over 67% of the voting power backing an upgrade, validators updated their nodes to block future exploits.

But not before ASTRO’s price tanked 56%, and Terra’s LUNC tokens, on the other hand, dipped 3.4%.

The silver lining is that after the fix, ASTRO started to bounce back, climbing above $0.02. Phew!

But then something else caught our attention:

Beosin mentioned this vulnerability was spotted back in April. So, the question is, why wait until disaster struck to fix it?

Well, Terra has some serious explaining to do!

Now, we really love their quick action in handling the situation and their transparency in warning everyone.

But if Beosin’s claim, backed by blockchain security firm Cyvers, holds true, then Terra might have a bigger fish to fry.

You can catch the full details here!

🤑 Tether's Stellar Financial Results for H1 2024!

Tether, the company behind the largest stablecoin USDT, just announced a whopping $5.2 billion net profit for the first half of 2024.

But that's not all – they also reached a net operating profit of $1.3 billion in the second quarter alone.

According to their press release, this incredible performance is credited to their yield-bearing investments, mainly in U.S. Treasuries, as well as their reserves.

Tether has also been capitalizing on the post-COVID inflation and subsequent raised interest rates to maximize their gains.

And what does it do with all these profits?

Well, they're putting it back into the game with investments in decentralized AI, Bitcoin mining, and even a peer-to-peer messaging platform called Keet.

And get this—Tether's profits have been on the rise since at least 2022!

With all this success, it seems like Tether won't be going anywhere anytime soon, right? 🤔

But hold on. Let's not forget that they've faced some scrutiny over the transparency of their reserves following a 2021 settlement with the New York Attorney General.

There's more to the story, so check out all the details here!

🧱 Around The Block

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

Did we miss anything? Or just want to say hey? We'd love to hear from you! You can

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Catch you soon.

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.

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