Daily Digest - 4 January 2023

Headlines

▌Binance Provides BTC Reserve Proof Again

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has announced a new program that will provide all current and future cryptocurrency investors with proof of their existing Bitcoin and Ethereum reserves. Currently, the company has clarified how much BTC and ETH it has in its reserve tanks. The company has issued statements suggesting it has more cryptocurrencies to its name, and information about these reserves will be released in the coming weeks. At the time of writing, Binance posted a screenshot showing a stash of more than 582,000 bitcoins. Currently, the number of bitcoins stored on exchanges is just over 572,000, owned by individual traders.

Cryptocurrency

▌Cryptocurrency trading platform FTX founder pleads not guilty to charges of defrauding clients

Sam Bankman Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, pleaded not guilty to charges of defrauding customers of digital assets worth millions of dollars on January 3, local time. Bankman Freed appeared in court in New York on the 3rd after being released on a $250 million bond. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York charged Bankman Fried with eight counts of fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes. Bankman Fried, who resigned as FTX CEO in November, also violated political contribution laws by donating to candidates and committees in New York in another person's name, according to prosecutors.

▌The founder of the Goobers NFT DNP3 admitted to using user funds for gambling

DNP3, the pseudonym of the founder of the Goobers NFT collection and other web3 projects, admitted to gambling away user funds and causing the loss of user funds. "Over the last year I got incredibly addicted to gambling," DNP3 wrote. "Every dollar I could find I would put into Stake in hopes of winning big. Even when the big wins did happen it wasn’t enough. Eventually I lost everything. In addition to my own life savings, I also irresponsibly used investor funds to try and 'get my money back' from the casino, which was wrong for so many reasons."

▌The Dedaub team has disclosed a Critical vulnerability to the Uniswap team. The vulnerability allows re-entertrancy to drain the user's funds. Uniswap has since fixed the issue

The Dedaub team was the first to identify the re-entrancy problem that may have resulted in the loss of customer monies. They then informed the Uniswap development group. The DEX developer acknowledged the fault, fixed it, and redeployed the Universal Router smart contracts across all of Polygon’s networks. The Dedaub team observed that this issue was established due to Uniswap’s decision to introduce the Universal Router, which combines NFTs and ERC-20 tokens into a single swap router. According to their analysis, malevolent actors might embed a scripting language for all token activities.

▌YouTuber Logan Paul says he unknowingly hired multiple criminals & conmen who lead and developed his crypto NFT project 'CryptoZoo.'

This is not the first time CryptoZoo has been called a scam. Unfortunately, some investors lost seven-figure sums, and CryptoZoo did not reimburse their losses. Even blockchain detective ZachXBT called the nft project a Rug Pull. However, new allegations from Coffeezilla say that CryptoZoo has actually never been in a playable state, even though users have spent up to half a million US dollars in the game. Not only this, but the native token – the zoo coin – reached a market cap of over 2 billion dollars pre-launch. A user of CryptoZoo has also spoken out about the game’s failures. ‘Helicopter Bob’ reveals that you cannot retrieve your zoo coin yield. According to this user, yield did not work on the day of launch. It still does not work to this day. As a result, investors poured money into CryptoZoo and were not able to retrieve their funds. Initially, influencer Logan Paul did not interact with the scam and rug allegations. Therefore, many people believe that he has abandoned the project. However, when Logan Paul did comment, it was only to blame the failures on a third party. Logan Paul claims that a developer held the gaming code hostage for $1 million dollar ransom. So, Coffeezilla investigated this claim. The YouTuber reached out to the developer. This developer does not deny taking the code, yet says he held it hostage as Logan Paul owed the development team payment for their work on the game.