Another week of DeFi hacks, but ZK-proof development heats up: Finance Redefined
Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you the most significant developments from the past week.
The past week in DeFi was dominated by exploits and hacks, with three DeFi platforms losing nearly $39 million. Alphapo’s hot wallets were exploited for over $32 million, Era Lend was drained for $3.4 million, and the decentralized finance protocol Conic Finance was exploited for almost $3.5 million.
In better news, the DeFi ecosystem was buzzing with developments in zero-knowledge-proof (ZK-proof) scaling solutions as the layer-2 sector heats up despite the bear market.
The exploits and bearish market condition took their toll on DeFi protocols, with the total value locked in DeFi protocols seeing a significant drop over the past week.
Crypto payment platform Alphapo had roughly $31 million drained from its Ether (ETH), TRON (TRX) and Bitcoin (BTC) hot wallets, security experts reported on July 22. Since the amount of Bitcoin stolen is uncertain, the figures may be even higher.
According to on-chain sleuth ZachXBT, the funds have been stolen on the Ethereum network, then swapped for ETH before being bridged to the Avalanche and Bitcoin blockchains. DeDotFi’s security team said a leak of private keys may have caused the hack. Investigations are still in progress.
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The lending zkSync lending app, Era Lend, has been exploited for $3.4 million in crypto, according to a July 25 report from blockchain security firm CertiK. The attacker used a “read-only reentrancy attack” to drain the funds, which is an attack that interrupts a multistep process and then causes it to continue after a malicious action has been performed.
Read more on cointelegraph.com
