Mango Markets $114 Million Exploit

Mango Markets is a decentralized lending and trading platform on the Solana blockchain. Users can trade with leverage (up to 20x) and go long or short cryptocurrencies in a permissionless manner. This means no KYC and no central limit orderbooks.

Recently, a hacker made out with over $100 Million by manipulating the price of the Mango token (MNGO). Crypto exchanges typically have their own tokens that users can buy and use for utility on the exchange. Other examples include the BNB token or the FTT token found on Binance and FTX respectively. The hacker took out a very high-value long position on the Mango token, causing the price to skyrocket on some oracles pricing. This meant the value of his account also went up in value, the hacker had an unrealised PNL of $420 Million, this additional value was used to take out a loan of $116 Million, essentially draining the Mango Markets platform.

Mango Markets has proposed a way to pay back users of the platform, it will be taking a snapshot of user balances 1 hour before the attack and using its treasury to pay users back. A “digital art dealer” named Avraham Eisenberg has taken responsibility for the hack and claims his actions were all legal, The Mango community voted to allow the hacker to keep $47 million while agreeing to return the remaining $67 million, contingent on the funds being used to pay back users of the platform.

Three Million Wallets Bought Reddit NFTs

Back in July, we talked about Reddit launching an NFT series on the Polygon blockchain, based around the Reddit avatar “Snoo”.

Since then, nearly 3 million wallets have been created by users to purchase Reddit avatar NFTs. Reddit users can flex these NFTs are profile pictures, each NFT has its own unique traits and rarity. Some of these NFTs have sold for as much as 4 ETH (approximately $5,000 USD).

Real World House Sold as an NFT

For the first time ever, a house was sold as an NFT in a town in South Carolina, USA. The three-bedroom house sold for $175,000 USD. The transaction occurred on the real estate marketplace “Roofstock”. Each NFT property on Roofstock is owned by an LLC, the LLC’s details are hardcoded into the NFTs data and the ownership of the property can be transferred as easily as transferring the NFT. The lucky buyer says the process was far easier than the usual mortgage process.

Tether stablecoins (USDT) will be available at more than 24,000 ATMs in Brazil

Tether has partnered with the payment solution “SmartPay” to bring USDT to around 24,000 ATMs in Brazil. While you can’t withdraw USDT tokens like cash, you will be able to convert USDT into Brazilian reais and withdraw those. SmartPay also has a connection to “Pix” which is a commonly used Brazilian payment app where people can send money to friends/family, and so users will be able to use USDT within Pix.

Hong Kong to Potentially Allow Retail Investors to Buy Crypto

Hong Kong is going through interesting times as it still leans on some of the most stringent Covid-19 measures around the world. These measures which up until recently included hotel quarantine, have led to an exodus of talent in the city. As part of its plans to attract new talent and retain existing talent, the government has made clear that its crypto strategy is different from that of mainland China. Who straight-up banned cryptocurrency-related activity in September 2021.

Hong Kong’s SFC is now considering allowing retail investors to invest in cryptocurrencies. Currently, the rules are quite grey but typically, only professional investors have been allowed to use crypto exchanges. In 2023, the SFC is set to release clear guidelines and a licensing regime for crypto-related companies to obtain and act under. In somewhat related news, this week crypto exchange BitMEX opened up spot trading services to Hong Kong citizens. BitMEX was founded in Hong Kong and is well known for occupying the most expensive office space in the city. They did, however, bar Hong Kong residents from the platform in October 2019.