penguins
Crypto is politically very much front, back & centre. Irrespective of the fact that the amendments folks wished for didn't get through; simply the amount of push/pull that the activists and the crypto lobby threw at the infrastructure bill is testament to the future political battles. The result of this experience is that now there is noise amongst young crypto-aware Americans for the need for single issue candidates as well as to primary politicians based on a single issue. They may not have the numbers to swing the pendulum but they certainly have funds, willpower and numerous avenues to market their ideas.
The $600m DeFi saga - went from being a biggest hack in DeFi history to not-a-hack.....well the story isn't as crystal clear if you follow the events of the timeline. Indeed there was a bug; and this person (lets call him X) found it. Watching the events unfolding live on the blockchain and the communication between X and others, its pretty clear that X is one person. Within minutes of the movement of funds, quite a few exchanges blacklisted the offender's address. Someone sent X a message to inform him that he shouldn't try to cash-out Tether (USDT) because they have blacklisted him. X thanked the person by paying him $40k worth of ETH. Suddenly, this started a storm of additional messages - some even trying to hint to him how he could launder it out.
Irrespective, after a while you begin to get a feeling that X is feeling the pressure, as number of various teams are trying to hunt him down. So there seems to be hints that he is willing to return the amount back.
By then Bloomberg, CNBC etc are running with hack headlines. Eventually, he returned back majority, some he was allowed to keep (500k as a bounty); while difference of approx $100m he actually lost because of his attempts to try to move the funds between various tokens / platforms.
musings:
Nothing is exactly as it seems. Moreover, news media is too late by the time they report it. Pretty much many things can be tracked on blockchain. Thus, you can hack but high unlikely you can live off that money for the rest of your life.
Due to EIP-1559; 37.7k ETH has been burned. That's slowly starting to show that approx. 120m would be the long term supply limit for ETH. So now there is some sort of a ceiling. More ETH is used; more ends up burned in fees. Current burn rate is approx. 3.22 ETH/min; with the NFT platform called OpenSea being responsible for nearly 10% of the burn.
