Decentralized exchange Velodrome recovers $350K stolen funds from team member
Another day, another heist! Velodrome Finance, a trading and liquidity platform, claimed the recovery of $350,000 stolen. On Aug. 4, one of Velodrome's high-worth wallets was drained off before it could be transferred to the company's treasury multi-sig wallet.
The situation grew awkward when the investigation revealed that a former team member was responsible for the theft.
The Platform announced on Saturday that anonymous developer "Gabagool", popular as Gabagool.eth on Twitter, was responsible for the theft.
However, Gabagool owned up to the allegations.
Velodrome had given the ownership of its wallet's private key to five individuals, which included Gabagool. That's where it all went wrong.
Here's what happened, as explained by Gabagool himself in a note:
Gabagool lost vast amounts of money during the 2022 crypto crash and wanted to recoup losses.
Gabagool withdrew $350,000 in various cryptocurrencies, converted it to Ether (ETH), and sent it to Tornado Cash.
By the time Gabagool decided to return the stolen funds, Velodrome investigators discovered his involvement.
The fund was returned by Gabagool.
Velodrome decided to revoke ownership of private keys from team members and instead set up gnosis safes for all monetary operations.
The greatest irony is that Gabagool.eth, who gained popularity by being among a group of on-chain sleuths regularly exposing nefarious actors in the DeFi space, has now turned into one.
Many projects, including Nomad Bridge and the Solana ecosystem, have recently been targeted by fraudulent activities, which are at an all-time high in the crypto industry.
OpenSea changes stolen NFT policy
As crypto crimes and asset thefts continue to be the primary concern in the industry, NFT marketplace leader OpenSea introduced a new policy to help fight against stolen NFTs being sold on the Platform.
In February, there was a fishing attack, and in June, there was a data breach incident. Sometimes the users get into trouble when they lose their NFTs or mistakenly purchase the stolen ones and get penalized. Such incidents truly infuriated the community.
But now, the marketplace has decided to address the problem by adjusting its policy to expand the use of police reports.
1/ Can we address the 🐘 in the room? We want to provide you more clarity and transparency around our stolen items policy ↯
— OpenSea (@opensea) August 10, 2022
Instead of focusing exclusively on cases with escalated disputes, the Platform has decided to employ police reports to confirm all reports of stolen assets within the NFT platform.
Without a police report within seven days, the Platform will enable the buying and selling of the reported item again to avoid fake reports. The company has also decided to make it easier to re-enabling the buying and selling features once the stolen items are recovered.
Apparently, they are also working to find other solutions to tackle the problem of NFT theft at its roots.
BlackRock announces the launch of a new private spot Bitcoin trust
BlackRock is seriously exploring crypto. Last week, the asset manager partnered with crypto exchange Coinbase to give Aladdin platform customers crypto access via Coinbase prime.
And now, BlackRock has launched a spot bitcoin (BTC) private trust for U.S.-based institutional investors.
The company claimed that despite recent market volatility, some institutional clients still express "substantial interest" in using its technology to enter the crypto market.
The world's largest asset manager is now exploring permissioned blockchains, stablecoins, cryptoassets, and tokenization as well.
For the institutional investors concerned about the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, the firm said it's been encouraged by a plan for "decarbonizing crypto" created by nonprofits such as Energy Web, which are creating initiatives to promote sustainable energy consumption in crypto mining.