Yesterday, Curve experienced a security breach targeting Vyper, a smart contract language and compiler for EVM applications, which led to a “zero-day vulnerability”. The attacker displaced an estimated $70 million of CRV, or 8% of the circulating supply. While some of this had been salvaged by white-hat hackers, the hacker sadly still has the majority of the funds.

Unfortunately, it looks like the story is not over yet. The CRV collapse continues, with other protocols including Aave and Frax facing the risk of being affected by the spreading impact.  

Curve Founder’s Bad Debt

A few months ago, CRV founder Michael Egorov took a collateralized debt of $110 million, backed by 460M CRV tokens, or 47% of the entire CRV circulating supply. The debt was made across multiple protocols including Aave and Frax. Egorov chose this method rather than selling CRV directly, a decision that drew backlash from the community.

The attack yesterday drained most of the CRV/ETH, a primary liquidity pool for CRV. As the price of CRV crashes rapidly, Egorov’s loans are at risk of being liquidated.

Aave

His largest position is on Aave, where Egorov backs a $63.2 million USDT loan with 305 million CRV, or 34% of circulating supply. The liquidation price of this loan is $0.376. At the time of this writing, CRV is trading at $0.50. Should the hacker sell out of his 7 million CRV position, the price of CRV is likely to drop below the liquidation price

Frax Finance

Egorov’s second largest position is on Frax Finance. He currently has 59m $CRV supplied against 15.8m FRAX of debt.

FraxFinance poses a greater risk to CRV due to its Time-Weighted Variable Interest Rate, despite being a smaller position. In Frax’s case, interest rate adjusts over time based on loan utilization rate. In case of a Curve selloff, the loan utilization rate will increase due to a decrease in collateral value. 

At 100% utilization, which it currently is at, interest rate would double every12 hours, leading to an eventual liquidation, regardless of CRV price. The current interest rate is 81.20%, but can be expected to increase to the maximum of nearly 10,000% APY after just 3.5 days.

Egorov has tried to lower his debt and the utilization rate but to no avail, as the market’s utilization rate remains at 100%. 

Other Protocols

The rest of Egorov’s positions are in Abracadabra, Inverse, Convex, and Silo, all nearing liquidation

What’s Next

Currently, all DeFi protocols that accept CRV as collateral are at risk of contagion. This is a quickly developing story. We will keep you updated as it unfolds. Meanwhile, you can check updated news at: https://app.coinfeeds.io/coins/curve-dao-token

There are a couple of significant occurrences on Litecoin's horizon that could be influencing its recent surge. The first is the imminent halving event - a fundamental shift in the mechanics of Litecoin that will see a 50% reduction in the generation of new coins. This in itself is an event that often stirs interest in the cryptocurrency market.

The second key development is the introduction of the new token standard, LTC-20. This standard, a derivative of Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC-20s, has been introduced without fanfare, aligning with Litecoin's history of consistent, steady innovation.

These phenomena—the introduction of LTC-20s and Litecoin's upcoming halving—may well be the fundamental catalysts sparking the recent bullish trend in LTC's price.

Source: Coinmarketcap

Litecoin TLDR

Litecoin (LTC) was created by forking Bitcoin’s original source code in 2011. It is an open-source, peer-to-peer network which also uses Proof of Work (PoW). Litecoin’s most notable features differentiating it from Bitcoin are its reduced block times from 10 minutes to 2.5 minutes, increased maximum supply from 21,000,000 to 84,000,000, and converting its algorithm from Bitcoin Core to Scrypt. 

These features improve transaction throughput by increasing transaction speeds and reducing fees, however, at the detriment of decentralization.

Upcoming Halving Schedule

Litecoin has a built-in mechanism where block subsidies denominated in LTC are cut in half every 840,000 blocks or roughly every 4 years. This halving schedule resembles that of Bitcoin and reduces mining rewards over time decreasing newly minted tokens that are introduced into circulation.

Source: Litecoinhalving

Nine months following the halving in August 2019, coinciding with the spark of a bull market, LTC’s market capitalization grew from ~$5.8B to ~$23.2B (~3x growth). The total crypto market capitalization during this peak was ~$2.5T. As the scarcity of LTC increases due to a decrease in newly minted tokens brought into circulation, could the next halving be a driver of upward price pressure as markets mature?

Although there are magnitudes more cryptocurrency tokens today since the prior halving, the implications of the upcoming halving are worth monitoring as crypto markets continue to develop. In addition to this embedded deflationary phenomenon, the emergence of LTC-20s creates an interesting environment for LTC as we approach the halving in less than a month (August 2, 2023).

So what are LTC-20s?

Think Litecoin NFTs. The same Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC-20s that stirred up debate and drove revenue to the Bitcoin ecosystem now have their forked version in the Litecoin ecosystem. Litecoin Ordinals, also known as LTC-20s, is an experimental token standard that enables more flexibility than its Bitcoin counterpart. Ordinals allow users to inscribe arbitrary data like text, image, and audio files.

Remember Litecoin block speeds were 4x faster? This allows users to mint or inscribe Litecoin Ordinals at greater speeds with substantially lower fees.

Source: Blockchair

Since the deployment of Unilit, LTC-20’s first marketplace on June 15 and the rollout of the Litescribe Wallet’s (UniSat wallet fork) Google Chrome Extension on June 22, Litecoin’s median block size experienced a massive surge shortly after as users quickly began inscribing Litecoin Ordinals. The increase in usage typically results in growing network fees which benefit miners who secure the network.

How to get started with LTC-20s?

The infrastructure and tooling around LTC-20s are still in their infancy and continue to be developed. However, the Unilit.io marketplace allows users to create an account and buy and sell LTC-20s. Additionally, users can inscribe arbitrary data onto Litecoin using Litescribe. Below we share details on how to get started on Unilit.

Sign Up: You can create an account on Unlit using an email, Google, Twitter, or Discord account, followed by a quick email verification.

Link External Wallet: To sell LTC-20 inscriptions, an external wallet must be linked to a verified Unlit account to receive payment. The default internal Unlit wallet does not accept LTC balances or any tokens except LTC-20 inscriptions. The external wallet can be linked by clicking on the Wallet tab and submitting the external wallet address.

Buying Inscriptions: To buy an inscription, select it from the "Choose your next LTC-20" section. The marketplace lists all the confirmed sell orders in ascending price order. Select the listed order to be purchased using the buy button, and adjust the quantity in the following window. Then, proceed to MixPay, where various cryptocurrencies can be used for the purchase. Once the transaction is successful, the order will appear in the wallet tab, and the transaction will be marked with a green checkmark.

Selling Inscriptions: Select an inscription in a wallet and click sell in the wallet tab. A prompt will enable you to set the quantity and price to be sold. The minimum total sell order should be over $50, and the total number of inscriptions sold should exceed 50. Once a sell order is confirmed, it will appear in the Pending Orders column. These orders can be modified or canceled until the transaction is processed.

Closing Summary

Builders are working through updates and implementing changes to improve indexing and the display of Litecoin Ordinals, introduce new marketplaces, release compatible wallets  and continue experimenting with this new token standard. The emergence of LTC-20s has onboarded more than 90,000 users, inscribing over 1 million ordinals. 

The Litecoin ecosystem has remained relatively quiet over the years. However, as we quickly approach the next Litecoin Halving in August and the new spotlight on LTC-20s, time will tell if these could be catalysts that continue to draw more attention to the ecosystem or if it is just another fad.

Top Uniswap Pools by Volume (24 hours)

1. USDC / WETH

2. WETH / USDT

3. FAIR / ETH

4. FERC / ETH

To get Uniswap trading alerts like this, you can get our Discord bot

FERC20

This new standard is called Fair ERC20, inspired by the simplicity of the Ordinals protocol. Because the Ordinals protocol is so bare-bones, it restricts the issuer’s ability to program the token too much — this creates many advantages that make BRC 20 fairer than ERC 20. The creator of the project argues that BRC 20 is fairer for these reasons:

• Minimalistic design restricts the issuer’s ability to program, reducing many security risks

• Issuers and project teams cannot reserve a portion of free or cheap tokens for themselves. (No pre-mine)

• Bitcoin's UTXO mechanism and low performance prevents many smart contract bots from operating on the network

Fair ERC-20 is BRC 20 on Ethereum, bringing the spirit of fair launch to the Ethereum network, but with the advantages of Ethereum, such as ease of access through common wallets like MetaMask, and compatibility with the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem.

This new standard was launched today. Now, anyone can mint or deploy FERC-20 tokens on the project’s website.

FERC was the first fERC-20 token ever deployed, fueling speculation that “FERC is ORDI on ERC20”. It has a max supply of 10 million, which has been completely minted. Here is the Uniswap pool for the token.

The first fERC-20 tokens minted

It’s also interesting to participate in the new standard, by deploying your own token or minting tokens. You can deploy your own fERC-20 token, all you need to do is set a few simple parameters:

You can also mint any token still in progress, by inputing the Ticker:

The creator of the project describes it as an experiment. It’s been only one day, and it’s definitely off to an interesting start.

Relevant links

Project website: https://www.erc20.cash/

Blog post (Chinese): https://mirror.xyz/jackygu.eth/l6Z0PIFnzpKJkzhkOanNGaqUZfJNOYlvck3Lq5ZihVU

Discord: https://discord.gg/ggDAAu6zKe

Today we’re taking a much more comprehensive look at over 100 NFT collections across Ethereum and Solana. This time we are not just looking at their recent followers, but all of their followers. So here is our report on how many accounts are passive promo-only accounts. 

Background

NFT Twitter is filled with giveaways that incentivize follows, likes, and retweets for a chance to win an NFT, an airdrop, get on a white list, etc. While this creates engagement for sure, it attracts many low quality accounts who are only there for the promotion, and often un-follows after some time.

We looked at over 100 NFT projects on Ethereum and Solana. We downloaded all of their followers, and we looked at the tweets they engaged with, and found accounts who only engaged with promotional tweets and nothing else.

To do this, we found all promotional tweets in the past 30 days. We found how often people engaged with them, compared to how much they tweet in general. Then, we found people who only engaged with promotional tweets, or who recently created an account just to engage with promotional tweets.

30% of all NFT followers are promo only

This is looking at Twitter accounts whose only purpose is to participate in promotions like giveaways or whitelists. They share characteristics like:

• They don’t tweet anything of their own

• They are overactive in participating in promotions

The extent of promotions is much higher for Solana NFTs

This could be because Solana NFTs are newer. Here is the breakdown:

• Ethereum - 27% promo accounts

• Solana - 43% promo accounts

Breakdown by Collection

Here are the top 10 projects with the least promo accounts on Ethereum

Here are the top 10 projects with the most promo accounts on Ethereum

Here are the top 10 projects with the least promo accounts on Solana

Here are the top 10 projects with the most promo accounts on Solana

Most Active Promoters

Here’s the most active promoters on Solana:

Here’s the most active promoters on Ethereum:

More to come

Keep a look out for the upcoming Followers tab on Coinfeeds, which will appear for most NFT collections, where we will be releasing these stats and more.

Twitter Account Sale

Today I was DM’d by someone on Twitter to sell me an account with 211k followers. Since I have been observing a lot of questionable activity from spam accounts recently, I decided to talk to this account and find out more.

I was skeptical if there even was a real account being sold, but I was surprised to find that there was — https://twitter.com/im_ryand — and she is asking 900 usd for it, a discount from the normal 1.2k, since it is a rush sale.

She sent me the tweet selling this account (I decided I shouldn’t reveal the account for their privacy, so I’m blurring it out) -

I noticed the strange hashtags on it, #snakezone #junglezone #ratszone. Clicking on these hashtags reveals that all of them are code for selling social media accounts. This is apparently a trend that dates as far back as 2018.

It is pretty consistent and unambiguous. Each and every post with these hashtags is about selling accounts, and it can be found on other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as well.

Here’s some quick data —

#snakezone #junglezone #ratszone and #ratzone had total volume of 15,611 tweets in the past 30 days.

People often use NFT related hashtags along with the above hashtags. So out of these 15k tweets, 6,526 tweets also have NFT or crypto hashtags (#NFTCommunity, #NFTGiveaways, #NFTs, #Crypto, etc.) in the same tweet.

So 41% of account sale tweets are targeted for NFTs or crypto use. Other than NFTs, I also see these hashtags appear with #royalehightrades or #robloxgiveways.

I asked the seller what I can do with the account, and she told me that “it's safe for any content sir, giveaway, crypto, business. anything” All details can be changed, tweets can be deleted, and the followers apparently are organic. I wonder how many people did this, or if there are any NFT projects that bought accounts like this.

Promoters Admin

On the same day, I was also contacted by a promoter admin.

I responded and I was put into three groups, each is a different promoter. I was sent pictures like these, with their name on top.

They do promotions across all social platforms —

And I was given examples like these:

A tweet like this can generate 15k+ followers in 24 hours. I thought it was notable that this account is even a verified account on Twitter.

We asked around, and there are people who worked with these promoters, and they are able to drive a lot of traffic into their community, but it did not lead to sales.

The Solana NFT community has seen a lot of growth recently, and we wanted to take a closer look at this community, and understand who is engaging in this community.

Magic Eden is the leading marketplace for Solana NFTs, capturing well over 95% market share in daily Solana NFT transactions. Anyone who follows Solana NFTs is sure to follow Magic Eden, so this is a great place to start in understanding the Solana NFT community.

In the following analysis, we took a look at the most recent followers of Magic Eden’s official twitter account, @MagicEden — we looked thousands of accounts covering three days worth of followers gained, in the time period between July 26, 2022 to July 29, 2022.

What do followers engage with?

Retweeting is one of the most powerful ways to engage since it shares content to a wider audience. We wanted to know what followers of Magic Eden are retweeting. Which accounts do they retweet the most?

Here’s the leaderboard. (The way to read this chart this is, “36% of followers have retweeted the account @magiceden)

The first thing that stands out is the high presence of promoters.

Here are the most retweeted tweets:

These tweets are all promotional tweets that offer something of monetary value in exchange for engagement. Not surprisingly, they got the most engagement.

Paying for engagement is not necessarily bad - it can be a way to draw people into the community. The next question to ask is, what else are they doing, other than participating in promotions?

Who ONLY participates in promotions?

We want to make a distinction between accounts that do other things, while also engaging in promotional tweets, and accounts that only engage in promotional tweets, or are created for promotional tweets.

To find this, we found all promotional tweets in the past 30 days (promotional tweets = tweets offering incentives for engagement) - which is over 166k tweets — and then we found how often people engaged with them, compared to how much they tweet in general. Then, we find people who only engaged with promotional tweets, or who recently created an account just to engage with promotional tweets. We found that 45% of accounts are dedicated to promotional tweets.

So, what about bots?

Some people may think of bots at this point, and the prevalence of bots on Twitter is also a very topical debate right now. One reason why this is a contentious topic is that it is very challenging to define what is a bot. We don’t think that promotional accounts are equivalent to bots. Many might be operated by real people, who choose to only engage with promotions. However, even so, they are not engaging with the community in a very meaningful way. Shedding light on promotions can inform the motivations behind some accounts, and this can contribute to the discussion in this way.

There is a real community

Here’s the bright side — the remaining 55% of accounts are higher quality. Besides, we only looked at recent followers, so this actually means that Magic Eden gained a bunch of real followers in the past three days. However, it is not great that the so many followers are promotions driven, and this is definitely something that people should be aware of.

We have more questions

While this analysis is on Magic Eden, promotions happen across crypto Twitter, and probably across Twitter as a whole.

Stay tuned, and we will be sharing similar analysis for some other crypto accounts, so that we can get a better understanding of how widespread promotional accounts really are.

We had many more questions after this analysis — maybe you do too. Let us know what you think!