DeFi Herald: Chainlink team announced staking, and hackers hacked Horizon for $100 million

The decentralized finance (DeFi) sector continues to attract increased attention from cryptocurrenciesinvestors. ForkLog has collected the most important events and news of recent weeks in a digest.

The main indicators of the DeFi segment

Against the backdrop of the crisis in the cryptocurrency industry, the volumeblocked funds (TVL) in DeFi protocols fell to $78.89 billion. The sector leader in terms of indicator is the Aave landing protocol ($10.48 billion). The second and third places in the ranking are occupied by MakerDAO ($7.93 billion) and Curve ($5.51 billion), respectively.

Data: DeFi Llama.

TVL in Ethereum apps drops to $46.03billion. Over the past month, the indicator denominated in US dollars has decreased by almost 40% (on May 25 - $ 75.49 billion). In ETH, the value decreased by only 0.5%, to 37.44 million coins.

Data: DeFi Llama.

Decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume over the past 30 days was $76.5 billion, according to Duna Analytics.

Uniswap continues to dominate the non-custodial exchange market with 56.9% of total turnover. The second DEX in terms of trading volume is Curve (20.3%), the third is Synthetix (8.7%).

Hacker stole about $100 million during the attack on the Horizon cross-chain bridge of the Harmony protocol

The Harmony blockchain platform team reported an attack on the Horizon cross-chain bridge, as a result of which the attacker stole assets worth about $100 million.

According to Certik, the attacker managed to obtaincontrol over the multisig wallet. The unknown person withdrew the tokens in several transactions, after which he sent them to another wallet and exchanged them on the Uniswap decentralized exchange.

The developers have suspended Horizon. They also said they launched an investigation with law enforcement, including the FBI, and notified cryptocurrency exchanges of the situation.

The team assured that the incident did not affect the trustless bridge for bitcoin - all funds are safe in decentralized vaults.

Chainlink team announced the launch of staking

Decentralized oracle network developersChainlink announced the introduction of the LINK token staking mechanism in the second half of 2022. The team noted that the move will improve the security of the ecosystem as it scales.

According to the statement, the staking mechanism will achieve “four long-term goals”: 

• improve network security and provide assurance to users;
• ensure the involvement of community members in the work of Chainlink;
• generate and distribute rewards for stakers; 
• create a reputation structure for selecting nodes in decentralized oracle networks.

According to the developers, the first stage isthe goal is to create “a solid and simple foundation that will allow you to collect feedback.” Over time, the scope of staking will expand, and its structure will become more complicated.

Blockchain Osmosis Suspended Due to Critical Vulnerability

On June 8, blockchain platform Osmosis of the Cosmos ecosystem suspended block production due to a vulnerability that could lead to the depletion of the liquidity pools of the Osmosis DEX application.

Reddit users were the first to notice the exploit. One of them noted that the vulnerability allows you to deposit liquidity into the pool and get 50% more deposit when it is removed.

The developers explained that the exploit was made possible due to a bug present in the Osmosis v9 update, which was activated on May 7th.

The error consisted in the incorrect calculation of the shares of liquidity providers when depositing and withdrawing assets from pools. It was skipped at the stage of internal testing of the update.

It took the project team several days to get the platform back up and running. Osmosis only resumed block production on June 12th.

An attacker attacked the DNS servers of DeFi projects from Namecheap clients

Since June 23, a number of DeFi projects, including Convex Finance, Allbridge, Ribbon Finance, and DeFi Saver, have experienced attacks on their DNS servers. All of them used the services of the Namecheap domain name registrar.

The attack vector in all cases was similar: an unknown person seized control of the project’s DNS server and invited its users to approve malicious smart contracts. 

Allbridge co-founder Andrey Velikiy saidForkLog that about 23 cryptocurrency projects faced a DNS attack. He added that a group of victims is considering filing a lawsuit against the provider. 

Namecheap remained silent for almost a day, but on the evening of June 24, the head of the company, Richard Kirkendall, wrote on Twitter that the provider had identified a “compromised agent” and removed access.

The volume of venture capital financing of the DeFi sector in May fell to $176.3 million

In May, the total volume of decentralized finance-focused venture capital deals amounted to $176.3 million, the lowest since September 2021.

In the total influx of venture investments in the blockchain industry, the share of the DeFi sector fell to 9% against 18% in April.

Data: The Block Research.

For the first time since July 2020, DeFi funding has not been among the top two types of deals in the industry, according to analyst John Dantoni.

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