Crypto and NFT Today: The Latest Blockchain News for March 8 – 14
Welcome to another edition of Crypto NFT Today! If you enjoy cryptocurrency, NFTs, and riding emotional, and sometimes sketchy, roller coasters, you’ve come to the right place. So put on some soothing music and let’s go!
“White Hat” returning stolen funds to Tender.fi Get $97,000 reward
A hacker behind stealing $1.59 million worth of funds from decentralized lending platform Tender.fi has collected a $97,000 “bounty” to return the funds.
Tender.fi confirmed the exploit, which was carried out on March 7, on Twitter citing “unusual number of loans”. It then suspended all borrowing.
Data on Blockchain revealed that the hacker was able to exploit an oracle price flaw to steal the funds by depositing just one GMX token, valued at just $71. “It looks like your oracle was misconfigured. contact me to sort this out,” the hacker wrote in a chain message.
Less than nine hours later, the DeFi protocol revealed that it had reached an agreement with the hacker to return the stolen funds, minus a 62.16 ETH reward, worth around $97,000. DeFi characterized the hacker as a “White Hat”.
AI generated NFTs to be displayed at the Louvre
An artist who uses artificial intelligence to create NFTs is to exhibit his latest collection at Paris’ Lourve museum. Claire Silvers the collection is titled “can i tell you a secret,” is an “autobiographical series of 100 post-photographic pieces created with AI,” according to Variety.
Silver has previously signed with the world famous talent agency William Morris as its first AI artist. “We will bring AI art to mainstream culture together,” she tweeted about the partnership.
William Morris has an expanding list of NFT artists that now includes Dapper Labs and CryptoKitties co-founder Mack Flavelle, NFT gallery Bright Moments, NFT project Non-Fungible Heroes, NFT startup Boss Beauties and NFT artist Valfré are among the list of Web3 talents.
Meanwhile, NFT artist Refik Anadol is exhibiting his AI-generated art at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The temporary installation is titled “Unsupervised” and will run until April 15.
SEC accuses Bkcoin of $100 million “Ponzi-like” scam
On Monday, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it was filing an “emergency action” against Kevin Kang, a principal investment advisor for Miami-based Bkcoin. The SEC accuses Bkcoin and Kang of “orchestrating a $100 million crypto fraud scheme,” adding “it achieved a successful asset freeze, appointment of a receiver and other relief.”
The emergency action describes that from October 2018 to September 2022, Bitcoin raised approximately $100 million from no less than 55 investors in cryptoassets.
“Bkcoin and Kang assured investors that their money would be used primarily to trade cryptoassets and represented that Bkcoin would generate returns for investors through separately managed accounts and five private funds,” the SEC detailed.
But instead, according to the SEC, “the defendants disregarded the structure of the funds, commingled investors’ assets and used more than $3.6 million to make Ponzi-like payments to fund investors.”
Amazon set to launch NFT Marketplace
On April 24, retail giant Amazon is launching an NFT marketplace. The platform called, Amazon Digital Marketplace will promote 15 NFT collections and also offer NFT rewards to customers for real-world assets purchased from Amazon.
CEO Andy Jassy has expressed qualified support for crypto and NFTs, saying, “I expect NFTs to continue to grow very significantly. We’re probably nowhere near adding crypto as a payment mechanism to our retail business, but I think over time you’ll see crypto get bigger and — it’s possible that Amazon integrates crypto payments.”
Last month, Amazon funded NFT platform Superplastic with $20 million in a Series A purchase. The move is seen as evidence of Amazon’s strategy to use Web3 technology.
In January, Amazon’s AWS cloud service teamed up with Ava Labs to accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology, allowing users to run Avalanche blockchain nodes with a single click.
