Evening News | MakerDAO architect Nikolai Muchgian has passed away; U.S. Department of Justice re-examines the case of Tether concealing crypto transactions

Organizer: Cookies, Chain Catcher

"What important events have occurred in the past 24 hours"

1. Bloomberg: The U.S. Department of Justice is re-examining the "Tether hiding crypto-related transactions from banks" case

According to Bloomberg citing informed sources, the U.S. Department of Justice's review of whether Tether concealed crypto-related transactions from banks has been transferred internally after months of legal disputes and has moved from Washington to Manhattan. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in Manhattan has recently taken over the investigation and has been asked to discuss this confidential case anonymously, recently obtaining a guilty plea from someone associated with Tether.

Tether declined to comment before the publication of this article. It later released a statement online stating that this is "not even factual old news." It responded that "Tether executives have not interacted with the Department of Justice regarding any investigation for over a year, and the Department of Justice does not appear to be actively investigating Tether." Tether stated that it does engage in regular, open dialogue with law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Justice, and cooperates with authorities worldwide. (Bloomberg)

2. DOGE briefly rises over 10%, suspected to be related to Musk's tweet of a dog picture

Musk posted a picture of a Shiba Inu (the Dogecoin logo) dressed in Twitter attire, marking the first time he has shared Dogecoin-related content since acquiring Twitter. Following this tweet, Doge surged from $0.126 to $0.142, an increase of over 10%.

According to Lookonchain statistics, the top 50 holders of Dogecoin (DOGE) collectively hold 87.1 billion DOGE, worth approximately $12.6 billion, accounting for 63.71% of the total supply (circulating supply). The holdings of the top 50 DOGE holders have decreased by 21 million DOGE ($3 million) compared to a month ago, decreased by 761 million DOGE ($11 million) compared to a week ago, and increased by 484 million DOGE ($7 million) compared to yesterday.

Morning, Musk clarified on social media that he is only temporarily serving as the sole director of Twitter and will later form a new board with individuals he believes are better suited to represent the company's interests and care for its development. (Source link)

3. MakerDAO architect Nikolai Muchgian found dead, had reported threats three days prior

Former technical partner of MakerDAO, DAI architect, and Balancer co-founder Nikolai Muchgian was found drowned at Condado Beach in Puerto Rico at the age of 29. Tether founder Craig Sellars and 21stParadigm co-founder Dylan Leclair have confirmed this news on Twitter and expressed their condolences.

It is reported that Nikolai returned to social media in April this year and posted information about U.S. law enforcement three days before his death, stating that he had received threats. Nikolai was the CEO of DappHub and a renowned security researcher. He was also involved in the initial architectural design of the Maker/Dai contract system and created the Balancer AMM. Nikolai had previously prevented MakerDAO from experiencing an attack similar to The DAO. (Trustnodes)

4. Serious sandwich attacks suspected in DODO's USDT/DAI liquidity pool

Mike B, the technical lead at Balancer DAO, tweeted that serious sandwich attacks have occurred in the USDT/DAI liquidity pool of the decentralized trading platform DODO, which has a liquidity of less than $10 million but a daily trading volume of $50 million to $100 million, due to MEV (maximum extractable value). "Worse, when users load DODO in a new browser, the default slippage is set to 3%, rather than the more appropriate automatic setting of 0.1%."

Additionally, Mike B suggested that Dodo should add fees to trades in the pool to significantly reduce the number of transactions. The default slippage should also be changed; non-stableswap trades should not default to 3%. (Source link)

5. Gitcoin to gradually shut down the existing cGrants platform, focusing on building the new Grants Protocol

Gitcoin announced that the community has voted to gradually shut down the existing cGrants platform and focus on building and transitioning to the new Grants Protocol.

In addition to hosting Gitcoin grant programs, the Grants Protocol will allow any community, ecosystem, or individual to run their own grant rounds and will enable out-of-the-box creation of secondary financing rounds.

It is reported that Gitcoin will conduct two rounds of Alpha testing from January 17 to 31, which will include a climate solutions round and a joint open-source software and Ethereum infrastructure round, each running with a subset of existing grantees. (Source link)

6. Cosmos community initiates ATOM 2.0 governance proposal vote

The Cosmos community today launched an on-chain voting process for the ATOM 2.0 upgrade to the Cosmos cross-network infrastructure platform. This governance proposal aims to make ATOM the preferred collateral within the Cosmos network and to transition the Cosmos Hub, as an infrastructure service platform, to the next phase. The voting for this proposal will close on November 14, and current voting data shows that over 92% of members support the proposal.

It is reported that on September 26, Cosmos developer Tendermint released the white paper for the ATOM 2.0 version at the Cosmoverse conference. ATOM 2.0 will allow the Cosmos Hub to play a role in cross-chain interactions, making cross-chain access easier and enabling large-scale applications. It also proposed changes to the utility and issuance schedule of ATOM, intending to reduce the monthly new issuance of ATOM from exponential to a constant amount after a 36-month transition period. (Source link)

7. SBF: FTX now supports cryptocurrency transfers using email or phone numbers

FTX founder SBF tweeted today that FTX and FTX US now support cryptocurrency (or USD) transfers using email or phone numbers. (Source link)

8. Abracadabra initiates vote on bad debt repayment plan triggered by UST collapse

The community of algorithmic stablecoin MIM issuer Abracadabra has initiated a vote on a bad debt repayment plan triggered by the UST collapse, with voting options including using treasury funds, using protocol revenue, or a combination of both. The voting deadline is November 2 at 22:00.

The Abracadabra team stated that during the Terra collapse, Abracadabra's UST lending market generated approximately 12 million MIM in bad debt. As of mid-October, the Abracadabra treasury assets included 6,580,153 CRV, 996,059 USDT, 280,153 USDC, 3,300,000 yveCRV, 5,312,299 MIM tokens, and other assets worth about $300,000. (Source link)

"What excellent articles are worth reading in the past 24 hours"

1. “What innovations has Art Gobblers, created by top institution Paradigm, brought to the NFT field?”

In less than a month, four related white papers (Paradigm's explanatory documents) have been released. Art Gobblers has made comprehensive innovations to the existing problems in the NFT field: it adopts a variable rate progressive Dutch auction (VRGDA) for NFT issuance, uses a progressive ownership optimization model (GOO) for the issuance of ERC20 tokens accompanying NFTs, introduces new creation tools and Pages NFT gameplay for creator participation, and builds a "decentralized gallery" for curation. This is "Biosphere 2.0" for NFTs, crafted by the top investment institution Paradigm, which has the potential to become a new paradigm for the NFT industry.

2. “Multicoin: The flow of value in the MEV ecosystem”

MEV has historically sought to achieve some balance between miners and searchers. For any given opportunity, the task for searchers is to technically optimize a set of transactions and select the miner that offers the optimal potential profit percentage from the chosen transaction based on game theory principles. The profits paid to miners and the profits extracted by searchers are classified as MEV. This article will explore how integrated MEV systems can improve the experience for all participants on-chain.

3. “Understanding Hong Kong's virtual asset regulatory framework in one article”

Yesterday, the Hong Kong Financial Secretary officially released the "Policy Declaration on the Development of Virtual Assets in Hong Kong," which has attracted significant attention from the blockchain community from mainland China to Singapore, Canada, and Australia. Indeed, this is a major positive development, but we should not skim the surface; we must seriously study the real issues. This article will summarize the legal norms and policies regulating virtual assets in Hong Kong for friends in the industry for reference.