Bitcoin’s Wartime Maneuvers | DAO Hacker Revealed

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN INTO THE FIRE

The war has started. As Russia invaded Ukraine early Thursday, bitcoin dropped below $35,000 for the first time since January, dragging down the rest of the cryptocurrency market. In contrast, gold was trading at its highest levels in more than a year. However, intraday reversal in equities led major indices to close higher. Accordingly, digital assets, which have lately moved in tandem with stocks, rebounded Friday morning. As of 11 a.m. ET Friday, bitcoin was changing hands at $39,556, with most other major assets seeing gains in the high single digits.

Source: Forbes Digital Assets, powered by Nomics.  Prices as of 4:00 p.m. on February 25, 2022.

CROWDFUNDING THE WAR WITH CRYPTO

Donations, including those made with cryptocurrencies, have been pouring into Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion. Within the first few hours, Come Back Alive, a Kyiv-based foundation providing support to the Ukrainian army, raised around $400,000 in bitcoin, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. As of early Friday, the organization’s wallet appears to have received 109 BTC (approximately $4.1 million) with over more than a thousand donations in total. Additionally, a host of crypto activists and executives have called for support towards Ukraine. CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, announced this week that the company had given $25 to each Ukrainian client. Russian protest group Pussy Riot, Trippy Labs and PleasrDAO launched Ukraine DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization dedicated to raising funds for Ukrainian civilian organizations.

WHO HACKED THE DAO?

The largest theft in Ethereum’s history had gone unsolved for nearly six years after an unknown attacker siphoned 3.64 million ETH, or about 5% of all ether then outstanding, from a decentralized venture capital fund known as The DAO. Now, journalist Laura Shin says she may have found the culprit, with the help of a powerful and previously secret forensics tool from crypto tracing firm Chainalysis.

Shin’s investigation points to Toby Hoenisch, a 36-year-old programmer who grew up in Austria and was living in Singapore at the time of the hack. Until now, he has been best known as a cofounder and CEO of TenX, which raised $80 million in a 2017 initial coin offering to build a crypto debit card—an effort that failed. The market cap of those tokens, which spiked at $535 million, now sits at just $11 million. Hoenisch denied the claims…Read the full story here.

BLOCKCHAIN 50 SPOTLIGHT

Adobe: In October 2021, the company that makes Photoshop and the keeper of the PDF format launched Content Attribution, which lets creators export their images directly to certain non-fungible token (NFT) exchanges: KnownOrigin, OpenSea, Rarible and SuperRare. The feature lets artists protect their work against fraudulent claims by irrefutably proving their provenance before “minting” them as NFTs ready for auction. The service will eventually be available to all of Adobe’s 20 million Creative Cloud subscribers.

ELSEWHERE

Blockchain Teams In Ukraine Struggle And Galvanize As Russia Invades Their Country [The Defiant]

Coinbase Posts Big Revenue Beat But Expects Trading Volume To Fall In The First Quarter [CNBC]

European Parliament Delays Vote On Crypto Assets Bill Over Proof-Of-Work Debate [The Block]  

Steven Ehrlich
Editor 
Forbes CryptoAsset & Blockchain Advisor

Nina Bambysheva
Reporter
Forbes Money & Markets

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