The $325M DeFi Heist đź’°

Author

Shaan Puri
February 03, 2022

https://delta.onelink.me/a1Ot/milkroad

GM, This is the Milk Road. We show you 1-2 cool things about crypto, in less than 5 minutes a day.

In Today's Email:

  • 🧾 A Big Tax Win For Crypto Investors

  • đź’° $325m Stolen in a DeFi Hack

  • 🎥 NFTs Just Outsold the Entire Movie Industry

  • 🎸 Coachella Going Full NFT

Big Tax Win for Crypto Investors

A husband and wife in Nashville asked the IRS for a refund for crypto taxes, and they got it. 

Let’s be more specific.

The IRS rules that unsold tokens from staking and mining will not be taxed.

This is a nice win for the nice guys (us)

For example, I have a bunch of ETH staked right now for ETH2, and don’t want to be on the hook for huge taxes for tokens I’m not selling and taking gains on.

Thanks IRS. Love ya.

The Second Largest DeFi Hack Ever

The 2nd biggest hack ever went down today. A hacker stole $325M from Wormhole protocol. 

$325M.. Hot damn! 

Here’s my updated “stealing money” rankings:

  1. Clooney & Brad Pitt in Oceans 11

  2. The hacker who just stole $325M from wormhole

  3. Comcast, charging $90 a month while providing the crappiest service on the planet

Check this out. The protocol offered the hacker $10M to give back the stolen $325M.

I know this is hard to believe, but he didn’t take the deal yet. 

Anyways - this is the 2nd biggest hack EVER 

So - what do we need to know about this hack? 

  • Wormhole lets users move tokens & NFTs between Solana and Ethereum

  • The hacker stole $325M due to a smart contract bug (ouch) 

  • Wormhole is pledging to replace the stolen $$ “within hours” (no clear answer on where they will get the $325M to replace it) 

If you wanna go deeper, this twitter thread from Jon Wu explains how the hack went down: 

Smart contract bugs are just one of many “lose it all” risks in crypto.

That’s why Rule #67 on the Milk Road is: Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Protocol

NFTs Outsold the Entire Movie Industry in January

Wanna hear the craziest stat I heard all month?

Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club did more in sales on Opensea ($495m) than the global movie industry did at the box office ($482m)

That’s just bored apes.

If you look at all NFTs on opensea, that’s ~$5B in NFT sales in january.  And the craziest bit? These numbers don’t even include the Milk Road NFTs that may or may not be coming soon. 

*cue the dr evil laugh*

Coachella Going Full NFT

I’ve said it before (right above!) and I’ll say it again - NFTs are the boybands of crypto. You may think they look stupid, but they are going mainstream.

It might sound crazy but it ain’t no lie.. 

Another day, another big celebrity launching an NFT. 

This time it’s Coachella.

A few interesting things:

1/ This is launching on Solana, not ETH.  One of the first big brands we’ve seen go that route

2/ They’re pricing everything in USD (easier to understand)

3/ This is all done on FTX (why the f*ck isn’t FTX sponsoring this newsletter by now? We are the fastest growing crypto newsletter on planet earth) 

Will I buy the Coachella NFT? 

No. Is it because I got kids and am too damn old to be going to festivals? 

Yes.

- Shaan "Never Going to Coachella" Puri

What'd you think of today's email?