I, Degen - Episode 3

Suspicious Coinbase Trades, Rug-pull Finder, more DeFi hack

Listen at: idegen.fm

Contact us: @idegenfm

Intro:

Each week we track down and explore the most interesting crypto stories we can find. We examine scams, hacks, defi exploits, and anything that feeds our crypto curiosity. Welcome degens! Come one, come all.This weeks show - evolving format, testing something new. Start with a run down of this weeks most wild and interesting crypto degen stories.

1) Week in review

Crypto, DeFi, & NFT hacking

1. Elephant Money Flash Loan Attack Nets hacker 22.2 Million USD in various tokens from the treasury - Rekt.news, @BlockSec, Elephant Money
   
   
2. US Officials Tie North Korea’s ‘Lazarus’ Hackers to $625M Ronin Bridge Attack
   
   
3. Tornado Cash Blocks Sanctioned Addresses VIA their UI
   
   

Tornado Cash uses
@chainalysis
oracle contract to block OFAC sanctioned addresses from accessing the dapp.Maintaining financial privacy is essential to preserving our freedom, however, it should not come at the cost of non-compliance.

1. Another Former Bored Ape Holder Suing OpenSean over inactive listing UI bug

General Crypto News

1. From the New York Times, Wolf of Wall Street is now marketing himself as a crypto guru
   
   
2. From CryptoSlate Russia to legalize crypto as means of payment- "Russia’s Ministry of Finance is working on draft regulations that will legalize crypto as a payment method."

3. Another from CryptoSalte Monero community set to blitz CEXs in coming ‘Monerun’- "Suspicions of CEXs overstating XMR reserves will be put to the test in a coordinated run on Monero."

2) Feature - Coinbase Insider Making Bank?

What
Coinbase drops an article on April, 11th titled:‘transparency for new asset listings on coinbase’: from the article:

Starting immediately and as part of an effort to increase transparency by providing as much information symmetry as possible, Coinbase will be using this blog post as a pilot to communicate assets under consideration for listing in Q2 2022 (April 1st, 2022 to June 30th, 2022).

The article inspired fears of insider trading and caused degens to hit the blockchain to see what they could find. Before we dig in, it’s worth noting that this is not a new issue for Coinbase. The BCH Coinbase insider trading issue was a thing in 2019

Post from Reddit user dragondude4 on r/cryptocurrency

Earlier today Coinbase made a “transparency post” naming about 50 assets that they are planning to list on their exchange. Most of them are illiquid shitcoins that no one can figure out why they are even listing in the first place.

The post goes on to show 4-5 screen shots of tweets [like]((https://twitter.com/AlanStacked/status/1514062386851946499):

Thread blows up…but then:

So, it turns out this wasn’t a Coinbase insider, but instead a clever chart scammer.

What is chart scammer? idk, I just made that up.

Nansen AI, blockchain analytics, and intelligence platform. They do a lot of cool stuff, but in this context, the smart money dashboard lets you track flows of coins going to and from smart trader's accounts.

So the tricked the Nansen.ai into making it look like this coin was pumping:

How?

So, it looks like people gaming Nansen to make it look like honeypot/scam tokens are pumping. clever. But what does this have to do with coinbase? Nothing, so lets look at another:

This one looks legit. Indeed we can see large Pawtocol - UPI tokens being snagged up on Feb 8th before the Feb 11th coinbase announcement

It’s hard to say what this means. It could be legit. It could be insider trading from someone at Coinbase or maybe even just at UPI?

Cobie Tweet: