TLDR Crypto 2022-02-03

Butterfly Protocol and Cortex Application are launching new 'dot human' domains on Polygon. The NFT domains are free and cross-chain with lifetime ownership. They will be compatible with the Cortex App, a project that allows users to build on a complete web3 stack where wallet addresses and URLs are synonymous. Anyone can claim their address by visiting the website linked in the article or by tweeting a Polygon address to Cortex. Butterfly Protocol will be giving away the domains for free indefinitely.

The Hypercycle initiative is a blockchain community that aims to provide massively scalable, low-cost infrastructure for decentralized AI functions and other related programs. It plans to create a layer 2 sidechain on Cardano for advanced multi-agent AI techniques. Hypercycle will not have a replicated ledger, but will instead use the decentralized strategy used by the TODA ledgerless blockchain network. It will use proof of status as its consensus strategy. Development is now in its early stages and will ramp up throughout Q2 2022.

Pollen Mobile is a new mobile data network that promises a way to exchange data anonymously at high speeds and cheap prices. The peer-to-peer wireless network incentivizes users to run their own mini cell towers with a cryptocurrency called PollenCoin. Users have to pay an upfront cost for the hardware, which can cost from $999 to over $10,000. Pollen was created by Pronto AI, an autonomous vehicle technology startup. Pronto started Pollen due to its need for a reliable and affordable mobile network for its vehicles.

Around $300 million of ETH was recently pulled out of the Wormhole contract on Ethereum in a single transaction. Wormhole is a bridge that allows users to move crypto assets between blockchains. This Twitter thread details how the hack was executed, including references to the code that was exploited. The hackers found a way to bypass signature checks, created their own tokens, and then withdrew the fake tokens through ETH.

Cross-chain bridges like Wormhole use a mint-and-lock mechanism where the contract mints tokens only after validators observe and agree that a user has deposited funds into a smart contract. Hackers in the recent Wormhole hack exploited a bug to trick the contract into minting tokens without confirming funds. Despite the size of the hack, the bug exists within the smart contract and was not the result of using a cross-chain bridge. The warnings about cross-chain bridges made recently by Vitalik Buterin were related to 51% attacks. Cross-chain bridges are not more susceptible to bugs than anything else.

Charging fees for exchanging tokens is one of the most direct ways to generate cash flow for a DeFi protocol. This article looks at how fees are distributed among the parties involved in decentralized exchanges. Distributing fees correctly is critical to the success of a decentralized exchange. Users, liquidity providers, and developers all need to be incentivized correctly, making distribution a very non-trivial task.

Input Output, the developers behind the Cardano network, recently submitted proposals to increase the network's block size by 11% and to increase the performance of Plutus, the blockchain's smart contract platform. Blocks are batches of transactions that are confirmed and recorded on a blockchain. Increasing the size means more transactions can be included in each batch, but it can affect transaction times and overall network capacity. The proposals are part of a broader plan to increase transaction volumes on the Cardano network.

Wormhole has confirmed that it has suffered an exploit that resulted in 120,000 Wrapped Ethereum being stolen. The Wormhole team is adding more ETH to the protocol to get the network back up. They have attempted to reach the hackers to offer a $10 million bug bounty for information on the exploit and for the return of the tokens. Wormhole works with various assets to allow users from one chain to take 'wrapped' assets and use them on another chain to take advantage of lower fees or different applications across networks.