The decentralized finance (DeFi) sector continues to attract increasing attention from crypto investors. ForkLog has gathered the most important events and news of the last weeks into a summary.

Main indicators of the DeFi segment

The volume of blocked funds (TVL) in DeFi protocols fell to $59.08 billion, with MakerDAO leading with $7.96 billion, while Lido ($6.9 billion) and AAVE ($6.2 billion) took second and third places, respectively.

TVL fell to $33.68 billion in Ethereum applications. In the last 30 days, the indicator has decreased by 2% (value was $34.41 billion on July 27).

The decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume in the last 30 days was $54.3 billion.

Uniswap continues to dominate the non-custodial foreign exchange market, which accounts for 69.3% of the total turnover. In terms of trading volume, the second DEX is Curve (11.9%), and the third is DODO (6.2%).

Mixer Tornado Cash falls under US sanctions and its developer is arrested

On August 8, OFAC approved the Tornado Cash website and its associated 39 Ethereum and 6 USDC addresses. According to the agency, since the service was created in 2019, attackers have laundered more than $7 billion in cryptocurrencies with its help. Some of the funds are linked to the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group.

Circle has blacklisted the mixing service’s USDC wallet addresses.

Infura and Alchemy infrastructure platforms blocked RPC requests to Tornado Cash. The exchange Uniswap, which was not detained, also closed access to its platform for a number of related addresses. Similar measures have been taken by dYdX.

On August 12, law enforcement in the Netherlands arrested the developer of Tornado Cash on suspicion of money laundering and hiding criminal financial flows through a mixer. Later it became clear that we were talking about 29-year-old Pertsev.

The actions of the authorities caused a resonance in the global crypto community, which worried about the attack in the field of open source software. A rally in support of Pertsev was held in Amsterdam, and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson and other distinguished industry participants spoke in defense of the Tornado Cash developers.

On August 24, it was learned that the Dutch court had detained Pertsev and set a 90-day period for the first hearing of the case.

Later, Fortune, citing a report from the analytical company Kharon, reported that Pertsev previously worked for a company associated with the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB). The developer’s wife, Ksenia Malik, denied her participation in the Russian special services.

A hacker unsuccessfully attacked the Rainbow Bridge cross-chain bridge and lost 5 ETH

The chain-link bridge Rainbow Bridge successfully repelled an attack by an unknown hacker on 20 August.

The attacker sent a fabricated NEAR block that required a deposit of 5 ETH. According to Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora Labs, the unknown expected Saturday morning that it would be difficult for developers to respond to the attack.

The system automatically rejected the fabrication block 31 seconds after the transaction was sent. As a result, the hacker lost his deposit, the user funds remained safe.

Nomad offers hackers NFT to return stolen funds

The hackers behind the $190 million Nomad cross-chain protocol hack were offered NFT as a reward for returning more than 90% of the funds withdrawn.

Special NFTs featuring a wizard’s white hat are offered by the Metagame project. Only a hacker who pays back their assets can issue a token, thus falling into the category of white hackers – white hat.

On August 2, unknown persons hacked the cross-chain protocol. The attackers exploited a vulnerability in a smart contract that allowed unauthorized withdrawals.

Compound launches third version of DeFi protocol

On August 16, the Compound landing project announced that it was ready to launch the third version of the protocol, called Comet.

According to the developers, the update marks the platform’s transition to a multi-chain approach.

Kevin Cheng, Senior Software Engineer at Compound Labs noted that the first implementation of Comet will be a marketplace based on the USDC stablecoin. It will then add support for five crypto assets that are also available as collateral: WBTC, WETH, UNI, LINK and COMP.

On August 24, the decentralized autonomous organization behind the development of the project decided to launch a new version. August 26 developers announced About the activation of Comet.

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