NFT (Nearing Future Times)

Success of the Women in Crypto Event!

On the 27th of April, we were proud to host our very first Women in Crypto Event at AllBright’s Members’ Club. The event brought together over 60 women from all walks of life and at different stages of their careers in both TradFi and DeFi.

It was an evening to network, share experiences and knowledge, and encourage more women to be curious about what the world of crypto has to offer them specifically. Due to the success and positive feedback from all attendees, we will be aiming at making our Women in Crypto event a more regular occurrence, each one with a different format.

If you’d like to be the first to know about our next events, feel free to reach out to email events@durlstonpartners.com

📅 This Week in Crypto 📅

• Binance’s $500 Million Investment in Twitter: What does it mean for the Social Network’s Future?

Binance is among 18 investors backing Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid to purchase Twitter, a move industry participants dubbed an effort to expand the crypto exchange’s revenue streams from trading fees.

• Meta’s Instagram to Support NFTs

Non-fungible tokens from some of the most popular blockchain networks for crypto art (such as Ethereum, Polygon, Solana and Flow) are coming to Instagram, and the social media powerhouse (owned by Meta)will not charge users for showcasing their artwork.

• Number of Central Banks Involved in CBDC Projects Almost Doubles

A rising number of central banks globally have the legal authority to issue central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and, compared with a year earlier, the share of central banks which are currently developing a CBDC or running a pilot nearly doubled from 14% to 26%, according to a new report by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

📰 Digital Take Away 📰

At the time of writing this article, there are 19,362 crypto protocols live (according to www.cointmarketcap.com). The growth of this ecosystem has been exponential, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. What most of these projects have in common is a “smart contract” and an engineering team that can write and deploy smart contracts using Solidity.

It’s no surprise that the need for Solidity Engineers is at an all-time high right now and the pressure to secure top talent is on.

In this race to deploy the best project, is there any room for compromise? 

Akutars, an Ethereum-based NFT project developed by Aku Dreams, hit a snag after its launch on the 22nd of April and locked up $34 million, due to the faulty code of the smart contract.

Once the launch started, a Twitter user named Hasan, warned of an issue with the smart contract—and wrote that he was told by Aku’s developers that he was “wrong” and was assured that there were fail-safes in place to prevent the issue.

However, someone going by the name USER221 then triggered the suspected exploit, which apparently halted both Ethereum withdrawals and refunds from the contract, according to a thread by Ethereum developer 0xInuarashi.

An evaluation by blockchain safety agency BlockSec confirmed that there have been two key vulnerabilities within the contract. The first one is in defective code over processing refunds, which has to this point not been exploited. The second is a software program bug, particularly in a form that enables the venture proprietor to say funds locked into the contract.

In a research paper titled, “Exploring Security Practices of Smart Contract Developers” it was observed that $680 million worth of digital assets controlled by smart contracts were lost because of security vulnerabilities in 2021. They wondered how smart contract developers approach security.

They went about interviewing 29 smart contract developers, 10 of which having had less than a year of experience and 19 with 2-5 years of experience, to ask about security perceptions and practices.

When the survey participants were asked about their priorities in smart contract development, most respondents (83 per cent) did not say security was a top priority and offered three primary reasons: (1) they need to ship projects fast and security becomes secondary, (2) their projects forked other popular projects (e.g., Uniswap), which are often already vetted by the community, and (3) someone else internally or externally will conduct security audits.

When facing tight deadlines plus the added rush to beat competitors to the next best thing, it can be tempting to treat the recruitment process with superficiality, but as we learned from Akutars, the consequences can cost more than 7 figures.

Written by Danny Placinta