The SEC Sues Elon Musk

⚡ Alpha

• Farcaster Protocol releases version "Elephant". A commemorative NFT is available to mint on Zora.

• Floor, a mobile application for everything NFT's; releases free commemorative NFT to celebrate Floor’s second birthday. Floor previously raised $8 million in funding.

• Encode Club Q4 Bootcamps applications are live. Apply now to become a certified blockchain developer. Q4 Bootcamps consist of Expert Solidity Bootcamp, ZK Bootcamp, and Solidity Bootcamp.

🪂 Airdrops

• ZKX Airdrop Phase #1 is live for early adopters & contributors. Airdrop Phase #2 is coming soon for anyone to participate.

• ICYMI: EarnDrop X thread covering an airdrop strategy for Privacy Pools, a new protocol co-authored by Vitalik.

📰 Finance News

• FTX employees discovered Alameda's backdoor months before collapse. The backdoor allowed Alameda to have a negative balance of up to $65 billion using customer funds. The employees alerted their boss who discussed the issue with FTX executive, Nishad Singh. The issue was ignored and one of the FTX employees who brought the issue to light was fired.

• The SEC is suing Elon Musk to investigate whether anyone committed securities fraud when Musk acquired X. Musk failed to appear for testimony on September 15th after a subpoena was served in May. Alex Spiro, Elon Musk’s attorney; stated, "The SEC has already taken Mr. Musk’s testimony multiple times in this misguided investigation—enough is enough.”

• JP Morgan analysts state Ethereum staking has resulted in increased centralization of the network. JP Morgan highlighted liquid staking providers as, "The top 5 liquid staking providers control more than 50% of staking on the Ethereum network, and Lido specifically accounts for almost one-third."

📰 DeFi News

• Jaynti Kanani, Co-Founder of Polygon; step down from day-to-day operations.

• Polygon 2.0, POL contracts are live on Goerli testnet, a major step towards the upgrade. The first steps of the new proposed governance for Polygon 2.0 will be shared in the coming weeks.

• Immutable publishes zkEVM: The Road to Mainnet & Beyond, a milestone roadmap of what's to come. The milestones include Immutable zkEVM Testnet Re-Genesis (November), Immutable zkEVM Mainnet (December - January), Immutable zkEVM Dedicated App Chains (2024), and Prover Integration (2024).

• Sui Foundation reallocates 117 million $SUI (~$51 million) from external market makers to support growth initiatives such as offering grants to developers to build decentralized applications on Sui and supporting Sui’s DeepBook CLOB, automated market makers, and liquid staking and lending protocols on the network.

• dYdX will soon transition from a rollup to an app chain. dYdX cites that app chains are sovereign blockchains optimized for specific applications which also have their own consensus protocols and are highly customizable.

• THORSwap transitions to maintenance mode after potential movement of illicit funds through the protocol. The decision was made following an evaluation of the situation and consultation with advisors, legal counsel, and law enforcement. THORSwap will remain in maintenance mode until a more permanent and robust solution can be implemented to ensure the platform's continued security and integrity.

🛡 Security and Exploits

• FTX Exploiter is swapping $ETH for $tBTC on Threshold Network after THORSwap transitioned to maintenance mode. So far, the FTX exploiter has swapped 75,636 Ethereum (~$124 million) for Bitcoin assets.

• Friend tech adds the ability to add/remove log in methods to Friend tech account following incidents of hijacked accounts. SIM swap attacks were pointed to as the cause of accounts being hijacked.

• Stars Arena, a Friend tech fork based on Avalanche; fixes vulnerability that posed a risk to funds locked in its smart contract. With that said, the high transaction fees needed to drain the funds deterred the attackers before the vulnerability was fixed. A total of $2000 was drained.

Token Unlocks

• Hashflow $HFT - 3.28M ~$1.12M on OCT 06
• ImmutableX $IMX - 22.71M ~$13.7M on OCT 07
• Moonbeam $GLMR - 4.47M ~$1.03M on OCT 07
• X2Y2 $X2Y2 - 17.4M ~$213.86K on OCT 08
• GMX $GMX - 2.81K ~$114.45k on OCT 08

💰 Funding

• Burnt (XION), an L1 blockchain; receives strategic investment from Circle Ventures.

• Cicada, non-custodial credit risk management company; raises $9.7m in Pre-Seed funding round.

• Phaver, a gateway for web3 social; raises $7 million in Seed funding round.

• Fairblock, a pre-execution privacy and conditional decryption infrastructure; raises $2.5 million in Seed funding round.

• Convergence RFQ, an on-chain RFQ primitive for provisioning protocol liquidity; raises $2.5 million in Pre-Seed funding round.

• L1 Advisors, an operating system for onchain wealth and asset management; raises $1.6M in Pre-seed funding round.

• Paima Studious, the developers behind Paima; an advanced Web3 gaming engine, receives $1.4 million grant from the Cardano.

That's it for today's dose! See you soon.