Weekly news from Kusama&Polkadot #41

1. Interlay has launched iBTC on Polkadot

Interlay has launched iBTC — the first fully trustless and decentralized wrapped Bitcoin on Polkadot. With iBTC, you can experience all the advantages of DeFi with your Bitcoin.

From the 10th of August, users are able to mint iBTC, which is a BTC representation on Polkadot. So far, there have been more than 50 iBTC minted on the network!

Why is interBTC so unique? And why is it a much better solution than other wrapped BTCs such as WBTC or renBTC? Just find out yourself in our previous descriptive article.

2. Acala misconfiguration of iBTC/aUSD liquidity pool resulted in aUSD minting issue

On the 13th of August, Acala launched the new liquidity pool which contained iBTC, the wrapped Bitcoin from Interlay. But right after the launch, misconfiguration of the Honzon protocol has been exploited resulting in an erroneous mint of more than one billion of aUSD.

Acala team quickly used the power of governance and paused certain parachain operations such as transfers. They also quickly rectified the bug in their configuration.

A community proposal was submitted on Acala via governance which aims to trace on-chain activities. That fast reaction is allowed by the Substrate.

What exactly happened?

16 wallet addresses of contributors to the iBTC/aUSD LP erroneously minted 1,29 billion aUSD. +99% of the aUSD hasn't moved from Acala. Right now, Acala already agreed in the community governance referendum about the execution of the burn which just happened a few hours ago.

In a summary, 1.6m aUSD were drained, up to 4,6m aUSD remained uncollateralized on other parachains and hopefully, Acala finds a way to re-collateralize it.

Further analysis of these accounts is underway and will be published in the following trace reports.

3. Basilisk and GM parachain secured a slot in Kusama

While Basilisk secured another parachain for themselves with #47, GM parachain won their first Kusama parachain auction #48.

Basilisk is the canary network of HydraDX and besides the AMM function, it provides bootstrapping liquidity services for new assets. Basilisk already won auction #8 on Kusama which will expire soon.

GM parachain is…well, something the Dotsama space needed a lot. It solves the problem of the cold and isolated nature of crypto. Expect memes, fun, emotions, NFTs, a lot of $GMs in the morning and $GNs in the evening. The primary token is $FREN, so the best for GM is to collect FRENs.

4. Nomad bridge used by Moonbeam has been hacked

Not just merry things happening in the Polkadot/crypto space. Just about a week ago before the iBTC/aUSD LP was drained at Acala, Moonbeam witnessed a bridge hack.

Nomad Bridge, which is used by StellaSwap AMM, was hacked. Nearly all of the $190m funds from this bridge, which is used by Ethereum, Avalanche Evmos, Milkomeda C1 and Moonbeam, were drained.

Since that, over $35m were returned by white hat hackers, and to this date, it can be even more. Let’s hope for further investigation and solving of this unwanted situation.

5. Pendulum started a grant program

Pendulum launched a grant program to build on Amplitude, which is the canary network of Pendulum. So what is the subject of a grant program?

AMMs
Lending protocols
Stable fiat tokens
Yield optimizers
Decentralized custodianship
On/Off-ramps
Money streaming services

Go and apply now and grab financial support from Pendulum.

6. Bifrost rainbow boost 3.0 started

On the 8th of August, Bifrost started the rainbow boost 3.0. Rainbow boost records your beneficial behavior and converts it into raindrops, which then serve as the reward mechanism for airdrops. For getting raindrops, you can do a few activities on the Bifrost parachain such as mint vKSM, support crowdloans, or stake $BNC.

At Rainbow boost 3.0, any address that has ever participated in Kusama Crowdloan via Bifrost could claim 2000 free raindrop points. Get 1000 raindrops for minting one vKSM (minimum contribution is 0,5 KSM) and extra 1000 raindrops for each person you invite.

Rainbow boost 3.0 will end on the 23rd of August.

Consider supporting us by the nomination of your tokens to the Kusama or Polkadot validator going by the POLKADOTTERS name.