Crypto wows

It's Friday the 13th but creepy vibes are nowhere to be found.

Total crypto market capitalization can almost taste $2 trillion. Bitcoin bulls sense their chance to grab sentiment by the horns, with $675 million worth of BTC options set to expire today.

Second-largest crypto, Ethereum, sits comfortably perched above $3,000, up 5% over 24 hours. And third-largest, Cardano, has risen 15% in that span.

Wait, what? ADA is No. 3?

A seven-day surge of nearly 50% has thrust ADA’s market capitalization to $65 billion, enough to overtake Binance Coin (BNB), and then go on to displace Tether (USDT) from the third spot. ADA returned to above-$2-glory for the first time since May.

All members of the Big Ten are in the green. No. 11 Solana (SOL) is up 6% in the past day. So is No. 12 Litecoin (LTC).

There's talk of a “DeFi summer” still being in play. NFTs are exploding in popularity. Messi's latest contract is said to include crypto. Oh and the Poly Network hacker reportedly gave back nearly all of the stolen funds.

In something of an asterisk to a footnote in the appendix of the story of decentralized finance exploitation shenanigans, hackers yesterday siphoned roughly $7 million in USDC from DAO Maker, a platform for crypto developers to crowd fund their projects. Some 5,251 user accounts were impacted (Cointelegraph).

XRP didn't only manage to go above $1 – it held tightly to the psychologically potent talisman like a Tolkien Fellowship character in a lava field. Rising to $1.04, XRP has gained 7% in the past 24 hours.

Ripple's regulatory battle continues to be a dark cloud if not a looming abyss for the coin with which the San Francisco-based company is closely associated. And yet, says analytics firm Santiment, XRP’s price could further rally.

Helping to sustain momentum this week was the news that GME Remittance, one of the largest non-bank remittance service providers in South Korea, joined RippleNet (CryptoGlobe).

This week's Poly Network exploit won't soon be forgotten.

Or who knows, maybe it will be. Anyway, a quick recap, by the numbers:

• $150 million: initial amount noticed as suspiciously trifled with during the initial phase of the hack.
• $611 million: total amount stolen by the hacker
• $474 million: total amount of DeFi-related losses from hacks in 2021 (according to a report published immediately prior to the Poly Network hack)
• $4.7 million: initial amount hacker sent back after reports of cyber fingerprints being discovered
• $265 million: amount returned as of the end of day on Wednesday
• $342 million: amount returned as of Thursday afternoon
• $33 million: amount of USDT connected with the hack and frozen by Tether
• 1,032: WBTC returned
• 28,953: ETH returned
• 42,000: UNI returned
• 84,000,000: USDC returned
• 96,000,000: DAI returned
• $103 billion: total market capitalization of all DeFi-related tokens

Atomic Swaps: earliest means of trading crypto across different types of blockchains; forerunner to cross-chain networks – such as Poly Network.

Binance Smart Chain: one of three blockchains on which Poly Network runs.

Code: all Poly Network actually is, essentially.

Da Hongfei: Chinese entrepreneur who founded Poly Network.

Ellipsis Finance: liquidity pool into which about $100 million in ill-gotten gains reportedly flowed.

Ethereum: one of three blockchains on which Polygon Network runs.

Fun: reason hacker gave for carrying out the attack.

Gurvais Grigg: Chainalysis CTO, former FBI veteran and among those cybersecurity experts who floated the theory that the hacker returned the money because it was too enormous of a sum to possibly launder.

Hoo.com: relatively unknown exchange used by hacker.

Interoperability protocol: what Poly Network ostensibly is.

Kelvin Fichter: an Ethereum programmer who tweeted out early analysis regarding what appeared to go wrong: a smart contract bug allowing for an override of the contract instructions.

Neo: blockchain platform, led by Hongfei, that collaborated with blockchain company Ontology and Switcheo, a crypto trading platform, to create Poly Network.

O3: trading pool run on the Poly Network to trade tokens among different blockchains, and which had to suspend its cross-chain functionality.

SlowMist: blockchain security firm said to have captured a fingerprint of the hacker.

Tether: stablecoin connected with the attack (see above, by the numbers rundown).

Unregulated: Apt description of DeFi.

Vulnerability: (see Code, above).

White Hat: techspeak for righteous hacker, though in this case probably not an apt description.

You Should Talk To Us To Work Out A Solution: Closing line of a "Dear Hacker" twitter plea from The Poly Network Team looking to establish contact with the perpetrator and calling for the return of the hacked assets.