Alts parade around

That proud riverboat Ethereum steam-paddled upstream on a sunny day, its decks festooned with green bunting in the form of a 2.7% gain over 24 hours.

At the same time, a flotilla of altcoins can be seen in tow, bouncing above the churned-up foamy wake. We kept spotting them, waving to us.

One of the biggest splashes this week comes courtesy of Chiliz which has gained 15% since last Wednesday. The sports-centric platform's native token has rocketed in recent weeks on regulatory warmth in Italy where fan token platform Socios got its green light. Recall if you might that CHZ limped out of June under a dime. Now it’s nearly a quarter.

"Traders have turned their attention to Ethereum and altcoins," analytics firm Santiment said.

Amidst news reports that NASA wants to go back to the moon for the first time in nearly half a century, a bunch of alts, including Evmos, Helium and Ziliqa, surged by 10% or more.

Nomad's cross-chain bridge took a hit earlier this month after a bug in a protocol upgrade resulted in the crowd-pillaging of $190 million. Now its new white wizard hat has become a bulls’ eye for insults, as has a new campaign to incentivize hackers to return stolen funds.

This all started back on Aug. 1 when someone managed to suspiciously walk off with 100 Wrapped Bitcoin tokens from the Nomad bridge. Wait. Actually, it all started when Nomad broke norms, building its cross-chain bridge leaving out the blockchain part, but rather as an app atop Nomad messaging-passing channels, deployed in the form of "lightweight" off-chain smart contracts.

Subsequently, a routine upgrade of one of the contracts, named Replica, caused a zero hash to be inadvertently marked as a valid root, allowing messages on Nomad to be spoofed. Within hours of the initial exploit, chaos ensued. Malicious actors merely needed to find a transaction that worked, replace the target address with their own and rebroadcast it, leading to a "frenzied free-for-all,” as developer Samczsun described it.

In recent weeks, some $36 million of stolen funds had been returned, including some assets that had been taken by white hats ostensibly trying to keep them safe.

This week, Nomad teamed up with Metagame to create a white wizard hat NFT, deemed to be “exclusive,” and available to any hacker who gives back at least 90% of ill-gotten spoils (AMBCrypto).

"That's what the team came up with to solve the problem?" jabbed one Nomad user via Twitter. "Rewarding hacker with worthless NFT?"

Another user tweeted, “did the Nomad twitter account get hacked as well?”

Cross-chain bridge hacks have accounted for more than two-thirds of the $1.9 billion in crypto that had been stolen by hackers as of the end of July, according to Chainalysis.

That compares to $1.2 billion stolen by hackers during the first seven months of 2021.

It's worth noting that Chainalysis' mid-year crime report heralds a decrease in crypto scam revenue, which so far this year totals $1.6 billion, which is 65% lower compared to last summer, reflecting greater awareness among members of the public – and falling crypto prices.

Yep, we’ll admit curiosity regarding the "hashribbon cross" got the better of us. Do a deep dive if you must. Bring snacks though.

We’re talking about a Bitcoin indicator. Let's just call it a proxy for mining activity. Miners run the show, goes the logic behind the signal; and this could explain why a plunging Bitcoin network hashrate is bad news as miners beg off, disinclined to blow their computational resources on an unprofitable endeavor, signaling perhaps overblown, short-sighted fears of further unprofitability to come – or, in other words, possibly a bottom.

"When miners give up, it is possibly the most powerful Bitcoin buy signal ever," declared a Capriole blogger.

And when short-term and long-term hashribbon trend patterns intersect from bottom to top, it's considered bullish.

"Miners are becoming more active as hashribbons perform the opposite cross," said UToday's Arman Shirinyan, adding that this might be the first significant bullish BTC indicator in months.