😬 Who stole the $100 million from Atomic?

Gm, this is the doodhwala, the crypto newsletter that gives you the same feeling you get after eating a Death By Chocolate Sundae.

Happy, satisfied and high blood pressure. (But it’s worth it, isn’t it? 😎)

Here’s what we feelin’ today:

• 🇰🇵 They’re BACK! The infamous North Korean hacker group is back with a BANG.

• ⛔️ No Crypto Allowed: Apple is fighting crypto again. This time, Zuck would also approve.

• 💰 Layer 2 > Layer 1: Is one actually better than the other? Or is it all the same?

• 🛠 Resourcewala: The Truth about "Trustless" Blockchains

• 🍼 Doodhshots: Shiba's Showtime?

💥 The Atomic Story continues

Atomic wallet, the wallet where—

• Hackers stole money

• Users lost their life savings

• Atomic had no clue how

… has seen developments in its story.

And the curtains are unveiling now to reveal behind the scenes exclusive of the crime. 🎥

Who hacked the wallets, and how were they able to do it?🤔

Time to understand how your money got rekt. And how your safety net might not be enough.✋

1️⃣ A quick recap of WTF happened with Atomic Wallets

Atomic Wallet is a fully Decentralized and Self custody wallet. Meaning if things get rekt → You’re responsible. 🫵

We wrote about the story last week→

Here’s a tl;dr anyways👇

👉 Users of Atomic started reporting wrong balances / no balances in their wallet.

👉 Turns out it was a hack, with over $35 million being stolen.

👉 The culprit has been using Tornado, a crypto mixer to try and make the funds difficult to trace.

2️⃣ North Korea is the culprit (The Lazarus Gang)

Well here’s the fresh and taaza update-

Over $100 million has been stolen from Atomic Wallets so far! 😱

And the culprit has been identified as the infamous Lazarus group, the North Korean hacker elites who have been involved in such cases in the past as well.

With their heists, they altogether have stolen more than $2 billion so far, making them high-profile targets for the US government. 🇺🇸

Now we know how Kim Jong Un was able to afford that education program in Switzerland! 🤷

And guess what—

The story doesn’t end there, the crypto investigation company Elliptic uncovered that the group is moving ahead for their next heist. 🥷

Their next target is Garantex, a Russian exchange, where they seemingly could off-ramp their stolen crypto from Atomic wallet.

Garantex is—

👉 An off-ramp exchange for converting crypto → fiat 💵

👉 On the radar of the US govt for their involvement in offloading ransomware in the past.

👉 Illegally operating their exchange and consuming oat milk. 🤢

Elliptic has traced the wallets activity to Atomic, here’s what they said👇

Elliptic is tracking data of over 5500 wallets and has frozen over $1 million of stolen funds. 💰

In the meantime—

Atomic Wallet has assured that the stolen money has affected less than 1% of its users.🧍‍♂️

3️⃣ Your activity is always traceable.

If there’s one thing that we can learn from this, it’s the bitter-sweet truth about using crypto in general. 😬

And that is — Things are safe until they’re not. But also, the culprit can always be traced.

You see, the goal of wallets is safety.

But an elite hacker could always steal your funds or anyone’s funds if

• You haven’t done proper self-custody.

• The exchange hasn’t tested bugs and discrepancies in their code.

• There’s a new damn way to hack a wallet. 🤷

And therefore my doodhs, the goal is Anonymity, not being untraceable. 🥷

Your transactions are and will always be inscribed on the blockchain—

Which is useful to hackers, but also to the people who can help recover your funds once hacked.

Doodhwala’s take:

Learn to self custody your crypto the same way you learned that doodh is the most supreme drink in the history of the universe. Especially cow milk. 🐄🥛

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😲 Apple in no-crypto mood

Apple and Damus.

They’ve been fighting like Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr (what a match it was!).

Damus, the social media app built on the Nostr protocol, has got some heat from Apple 🍏 (← no not this one, the half-eaten one).

And I forgot to tell you Damus is backed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Hold up…what's this Nostr protocol? 🤔

Well, it's a protocol that allows for decentralized social networking.

So no single entity owns your data (f** you, Zuckerberg).

But why is Apple bothered? 🤨

Well, here's why → Damus has a feature called 'zaps' that lets you tip in Bitcoin for posts you like. 🟠

Think of it as giving a high-five ✋, but in crypto, for good content.

But Apple 🍎 ain't happy about it. 🙅‍♀️

Apple’s like:

"Damus, you've got 14 days. Tweak that app to comply with our rules or it's bye-bye App Store." 😰

Let’s dig deeper🕵️‍♂️

So, zaps lets you appreciate someone's content by sending them a Bitcoin tip at lightning speed (pun intended).

But Apple wants in-app purchases for anything connected to receiving digital content.

You know, their guidelines 3.1.1, and all that shit.

But Damus isn't selling any digital goods or features for selling digital goods.

It's just got a button for facilitating peer-to-peer transactions, like Venmo or CashApp. 🤷‍♀️

Though Apple doesn’t wanna understand.

So yeah, a really big problem (just like I have with Delhi’s summer).

For Apple, their 30% in-app purchase fee is non-negotiable (like doodh for us).🥛

Being pressured, the main man behind Damus, William Casarin, says that the zap feature might have to go. 😢

But if Damus loses the zaps feature, they say it's gonna be a "dead platform for Bitcoin applications trying to innovate on lightning".👇

And here's a quick FYI:

Apple isn't exactly famous for being crypto-friendly.

Philip Shoemaker, former App Store Director, uncovers some behind-the-scenes drama at Apple.

He shares that the process of getting an app listed on the App Store has been particularly hard for crypto companies. 🧩

Shoemaker, who once co-crafted the App Store guidelines with Steve Jobs, suggests → that the recent changes in these guidelines have made them intentionally ambiguous.

He points out that Apple views crypto as a Ponzi scheme since day one.

Shoemaker's original vision was to make the guidelines as straightforward as possible.

But after he left in 2016, Apple's legal team and Phil Schiller rewrote them, making them more grey than ever. 🌚

Coinbase, the crypto giant, also saw its app being banned from the App Store for a whole year.

So that's the saga!

All eyes are on the clock ticking down to the 14 days.

Will Damus comply or be ousted? 🤔

📈 Cheese and Charts: Layer 2 solutions are Winning

It’s always the second layer that adds the “oomph” factor to anything in life.

Whether that be the second layer of cheese on your sandwich or Layer 2 solutions on Ethereum. 😋

Although L2 solutions didn’t account for a majority % of the transactions generally—

L2 solutions have always proven to beat the underlying blockchain performance.💯

Simply because all chains have to deal with the problem of the blockchain trilemma. ♻️

However, that trend seems to have changed, with ETH L2s outpacing the chain by a huge margin!

By analyzing the total transactions, we see👇

👉 Less than a year ago, L2 transactions accounted for <20% of total transactions.

👉 Today, they account for >64% of total transactions.

👉 Eth L1 is still dominant in comparison to any particular protocol, but cumulative volume is neck-to-neck, with ~332k transactions on L2s and ~380k on L1.

What do you think about the massive shift to L2 solutions on ETH? Will the trend continue? Hit reply and let us know what you think!

🛠 Resourcewala: The Truth about "Trustless" Blockchains

Too often we all throw around the term “trustless” while talking about blockchains, like we're playing a game of crypto-bingo! 🙄

But let's get real, folks! Is it really the right term to use? 🤔

Cuz they’re not about vanishing trust, it's about making it distribute faster than a celebrity gossip! 🤭

In today’s resource, we'll delve into:

• The myth of "Trustless" Blockchains

• How does blockchain distribute trust?

• What role does the economic game play?

🍼 Doodhshots: Shiba's Showtime?

• 🐕 Shiba's Woof: Shiba Inu's Testnet Blockchain 'Puppynet' surpasses a staggering 20M transactions. That's one fetching pup, right?

• 🇪🇺 EU vs DeFi: EU's latest data bill threatens to topple the world of smart contracts. Ooh-la-law, what next?

• 🌴 Bahamas Battle: Sam Bankman-Fried dusts off his gloves, challenging post-extradition charges in a heated Bahamas court brawl. Surf's up, but so is the tension!

• 🚨 Atomic Alarm: Estonian and Kazakh police join forces to probe Atomic Wallet Hack. Your move, hackers!

• 🎉 UK’s Welcome: Bitstamp and Interactive Brokers get a royal nod with UK crypto register approvals. How’s your crypto, mate?

🤣 Milky Meme Of The Day

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That’s all for today folks! See ya tomorrow!

Yo! Our legal and financial advisors (aka our good ol’ conscience) have asked us to add this boring disclaimer. None of what you read here is financial advice. We aren’t here to get you to buy or sell crypto. We’re only here to tell you what’s up in crypto today and make you laugh. So, if you screwed up on a trade, that’s on you G. Stay safe in the markets.

Today’s edition was brought to you by Ritik Gupta and Sumanth

Edited by: Arvind Krishna and Aakash Athawasya

sday