Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter.
As the calendar year comes to an end, Cardano’s personable leader Charles Hoskinson shares a message of optimism, unity and collaboration for the future of crypto.
As a gesture of goodwill for the holiday season, this week our long-form DeFi newsletter will be published in full here as an article alongside the regular email. Subscribe below for full access to next week’s edition!
Polygon fixes potential billion-dollar protocol vulnerability
Layer-two protocol Polygon announced this week the rectification of a potentially multi-billion-dollar vulnerability in its proof-of-stake Genesis contract through implementing an Emergency Bor Upgrade to the mainnet.
The incident and subsequent upgrade took place at the beginning of December. If compromised to the fullest extent by a malicious entity, the vulnerability could have resulted in almost $24 billion in financial losses, equating to 92.7% of the network’s native MATIC tokens and effectively causing imminent demise.
All you need to know about the recent Polygon network update.
✅A security partner discovered a vulnerability
✅Fix was immediately introduced
✅Validators upgraded the network
✅No material harm to the protocol/end-users
✅White hats were paid a bounty https://t.co/oyDkvohg33— Polygon | $MATIC (@0xPolygon) December 29, 2021
According to a recent blog post from Polygon, two good-willed whitehat hackers, Leon Spacewalker and Whitehat2, discovered the incident on Dec. 3 and Dec. 4, respectively, alerting blockchain security platform Immunefi.
Following procedural investigation and authentication from Immunefi, the information was passed to Polygon, which upgraded the network on Dec. 5, albeit a hacker was able to drain 801,601 MATIC ($2.04 million) before the bug was resolved.
Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani emphasized the network’s ability to promptly resolve the critical bug, noting in a blog post that:
“What’s important is that this was a test of our network’s resilience as well as our ability to act decisively under pressure. Considering how much was at stake, I believe our team has made the best decisions possible given the circumstances.”
Leon Spacewalker is set to be rewarded a cool $2.2 million in stablecoins for their efforts, while the second anonymous hacker, Whitehat2, will pocket $1.27 million in MATIC tokens directly from Polygon.
Related: Here’s how Polygon is challenging the limitations of Ethereum, as told by co-founder Sandeep Nailwal
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson predicts DeFi “greater extinction”
This week, in an end-of-year YouTube live stream titled “DApps and Cardano DeFi Alliance,” Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson spoke candidly about the emerging landscape of DeFi projects and creators on Cardano in addition to advising participants about the volatile nature of exponential markets.
“It’s very hard to do this kind of engineering and to do it right,…
Read More: cointelegraph.com