This Week on Crypto Twitter: $100 Million Mango Markets Saga, Caitlin Long Calls Out Fed

Although markets offered little to write home about, crypto Twitter was a veritable hive of hot-takes, revelations and anxiety-inducing hack news this week. There were also rumors that someone had committed an “impropriety” with one of our bovine chums. 

But the undoubted talk of the week was centered on the current hacking epidemic, which has really been rising over the last few years. 

Hack week. 

We’re only sixteen days into it and October has already been an especially bad month for crypto hacks, in what is turning out to be the worst year of all-time for hacking. In fact, this week was the worst of all, with four huge hacks in a single day on Tuesday. Crypto analytics company Chainalysis wrote a thread about the criminal hackathon that 2022 has been.

Of the four hacks, Solana-based crypto trading platform Mango Markets was hit by the biggest. It was drained of $100 million. When he first heard about it, blockchain sleuth ZachXBT drove his fist through his computer at his kid’s birthday party and made everything awkward. 

The Mango Markets exploit was also the most intriguing, since the hackers appeared to be working in the interest of Mango’s depositors. In their proposal, they cited “bad debt” from a bailout executed by Mango Markets and Solend back in June. 

Elrond Network researcher Alex Valaitis had a popular take. 

The hackers didn’t appear to have covered their tracks very well. One attacker was doxxed by SolScan. 

 Eventually “Eisenberg” came clean. Turns out he’s Avraham Mayer Eisenberg of New York and he has allegedly milked millions from crypto exploits before. Eisenberg confirmed that for his latest exploit, he was working as part of a bigger organization and claimed that their actions were legal. 

He also returned more than half the plunder.

And speaking of cyber crime, this surely doesn’t bode well…

In other news

Crypto enthusiast/investor Charles Trussel on Monday shared a screenshot that ranked the multimillionaires that lost the most out of crypto lender Celsius’s high-profile ongoing liquidity crisis. Trussel himself allegedly lost $5 million. 

On Monday, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty hit a new all-time high after rising by 14%—the largest spike since May. As difficulty increases, miners could face slimmer profits if Bitcoin’s price stays inert, since more computing power and electricity is needed to mine. However, mining difficulty increases also indicate a strong and growing network.

Will Clemente of crypto research and trading platform Reflexive Research said if the current Bitcoin mining climate is anything to go by, only the fittest will survive. 

At an Ethereum Foundation developer conference on Tuesday, one attendee’s vocal harassment went unremarked by the team. Tweeter Daphne later wrote a fuller account of the incident on her blog/newsletter, and the accused attendee also posted his version of events.

Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of upcoming crypto bank Custodia, has been waiting on the Fed for over two years to approve her bank’s application for a master account. On Wednesday, she called out the U.S. central bank for hypocrisy after the Fed-approved investment banking giant BNY Mellon began custodying Bitcoin for select firms on Tuesday. Video footage of Long’s response was shared widely. 

Finally: