What's Driving Token Prices? October 19, 2022

MNGO (-23%) - Solana-based lend/borrow protocol Mango Markets suffered a hack of $112M last week. Unlike other recent hacks, this one did not exploit or hack the code or manipulate price oracles or other validators. The hacker used $5M to take a 3.7x levered $18.4M long position in MNGO on Mango's platform. The hacker then pushed up the price of MNGO from $0.038 to $0.91, which was easily done due to low liquidity. As Mango Markets allows users to take a loan out against the "floating PnL" of a position, the hacker was able to withdraw $112M in loans from the protocol based on a $440M inflated MNGO position. Despite Crypto Twitter tracing the hacker's identity, the hacker was still able to request a $47M bug bounty from the Mango DAO and push through a yes vote using the millions of MNGO tokens acquired through the scheme. The DAO also decided to fund the remaining user funds from its treasury.
AVAX (-2.8%) - Layer 1 protocol Avalanche released its Banff upgrade, which allows "cross-chain validation." For example, someone could stake AVAX on the Avalanche Mainnet to validate a subnet. Avalanche consists of a base chain and other chains called subnets that allow the protocol to scale transactions. This feature is very similar to Cosmos' interchain security, which brings back some usage and importance to the AVAX token.
FTT (-2.3%) - The Texas State Board of Securities announced it would investigate U.S.-based entity FTX US and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried regarding FTX's recent acquisition of Voyager's assets. Primarily, the Texas State Board of Securities is concerned with Voyager's prior yield product and FTX US potentially offering those products to its customers.
UNI (+9.4%) - Uniswap Labs, the corporation behind the decentralized exchange Uniswap, announced a $165M fundraise last week. The raise reportedly valued Uniswap at $1.6B and was led by Polychain Capital along with a16z, Paradigm, and Variant. The fresh round of funding will support expanding Uniswap's product lines, which might include NFT trading in the near future.

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