What's Driving Token Prices? (August 17, 2022)

VELO (-36%) - Last week, Velodrome Finance, a decentralized exchange on Layer-2 Optimism, released a post-mortem on a possible hack that occurred a few weeks ago. An investigation revealed that the $350K stolen (and since recovered) from team wallets was stolen by an employee—Gabagool. The pseudonymous developer announced via Twitter that he stole the funds to recoup the losses he suffered during the market crash earlier this year. This specific wallet was not part of the treasury’s multisig—which has much higher levels of security—but was a team wallet for paying salaries to which 5 team members, including Gabagool, had access.
ACA (-20%) - Acala, the largest DeFi project on Polkadot, suffered an attack over the weekend in which exploiters minted $1.28B of Acala’s stablecoin, aUSD. Several individuals were able to exploit a newly launched liquidity pool for Bitcoin and aUSD on Acala, minting additional aUSD. The exploit caused the price of aUSD (which had roughly held its peg since launching earlier this year) to shoot down to $0.009. However, a community vote elected to burn the newly minted stablecoins to restore aUSD to its peg. Online estimates believe the hacker got away with anywhere from $0-$10M in value.
SPS (-10%) - Blockchain-based trading card game Splinterlands announced a horizontal expansion into sports last week with a new blockchain-based soccer game called Genesis League Soccer. The expansion also involves a partnership with the Major League Soccer Players Association (MLSPA). The partnership should increase the market opportunity for Splinterlands as the SPS token will be the governance token for both Splinterlands (fantasy-themed card game) and Genesis League Soccer (sports-themed card game).
INJ (+4.6%) - DeFi protocol Injective announced a fresh $40M round of funding led by Jump Crypto and BH Digital (Brevan Howard’s crypto arm). The raise is designed to help expand the ecosystem for the decentralized finance protocol and attract Web3 DeFi developers. The token traded up on the news, as many speculate that the funding round was completed earlier this year when INJ's market cap was much higher (the token was up over 30% at one point).

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