It takes only a few minutes of investigation to show that one of the biggest selling points for the Ethereum ecosystem is the decentralized finance (DeFi) aspect of it. For the past week, however, this has come under considerable scrutiny. Two significant hacks occurred on Ethereum’s DeFi network, using the same exploit to steal assets from two different DeFi platforms.
Exploit Used To The Fullest
The first victim was the Uniswap market, which had lost an approximate $300,000 in crypto. This was stolen in the form of tokenized Bitcoin, imBTC, as well as Ether. Something of particular note, in this case, is that there was no bug within Uniswap’s protocol. This was enabled through a fault within the transfer protocols themselves.
This hack, in turn, led to another one, bigger than the first by a considerable degree. Just about 24 hours after the first hack, Lendf.me, a decentralized lending platform, had $25 million in cryptocurrencies stolen, a majority of which being Ethereum and Tether.
Happy Results; Unhappy Whales
With the crypto industry being the strange beast that it is, however, this story has a happy ending. In the end, the hacker returned all the funds, since he accidentally revealed details that could lead to his identification. Forced to choose between being arrested after he was identified or just losing the money outright, the hacker gave it back and had the entire matter settled.
However, key players within the crypto industry took notice. Particularly, Joe007. Joe is one of the “whales” of Bitcoin, holding an incredible amount of crypto to his name. Besides claims of dozens of millions in profits, according to the official data from the Bitfinex exchange, he was none-too-pleased with DeFi after the hacks. In fact, he’s never had an eye for it to begin with.
Joe007’s Two Cents
In a tirade of tweets, the crypto trader slandered the budding Ethereum use case. In his words, he likened Ethereum’s DeFi to a Rube Goldberg machine, stating that no one knows which part will fail or get hacked next.
People giving up security and robustness of Bitcoin for a chance to participate in a stupid rat race of #DeFi Rube Goldberg machine where you never know which part fails or gets hacked next? Don’t know about you but I would call them morons. Yeah, that’s the proper name. pic.twitter.com/HltpNoeUqO
— ᴹᵁᴴJoe⁰⁰⁷ 🐳 (@J0E007) April 24, 2020
Joe007 seemed to not let go after he latched on, going on about how DeFi, a globally recognized discovery of a blockchain use case, is just a marketing ploy by Ethereum’s heavyweights. He stated that these protocols had no fundamental use, claiming that there was zero utility in real-world cases.
If this was some fad or marketing ploy, it’s an entirely successful one. So successful that other blockchains are doing the same, as well, to try and compete with Ethereum’s massive offering of DeFi. Joe007 has made reported millions through crypto trading, but so has Warren Buffet, someone who is infamously against cryptocurrencies as a whole. It’d be interesting to see what Joe007 would have to say about a man defaming the very thing that’s made him rich.