Poly Network returns stolen assets.
Indian women lead charge in crypto exchange account sign ups.
OKEx lists Doge memecoin spin off Baby Doge.
We’ll have more on that story — and other news shaping the cryptocurrency and blockchain world — in this episode of The Daily Forkast, August 12th.
Transcript
Welcome to The Daily Forkast, August 12th, 2021. I am Angie Lau, Editor-in-Chief of Forkast.News.
Coming up, Poly Network hacker returns stolen assets; Indian women lead the charge in crypto exchange account sign ups and OKEx lists Baby Doge, a spinoff from the Doge meme coin.
Let’s get you up to speed from Asia to the world.
First up, an update on the Poly Network hack that saw around US$600 million in crypto assets stolen following a plea from Poly Networks to return the assets and a chase from the China based blockchain security company SlowMist.
The hacker had a change of heart that saw around US$ 260 million worth of the assets returned on Wednesday night Asia time.
Forkast.News Carolyn Wright has the latest.
In a tweet, Poly Network confirmed that US$256 million worth of assets had been returned on the Binance smart chain, three million on a Ethereum and one million on Polygon.
Since then, Polygon Scan said USDC worth around US$ 84 million have been returned on the polygon blockchain, meaning all of the tokens stolen on Polygon are back in safe hands.
That’s a total of US$340 million as of 3 p.m. Hong Kong time Thursday.
In a Q&A embedded within Ethereum, a person claiming to be responsible for the hack said they never intended to keep the assets and they were seeking to expose a vulnerability on the Poly Network. One expert told Forkast.News, this will always be a risk with public chains.
“Everybody can see the source code, so they can always find some problems to do some damage in there.”
The hacker says the rest will be returned slowly as they want to protect their identity and get some rest.
Though as they say, no rest for the wicked! For Forkast.News I’m Caroline. Wright.
Meanwhile, in India, when it comes to crypto investing, women are leading the charge.
Not only that, but Indian crypto exchange WazirX says many of the women signing up to open accounts with them live in the country’s smaller tier two and tier three cities.
Cities with 100,000 population or less, but with hopes far greater than that.
Here’s Forkast.News, Monika Ghosh with more from Pune, India.
WazirX says it has seen user sign ups in those smaller cities explode by over 2500% so far this year, with 55% of new user accounts created being located in them. And women from those cities contributed 65% of the sign ups by women for the whole country.
WazirX told Forkast.News, many of them are very crypto savvy.
“They have understanding about charting, the understanding about projects, and they have very good knowledge about how to sort of filter out good projects.”
Some of these female traders told WaxirX that crypto help them achieve financial independence and raise their living standards.
WazirX says this is a good sign towards India becoming a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.
For Forkast.News, I am Monika Ghosh, Pune, India.
And finally today, Seychelles based crypto and derivatives exchange, OKEx, has listed a spinoff from the world’s premier meme coin, Doge.
According to data from CoinMarket Cap, the price of the baby dogecoin briefly surged 25% following the listing, only to swiftly return to its original level before continuing a downward trend.
Baby doge rose to prominence last month after Elon Musk tweeted his support by inserting its name into the lyrics of Baby Shark, the children’s song that will be stuck in your head again all day now that I have mentioned it.
At that point the coin rose a whopping 800%, however, a recent article by David Segal in The New York Times shone a light on the underbelly of meme coins, with the author revealing he was able to set up his own coin for just US$300 and that an expert told him he probably overpaid because it could have been done for as little as eight bucks.
Segal highlighted the growing criticism of alt-coins, saying that a significant portion of the 70,000 such currencies in circulation are what he called “hype-coins”, with little to no real world use case.
Despite what could be seen as bad press, their dogecoin itself is faring quite well on the markets, with its gain of over 40% in the last seven days, outstripping those seen by both Bitcoin and Ethereum in a wider market surge.
And that’s The Daily Forkast from our vantage point right here in Asia. For more, visit Forkast.News, I’m Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau. Until the next time.