Last week about $250 million of eth was stolen through a bridge… and it more or less can’t be touched. The moment is was stolen it’s pretty much blacklisted by every exchange and app. Wherever that money moves it will always be tracked. The hackers are basically limited to small amounts of privacy coin transfer. As you said they’d be better off with a suitcase of cash. It’s hard to imagine governments not absolutely loving crypto.
The Solana hack is everything that's wrong with crypto right now. - The vulnerability was originally exposed on the Eth2 Kintsugi testnet on January 7th.. No actual value exchanges hands on Kintsugi - it's entirely a place to wargame your code and see what breaks. - The vulnerability sat on Wormhole, waiting to be exploited, until Wormhole committed an upgrade for an unrelated matter at which point the hacker went "whoopsie better hurry" - The equivalent of $320m worth of ETH was siphoned off of Solana and immediately dumped on ETH - Everyone on Solana freaked out until Jump Capital revealed they were the earnest money behind Tether, Robinhood and Solana by writing a check Now, here's the dumb thing. Crypto people hate Tether. Crypto people hate Wall Street. EVERYONE hates RobinHood. But rip away the mask and discover that Old Man Ferguson is the one behind Solana? market barely moves. 'cuz here's the thing about Solana. It's Ethereum, with the safeties off. It's Ethereum, without the security. It's Ethereum, without the developer community. It's Ethereum, but written in a language everyone hates. It's Ethereum, but privately backed. It's Ethereum, but shitty. Nobody cares. Number go up. The Solana hack did fuckall to the value of Solana, because of course it didn't, because no one gives a fuck about fundamentals anyway even when they understand them and there's at least two comments on this page that fail to understand "proof of stake" which literally means "I have a stake in this succeeding here's proof."
I should have absolutely elaborated and explained that the hack was rooted in solana, it’s an important distinction. I’ve been ruminating on very similiar ideas since the hack, mostly why the hell solana still has popularity. Or really any of the other L1 chains. Any other chain makes at least one sacrifice in the blockchain triangle and in the end those are the fundamentals that drive crypto. I think the nature of the hack is slightly hilarious as well. As a more technical person explained to me, the exploit+fix was actually publicly published for anyone to see, and wormhole just didn’t fix it. $320 million of negligence is quite a beautiful thing to see sometimes.
'member back when George Soros broke the Pound? Now that Jump has announced that it's worth a third of a billion dollars to them to keep Solana alive, how hard would it be to take a flyer at it to see just how committed they are? And how much would it cost to hedge your bets that you can make them cry uncle?