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The Breakdown

Is It Exploitation Season for DeFi?

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8806 Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2020

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Part of what makes DeFi interesting to people is how it takes advantage of open source protocols to enable types of transactions never before available. The problem, however, is that financial structures mean new financial vulnerabilities.  In the last few days, two attacks on bZx have used a similar strategy of manipulating the price of synthetic assets in the context of a new instrument called “flashloans.” On this episode of @nlw breaks down exactly  How the attacks were carried out  How the community is responding  What the larger ramifications for DeFi might be

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW.

0:15.0

The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk.

0:20.0

Welcome back to the breakdown.

0:22.5

It is Tuesday, February 18th, and today we are going to talk about defy, and in particular,

0:29.9

this set of attacks or exploitations or whatever you want to call them that have been

0:34.7

defining the conversation in not just defFi, but crypto as a whole for

0:39.1

the last two or three days. I think that in many ways, Defy has come to be the perhaps second

0:46.2

greatest focus across this industry after perhaps Bitcoin and just the role of Bitcoin

0:51.3

in the world at large. Defy has surged in attention. It has obviously

0:56.2

come to define the Ethereum community. And with recent milestones like a billion dollars being

1:02.0

locked in defy, it is starting to get notice from people who are outside the crypto community

1:07.6

and who are in the mainstream financial world. And that's why these attacks,

1:12.1

these exploitations, which really in some ways represent the first sustained affront to the

1:19.0

defy system that isn't just theoretical, but is clear and in practice, are so important, right?

1:25.0

This is, I think, a pivotal moment in the history and evolution of the

1:29.2

DFI space, and which should have ramifications for how the space evolves. First, we're going to

1:35.2

talk about what actually happened, and then second, we're going to look at the way that

1:39.3

different parts of the community are responding to it. All right, so there are two attacks we're going to be talking about today.

1:46.0

And actually, before we dive into them, let's talk about the nomenclature that we're using for a second.

1:51.0

Because in various reporting, in tweets and whatever, these attacks have been called variously hacks, they've been called exploits,

1:59.0

they've been called smart people seeing an arbitrage opportunity,

2:03.6

and that's what makes this interesting, because both of these actions weren't traditional hacks

...

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