Socket Launches Synthetix Bridge

• Solana Slope wallets become compromised.

• Sepolia upgrade is planned for August 17th.

• Socket launches a Synthetix bridge.

• StarkNet updates its Voyager block explorer.

Interoperability protocol Socket has launched a Synthetix bridge for transferring tokens from any chain into the Synthetix Ecosystem. The bridge allows users to zap into a synth asset from any non-synth asset in a single transaction. Socket’s Refuel feature is also integrated into the bridge, allowing users to bridge native gas tokens on the destination chain. Synthetix is a synthetic assets protocol that allows users to stake the protocols native SNX tokens to mint sUSD. Users can then trade sUSD for synthetic assets that can be used across DeFi apps such as Lyra. Synthetix currently holds $624 million TVL across Ethereum and Optimism.

An exploit in the Solana ecosystem has led to more than $4 million worth of SOL and SLP tokens being drained from over 9k unique wallets. Initially, Slope and Phantom mobile wallets users across iOS and Android reported funds being stolen. Details on Solscan revealed that the transactions were being signed by a user's own keys, indicating a critical seed phrase compromise. The hack was first believed to be a supply chain attack or an entropy flaw in private key generation. A supply chain attack occurs when an application ships an update while there is malicious code in software from third-party vendors. It seemed possible because only users from mobile wallets were affected. Solana Status later discovered that the exploit was isolated to the Slope wallet. Compromised Phantom wallets were tied to users that reused the same seed phrase from Slope. Any user that generated or imported a seed phrase into the Slope mobile wallet is affected by the exploit. Affected users should transfer out funds into a new wallet as soon as possible. Slope reportedly logged user seed phrases in their servers over POST, leading to the compromise of private keys.

The Sepolia testnet is scheduled to undergo its first post-merge execution layer upgrade on August 17th. The upgrade will cause peers, who do not have the same sequence as Nodes, to be disconnected. As per EIP-2124, the upgrade will check whether a peer has completed all upgrades between Frontier Thawing and Gray Glacier. Sepolia node operators are required to update their execution layer client prior to the upgrade. Goerli and Ethereum mainnet will undergo the same post-merge upgrade once the networks have transitioned to PoS. Ropsten will not be upgraded since it is no longer maintained by the Ethereum Foundation. Consensus layer clients are not affected by this upgrade.

StarkNet has updated its UI and front end for its Voyager block explorer. Users can view transaction data for StarkNet Alpha Mainnet and the StarkNet Goerli testnet. The block explorer features a tab for Blocks, Transactions, Contracts, Messages, and Events. StarkNet refers to wallet addresses as contracts. The block explorer was built by Nethermind using StarkNet’s node implementation called Juno. Since launching in November 2021, StarkNet Alpha Mainnet has processed more than 450k transactions from 208k contracts. StarkNet is a permissionless L2 network powered by zk-Rollups.

Gitcoin Grants announced the dates for GR15, which will take place from September 7th to the 22nd. Gitcoin is a quadratic funding platform for supporting public goods. Gitcoin facilitated $9.4 million in value transfer during its last funding round in June. Gitcoin is also running a Money Legos Virtual Hackathon between August 8th-23rd.