Good Bye, BlockFi

GM Readers!📪 It's BitDegree Insider, and here's what's happening.

⭐️Today's selection:

• 🚩BlockFi Declares Bankruptcy
• 💰$27M Unclaimed Funds on Polygon Bridge
• 👌Selected Meme of The Day
• 📰Bite-Sized News

GOOD BYE, BLOCKFI

Yet another construction collapsed due to FTX earthquake.

This time BlockFi, the crypto lender (or to put it in simple terms, a DeFi bank), is on the news.

Founded in 2017 by Zac Prince and Flori Marquez, BlockFi made profits by giving loans to customers who were willing to use crypto as their collateral.

But it all hit the wall. Yesterday.

On Monday, BlockFi has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. And when this happens... You can simply shorten it for 'declared bankruptcy'.

The first red flags appeared a few week ago when they... at this point you can guess it... halted withdrawals.

The reason behind it? 'Significant exposure' to FTX that led to... a liquidity crisis.

Ironically, at first, it was FTX who tried saving them. This July BlockFi received $400 million from them. Now, FTX is BlockFi's second-largest creditor.

Apart from them, BlockFi owes money to over 100,000 other creditors.

2022 has been a killer year (in the literal sense of the word) for crypto lenders.

Half a year ago, BlockFi performed as a strong and ambitious company facing harsh market competition.

Their main competitors were Voyager Digital and Celsius Network.

Today... all three of them are out of the game. With billions of everyone else's money.

TL;DR: Crypto lender BlockFi declares bankruptcy. Reason behind it is 'significant exposure to FTX'. 🔥

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Today's exciting news is coming from Crust Network. They just launched a Learn&Earn course on Learnoverse.

The course is free, and it only takes 15 minutes to complete.

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🍒And the cherry on top — you will earn 5 CRU!

Take me to the Learn&Earn course!

$27M UNCLAIMED FUNDS ON POLYGON BRIDGE

So, we talked about bridges yesterday, remember? 👀

Today there's an interesting piece of news about them. It illustrates perfectly how much optimisation is left when we're talking about cross-chain bridges. 

It turns out that thousands of users that have been swapping tokens from Polygon to Ethereum... Are not very details-oriented.

Because every time they've done it... they completed only half of the two-step withdrawal process.

And completely forgot that they left around $27 million on the Polygon bridge that's used for users to send tokens from one blockchain to another.

Because when sending from Ethereum to Polygon, it takes only one transaction. Easy to get used to. But when sending from Polygon to Ethereum...

At first, users have to complete the initial transaction, and then, after having waited for a while... complete the second transaction. Not so easy to get used to.

And, apparently, around 35,000 users have not completed this second transaction.

Polygon announced that these funds are not completely 'forgotten' though. Some of them are still in the process of being sent into the Ethereum blockchain...

Whatever the case is, we can draw several conclusions from this:

• Bridges have to be improved, and there's quite a lot of work left to be done.
• There are quite a lot of rich people who afford the luxury of 'forgetting' their money.
• This is quite hilarious nevertheless.

So... If you ever feel lonely... Remember that there's $27 million just sitting there, left behind, thinking about the wallets that they belong to...

TL;DR: There's around $27M worth of tokens 'forgotten' on Polygon bridge. People didn't withdraw it because they forgot to complete the second part of two-part withdrawal process.

SELECTED MEME OF THE DAY

BITE-SIZED NEWS

• Web3 Game Developer Fenix Games Secures $150M in Funding. Fenix will rise like a phoenix.
• Israel's Chief Economist Issues Recommendations for Digital Asset Regulation. Post-FTX world will be full of calls for regulations.
• National Bank of Ukraine Introduces the CBDC Project, Dubbed E-hryvnia. Primary intention of e-hryvnia is to make it function like physical money.
• Crypto Exchange Kraken Reaches Settlement with OFAC. A civilized sea monster.