Friend.Tech Reveals Paradigm Seed Round

Quick Take

• Friend.Tech received funding from Paradigm.
• Exactly Protocol suffers a $7.3 million exploit.
• Arbitrum One suffers a finality incident.
• A judge upholds OFAC sanctions in a Tornado Cash lawsuit.

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Optimism Highlights 🔴✨

Friend.Tech Reveals Paradigm Seed Round
Friend.Tech, a web3 social app that allows users to buy and sell profile-based shares, revealed a seed investment from Paradigm. The amount of the investment was not disclosed. Friend.Tech was created by pseudonymous founders 0xRacer and ShrimpPepe. The team previously created a picture-based social app called stealcam. The Friend.Tech dapp is native to Coinbase’s Base L2 chain and is only available for iOS users. Since its beta release earlier this month, Friend.Tech has processed over 500,000 unique transactions and $10 million in trading volume from the buying and selling of shares. The dapp is also airdropping 100 million points over the next 6 months to beta users.

Exactly Protocol Suffers $7.3 Million Exploit

Exactly Protocol, a variable and fixed interest rate protocol native to Optimism, suffered a bridge-related exploit resulting in a loss of over $7.3 million. According to the security arm of De.Fi, an attacker funded an exploiter contract on Ethereum, transferring deposits to Optimism, and ultimately bridging stolen funds back to Ethereum. Exactly Protocol has since paused its contracts and scheduled an upgrade to fix one of its periphery contracts. The protocol is currently in withdrawal-only mode. Exactly also sent an onchain message to its exploiter requesting to initiate discussions about the next steps for a potential return of funds. Exactly now holds under $10 million in TVL, down from a peak of $39 million prior to the exploit.

Arbitrum One Sufferers Finality Incident

Arbitrum One suffered an hour-long finality incident after its batch poster, an entity that posts transaction batches to Ethereum, stopped posting transactions. Transactions were still processed and ordered by the Arbitrum One sequencer but were not posted to L1. Offchain Labs CTO Harry Kalodner said users still had a “soft confirmation.” While users could still execute transactions on the L2, some exchanges paused deposits until finality was restored at the L1 level. Kalodner pointed to an edge case relating to geth’s mempool implementation as the reason for the issue. The batch poster was temporarily unable to escalate the gas fees of any transaction. Arbitrum also has an emergency exit mechanism to force transactions.

Judge Rules Against A Tornado Cash Lawsuit

A U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of the U.S. government in a Coinbase-backed lawsuit against OFAC over Tornado Cash sanctions. The lawsuit claimed OFAC overstepped its authority by sanctioning open-source software rather than an individual or entity. The judge determined that Tornado Cash qualifies as an “entity” due to its composition of founders, developers, and DAO. The lawsuit also claimed that the sanctions violate First Amendment rights to free speech, but the judge dismissed the claims stating that the sanctions target service use, not code interaction. The lawsuit was filed last year by six individuals who had funds trapped in the sanctioned smart contracts. The plaintiffs do plan to file an appeal.

Coin Documentary Now Free To Watch

Coin, a documentary about Coinbase’s 10-year journey to a public company, is now free to watch on Youtube and Amazon Prime. The documentary was first released for purchase in October 2022. The film documents internal happenings at Coinbase, the challenges of building a tech startup, and the company’s IPO.