It’s All About Crypto Blog
When DeFi Complexity Costs Millions: The AAVE Slippage Incident
Today's AAVE incident is yet another reminder of how complex DeFi protocols still are - complex enough to cause enormous losses. Here is what happened. Through the Aave interface, a user attempted to buy AAVE tokens worth more than 50 million USDT. The system warned them about extremely high slippage, but the user accepted the risk, executed the trade, and ended up receiving only...
Fewer Developers, Fewer Changes: Is Crypto Finally Maturing?
Today, CoinDesk published a summary of some interesting statistics compiled by Artemis Analytics: developer activity in cryptocurrency projects has dropped by 75% over the past year. The data refers to the number of weekly code change proposals submitted to blockchain-related repositories on GitHub. A year ago there were about 850,000 of them; now there are roughly 210,000. The number of...
Georgia's Stablecoin Regulation: Great for Users, Hard for Issuers
President of the National Bank of Georgia has approved a new regulation governing the issuance of stablecoins in Georgian jurisdiction. One provision in this regulation appears likely to distinguish stablecoins issued by Georgian companies from most stablecoins issued elsewhere. Holders will have the right to redeem them at face value at any time. The rule even sets a...
Humans Leave Crypto Mining. AI Walks In
An AI agent launched by a research group affiliated with Alibaba unexpectedly started mining cryptocurrency. The system had access to GPU resources and, on its own initiative, redirected those resources to crypto mining - apparently without notifying the researchers. Unfortunately, the researchers did not disclose in their paper which cryptocurrency the AI agent chose to mine. It would be...
A Trojan Horse in the Treasury's Report on Crypto Mixers
The United States Department of the Treasury noted in its recent report to Congress that cryptocurrency mixers can have legitimate use cases. What counts as legitimate is fairly obvious. Strictly speaking, any use is legitimate unless it is explicitly prohibited by law - and that includes the overwhelming majority of ways ordinary users actually employ mixers...
Everything Looks Right - But the Transaction Fails. Part II
In the first part of this article, I described a case where the swapping service rabbit.io tried to send a small amount of SOL to a client, but the transaction kept being rejected - even though, according to all the known rules of the Solana blockchain, everything seemed perfectly valid. That first part of the article also covered situations where...
Kazakhstan's $350M Crypto Plan and the Nature of Crypto
Yesterday, two senior executives of the National Bank of Kazakhstan said the central bank had created a $350 million reserve to invest in crypto. Their quotations are published by Reuters. I admire the way Kazakh officials phrase things when they talk about cryptocurrencies. Just a couple of months ago, Kazakhstan adopted a new banking law that, in my...
When War Can Start Anywhere, What Is the Safer Asset?
If you had enough spare cash right now, what would you buy: real estate in Dubai or Bitcoin? The answer seems obvious, doesn't it? And what if I slightly change the question: real estate somewhere else in the world - or Bitcoin? Recent years have shown that the choice of region hardly matters. War can break out unexpectedly almost anywhere. And real estate in such a...
ADA Arrives at SPAR - And Reminds Us What Crypto Was Meant For
The Cardano Foundation has announced that ADA is now accepted in 137 SPAR stores across Switzerland. At first glance, this might sound like just another routine headline. I have seen plenty of similar stories before: a retail chain starts accepting crypto payments, a gas station network adds support for digital assets, or a hotel group begins experimenting...
AI Investors Are Buying Bitcoin Miners - Just Not for Bitcoin
The investment structure of the Situational Awareness hedge fund, revealed today in a Cointelegraph article, looks quite surprising. According to the fund's year-end 2025 report, several Bitcoin mining companies are among its key holdings. Recently, a popular narrative has emerged claiming that AI is pulling capital away from the crypto market, and from Bitcoin in particular. Just a year...
