Fast-growing decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, Harvest Finance, has increased its bounty from $100,000 to $1 million for details of an unknown cyber hacker – leading to the return of $24 million in siphoned funds taken recently.

What you should know

According to tweets seen on its official Twitter handle – Harvest Finance anonymous, Harvest is offering the bounty of $1M for “tracking down” the attacker and returning the funds.

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At the moment, the attacker is known to:

• understand flashloans
• understand arbitrage and trading
• understand the curve internal code
• understand renBTC
• understand opsec

READ: Fate of $2.3 billion worth of Bitcoins in Limbo

💵Increasing the bounty for tracking down the attacker and returning the funds to $1M

Here's what we know about the attacker:

1) understands flashloans
2) understands arbitrage and trading
3) understands curve internal code
4) understands renBTC
5) understands opsec

1/2

— Harvest Finance (@harvest_finance) October 29, 2020

READ: $100,000 bounty offered to catch crypto hacker

Why it’s happening

Harvest Finance’s bounty is coming on the back burner when it observed its protocol was apparently hacked, with the cyber hacker reportedly exploiting about $24 million from Harvest Finance pools and swapping for renBTC (rBTC).

READ: Cryptos: Nigerian financial experts talk risks associated with trading digital assets

• Hence, Harvest Finance affirmed the hack, stating the protocol is “working actively on the issue of mitigating the economic attack on the Stablecoin and BTC pools.”
• To protect users, we’ve pulled y pool and btc curve strategy funds to the vault.
• At this point, all Stablecoin and BTC funds are in the vault (not deployed in a strategy). No other pools are affected.
• To be specific: to protect users, 100% of Stablecoin and BTC curve strategy funds have been withdrawn from the strategy to the vault.

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About Harvest

Harvest, a new (DeFi) platform created on the Kava blockchain, plans to launch a product that will enable users to earn more on Bitcoin, XRP, Binance coin, and two other cryptos.

Harvest offers crypto users the platform to supply crypto assets for lending, and earn interest on them, as well as, use their crypto as security for borrowing; this is according to Brian Kerr, Kava’s co-founder and Chief Executive.

Explore the Advanced Financial Calculators on Nairametrics

High net worth investors are quietly putting capital into some cryptos amid the recent bullish happening at the flagship crypto market.

Unsurprisingly, all the cryptos seen by Nairametrics recording high cash inflows are based and built on Ethereum, and the amount of each held by the high net worth investors addresses has hit one-year highs in the previous week, according to a crypto analytics firm – Santiment.

READ: Zoom’s market valuation hits $50 billion mark, thanks to COVID-19

As investors give the world flagship crypto the much-needed attention, Bitcoin’s market price has been ranging between $12.7k and $13.3k, as crypto whales of many respective $ETH-based #altcoins have added to their non-exchange bags. $ETH, $LINK, $REN, $ELF, $KNC, & $ZRX are among those recently hitting one-year highs.

READ: Bitcoin Whale transfers $1.1 billion worth of crypto for $3.58

🐳 With most eyes on #Bitcoin's market price between this $12.7k and $13.3k range, whales of many respective $ETH-based #altcoins have added to their non-exchange bags. $ETH, $LINK, $REN, $ELF, $KNC, & $ZRX are among those recently hitting one-year highs. https://t.co/JRk8mdEaAx pic.twitter.com/2J2wTDy2Ox

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) October 26, 2020

What you should know

All seems to be going well for these crypto’s derivative Ethereum. At the time of writing this publication, Ethereum traded at $387.51 with a daily trading volume of $10,620,097,122.

READ: Ethereum whale transfers 169,296 Cryptos

• ETH price is up 0.2% in the last 24 hours. It has a circulating supply of 110 million coins and a max supply of ∞ coins.
• There are good news and bad news for #Ethereum’s quest to again surpass the $420 price barrier.
• The good news is that miners aren’t selling, and there is a big increase in new $ETH addresses being created, and pre-existing addresses have shown increased inactivity.
• The bad news is that social sentiment is bordering on the euphoric territory, and daily active deposits have jumped in a big way.

Nigerians are fasting adopting the world’s most popular crypto – Bitcoin, as their mainstream for payments and wealth preservation. Thus, setting the pace for other African countries – as it leads the whole African continent combined in the use of Bitcoin via transactions turnover.

Then, it becomes unsurprising to see leading crypto brands like Binance, Paxful, FTX, Crypto.com, printing their labels in Nigeria, as it is apparently one of the fastest-growing crypto markets in the ever-changing world.

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According to a new study seen by Nairametrics, Nigeria has seen the largest influx of activity in peer to peer lending in the month of October.

What you should know

Data obtained from usefultulips, a BTC analytic data provider showed Nigeria leads Africa’s peer to peer lending in the month of October 2020, as it posted a monthly P2P volumes of between $32.5 million, followed by South Africa and Kenya posting about $9million and $7.4 million respectively.

READ: #EndSARS: Access Bank announces N50 billion interest-free facility for businesses

What they are saying

Ekene Ojieh, Head Of Public Relations, Buffalo Chase, a fast-growing crypto analytic firm, attributed the upward trend in the adoption of cryptos – most especially Bitcoin, to Nigeria’s demographic structure.

“Nigeria ranks 8th position in the largest country with crypto adoption. The reasons for this fact are not far-fetched.

“The Nigerian youth has about 32% of the entire population of about 200 million people.

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“It’s easy for a young country like Nigeria to adopt the use of bitcoin because a large percentage of its population falls within the age range that is tech-savvy. Although, that’s not the only reason why many Nigerian youths adopt bitcoin.

“Nigerian youths prefer to secure their assets in bitcoin or stablecoins because naira like every other fiat currency is susceptible to inflation.

“The borderless feature of bitcoin makes payment effortless and transaction fee outrageously low.

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“In the recent protest in Nigeria, we saw the sharp switch to bitcoin after the movement’s bank account was frozen making up to about 44% of the entire donation.

“Bitcoin gained an impressive 13.7% over week 43 – as per Glassnode. Bitcoin is currently traded at a $13,000 region. With the accessibility of bitcoin, we see more Nigerian youths adopting the use of bitcoin.”

READ: Rich Bitcoin investor moved $175 million worth of BTC for just $0.84

It’s also critical to note that a significant number of Nigerian youths, amid #EndSARS protest that had triggered police reforms, got help from Bitcoin, on the principle that its payments were secured and had no central authority, which could breach payment. The funds were consequently used in aiding and providing medical and legal bills for some youths who had peacefully set out for such cause and got arrested in that period.

Another thing that surely stood out in the just concluded #EndSARS protest and got the rare limelight in the crypto-verse, is a Nigerian female rights group better known as the Feminist Coalition, a non-governmental organization originally created to push for gender equality in Nigeria, used the power of crypto technology in disbursing funds for injured protesters, food, water, first aid supplies – that the co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey had to lend his support.

READ: Togo, Niger, Benin remit N2.04 billion to Nigeria for power supply

READ: Tether opens up 300,000,000 USDT

Dorsey tweeted, “Donate via Bitcoin to help #EndSARS,” while also retweeting a tweet by the Feminist Coalition informing Nigerians of how to support the fast-changing female right group.

Donate via #Bitcoin to help #EndSARS 🇳🇬 https://t.co/kf305SFXze

— jack (@jack) October 14, 2020

Bottom line

Nigerian millennials are fast adapting to the most ever-changing financial asset in the modern era and leading brands are also taking advantage of such prevailing macro.