Weekly Roundup: WLFI Token Controversy, Gemini's Initial Public Offering, StarkNet Malfunction

In the ever-evolving world of cryptocurrency, several significant developments have taken place recently. Here's a summary of some of the key events that have caught the attention of the crypto community.

Ripple's dollar-backed stablecoin, RLUSD, has expanded its reach across Africa. Meanwhile, World Liberty Financial (WLFI) made a splash with the launch of its token on major exchanges, including Binance, Kraken, and Upbit.

However, not all news was positive. Venus Protocol suffered a phishing exploit that drained around $27 million from one user. Fortunately, Venus managed to recover about $13 million and has since resumed operations. Similarly, two DeFi projects were hacked on the same day, but specific details about the hacks remain scarce. Bunni, a DEX, disclosed a rounding bug in its smart contract was exploited for $8.4 million. The attacker manipulated liquidity pools through a flash loan exploit.

Justin Sun, an early Ethereum investor, moved roughly $9 million worth of tokens in test transfers before his address was blacklisted, freezing 595 million WLFI tokens worth around $107 million. WLFI also froze 272 wallets and burned 47 million tokens worth over $11 million.

The WLFI token was priced at $0.20 during its launch and within hours of its launch, WLFI pulled in over $60 million in DEX trading volume.

On the regulatory front, Polymarket, a prediction market, received a green light to operate in the U.S. under a no-action letter from the CFTC. Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange, is aiming for a $2.2 billion valuation in its U.S. IPO. Gemini plans to list 16.7 million Class A shares on Nasdaq under the ticker "GEMI." However, no information about the persons or institutions involved in the planned IPO and their roles has been disclosed.

Block production halted at 4:36 AM UTC on Sept. 2, with no transactions going through for hours. The cause of the outage remains unclear. StarkNet faced an outage just a day after a major upgrade, but details about the outage are scarce.

Lastly, Uniswap governance is considering a proposal to set up a Wyoming entity to handle off-chain operations while keeping on-chain governance intact. This move could potentially streamline operations and enhance the efficiency of the popular decentralized exchange.