November to Remember: Issue #1

By far one of the craziest months ever, we had the OpenAI debacle, ensuing Emmett Shear saga, decel vs. e/acc vs. EA debates and Binance v. DoJ settlement.

This tweet that started it all, the post entails that the board effectively fired Sam Altman (now ex-CEO of OpenAI) from his role due to less-than-effective communication.

Emmett Shear (former Twitch CEO) was quickly appointed the new CEO by the board, and effectively all of Twitter dragged his deceleration agenda (not my words!) out into the fighting ring, including some tweets like these:

Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) quickly capitalized on OpenAI's loss over the weekend, with Sam Altman and lead researchers joining the Microsoft AI Research team.

It still wasn't over of course, and a supermajority of OpenAI employees proceeded to petition the board to resign and reinstate original leadership pending which they would resign from their positions.

One of the board members proceeded to apologize to Sam publicly, which again people didn't take too well to (understandably). It is a bit confusing after all.

For the moment though, it seemed as though we had reached a new status quo and Sam would be sticking around, leading the Microsoft AI team, and maybe that would have counted as real progress.

SIKE! The board eventually folded, and with that, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will be making their eventual return to OpenAI.

In other news, the CEO of Binance, Zhao Chanpeng, had to resign and admit wrongdoing following a settlement with the United States Department of Justice, along with a $4.32 billion fine and an agreement to completely stay uninvolved with Binance for a minimum period of three years (anyone in crypto knows this is a big deal).

You can read more about the entire affair at Reuters.

If that wasn't enough for crypto news for you, Paradigm-backed team Blast, launched an Ethereum "L2" rollup, which claims to have "native yield" and in-built incentives.

If you're wondering why L2 is in quotes, it's because the layer 2 nature of it is quite dubious at best (despite being listed on L2Beat). Patrick from Arbitrum puts it quite aptly.

Hey, but if you're a dev, you might enjoy the sound of those sweet, sweet $BLAST tokens coming to your wallet at an unknown point of time in the future.

Dan Robinson from Paradigm proceeded to write an explanatory tweet, which most of the Ethereum community did not receive positively primarily because it reads almost a bit exactly like the classic beat around the bush proverb.

One of the biggest DEXes and quite an OG in the entirety of DeFi space, KyberSwap was exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack.

They negotiated a 10% bounty for MEV botrunners who were able to frontrun some of the transactions of the exploiter, however the interactions with the exploiter itself did not start off on a good note with the hacker posting this message on-chain. You can see the transaction yourself here: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7a8912583520304ce2364fa165dafe94461a91ab2dcf45dab942e296594dc40a

The SlowMist team has published an excellent article articulating how the hack occurred.

That was not it, and in an ironical twist of fate, the Code4rena Twitter account was hijacked after founder zkCole's phone was SIM-swapped.

To top off the month, the frontends of Velodrome and Aerodrome (the eth.limo links used here are safe) were hijacked to point to phishing sites. Contracts were not affected, and the decentralized frontends kept working as intended. Yet another example of web2 security issues persisting in the web3 world.

That's it for this issue, catch y'all in the next one! 🫡