https://hackmd.io/@idegen/E10-Tornado-Cash-Sanctioned-Saber-Protocol-Unmasked

I, Degen - E10: Tornado Cash Sanctioned, Saber Protocol Unmasked - 8/11/2022

Listen at: idegen.fm

Contact us: @idegenfm

Intro

Welcome to I, Degen - We track down and explore the most exciting crypto hacks, mysteries, exploits, and anything that feeds our crypto curiosity each week. We dig in, cutting through the misinformation and hype in search of a signal in the noise.

Episode Summary

This week we dive into the unprecedented Tornado Cash sanctions, including the arrest of a suspected developer. We also spent some time on the fascinating story of two brothers that operated 11 anon personas to fake a thriving DeFi ecosystem on Solana with the popular Saber protocol.

Weekly Thought

What’s your crypto narrative, and how is it defined/created?

I,Degen - Weekly

1. Nomad Bridge Hack Update

• Nomad announces bounty:
• CoinTelegraph reports that 88% of the exploiters were copycats
• Excellent technical breakdown by Coinbase Threat Intel

1. Report of a consensus level attack on Ethereum
   
   
2. Curve.fi DNS hijack results in theft of 570K - some stolen funds frozen on the move though FixedFloat
   
   
3. Ethereum POS merge scheduled for September 15-16 
4. Master of Anons: How a Crypto Developer Faked a DeFi Ecosystem from Coindesk

The Macalinao brothers used a web of bogus identities to create the illusion of a dev community, juicing value on the Saber protocol and Solana blockchain. Now they’re moving to Aptos.

• Ian Macalinao says that Saber and Sunny comprised $7.5 billion of the total Solana TVL of $10.5 billion at their peak. He believes this contributed to SOL’s meteoric rise when the token reached a record high of $188.
• 11 devs all the same person
• protocols built on Saber, used to artificially inflate TVL
• Crypto data website DeFiLlama has changed the way it presents key decentralized finance (DeFi) metric metric in response to this news

I, Degen - Deep Dive Tornado Cash Sanctioned

What: U.S. Treasury Sanctions Notorious Virtual Currency Mixer Tornado Cash

What is TC, and how does it work?
Tornado Cash is a decentralized application launched on the Ethereum blockchain in 2019 that allows someone to un-link the source and destination of coins. That is to say, provide privacy or ‘mix’ coins.

When you deposit your 1 ETH on the contract, you have to provide a “commitment”. This commitment is stored by the smart contract. When you withdraw 1 ETH on the other side, you have to provide a “nullifier” and a zero-knowledge proof. The nullifier is a unique ID that is in connection with the commitment and the ZKP proves the connection,