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Tether challenges USDC Solana hegemony with $127.5M Drift bailout

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Tether challenges USDC Solana hegemony with $127.5M Drift bailout

Tether, the stablecoin giant behind $185 billion USDT, has announced its support of a recovery plan to assist Drift Protocol following a devastating hack on April 1.

Drift, a Solana-based perpetual futures exchange, lost around $285 million after its team was allegedly infiltrated by North Korean-linked hackers to compromise a multisignature wallet.

The move will also see Drift “transition its settlement asset from USDC to USDT” and appears to be a “masterclass” bid for dominance on Solana where competitor Circle’s USDC is more popular.

Read more: Inside the $280M Drift hack: weeks of setup, minutes to drain

While USDT is far-and-away the crypto industry’s dominant stablecoin, on Solana, closest competitor USDC flips the script.

In the wider market, USDT’s market cap is over 2.3 times that of USDC’s $79 billion. But on Solana, USDC’s market cap of $8.1 billion is 2.65 larger than USDT’s $3.05 billion.

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In replacing USDC, Tether claims it will bring “more than 128,000 users and over 35 ecosystem teams onto USDT-based trading… on one of Solana’s largest perpetual trading venues.”

Indeed, Drift Protocol’s pre-hack total value locked was $550 million, which would make it Solana’s eighth largest protocol by the same metric, ahead of real-world asset platforms Securitize and xStocks and decentralized exchange Meteora.

A long road to recovery?

The recovery plan is far from a straight-up reimbursement for users. It will instead see exchange revenue directed toward recovery, with “capital support… introduced progressively and aligned with performance.”

DeFiLlama’s 0xngmi remarked that it looks “closer to a plan where users recover their hacked amounts by trading on drift.”

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Both a portion of exchange fees and outside support funds will be committed to a “recovery pool” for distribution to affected users. Drift also describes a planned token “intended to represent a claim on the recovery pool.”

With a nod to concerns raised in the wake of the hack, it explains that all core assets will be controlled by a new “community-based multisig,” using “dedicated signing devices, with transaction content independently verified.” 

Going round in Circles

Circle has been repeatedly criticized over its failure to freeze funds in the aftermath of hacks and other illicit activity.

The Drift hack was one of the most egregious examples of this, as highlighted by blockchain investigator, and frequent Circle critic, ZachXBT.

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Read more: Circle rarely freezes stolen funds but wants reversible transactions

Other examples include the SwapNet hack, where over $3 million of USDC sat unfrozen on Base hours after the event, and last year’s GMX hack in which $8 million was bridged using Circle’s own tool.

This latest incident appears to have finally landed USDC’s issuer in hot water.

A class action suit has reportedly been filed against Circle, accusing the firm of “knowingly permitting the attackers, reportedly tied to North Korea’s government, to offload $230 million of their spoils over the course of several hours by using Circle’s own stablecoin USDC and its blockchain bridge CCTP, instead of freezing the funds.”

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Protos reached out to Tether for comment, but it didn’t respond immediately, we will update this piece if we hear back.

Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news, follow us on XBluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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Crypto World

After Kalshi Appeal, Prediction Markets Fight Could Head to Supreme Court

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Law, CFTC, Court, Kalshi, Prediction Markets

An appellate court is expected to reach a decision after hearing arguments from Kalshi and lawyers representing the state of Nevada.

Some legal experts speculated that the state vs. federal jurisdiction battle over regulating prediction markets companies could soon be headed to the United States Supreme Court.

On Thursday, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments from lawyers representing prediction markets platform Kalshi and Nevada authorities over the state’s ban on the prediction markets’ event contracts. The appeal was over a lower court decision preventing Kalshi from offering certain event-based contracts in Nevada, based on claims that the company needed a gaming license.

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Law, CFTC, Court, Kalshi, Prediction Markets
Thursday oral arguments by Kalshi and the State of Nevada. Source: US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit

The appellate judge overseeing Thursday’s oral arguments and the lawyer for Kalshi acknowledged that there had been several state-level enforcement actions against the company and other prediction market platforms, including criminal charges filed in Arizona. However, last week a federal court blocked Arizona authorities from enforcing the state’s gambling laws on Kalshi’s event contracts.

“I think the body of case law does demonstrate that what we really need to avoid here is having a state and a federal court considering exactly the same issue at exactly the same time and potentially reaching different outcomes,” said Colleen Sinzdak, representing Kalshi.

Related: CFTC probes oil futures trades tied to Trump’s moves in Iran: Report

Central to Kalshi’s argument was that the platform’s event contracts were “swaps” falling under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rather than state gaming authorities. CFTC Chair Michael Selig has backed this position in the case of Crypto.com’s prediction markets against Nevada authorities.

The appellate court did not immediately announce a decision following oral arguments. Any ruling could affect how state courts treat prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket as policymakers come to terms with the growing market, expected to reach $1 trillion by 2030.

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Coinbase’s top lawyer weighs in on prediction market arguments

Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal, whose company was not a party to the Kalshi proceedings but has a stake in the prediction markets fight, speculated that the case could go the US Supreme Court.

“The questions at oral argument are an unreliable signal in predicting the leanings of a court,” said Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal in a Thursday X post following the oral arguments. “Either way, I stand by my longstanding prediction— the Supreme Court will resolve whether sports [contracts] on [Designated Contract Markets] are swaps subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the CFTC.”

The US Supreme Court gave states the authority to regulate sports gambling in its 2018 decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association.

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Magazine: Should users be allowed to bet on war and death in prediction markets?