Trader Manipulates $100M on Solana-based Mango DEX!

Friday Crypto News Roundup

Latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) Data Baffles Economists

The latest Consumer Price Index Figures were released yesterday, and the figures were not as most analysts expected.

The cost of everything, including food, housing, and vehicle insurance, continued to rise faster than anticipated in September, highlighting the fact that the Federal Reserve still needs to take significant action to reduce inflation.

After two months of weaker monthly growth, the consumer price index increased by 0.4% in September from a month earlier, the Labour Department reported on Thursday. That sent prices up 8.2% from a year earlier, which was beyond economists' expectations of an 8.1% annual pace but still represents a minor decrease from August (mainly because of a big reduction in petrol prices).

According to several indicators, inflation has reached new highs. The so-called core index, which excludes food and fuel to reveal underlying pricing trends, increased by 6.6 percent, faster than anticipated by economists and at the quickest rate since 1982.

The Federal Reserve is likely to continue raising interest rates aggressively, which some investors fear could cause the financial system to become unstable, as shown by the sharp volatility in the markets on Thursday where we witnessed Bitcoin dropping from around $19,187 dipping to around $18,300 before bouncing back up above $19,800.

Google Partners with Coinbase

Google announced a partnership with Coinbase to allow crypto payments for cloud services. Google cloud stated: “a new, long-term strategic partnership to better serve the growing Web3 ecosystem and its developers.”.

For those in the crypto community – The concept of using crypto as a payment for mainstream services is not something new to most in the space wouldn’t get too excited by this announcement but this story might be quite different as it may allow for automation.

Looking at Google Cloud’s list of clients, like Netflix, Sky, 20^th Century Fox and Air BNB, among other and allowing users to pay for services using crypto via Coinbase wallets may be something to look forward to for those of us who would like to see mass adoption

Rogue Trader Manipulates over $100 on Solana-based DEX

After last week’s $100 million-dollar Binance Smart Chain hack, this week it’s the Solana ecosystem.

Millions of dollars were used by a rogue cryptocurrency trader to manipulate the prices of Mango's MNGO tokens on the platform's decentralized exchange (DEX), resulting in the loss of nearly $116 million in liquidity.

Solana-based DEX, Mango matches trades between users of decentralised finance (DeFi) by using smart contracts. Due to their complete decentralisation and lack of centralised control, smart contracts allow for the deployment of sufficient funds to exploit security weaknesses in any protocol without the risk of intervention from third parties.

The trader bought and sold using two separate accounts. Using the first account to buy MNGO token and shorting and using a second to buy the same amount of MNGO at the shorted price. This pump, dump, pump dump method of MNGO token manipulation was done over a period of 10 minutes.

The trader then effectively damaged the protocol by withdrawing over $116 million in liquidity from all tokens available on Mango DEX.