You didn’t lose your money in this one, right?

Plus, 🧹 Term Finance recoups oracle losses, 👟 Nike faces $5M NFT class action, ⚖️ Bitget preps lawsuits, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
April 28, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 🚨 Circle the wagons: Exploit freezes Loopscale lending

  • 🧹 Payback time: Term Finance recoups oracle loss

  • 👟 Soled out: Nike sued over NFT rout

  • ⚖️ Lawyer up: Bitget goes after rogue traders

Tune in live! Bits+Bips is streaming at 4:30pm EST on YouTube and X

The Financial Freedom Report explores the role currency and banking play in the civil liberties and human rights struggles of those living under authoritarian regimes and how Bitcoin is used to push back.

By Tikta

Loopscale Halts Lending After $5.8M Exploit

Solana-based DeFi lending protocol Loopscale paused its lending operations after suffering a $5.8 million exploit on Saturday, just two weeks after its launch.

The hack affected approximately 12% of Loopscale’s total value locked, specifically targeting depositors in its USDC and SOL vaults.

The attacker exploited a vulnerability in Loopscale’s pricing mechanism for RateX-based collateral. 

RateX is a decentralized exchange on Solana that enables leveraged trading of synthetic yield tokens for yield-bearing assets, offering features such as yield tokenization, fixed yield earning, and liquidity farming, functioning similarly to the more commonly known Pendle.

By manipulating RateX PT token pricing functions, the hacker was able to take out a series of undercollateralized loans, draining about 5.7 million USDC and 1,200 SOL from the protocol.

However, the exploit did not impact the RateX collateral system as a whole, nor did it affect borrowers or loopers outside the affected vaults.

Loopscale’s anonymous hacker has since accepted the team’s proposed white hat bounty: the return of 90% of the stolen assets in exchange for a 10% bounty (about 3,947 SOL) and immunity from legal action.

Loopscale is backed by Solana Labs and Coinbase Ventures, and had amassed more than $40 million of TVL and more than 7,000 lenders before the exploit. 

Ethereum-based fixed-rate lending protocol Term Finance suffered a $1.5 million loss due to a misconfigured oracle on Saturday, but by the following day it had managed to claw back 56% of the lost funds.

The error led to faulty liquidations in its Treehouse (tETH) market, but it was not the result of a hack or a smart contract exploit. Instead, the team said it was an update to the tETH oracle that had triggered “unintended liquidations.”

After promising a full reimbursement for affected users, the Term Finance team shared an update on X on Sunday saying that the outstanding loss had been limited to $650,000. 

“Of the original loss: 223.197 ETH was captured internally [and] 333 ETH was successfully negotiated for return,” the team said, adding that borrowers had already been reimbursed and that lenders would be able to redeem at maturity as usual.

Sneaker giant Nike is facing a class action lawsuit seeking at least $5 million in damages over its abrupt shutdown of RTFKT, an NFT platform it acquired in 2021.

The suit was filed in federal court in New York on Friday by a group of RTFKT NFT buyers led by Australian resident Jagdeep Cheema.

The plaintiffs claim that Nike orchestrated a rug pull by heavily promoting and selling RTFKT NFTs, then suddenly shutting down the platform last December, causing the value of the NFTs to collapse. 

The lawsuit also asserts that Nike’s NFTs were unregistered securities sold without proper registration with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

At its peak in January 2022, RTFKT's flagship NFT collection, Clone X, reached a floor price of approximately 15.5 ETH, with some rare NFTs selling for as much as 19.2 ETH.

Crypto exchange Bitget is planning to take legal action against a group of accounts associated with "abnormal trading activity" involving its VOXEL/USDT perpetual futures contracts earlier this month. 

Bitget accused eight accounts of being the main perpetrators of the alleged market manipulation. The accounts, believed to be operated by a professional arbitrage, or "scalping," group, allegedly made more than $20 million from the incident.

Jiayin Xie, the exchange’s head of Asia, said on X that lawyers’ letters would be sent to the alleged instigators in succession.

“Except for these 8 accounts, all other users who participated in VOXEL trading between 16:00-16:30 on April 20 and have withdrawn funds do not need to worry!” Xie said.

“The accounts have been restored to normal on Wednesday, and no responsibility will be pursued in the future,” he said.

  • 💳 Online payment processing platform Stripe is inviting companies outside the U.S., UK, and EU to test a new stablecoin payment platform after receiving approval to acquire Bridge, a move aligning with projections that stablecoins could become a $3.7 trillion market by 2030.

  • 🚪 Arbitrum says it withdrew from Nvidia’s Ignition AI Accelerator program after the chipmaker insisted that its brand be excluded from public crypto-related announcements, signaling hesitancy toward long-term blockchain partnerships.

  • 🇨🇭 Switzerland’s central bank on Friday ruled out adding Bitcoin to its reserves, citing liquidity and volatility risks, even though research showed a small allocation since 2015 could have nearly doubled portfolio returns with only minimal additional volatility.

  • 🏡The Arkansas town of Vilonia last week rejected a Bitcoin mining proposal for the second time in a year, with residents citing concerns over noise, internet strain, and energy use, despite promises of $14 million in economic benefits from Interstate Holdings Blockchain and the Arkansas Blockchain Council.

  • 🧠 Crypto investment firm Paradigm led a $50 million series-A funding round for decentralized AI lab Nous Research, valuing its soon-to-launch token at $1 billion as the project aims to decentralize AI model development using blockchain infrastructure such as Solana.

  • 📈 DeFi Development Company — formerly Janover — on Friday filed a $1 billion shelf registration with the SEC, planning to sell various securities over time to expand its Solana-based strategy of acquiring and staking SOL tokens as productive crypto assets.

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I know this isn’t exactly a meme, but watch this video Veronica made on Friday. So funny!