Meta, formerly Facebook, has lost $40 billion on its metaverse division since 2021. The founder of a security firm warns that phishing attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated despite fewer incidents. Meanwhile, a faulty smart contract has locked up $24 million worth of Lido-staked Solana.
Zuckerberg’s metaverse division has lost $40B since inception
Since rebranding from Facebook to Meta in 2021, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company has booked $40 billion in losses tied to its metaverse division.
Although Meta posted impressive revenues of $134.9 billion in 2023, a closer look at its financials reveals troubling signs for Reality Labs — the division responsible for products such as the Quest VR headset. The financials show successive year-over-year declines since 2021.
Data from UploadVR shows that, as of March 2023, Meta had sold roughly 20 million Quest headsets since 2019.
As Cointelegraph reported, Meta appears to have pivoted to an enterprise-oriented approach for its metaverse business. In a March blog post, the company declared the death of the metaverse hype and cited AI as the next technological disruptor.
Crypto phishing attacks reached “alarming levels” — CertiK co-founder
While the first quarter of 2024 seems “relatively typical” when it comes to hacks and exploits, Ronghui Gu, the co-founder of blockchain security firm CertiK, said the complexity of private key compromises and phishing attacks raises concerns.
Gu told Cointelegraph that among the incidents this quarter, losses attributed to private key compromises had increased significantly compared to the first quarter of 2023.
In its quarterly security report titled “Hack3d,” CertiK highlighted that losses from private key hacks reached $239 million despite only 26 incidents.
Compared to the same time period in 2023, when losses were only around $18.8 million, this quarter recorded a 1,171% increase in losses caused by compromised private keys.
“Broken” contract leaves $24 million Lido staked SOL stuck
A faulty smart contract has unintentionally locked $24 million in stSOL on the liquid-staking platform Lido.
Lido on Solana let users stake Solana (SOL) for a 5% annual yield, but it was sunset in October 2023 due to unsustainable financials and low fees. Users had until February to unstake through a user-friendly front end — but that’s gone, too, leaving them only the option of manually unstaking via Solana’s command line interface (CLI).
Lido Discord members have posted that the CLI is too complicated to use, leaving 31,588 stSOL holders with a combined $24 million worth of the token stuck.
the solana channel of the lido discord is a mess
stSOL holders trying to unstake completely lost and abandoned, CLI tooling broken.
there is over $24m of SOL stuck in stSOL.
i know stSOL is depreciated, but i don’t think this the right way to treat your users @LidoFinance
User error might not be the issue after all, as Pavel Pavlov, a product manager at P2P Validator — the team once behind Lido on Solana — revealed in a March 30 Discord message that there was an issue with the smart contract behind the withdrawal function.
Pavlov said the Lido DAO has to change the smart contract which “is quite significant in terms of complexity and time,” so it’s exploring workarounds that don’t require smart contract changes.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
Additional reporting by Geraint Price, Sam Bourgi and Felix Ng.
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