Meta's Metaverse Division Faces $40B Losses; Rise in Complex Phishing Attacks; Faulty Contract Locks $24M on Lido
Summary:
Since its rebranding from Facebook to Meta in 2021, the company has suffered $40 billion in losses in its metaverse division, largely due to disappointing performance in its Reality Labs division. Crypto phishing attacks have increased in complexity, provoking concern from security experts. A smart contract malfunction on the liquid-staking platform Lido has trapped $24 million worth of Solana, causing issues for users. Finally, alternatives are being explored to resolve the problematic smart contract.
Since its transformation from Facebook to Meta in 2021, the company, led by Mark Zuckerberg, has accrued losses of $40 billion in its metaverse branch. Detailed scrutiny of its financial performance, despite reporting significant revenues of $134.9 billion in 2023, exposes a worrying trend for Reality Labs, the team behind devices like the Quest VR headset, which has seen consistent annual dips since 2021.
As per information from UploadVR, Meta had sold about 20 million Quest headsets as of March 2023. A shift to a more business-centric model has been identified within the company's metaverse operations. In March, a blog post from the company marked the end of the metaverse craze, positioning AI as the impending game-changer in technology.
In the first three months of 2024, crypto phishing strikes have reached "grave magnitudes," as per Ronghui Gu, co-founder of CertiK, a blockchain security firm. Despite the number of cyberattacks seeming to be typical for the period, the severity and sophistication of phishing and private key breaches have escalated.
The firm’s quarterly security report, “Hack3d,” revealed that despite registering only 26 incidents, losses from private key hacks amounted to $239 million. This quarter's losses incurred due to private key breaches marked a staggering 1,171% rise from the same quarter in 2023, translating to $18.8 million.
An error in a smart contract has led to the unintentional immobilization of $24 million in stSOL on the liquid-staking platform, Lido. Due to unviable financials and low charges, Lido on Solana, which offers users a 5% annual return for staking Solana (SOL), ended operation in October 2023. The platform allowed users to unstake until February via a user-friendly interface, but after it was withdrawn, users can only unstake manually using Solana’s command line interface (CLI).
Incidentally, a product manager at P2P Validator, Pavel Pavlov, stated in a March 30 Discord message that there was an issue with the smart contract that enabled withdrawal. He indicated that Lido DAO must amend the smart contract, which is a time-consuming and complex process and the team is exploring alternatives that don’t necessitate modifications to the smart contract.
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Authors of this report include Geraint Price, Sam Bourgi, and Felix Ng.
Published At
4/3/2024 10:32:16 PM
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