The U.S. Federal Reserve has banned officials from trading a slew of assets that include stocks, bonds, and cryptocurrencies. The Federal Open Market Committee has announced most of the restrictions will take effect on May 1.

Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has awarded an anonymous security researcher who found a “market-nuking” bug on its platform a $250,000 bug bounty after promptly patching the potential exploit.

OpenSea users have reportedly lost a total of 254 non-fungible tokens (NFTs), according to a spreadsheet compiled by blockchain security service PeckShield. The stolen NFTs belong to well-known collections, including the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

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Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• Federal Reserve Bans Officials From Trading Stocks, Bonds and Crypto
• Coinbase Rewards Researcher Who Discovered ’Market-Nuking’ Bug
• OpenSea Users Lose $1.7 Million in NFTs in Phishing Attack
• Chart of the Week: Total Staked Value vs. Annual Yield
• Sponsored: Register for a Rewarding Bybit Experience

Federal Reserve Bans Officials From Trading Stocks, Bonds and Crypto

The U.S. Federal Reserve has banned officials from trading a slew of assets that include stocks, bonds, and cryptocurrencies. The Federal Open Market Committee has announced most of the restrictions will take effect on May 1.

The new rules will cover FOMC members, regional bank presidents, as well as other officials including staff officers, bond desk managers, and Fed employees who attend board meetings regularly. The rules extend to spouses and minor children.

The rules “aim to support public confidence in the impartiality and integrity of the Committee’s work by guarding against even the appearance of any conflict of interest” and come after Fed officials traded individual stocks and stock funds ahead of the central bank’s adoption of measures to boost the economy in the early days of the Covid pandemic.

Officials holding positions in the cryptocurrency market will have 12 months to shed them. From July 1, they must give a 45 days notice before making any permissible asset purchases and will be required to hold onto their positions for at least a year.

Coinbase Rewards Researcher Who Discovered ’Market-Nuking’ Bug

Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has awarded an anonymous security researcher who found a “market-nuking” bug on its platform a $250,000 bug bounty after promptly patching the potential exploit.

In a blog post, Coinbase said the problem was a bug in its new advanced trading feature that has limited beta availability. It allowed an exploiter with two accounts to manually modify their APIs connected to the exchange, and sell a certain amount in one asset if they had that same amount in the other account in another asset.

Coinbase explained:

“The user submits a market order to the BTC-USD order book to sell 100 BTC, but manually edits their API request to specify their SHIB account as the source of funds. As a result, a market order to sell 100 BTC on the BTC-USD order book would be entered on the Coinbase Exchange,”

The bug was fixed shortly after the security researcher, Tree of Alpha, managed to contact Coinbase’s team.

OpenSea Users Lose $1.7 Million in NFTs in Phishing Attack

OpenSea users have reportedly lost a total of 254 non-fungible tokens (NFTs), according to a spreadsheet compiled by blockchain security service PeckShield. The stolen NFTs belong to well-known collections, including the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

The value of the stolen NFTs is believed to be at around $1.7 million and reportedly occurred through an exploit of a flexibility in the Wyvern Protocol, the open-source standard underlying most NFT smart contracts.

The attack occurred after the hackers’ targets signed a partial contract, with a general authorization and large portions left blank through a phishing scheme. With that signature, attackers completed the contract with a call to their own contract, which transferred ownership of the NFTs without payment.

The exact attack vector hasn’t yet been discovered. Davin Finzer, OpenSea’s CEO, said that its website, listing systems, and emails were not compromised to lead to the attack.

Chart of the Week: Total Staked Value vs. Annual Yield

This week we’re looking at the total staked value of 6 major cryptoassets vs. their annual yield. Solana currently has the largest staked value, at $38 billion, and has a 5.9% annual yield. Per year, $2.2 billion in SOL are generated through staking.

Avalanche, however, has a 9.2% reward rate, which means $1.4 billion in AVAX are generated per year, with only $22 billion being staked.

Polkadot has the highest staking reward at 14%, and as a result, its annual yield income exceeds that of ETH, ADA, and LUNA, despite only $12 billion in DOT being staked.

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