Four top cryptocurrency stories from the past week

No week in crypto goes by without eye-catching headlines. This past week saw the birth of a new scaling blockchain from Coinbase, Jump recovering $140 million worth of stolen assets from its Wormhole bridge hacker, new indictment charges for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and layoffs at two major blockchain firms.

Here are the details on these four stories:

Coinbase unveils a blockchain

Crypto exchange Coinbase released its own blockchain, Base, on a testnet version developed using a software stack called “OP Stack” provided by Optimism, a popular Layer 2 blockchain. Base aims to offer developers an easier, low-cost platform to build decentralized apps (dApps) on-chain. Coinbase will also serve as a primary developer for the OP Stack in partnership with Optimism. It has introduced the Base Ecosystem Fund to support projects building on the blockchain and will contribute a small percentage of fees collected to Optimism's governance body, Optimism Collective.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried faces new criminal charges

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is facing new criminal charges, including conspiracy to commit bank fraud, operating an unlicensed money transfer business, wire fraud on FTX customers, securities fraud on FTX investors, conspiracy to make unlawful political contributions and defrauding the Federal Election Commission. He has pleaded not guilty and is under house arrest on a $250 million bond. His trial is scheduled for October.

More layoffs hit blockchain developers

Dapper Labs, the company behind the NFT-focused blockchain Flow, decided to lay off another 20% of full-time staff, while Polygon Labs, the developer of the Polygon blockchain, said it was going to reduce headcount by 20%, affecting about 100 people. Despite the layoffs, Polygon's founders said that its treasury remains healthy, with a balance of over $250 million and more than 1.9 billion MATIC tokens.

Jump recovers stolen funds 

Jump Crypto, a crypto trading and investment firm, with help from DeFi project Oasis successfully recovered $140 million in crypto assets, a portion of $323 million stolen from Jump-operated Wormhole bridge in February 2022. The hacker had been recently moving the stolen assets around and parked the funds into Oasis-run smart contracts to earn yield. The two teams secured the stolen funds by upgrading an Oasis contract and adding a function to direct the assets of the hacker’s address into their own. 

The former CEO and majority shareholder of The Block has disclosed a series of loans from former FTX and Alameda founder Sam Bankman-Fried.