Weak Facebook Earning Causes Bitcoin To Fall, $300M Wormhole Hack Causes Ether Issue

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Bitcoin and most other major cryptocurrencies fell on Thursday after Facebook (now Meta) disclosed weak Q4 earning and ditto guidance for the next quarter. Over at Ether, a hack in the Wormhole project saw a malicious player make off with some $326 million in stolen crypto.

Metaverse not ready

Wall Street was not impressed with Facebook (now Meta) latest earning results. The Mark Zuckerberg company had to admit that for the very first time ever since its creation it saw its daily active users drop.

The fact that its virtual reality division (known locally as Facebook Reality Labs or FRL),saw a $10 billion loss was enough to have investors pull money out of several metaverse-related investments.

The shares of Meta dropped by more than 18% in after-hours trading.

Zuckerberg believes most of the loss is due to the rise of a major competitor, explaining:

The teams are executing quite well and the product is growing very quickly. The thing that is somewhat unique here is that TikTok is so big a competitor already and also continues to grow at quite a fast rate.

Wormhole hack

DeFi project Wormhole was hacked (called a potential exploit in their explanatory post) for more than 120,000 Ether (worth some $326 million at the time), causing problems for the Ethereum blockchain.

#CommunityAlert 🚨@wormholecrypto’s Wormhole Bridge has experienced an exploit and the attacker withdrew 80,000 #ETH worth $216M

See the transaction here 👇https://t.co/hJAvpswnMy

Use caution if interacting!

Incident Analysis coming soon pic.twitter.com/lnMmsHx8I5

— CertiK Security Leaderboard (@CertiKCommunity) February 2, 2022

The hack was big enough to be reported by Bloomberg.

The Wormhole team, overseeing the biggest crypto hack of 2022 so far, contacted the hacker through their Ethereum address and offered a bounty of $10 million if the remaining funds would be returned.

The team said:

This is the Wormhole Deployer: We noticed you were able to exploit the Solana VAA verification and mint tokens. We’d like to offer you a whitehat agreement, and present you a bug bounty of $10 million for exploit details, and returning the wETH you’ve minted. You can reach out to us at contact@certus.one

joaoserafim / Depositphotos.com