Crypto Morning on June 22: Polymarket at the center of a scandal, Secret Network hacked for $4.7 million, and a Japanese pension fund enters crypto
The market is in a sideways trend on Saturday. Bitcoin is trading around $63,889, with a 24-hour low of $63,221 and a high of $64,712. Ethereum is also showing flat movement at $1,731. Among the top 10 by market cap, Tron shows the best daily performance (+0.51%), while Solana leads for the week (+3.49%). The worst 24-hour result is from Hyperliquid (-5.97%), and over seven days, Dogecoin (-6.64%). In the top 100, the daily leader is SKYAI (+9.15%), and the weekly leader is Aerodrome Finance (+34.93%). The biggest daily losses are from Humanity (-10.51%), and over the week, from Audiera (-68.18%).
Polymarket Accused of Fake Bets to Attract Users
The prediction market platform Polymarket is at the center of a scandal. An investigation revealed that the company paid dozens of bloggers to film fake bets and winnings on copies of its website. Out of 1,105 reviewed videos, none of the shown bets totaling approximately $1.9 million were real. In one video, a student demonstrated a "win" of $100,000, even though that bet was actually lost by over 50 users. For filming, Polymarket created fake websites, including those with similar address spellings. Bloggers were paid $2,000–3,000 per month and asked not to disclose the collaboration. The company targeted Americans, even though since 2022, Polymarket has been prohibited from working with users from the U.S. This is the second scandal surrounding the platform's marketing in a month: earlier, it was reported that the marketing director paid for unlabeled advertising via personal PayPal. Polymarket has promised to audit its promotional content.
Secret Network Loses $4.7 Million Due to Infinite Minting Vulnerability
The Secret Network bridge suffered a hack of $4.67 million. The attacker used a smart contract that did not verify the source of incoming transfers and created unbacked wrapped tokens — saUSDT, saUSDC, saWETH, saWBTC, and others. The attack occurred on June 10 but was only discovered a week later, after a transaction failed due to insufficient funds in a depleted account. The stolen assets were converted to ether and distributed across approximately 30 wallets, then withdrawn to exchanges. The hack is one of the largest in a series of June attacks, the number of which exceeded 22.
Japanese Corporate Pension Fund to Allocate 1% of Assets to Cryptocurrency
The National Corporate Pension Fund from Okayama, with assets of about 21.3 billion yen ($130 million), plans to allocate approximately 1% of its funds to purchase cryptocurrency in the 2026 fiscal year. The fund will invest in a passive fund managed by a major hedge fund that holds several crypto assets. The move is presented as part of a diversification strategy: currently, 80% of the fund's assets are in yen, and 15% in dollars.
My comment: The decision by the Japanese pension fund is a significant signal for institutional adoption. Even a modest 1% of $130 million is $1.3 million in direct inflows, but the key here is the precedent. If other Japanese funds follow this example, we could see a wave of institutional demand for crypto assets from one of the world's largest economies.