It has been a miserable August for crypto — and it’s only the third day of the month

The month of August has been a rough one for the sector.

From cross-chain bridge hacks draining hundreds of millions of dollars in customer funds to the Securities and Exchange Commission, this corner of the market can't catch a break.

The developments add to an already rough year for the market, which has seen huge declines due to fear of tighter monetary policy and lack of liquid assets.

Here is a list of what you missed since Monday.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission headquarters in Washington on Feb. 23, 2022.

A civil complaint was filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday against 11 people for their alleged involvement in a pyramid scheme that raised more than $300 million from investors.

The Forsage scheme claimed to allow millions of retail investors to use smart contracts on the ethereum, tron and binance blocks. The setup functioned like a pyramid scheme, in which investors earned profits by recruiting others into the operation, according to the SEC.

The SEC has accused Forsage of being a book pyramid and Ponzi scheme, in which Forsage aggressively promoted its smart contracts through online promotions and new investment platforms, all while not selling any actual product. The main way for investors to make money from Forsage was to recruit other people into the scheme.

According to the SEC, Forsage used assets from new investors to pay previous investors.

According to the complaint, Forsage is a pyramid scheme that was launched on a massive scale and aggressively marketed to investors.

The federal securities laws do not allow fraudsters to focus their schemes on smart contracts.

Forsage did not give a method for contacting the company and did not offer any comment.

The SEC charged 11 people for their roles in Forsage. They were living in Russia, the Republic of Georgia and Indonesia at the time.

Samuel D. Ellis, Mark F. Hamlin, and Sarah L. Theissen are all from the U.S. Ellis and Theissen agreed to settle the charges without admitting or denying them.

January 2020 saw the launch of Forsage. It has been tried by regulators around the world. Cease-and-desist actions were taken against Forsage in September 2020. The commissioner of securities and insurance in Montana tried the same thing. The defendants continued to promote the scheme despite the fact that they denied the claims in many videos.

So-called blockchain bridges have become a prime target for hackers seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in the world of decentralized finance.

The security exploit that caused the loss of $200 million was devastating. Users can transfer their token from one platform to another. Users were able to enter any value into the system and steal funds even if there weren't enough assets in the deposit base.

The nature of the bug made it easy for users to use it. Others used armies of bot to carry out attacks.

Victor Young, founder and chief architect ofAnalog, said that any user could simply copy the original attackers transaction call data and substitute the address with their own.

The Nomad hack was a free-for-all where multiple users began to drain the network by replaying the original attackers transaction call data.

ethereum, which has gained a reputation for slow transaction times and high fees, is being moved off of it's network by using aBlockchain bridge. Poor programming choices have made them a target for hackers. According to Elliptic, there have been more than $1 billion worth of bridge exploits in the last two years.

Adrian Hetman, tech lead at Web3 security firm Immunefi, told CNBC that he hopes developers will learn that they are running critical software.

A lot of money is locked in those contracts so they need to keep the security first.

In order to trace the movement of funds, identify the perpetrators behind the attack, and return stolen token to users, it is necessary to work with a security firm and law enforcement.

"Nomad is committed to keeping its community updated as it learns more in the coming hours and days and appreciates all those who acted quickly to protect funds."

Michael Saylor, chairman and chief executive officer of MicroStrategy, first got into bitcoin in 2020, when he decided to start adding the cryptocurrency to MicroStrategy’s balance sheet as part of an unorthodox treasury management strategy.

MicroStrategy said that CEO Michael Saylor is leaving to become executive chairman. Saylor will no longer be the company's president.

Saylor has been the CEO for a long time. The company went public in 1998.

The stock of MicroStrategy is down over 50%.

Saylor believes that splitting the roles of Chairman and CEO will allow them to better pursue their two corporate strategies. Phong will be given the power to manage corporate operations, while I will be able to focus more on our acquisition strategy.

The company's total revenues dropped in the second quarter compared to a year ago. The company reported an impairment charge on its digital assets.

MicroStrategy may technically be in the business of enterprise software and cloud-based services, but Saylor has said that the publicly traded company is the first and only bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund in the US.

Saylor told CNBC on the sidelines of the Miami conference in April that they were similar to a spot exchange traded fund.

Solana logo displayed on a phone screen and representation of cryptocurrencies are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on August 21, 2021.

On Tuesday night, attackers came after hot wallets.

According to Elliptic, nearly 8,000 digital wallet have been drained of over $5 million in digital coins. According to the Solana Status account, over 7,000 wallets have been affected by the exploit. Elliptic has an estimate of 7,936 wallet.

The sol token fell about 8% in the first two hours after the hack was discovered. It is currently down about 1% and trading volume is up about 105%.

Multiple users began reporting Tuesday evening that assets held in hot wallet had been emptied.

Phantom doesn't believe it's a Phantom-specific issue because it's investigating the reported vulnerability in the solanaecosystem The hack has affected multiple wallet across a wide variety of platforms, according to the firm.

Tom Robinson, Elliptic's chief scientist, told CNBC that the root cause of the breach is still unclear, but that it appears to be due to a flaw in some wallet software. The transactions were being signed by the actual owners, suggesting a private key compromise, according to Otter Sec. A private key is a code that allows the owner to see their holdings.

The root cause of the exploit is not known. The incident is still going on.

According to Solana Status, engineers from multiple ecosystems, with the help of several security firms, are investigating drained wallet on Solana.

Users are strongly encouraged to use hardware wallets since there is no evidence that they have been affected.

Don't use your seed phrase on a hardware wallet. One person said that wallet should be treated as compromised and abandoned. A seed phrase is a collection of random words that can be used to gain access to a wallet.

A private key is used to link users to their address. If a user's wallet is lost, a seed phrase is used as a back up.

The solana network was seen as a challenger to ethereum with faster transaction processing times and enhanced security by backers such as Chamath Palihapitiya. It has been facing a number of issues recently, including downtime in periods of activity and a perception of being more centralized than ethereum.

The defendants the SEC is accusing of endorsing Forsage on their social media platforms are U.S. based. The defendants were not named in the press release.