The World Marketplace is coming.
Open, decentralized infrastructure designed to make Ethereum the settlement and coordination layer for global commerce.
Read the full announcement below.
On October 20, an exploiter took advantage of a vulnerability in a legacy function of Slice's settlement contract, taking about $41k in store earnings that hadn't yet been withdrawn. Most of these funds were Slice's or tied to past partner initiatives; fewer than 10 user stores were affected according to our initial review.
Within an hour of being alerted, we paused the contracts and fixed the vulnerability. We also contacted incident response teams and traced the stolen funds, which we're actively monitoring. Funds in users' wallets were never at risk.
Use of the Slice protocol is temporarily paused out of an abundance of caution while we complete our review. If your store was one of the few affected, you'll see a notice in your Slice dashboard with next steps.
To the exploiter: return the funds by Friday, October 23, 17:00 UTC and keep 10% as a white-hat bounty, and we'll treat this as a white-hat recovery. After that, we will pursue all available options to recover them.
To our users: sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience. We take security seriously and have already taken steps to prevent similar attacks, which we'll share more about soon. We expect Slice to be back up and running within 24 to 48 hours, and we'll keep you updated here until then.
We’ve spent six years building Slice on one bet: the future of commerce is open, and bigger than any one marketplace.
Commerce is about to change dramatically. Merchants will have new ways to reach customers without convincing them to visit a website or depending on an intermediary to be discovered. The irony is that Amazon’s greatest strength—its tightly controlled platform—is also what makes it unfit to lead the next wave of commerce.
That’s why decentralization is fundamental to Slice, and why Ethereum is instrumental to our vision. An open protocol lets independent merchants, applications, services, and marketplaces become part of something much bigger than Amazon could ever become on its own.
It’s almost time to show the world what we’ve been building.
Base and Coinbase Wallet wouldn’t be where they are today without Chintan. A lot of the best and most impactful work across both has his fingerprints on it. I know because I’ve seen it firsthand.
He’s one of the most exceptional leaders I’ve ever worked with: somehow everywhere at once, always a step ahead and on top of the details, while consistently bringing out the best in the people around him.
From the very first Base Cafe and Based Merch stores, to the Onchain Summer Shop, to the countless Base + Slice events we worked on together over the years, I’ve only come away with more respect for him every time.
What he probably doesn’t know is how much I learned just by watching him work over the years. His dedication, judgment, and especially the way he leads and gets the best out of his team.
Chintan has had a much bigger impact on those around him than he probably realizes, and I’m very excited to see what he does next. He deserves every bit of the great things waiting for him.
> A world computer should also be the main owner of its state. [...] Composability is the superpower of blockchains
Exactly. Verifiable offchain computation is what lets Ethereum scale. Onchain state is what makes it composable. Ethereum's endgame is to hold the world's state.
Slice applies this thesis to commerce, and doing it properly meant rebuilding commerce from scratch. I'll be going deep on this soon, but in a nutshell, when state moves onchain:
- New primitives become possible, enabling more powerful, automated processes — on Slice we call this "smart commerce".
- Many problems typical of web2 disappear.
- New problems appear.
DeFi showed what happens when one domain's state moves onchain. We're doing the same for commerce, and I expect the pattern to repeat across most domains over time.
I believe one of Ethereum's main challenges is resolving the tension between privacy and composability. Ethereum wins when developers and users can decide what is private, shared or public, and everything stays composable. That's why I'm so excited about obfuscation.
Most of the building blocks are in place, and the design space in commerce is immense. Truly grateful to everyone who has contributed and keeps contributing to Ethereum for making possible a future worth building toward.
the endgame is portable accounts that can authenticate and authorize payments across apps and devices. that solves the same problem across industries.
no need to turn a game controller into a payment terminal. it's time to upgrade the web's identity layer.
commerce needs new rails and primitives if we want agentic commerce to reach its full potential without becoming a security nightmare.
good news is we’re building them at @slice__so, and we're almost done.