DeFiLlama adds a token-unlock tracker, while Allbridge gives up over $100k as a white-hate bounty after the hack — read about this and more in our weekly DeFi roundup.
The Arbitrum Foundation takes a step back after the fumble over last week’s communication blunder, releasing two new proposals for more clarity moving forward. Several exploited protocols, including Euler Finance and Allbridge, recover funds from their exploiters, thanks to the work of on-chain detectives. Finally, miner extractable value (MEV) makes headlines with a coordinated attack on MEV bots, an MEV-protection product and an MEV-powered liquid staking derivative (LSD) for Ethereum.
What an exciting week! Let’s see what went down this past week in DeFi.
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Overview: Markets Stay Undecided
Total value locked (TVL) across all chains, took a dip early in the week but rallied hard with the traditional markets before settling down slightly higher than the week before. Crypto markets seem to be unable to break local highs even as equities push higher. Notable TVL changes include zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) chains, zkSync Era and Polygon zkEVM, with both seeing more than 50% jumps in TVL.
Source: DeFiLlama
Welcome to Alpha Central
Popular DeFi analytics tool, DeFiLlama adds tracking of token unlocks to their site, allowing users to easily track large unlocks as well as daily emissions of their favorite projects.
0xSurferBoy on staying safe from rug pulls in the DeFi space with the security app, De.Fi. The app has also been integrated by the Fantom team onto their chain.
DeFi Mochi drops a refresher on LSD projects leading up to the week of the Shanghai upgrade, covering projects like Lido Finance, Frax, Rocketpool and more.
Ethereum: Euler Safu, Sushi Rekt
Weighted automated market maker (AMM), Balancer, launches Boosted Pools, an innovative product built on Aave, where idle stablecoin liquidity is sent to Aave to generate yield, increasing capital efficiency of liquidity on Balancer.
Popular multi-chain decentralized exchange (DEX), Sushi, leaks plans for concentrated liquidity on the platform after DeFiLlama releases the news prior to Sushi’s official announcement.
Sushi faced an exploit on their newly deployed Sushi RouteProcessor2 smart contract over the weekend - with affected users including the notorious crypto figure, 0xSifu. Fortunately, a notable amount of the stolen funds were successfully white-hatted by good actors in the space.
Olympus DAO fork, Redacted Cartel, drops the litepaper for Dinero, an experimental model consisting of a public RPC, a decentralized stablecoin (DINERO) and an ETH LSD known as LST for now.
Ethereum restaking layer, EigenLayer opens up stage one of their testnet, supporting staking and native restaking on the Goerli network. This is the first of three stages of EigenLayer’s testnet.
MEV-focused protocol, Manifold Finance, announces mevETH, an LSD that is optimized for MEV and natively omnichain via LayerZero’s technology. They have also partnered with lending protocol, Cream Finance, to stake 25,000 ETH tokens as mevETH on their launch.
MEV-protected DEX CoWSwap, Agnostic Relayer and Beaver Build among several others come together to release MEV Blocker, an RPC endpoint to protect users from sandwich attacks and frontrunning. In fact, 90% of profits generated from this service will be returned to users!
A targeted attack on live MEV bots on Ethereum occurred over the week as well, resulting in $25 million in losses for the MEV bots.
Self-repaying loan protocol, Alchemix, launches support for a decentralized stablecoin, FRAX, as collateral for ALUSD loans on the platform.
Former Gemini executive, Eugene Ng, unveils Open Eden, a smart contract platform to allow 24/7 access to US Treasury bills on-chain. The platform is targeting DeFi protocols, funds and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) looking to put their treasuries to work.
Money market platform, Euler Finance, delivers their update on the exploit situation, having recovered all token assets from the exploiters, following weeks of negotiations and assistance from the crypto community. The redemption plan for affected users is currently in the works.
Liquid staking protocol, Rocketpool, announces the upcoming launch of Rocketpool Atlas on 18th April, bringing to the platform higher node operator rewards, greater protocol efficiency, and increased boosted rETH capacity, among others.
L2s: Arbitrum Attempts to Appease
The Arbitrum Foundation follows up on the prior week’s governance fiasco with new proposals, AIP 1.1 and AIP 1.2, to implement better control over locked tokens, more transparency, and a clearer process for approvals before actions are taken.
On-chain undercollateralized borrowing protocol, Sentiment was exploited this week for $966k. They have successfully recovered 90% of the funds after negotiations with the exploiter with the help of on-chain sleuths.
Stablecoin issuance protocol, Unbound Finance, announces their V2 mainnet launch date on April 11th, which will enable the borrowing of their UND stablecoin against Uniswap V3 liquidity pool positions.
Exotic peg hedging protocol, Y2K Finance, announces new vaults for Liquity’s stablecoin, LUSD, opening the vaults up for deposits over the past weekend.
Arbitrum-native DEX and launchpad, Camelot DEX, announces Camelot V2, which began rolling out over the weekend and will continue over the coming weeks. V2 will bring concentrated liquidity and UI upgrades to the platform.
Arbitrum money market platform, TenderFi, announces the start of token incentives, allowing users of the platform to earn additional escrowed TND (esTND) tokens from borrowing or lending. EsTND can be compounded for more rewards or vested into TND over one year.
Cross-chain yield platform, Mugen Finance, partners up with omnichain interoperability protocol, LayerZero, to support cross-chain swaps across Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, and the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
Options trading platform, Aevo, has been launched on its own chain, an optimistic rollup on Ethereum. The platform will be gated by the PASS NFT, of which 4,000 have been distributed to selected users.
DeFi aggregation platform, Unidex, releases their Magma testnet, an app chain built using the Optimism tech stack as part of Optimism’s superchain. The chain will host Unidex’s ecosystem of products.
Stablecoin AMM, SithSwap, launches on StarkNet Alpha, being the first of its kind to do so on the chain.
A temperature check on Aave’s governance forum passes, greenlighting the deployment of Aave V3 on the newly launched Polygon zkEVM chain. The move comes as another proposal to launch on BSC passes in the same week. Another proposal has also been put up, ending on 11th April, to approve a deployment on zero-knowledge rollup (zk-rollup), StarkNet.
Bridging protocol, Hop Protocol, launches on Coinbase’s Layer 2 (L2), Base, on testnet, supporting their call for builders to deploy on the chain. Hop also has a proposal on their governance forums to discuss a launch on Polygon zkEVM.
The ZkSync Era team successfully unfreezes 921 ETH locked in Gemholic’s token sale smart contract, much to the relief of all involved parties.
BNB Chain: Thena Hops on LSDs
Solidly fork, Thena Finance, launches support for an array of LSDs on their platform including LSDs from Ankr, Frax, PStake, Stader, and StaFi, providing greater yield opportunities for LSD holders.
Multichain yield-booster protocol, Quoll Finance, partners up with the Wormhole bridge, providing seamless transfers across chains. Quoll is built on Wombat Exchange, which has recently deployed on Arbitrum as well, originating from BSC.
Multichain bridging solution, Allbridge, was exploited on BSC, with the protocol losing ~$570k from the BUSD/USDT pool. After some negotiation, the hacker has returned 1,500 BNB (~$465k) to the protocol, keeping the rest as a white-hat bounty.
Polyhedra Network deploys their zk-SNARKs-powered bridging protocol, zkBridge, on BSC.
PancakeSwap finally launches their V3 on BSC and Ethereum, bringing the much awaited feature of concentrated liquidity to the platform. The move comes shortly after the expiration of Uniswap V3’s license.
Avalanche: Trader Joe V2.1
Trader Joe launches V2.1, bringing auto-pools, permissionless deployment and Liquidity Book fee sharing for sJOE stakers. Yet to come sJOE will be deployed to Arbitrum and BSC in the near future.
Avalanche launches Evergreen subnets, which target institutional adoption with regulatory compliance via KYC, geofencing and other regulatory features built-in.
Cosmos: Injective Liquid Staking Enabled
Finance-focused Cosmos chain, Injective, launches liquid staking in collaboration with Stride, increasing the liquidity of staked INJ on the chain.
EVM-compatible Cosmos chain, Evmos, ships Evmos V12, bringing to the chain better security and improved user experience, such as enabling the use of unclaimed staking rewards to pay for transaction fees on the chain.
Privacy app-chain, Shade, announces the launch date for their DEX, Shadeswap, for 12th April and their money market platform, ShadeLend, the week after. The SILK token will also be released together with ShadeLend.
Another Week, Another Airdrop
NFT aggregator, Gem, rebrands to Opensea Pro, announcing a free mint for all Gem users before 31 March 2023. The free mint will remain open until 4th May.
The market stays undecided, stuck within a range, but builders know where they’re headed. Builders keep going forward. Stay tuned for next week’s edition, and keep supporting your favorite projects, degens!
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