ZkEVM heats up as Polygon zkEVM and zkSync Era hits mainnet, while MetaMask dispels airdrop rumors — read about this and more in our weekly DeFi roundup.
The rivalry between zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) chains continues to heat up, with Polygon deploying their zkEVM chain just days after zkSync Era hits mainnet. Balancer begins the drop in native token emissions, as part of a four year halving cycle. Finally, dYdX launches their V4 in a private testnet on the Cosmos, as part of their plan to deploy to the Cosmos as an appchain.
Huge week! Let’s see what went down this past week in DeFi.
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Overview: Markets Rally As TradFi Moves Higher
Total value locked (TVL) across all chains rose slightly from $49.43 billion to $50.13 billion, with TVL largely tracking the traditional markets which took a rally after the dip early in the week. Notable moves included zkSync Era which launched on mainnet the week prior as well as, interestingly, Arbitrum Nova, which could have been due to speculation over a second round of airdrops.
Source: DeFiLlama
Welcome To Alpha Central
Catrina discussed the business model of Miner Extractable Value (MEV) company, Flashbots, which was recently valued at one billion dollars.
GrizzlyTrades accuses CT influencer, Gainzy, of allegedly pumping and dumping the token of popular GambleFi protocol, Rollbit.
Francesco shares all on multichain decentralized exchange (DEX), Trader Joe, and its unique liquidity book design and automated market maker (AMM) design.
ZkSync dives into their implementation of account abstraction on zkSync Era and how it differs from the account abstraction implemented in ERC-4337.
Ethereum: Lending Protocols in the Spotlight
Popular weighted AMM, Balancer, reduced their emissions by 16% on the one year anniversary of their vote-escrowed token, veBAL. This drop represents the first of four drops leading to a halving of emissions every 4 years.
Money market protocol, Notional Finance, announces their V3, enabling leveraged yield vaults, leveraged interest rate trading, and higher capital efficiency among other features. The upgrade is expected to roll out on mainnet in June.
Lending protocol, Sturdy Finance, turns on liquidity mining — boosting their yields with native token rewards. Sturdy allows staked assets to be used as collateral on their borrowing markets, giving additional utility to assets such as stETH and a handful of Convex-staked liquidity pool positions.
Decentralized credit protocol, Goldfinch, partners up with Singapore-based Fazz Financial, to support 13% fixed-APY lending on USDC.
Cross-chain liquidity infrastructure, THORChain, was halted for several days due to claims of potential vulnerabilities in the protocol. The protocol has since been unhalted.
SafeDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governed by SAFE token holders, voted to redistribute 50% of unclaimed SAFE airdrop tokens to those who had already claimed theirs.
L2s: zkEVMs on Fire
Ethereum scaling company, Polygon, launches their zkEVM solution to mainnet, taking on fellow zkEVM, zkSync Era, which deployed the Friday prior. Protocols such as Quickswap, Celer, and 0VIX, have since launched on the chain, among others.
Hot on Polygon’s heels, ConsenSys deploys their zkEVM, Linea, to testnet, heating up the battle between the new zkEVM solutions to go live. Being the parent company of the popular Ethereum wallet, MetaMask, Linea comes with native MetaMask integration.
Arbitrum voters up in arms as the Arbitrum Foundation began selling part of a stack of 750 million ARB tokens from the Arbitrum treasury, even before the governance proposal to allow them to do so was passed.
Coinbase’s L2, Base, issues a call for builders on Base, announcing their ecosystem fund to support early-stage projects on Base and a list of great ideas for builders such as safer DeFi and on-chain limit order book exchanges among others.
Nuon Finance deploys on Arbitrum, bringing the first inflation-pegged stablecoin to the crypto space. Known as a flatcoin, Nuon is overcollateralized by ETH and uses data from Truflation to adjust its peg.
Yama Finance goes live on Arbitrum, bringing their omnichain stablecoin, YAMA, to the DeFi space. Yama allows for their stablecoin to be swapped with USDT without slippage or fees. Beyond that, they are also offering lending on USDT as well as leveraged GMX Liquidity Pool (GLP) vaults.
Arbitrum-based leverage platform, Numoen, launches staking yield boost, enabling holders of liquid staking derivatives (LSDs) such as stETH and stMATIC to earn boosted yields on their tokens.
FlashStake officially releases their GLP vaults to the public, allowing users to “flashstake” their GLP tokens to claim yields from GLP in advance.
Optimism-based social asset management platform, dHedge, launches staking V2 for their platform, allowing users to increase their staking yield through longer staking periods as well as enabling pairing on staked DHT tokens with dHedge vault positions.
Synthetic asset trading platform, Synthetix, announces that they will be adding the Arbitrum token, ARB, to Synthetix’s perpetuals offerings, allowing ARB to be synthetically traded on Optimism.
Derivatives protocol, Polynomial Finance, launches Polynomial Trade, their decentralized perpetuals trading platform, with 5-10 bps spreads powered by Synthetix and Pyth Network. Polynomial Trade is currently live on Optimism.
Starknet alpha v0.11.0 also pushed successfully to mainnet this week, setting the foundation for deployment and interaction with Cairo 1.0 contracts.
One-click optimistic rollup deployer, Caldera, releases two public testnets for users and developers to try out the power of Caldera’s rollups. The first is deployed on Goerli, while the second is deployed on Polygon, with USDC as its gas token.
Zk-rollup, Loopring, releases staking for their chain, allowing LRC stakers to earn a portion of protocol fees.
BNB Chain: PancakeSwap V3
BNB Chain’s largest DEX, PancakeSwap announces the launch date for their upcoming V3: 3rd April 2023. PancakeSwap’s V3 will provide more competitive fees to traders and a better liquidity provision experience on the platform.
A SafeMoon liquidity pool was also exploited this past week, with the SFM-BNB pool exploited for $8.9 million. Other pools on SafeMoon’s DEX were unaffected by the incident. SafeMoon is looking to reintroduce liquidity back into the pool over time.
Cosmos: DYdX V4
Top decentralized perpetuals platform, dYdX, deploys their v4 on a private testnet built on the Cosmos. The testnet will last two to three weeks, allowing thorough testing of the core product.
Cosmos announced their roadmap for the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol on the anniversary of the first IBC transfer, detailing plans to bring IBC to chains such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Near, Avalanche and even Bitcoin.
Noble went live on the Cosmos last Monday, seeking to bring native asset issuance onto the Cosmos, with the first order of business being natively issued USDC to be used with the Cosmos’ IBC.
Finance-focused chain, Injective, launches forex support on-chain, allowing decentralized applications (DApps) to deploy forex-based products on the chain quickly and easily.
Eclipse and Injective also launched Cascade this week, which allows Solana DApps to deploy seamlessly on Injective. The move also increases interoperability between the Solana and Cosmos ecosystem.
Amherst Labs announces Geregè, a bridge to connect Ethereum and the Cosmos in a trustless manner, with the use of zk technology.
Another Week, Another Airdrop
MetaMask dispels rumors that they will be doing a token airdrop, amidst speculation around a potential airdrop with the launch of the ConsenSys zkEVM chain, Linea.
The traditional markets rise back to life, pushing the markets higher. Builders keep shipping, bull or bear. Stay tuned for next week’s edition and keep supporting your favorite projects, degens!
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