Check out our weekly roundup of the latest DeFi news, airdrops and alpha right now!
Coinbase L2, Base, halts momentarily, experiencing its first major outage for just under 45 minutes. The Frax Finance team proposes a staked FRAX implementation, to compete against MakerDAO’s DAI and the DAI Savings Rate. Finally, lending protocol, Aave, resumes minting of their stablecoin, GHO, after halting it earlier due to integration issues.
Huge week for DeFi! Let’s dive deeper into what went down in DeFi this past week.
Overview: Market Crabs, TVL Flat
Total value locked (TVL) across all chains remained largely flat through the week as majors traded sideways. Notable exceptions to the trend include Gnosis Chain, which saw a 20% jump in TVL and StarkNet, which saw a TVL rise of almost 9%.
Source: DeFiLlama
Welcome to Alpha Central
Paul Veradittakit shares about some of the top trends at the recent Stanford Blockchain Week, including optimization of zero-knowledge technology, “plug & play” modularity and renewed interest in the Bitcoin developer ecosystem.
A new privacy paper has been released by several prominent figures, including Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin, concerning how to achieve compliance while enabling privacy.
Zoomer Oracle dives into the psychology of trading with the masses and understanding how to think about how other market participants think.
Ethereum: Staked FRAX Incoming
Stablecoin protocol, Frax Finance, releases a governance proposal for staked FRAX (sFRAX), which would allow FRAX holders to stake FRAX and earn a yield derived from either real-world assets or DeFi yields. The yield is expected to be between 5-10%.
Money market protocol, Aave, resumes minting of their native stablecoin, GHO, on Ethereum on Aave V3 after an integration issue resulted in minting being halted in late August. No funds were at risk or lost in the process.
In the same week, Aave introduced two new features, Debt Switch, which enables switching of debt from one asset to another for more competitive borrow rates, and Withdraw and Switch, which allows users to withdraw deposited assets as GHO.
Advanced DeFi strategy protocol, DeFi Saver, introduces ETH Saver, a protocol enabling single-transaction leveraged ETH strategies. Currently, ETH Saver supports Lido, Rocket Pool and Coinbase for ETH deposits and Morpho Labs, Compound Finance and Aave for leverage.
Ethereum LSDFi stablecoin protocol, Raft, releases Raft V2, pushing out new updates including the R Savings Rate, which yields 6% on their R stablecoin, similar to MakerDAO’s DAI Savings Rate. Additionally, V2 introduces the peg stability module to ensure that R maintains a tighter peg.
Liquid staking derivative (LSD) protocol, Swell Network, has turned their token, swETH, into an omnichain token, powered by LayerZero. Users can now trade or provide liquidity for swETH on Arbitrum, with more chains to come.
Uniswap V3 management tool, Arrakis Finance, introduces LST Vaults, optimizing specific vaults for market making on LSD tokens for depth and minimal price impact on LSD token trades.
Telegram trading bot, Unibot, introduces a loyalty program which will entitle qualifying users for discounts on trading fees on the platform. Additionally, Unibot cut the trading tax on their token from 5% to 4% in the same week.
Flexible credit facilitation protocol, Wildcat Protocol, drops a new whitepaper, outlining how it works, their target market and how users would be able to use the protocol.
L2s: Base Halts, Circle’s USDC Now on Base and Optimism
Coinbase L2, Base, went down for almost 45 minutes earlier this week, halting block production during the period. The chain is now operational again and no funds were lost.
USDC issuer, Circle, deploys the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) on Optimism, enabling the seamless transfer of USDC across their supported chains, which also include Ethereum, Arbitrum and Avalanche. In the same week, native USDC goes live on Optimism and Base.
Multichain stablecoin decentralized exchange (DEX), Wombat, releases their cross-chain pool, allowing traders to swap seamlessly between USDC and USDT across their three supported chains: Arbitrum, Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum.
Synthetix founder, Kain Warwick, announces the plans for Synthetix’s future, laying out the need to experiment with other chains using ETH as collateral for trading and the possibility of Synthetix moving towards an Optimism-based Appchain in the future.
Options protocol, Cega, deploys Eth Staker vaults, allowing USDC depositors to earn yields from premiums generated from selling options on ETH LSD tokens as well as governance tokens of ETH LSD protocols. The current underlying assets are LDO, RPL and stETH.
Single-click rollup deployer, Caldera, deploys three new chains on Arbitrum Orbit, for options and futures DEX, Syndr, on-chain game studio, Sanko Game Corp, and money-market development protocol, Volatilis.
Avalanche: CavalRe’s Multi-Token AMM
CavalRe deploys multi-token swap automated market maker (AMM), Multiswap, which uses a unified liquidity pool for concentrated liquidity to enable buying or selling of multiple tokens in a single transaction.
Solana: Zero-Day Futures by Hxro
Hxro Network introduces Zero-Day Futures (ZDFs), a new derivative contract for short term speculation on crypto assets. ZDFs settle on a 25-hour expiration cycle and settle back to USDC based on the oracle price at expiration.
Cosmos: DYdX Incentives Proposal
DeFi optimization platform, Chaos Labs, initiates a new proposal for perpetuals DEX, dYdX, to set aside $20 million in dYdX tokens for a six month incentives program for dYdX V4, ahead of their mainnet launch.
Another Week, Another Airdrop
Bridging protocol, Connext’s airdrop goes live, enabling eligible users to claim their share of the airdrop. Despite a small hiccup in the process which paused claims momentarily, claims are now re-enabled and processing smoothly.
Markets trade flat as traders lose interest in the crypto space, but projects are just heads-down building. Stay updated on your favorite projects and stay tuned for next week’s edition, and keep supporting your favorite projects, degens!
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