Ethereum gas prices spikes to highest since May 2022, while Sushi deploys concentrated liquidity pools — check out these news and more in the weekly DeFi roundup you don't want to miss.
In this week, stablecoin automated market maker (AMM), Curve Finance, launches their highly anticipated native stablecoin, crvUSD. In the recent memecoin season, one popular memecoin, WSB, launched by moderators of the popular subreddit WallStreetBets, rug pulls after one of the moderators dumps the team’s supply. Finally, Aztec Network is back, this time with a hybrid zero-knowledge rollup (zk-rollup), combining a private and public execution environment.
Quite an exciting week! Let’s see what went down this past week in DeFi.
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Overview: Uncertain Markets, Wild Moves
Total value locked (TVL) across all chains remained largely flat in the $49 billion range, despite volatile movement in both the crypto and traditional markets. Most chains saw only slight increases in TVL or decreases, with the recently-launched zkSync Era seeing a 22% decline in TVL, a stark reversal from weeks prior.
Source: DeFiLlama
Welcome to Alpha Central
Tim Beiko takes a look at the next big upgrade for Ethereum, Cancun, which will include the highly anticipated EIP-4844 — known by many as Proto-Danksharding, which is expected to significantly cut fees on ETH L2 chains.
Arndxt covers the hottest developments in the Real World Asset (RWA) space, touching on protocols such as Maple Finance, Credix, Clearpool, Polytrade and many more.
Ethereum: Gas Spikes, CrvUSD Deployed
Ethereum gas price spiked to a high of over 200 gwei over the weekend, as memecoin trading mania continues following the explosive run of PEPE and more. With most activity taking place on Uniswap, the DEX accounted for 34% of all fees paid last week. While this has cost users over $100 to make a swap on mainnet, the network burned 59,916.31 ETH in the past 7 days.
Stablecoin AMM, Curve Finance, deploys the long awaited contract for their native stablecoin, crvUSD. Unfortunately, a slight bug has been discovered after a peer-review, prompting a redeployment which has since been completed.
Dynamic AMM, Maverick Protocol, releases Maverick Boosted Positions, allowing protocols to introduce their own incentives to specific liquidity pool positions on Maverick. This allows more targeted and efficient use of incentives rather than incentivizing the entire pool.
Popular multichain decentralized exchange (DEX), SushiSwap, deploys concentrated liquidity pools all at once on all of their 13 supported chains, taking their main competitor Uniswap head-on.
Oracle-free perpetuals trading platform, GammaSwap, opens for testing on the Goerli testnet. GammaSwap aims to reduce losses resulting from impermanent loss (IL) to liquidity providers through a gamma borrowing market, allowing liquidity providers to directly hedge their positions or simply earn higher yield from borrowers to offset potential IL.
OlympusDAO fork, Redacted Cartel, launch Pirex V2. Pirex was designed to improve management of staked tokens and their rewards through auto-compounding and liquid wrappers. V2 brings to Pirex a more intuitive UI as well as support for Redacted’s own token, BTRFLY.
Jump-backed blockchain bridge, Wormhole, releases Wormhole Connect — a simple widget allowing any decentralized application (DApp) to integrate cross-chain asset bridging through Wormhole’s technology.
Interest-bearing stablecoin issuer, Lybra Finance, discovers a bug in the vesting contract for their locked tokens, esLBR, affecting approximately 20-30K vested LBR tokens. A new contract has since been deployed and affected users compensated.
Vault protocol, Yearn Finance, and maximal extractable value (MEV) protected DEX, CoWSwap come together to release Dump Services, a simple platform to dump multiple tokens in a single transaction.
Fraxlend, the lending arm of Frax Finance, announces support for Curve and Convex liquidity pool positions as collateral on Fraxlend, which is expected to drive interest revenue for Fraxlend higher.
The memecoin, WSB, launched by the moderators of popular investing subreddit, WallStreetBets, rugpulls after one of the moderators, zjz.eth, dumps a significant portion of the team’s supply netting 334 ETH in return. Zjz.eth claims he pulled liquidity due to the main moderator, WSBMod, taking “secret airdrops” of the token to himself, although WSBMod refutes this.
Optimized lending protocol, Morpho, deploys on mainnet. It introduces more efficient borrowing and lending WETH and ETH liquid staking derivatives (LSD) by combining Morpho’s peer-to-peer mechanism and Aave’s Efficiency Mode.
Nocturne introduces private accounts, a new primitive combining account abstraction and zero-knowledge proofs to allow users to transact privately without revealing their address on Ethereum.
ETH LSD issuer, Unsheth, releases vdUSH. This is the protocol’s vote-escrowed governance token, which can be obtained through locking USH, USH-ETH liquidity, or 80-20 USH-unshETH Balancer liquidity.
L2s: Aztec Network’s New Hybrid Zk-Rollup
Dynamic vault protocol, Sommelier Finance, goes multichain to the Arbitrum ecosystem. Sommelier leverages interchain communication protocol, Axelar, and their technology to bring their vaults to the chain and is expected to continue expanding to other chains in the near future.
DeFi infrastructure protocol, FactorDAO, announces Factor V2, which enables no-code deployment of vaults, liquidity pools, money markets, tokenized assets and more, with Factor V2’s middleware layer.
Options trading protocol, Lyra, announces that they will be airdropping the 400,000 ARB tokens they received as part of their airdrop to traders and liquidity providers on the Lyra platform. The rewards will be distributed over six two-week epochs for a total of 12 weeks.
ETH money market protocol, Galahad Finance, goes live on zkSync Era, allowing users to take loans out against their ETH collateral. Loans are secured at a 110% collateral ratio.
StarkNet-based perpetuals trading platform, RabbitX, announces the migration of their original Strips token, STRP, to the new RBX token on Ethereum. The tokens will be swapped at a 1:10 ratio and will be facilitated by Uniswap.
Consensys-backed zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) chain, Linea, announces the beginning of the Linea Voyage, a nine week series of tasks to increase adoption and usage of the Linea testnet to earn exclusive NFTs.
Zk-development firm, Aztec Network, releases their next generation hybrid zk-rollup, Aztec. It combines a public and private execution environment in the same chain.
Polygon: Derivatives, No-Code Launchers and RWAs
Decentralized derivatives protocol, SynFutures, launches their V2 after ending their closed Alpha. Users can now trade perpetual swaps and futures on the platform. V2 also brings to SynFutures a better user experience and increased listings. The protocol is expected to deploy to more chains in the future.
Lending market protocol, 0VIX Protocol, manages to reclaim a portion of exploited funds that were deposited into Gotchi Vault. 0VIX was hacked the week prior via flash loan attack, resulting in $2m in losses.
Steer Protocol goes live on Polygon this week as well, bringing a streamlined, no-code workflow to DApps deploying on the chain via their Steer Protocol SDK.
Polytrade Finance launches on Polygon, bringing real world assets on-chain, in an accessible and democratized fashion.
Binance Smart Chain: Exploits All Around
GMX fork, Level Finance, was exploited for 214,000 LVL tokens (~$2M). The exploit only targeted the Referral Controller Contract, which fortunately was isolated. Liquidity providers and the Level Finance treasury remain unaffected.
On-chain perpetuals trading infrastructure protocol, DeusDAO, has been exploited on both BNB Smart Chain (BSC) and Arbitrum, leading to an initial loss of $1.3M on BSC and $5M on Arbitrum. As of May7 , the exploiter has returned 80% of the stolen funds on BSC (~$1M), keeping 20% as a white hat bounty.
Cosmos: Astroport, Now on Sei
Delphi Labs-backed DEX, Astroport, launches on finance-focused Cosmos chain, Sei Network. In collaboration with Sei and tracked by Blocked Protocol, missions have also been released for Sei testnet users to complete.
Another Week, Another Airdrop
Top StarkNet wallet, Argent, announces their StarkNet Xplorer campaign, designed to help users explore the StarkNet ecosystem (and qualify for the STRK airdrop hopefully). The campaign will last eight weeks and the users will be able to claim eight NFTs if all tasks are completed.
Polygon airdrops exclusive NFTs to holders of their “To Ethereum, With Love'' NFT collection, which launched together with their zkEVM solution, Polygon zkEVM. Holders received one of three NFTs depending on the token ID of their original NFT.
ETH LSD issuer, Swell Network, hints again at an incoming token airdrop. On their website, a countdown has been revealed as well, counting down to May 24, 2023.
Memecoins ran wild last week, causing gas to spike, although that’s not the only thing that went up as the Fed hiked rates as expected.Stay tuned for next week’s edition, and keep supporting your favorite projects, degens!
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