Another action-packed week of DeFi protocols shipping, amidst a retracement in the markets. Don't miss out on our weekly roundup of the most important DeFi tweets, news and alpha.
This week swooped in with some unexpected Uniswap drama surrounding their founding days, exciting new features and launches by DeFi titans and new developments in the Polkadot arena. Despite the markets taking a more bearish stance this week, the builder space chugs along.
Let’s see what went down this past week in DeFi.
Overview: Traditional Market Jitters Take Hold
Overall, Total Value Locked (TVL) across all chains took a plunge this week, falling 3.4% after traditional markets saw a reversal of trend starting early in the week after the Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, said that further rate hikes are needed amidst a strong labor market. Notable TVL increases occurred in Telegram’s blockchain, TON, as they announced their funding program, and Hedera, after Dell joined their governing council.
Source: Defillama.com
Welcome to Alpha Central
Apes Prologue drops their Weekly Alpha thread, covering upcoming catalysts such as the Curve Finance stablecoin, GMX’s synthetics launch and Synthetix’s V3 upcoming launch.
Crypto Shiro Weekly Alpha thread is here as well, covering hot narratives, on-chain data and projects that he is personally watching.
Thor Hartvigsen discusses eight specific whale wallets and their main holdings in this thread on whale watching.
Alphanonce Intern releases his thread on Zero Knowledge (ZK) projects and what to look out for, as the ZK narrative heats up in the crypto space.
Ethereum: DeFi Giants Making Moves
Dominant liquid staking derivatives (LSD) protocol, Lido Finance, announces Lido V2 — which will introduce their staking router model and ETH withdrawals to facilitate the upcoming Shanghai upgrade. Lido V2 is expected to decentralize the protocol further, after coming under fire for being centralized in the past. It is expected to release on testnet in March and mainnet by April this year.
Shapella upgrade goes live successfully on the Ethereum Zhejiang Testnet, the first of three testnets to simulate the ETH withdrawals for the Shanghai upgrade. The remaining two testnet upgrades, Sepolia and Goerli are expected in the coming weeks.
Ondo Finance, a protocol built around yield from real-world assets (RWA), launches Flux Finance, which facilitates stablecoin lending to borrowers who deposit OUSG collateral, a tokenized version of US Treasuries.
Rumors of SEC clamping down on staking services from centralized providers such as Coinbase. Such a move could result in capital flight of Coinbase Wrapped Staked ETH (cbETH) to other decentralized LSD solutions. Other LSD protocols rallied as a result.
Decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator, CoWSwap, has been exploited for $166,000. Fortunately, the exploited contract only held protocol fees and no users suffered any loss in funds.
Lending giant, Aave, pushes their native stablecoin GHO, live on Goerli Testnet. This development is huge for Aave as other DeFi players such as Curve are expected to launch their own stablecoin this year as well. Who will emerge the victor? Only time will tell.
MakerDAO announces Spark Protocol, a growth focused arm of MakerDAO. The governance votes are currently underway in a series of proposals for the deployment of Spark Lend, a fork of Aave V3, for a lending protocol focused around DAI. This will deploy in April if passed.
Backed Finance, a tokenized RWA platform, launches their first product, bCSPX, representing tokenized shares of the famous iShares Core S&P UCITS ETF (CSPX).
Balance CEO, Ric Burton, tells all in his account of his role in Uniswap’s founding days and how Uniswap founder, Hayden Adams, allegedly backstabbed him. Hayden shoots back with a thread of his own to counter Ric’s claims shortly after dismissing Burton’s claims as ranging “from misleading to outright lies”.
L2s: Umami, Rekt
Vela Exchange goes live on Arbitrum, allowing synthetic leveraged trading on a handful of crypto and forex pairs. More pairs are expected to launch soon to level the playing field against the plethora of perpetual DEXs on Arbitrum.
Arbitrum DeFi yield protocol, Umami Finance, has been abandoned by its founder, Alex O’Donnell, who dumped all of his tokens while withdrawal features were disabled via the Umami UI. The team is opting to move towards a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) structure without the CEO to carry on building.
Radiant Capital, an omnichain lending protocol, releases details for Radiant V2, which is slated to go live on February 16. Radiant V2 increases support for various assets, number of supported chains and highlights their path to increased profitability in the future.
Optimism-based liquidity marketplace, Velodrome, announces VELO FED, allowing veVELO holders to set Velodrome’s monetary policy and control their emissions.
Arbitrum stablecoin protocol, Sperax USD, suffers a $300,000 exploit where its supply was highly inflated by a single user. The funds were subsequently returned to the protocol.
Polygon: Dopex Hops On
Liquidity Management Protocol, Mellow, is now live on Polygon. Mellow allows users to choose specific DeFi strategies for their funds, requiring less active management on more complex strategies.
Arbitrum's flagship options vault protocol, Dopex, launches on Polygon, starting operations with vaults on Polygon’s own token, MATIC.
Avalanche: Trader Joe’s Omni-Chain Vision
Avalanche top DEX, Trader Joe, partners up with LayerZero to launch JOE as an omnichain fungible token (OFT) as they roll into their multi-chain strategy. This move comes shortly after deploying on Arbitrum successfully and announcing their intention to launch on BNB Chain soon after.
Polkadot: Parachains x EVM
Polkadot’s largest parachain by TVL, Acala, launches EVM+ bringing the best of Substrate and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) together. This could bring in fresh liquidity from EVM-based platforms that may choose to deploy on Acala’s EVM+ layer.
DAM Finance officially launches their stablecoin, d2O, on Ethereum Mainnet and on Moonbeam Network, a Polkadot parachain.
Cosmos: Sushi Dips Their Fingers in the Pie
Mars launches on the Red Bank Outpost on Osmosis, just a week after launching the Mars Hub. The launch of the Red Bank Outpost brings lending and borrowing functionality to Osmosis as its first lending protocol.
Popular multi-chain DEX, Sushi, acquires Vortex Protocol, a perpetual trading platform on Sei Network, a Cosmos-based chain focused on supporting exchanges.
Another Week, Another Airdrop
Optimism announces a surprise airdrop #2 with 11.7M OP tokens dropped to more than 300,000 wallets with a focus on participation in governance and power users on Optimism Mainnet.
On the flip side, last week’s “Fistbump Flashmob”, in which various protocols on Artbitrum posted images of ‘fistbumps’, was revealed to be nothing more than a social experiment after much speculation over whether Arbitrum would finally announce their airdrop.
The market cooled off hard this week, but the builders did not. Every single day is still jam-packed with new features and protocols launching. Stay tuned for next week’s edition and keep supporting your favorite projects, degens!
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