The second largest
centralized exchange (CEX),
Coinbase, released their own
L2 blockchain, Base, looking to onboard the next 1 billion users to crypto.
Platypus Finance sees their exploiters get hacked by white-hat team, BlockSec, recovering some of the stolen funds. Finally, leading L2 chain Arbitrum surpassed
Ethereum in daily transactions.
What a big week! Let’s see what went down this past week in
DeFi.
Volatility hit hard this week, with traditional equities forcing the crypto markets to take a breather.
Total Value Locked (TVL) across all chains took a 2.8% dip to $48.79 billion. Not all was doom and gloom though. Notable increases in TVL included
Tezos, after Google Cloud became a validator on the blockchain, and
Stacks, which saw a spike due to the narrative for
smart contracts on
Bitcoin due to the
Bitcoin Ordinals.
Source: Defillama.com
Blocmates drops a hot list of 30 projects with
market caps of under $50 million that are expecting catalysts or could be part of large narratives in the coming year.
Louround shares his tips of making gains and, perhaps more importantly, keeping those gains from the market as bullish sentiments return.
As focus shifts from West to the East, JavierAng covers eight prominent Chinese coins and their potential with this new narrative.
Missed the recent
airdrops? Auri has got your back with an airdrop thread which dives deep into several lesser known airdrop opportunities.
With speculation around Arbitrum’s potential airdrop mounting by the day, Thor Hartvigsen opens up about the handful of promising Arbitrum projects on his watchlist.
Ethereum developers announce the date for Sepolia, the 2nd of 3
testnets before the
Shanghai Upgrade. The date has been set for 28th February 2023, 4am UTC.
Popular yield protocol,
Yearn Finance, teases the launch of yETH, an index-product tracking a basket of ETH
liquid staking derivatives (LSDs). Or as they like to describe it, an LSD of LSDs.
Frax successfully passes a
governance proposal, which retires the
algorithmic portion of its native
stablecoin mechanism. With just over 98% of the Frax community voting in favor, the
collateralization ratio of
FRAX will be increased from the current 92% to 100% making it a fully backed stablecoin.
Synthetic asset protocol,
Synthetix, pushes out V3 on Ethereum Mainnet after much anticipation, bringing a more
modular structure to Synthetix as well as better risk management through differentiated pools, more permissionless pool creation and better scalability for their native stablecoin, snxUSD.
Omnichain interoperability protocol, LayerZero, unveils their Testnet Bridge, which allows for ETH to be
bridged between Ethereum Mainnet and the Goerli Testnet. While advocating for easier access to testnet ETH, the launch faced backlash from many DeFi players.
Oasis, by
MakerDAO, utilized a set of smart contract upgrades via the Oasis
multisig to seize more than 120k ETH from the infamous
Wormhole bridge hacker. While a victory for Wormhole, many DeFi users fear it sets a dangerous precedent for law enforcement in DeFi.
Shared security protocol, EigenLayer, also dropped the first edition of their
whitepaper this week, outlining the team’s core ideas and goals for the year.
Cross-chain bridging solution,
Synapse, unveils Synapse Explorer, a comprehensive cross-chain explorer, enabling users and developers to track cross-chain movements and analytics across chains.
Fiat on-ramp solution,
Alchemy Pay, on-boards Google Pay, allowing users to deposit and purchase crypto from fiat quickly and easily via the payment solution in a huge win for Alchemy Pay.
Coinbase launches their own L2, Base, on testnet. Built on the
Optimism stack, Base is an Ethereum-based L2, with a bridge to allow users to cross to some of the most popular blockchains. Base will not have their own token, likely due to regulatory concerns.
Together with the Base announcement, Optimism also announces Superchain, an framework to allow all L2s built off the Optimism stack to be interoperable and composable with one another.
GameFi project,
TridentDAO, drops their ecosystem roadmap, outlining the various aspects of their ecosystem including their in-game
decentralized exchange (DEX), OasisSwap, the actual development of the massively multiplayer online (MMO) game and their eSports development.
Modular blockchain network, Celestia, launches Rollkit, allowing developers to easily deploy modular rollups on top of data-availability layers.
In other news, Arbitrum also surpassed Ethereum in daily transactions on-chain in a huge milestone for the L2!
Synapse Protocol also announced the Synapse Polygon Degen Quest to bring attention to DeFi opportunities in the
Polygon ecosystem.
Money-market protocol, Timeswap, releases their v2 on Polygon Mainnet as well, improving capital efficiency of lending on Timeswap and flexibility for lenders on the platform.
Custom rollup provider, Eclipse, unveils the Polygon SVM, an L2 compatible with Solana. This allows projects on Solana to easily deploy on the Polygon SVM.
Platypus DeFi’s exploiters were dealt a swift twist of fate as blockchain security team, BlockSec, reverse-hacked the stolen funds out of the exploit contract, successfully recovering 2.4m
USDC for the protocol.
Auto-compounding vault protocol, Kamino Finance, launched this week, beginning with 4 vaults. Kamino is integrated with
Raydium’s
Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker (CLMM) pools, a mechanism similar to
Uniswap V3 pools.
MarginFi launches mrgnlnd, a new lending service on Solana. The app currently supports USDC and
SOL, but will expand to include
USDT, SOL LSDs
mSOL and
stSOL, and the meme token,
BONK.
Finance-focused L1,
Injective, partners up with sports blockchain,
Chiliz, opening room for opportunities between the two chains. The chains are supported by Wormhole to support liquidity needs between the chains.
Composable Finance sees the departure of their CTO, Karel Kabut, over alleged unethical management and lack of financial transparency from their CEO. Other team members have also left the team citing similar allegations. Composable Finance is responsible for the
Picasso and
Composable parachains in the
Polkadot/
Kusama ecosystem.
Popular token-gating tool, Collab.land, opens claims for their airdrop from 23rd February 2023 to 23 March 2023.
Leveraged trading protocol, MUX Protocol also goes live with their airdrop, which will be claimable until May 15th. The MUX token is non-tradable but can be vested to receive the
MCB token or staked as veMUX to earn protocol fees.
The
SUDO token, from NFT marketplace Sudoswap, can now be transferred, after a proposal to enable the feature was passed via community vote.
Markets pull back again, tracking the movement in equities closely. Building never stops though, as projects continue to ship. Stay tuned for next week’s edition and keep supporting your favorite projects, degens!
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