Coinbase launches its own layer-2, while Arbitrum reached an important milestone — check out our weekly roundup of the top alpha in DeFi.
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.
Overview: Volatility’s Back on the Menu, Degens!
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
Welcome to Alpha Central
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: It’s LSDs All the Way Down
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.
Also read: A Deep Dive Into EigenLayer
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.
L2s: Coin-based
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!
Polygon: A Quest for Degens!
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.
Avalanche: Reverse-Hacked
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.
Solana: DeFi Resurgence
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.
Cosmos: Sports x Finance
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.
Polkadot: Internal Conflict in Composable
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.
Another Week, Another Airdrop
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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