Synthetix launches OP rewards with 400,000 OP to be earned, while Binance launches its Ethereum LSD product, WBETH. Check out the biggest DeFi news and alpha in this week's roundup!
The ETH liquid staking derivative (LSD) space continues to see new entrants week on week, this week with Binance entering the space, among others. Optimism releases their Super Token List to tie the Optimism SuperChain ecosystem together. Finally, the omnichain interoperability protocol, LayerZero, launches a new project, Essence, increasing accessibility of the validator space to smaller teams.
Let’s see what went down this past week in DeFi.
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Overview: Crypto Markets Fight To Crawl Higher
Total value locked (TVL) across all chains inch slightly higher as the market creeps back up slowly to recover from the prior week’s dump. Notable TVL changes include zkSync Era, which continues to experience healthy growth, and Cosmos chains, Secret and Kujira, with ShadeSwap’s launch on Secret and the launch of Kujira’s money market platform, Ghost, this week.
Source: DeFiLlama
Welcome to Alpha Central
Francesco discusses the current state of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), its potential future and the concept of redistributing MEV profits to Ethereum’s users.
DeFi Minty dives deep into crvUSD, Curve Finance’s upcoming stablecoin, as speculation bubbles up again with the CurveDeployer account quietly deploying contracts on Ethereum.
Ethereum: How Many LSDs Do We Need?
Binance enters the LSD space with Wrapped Beacon ETH (WBETH). Binance has since opened up staking ETH for WBETH on their platform as of April 27, 2023.
EtherFi announces Operation Solo Staker, a project intending to increase decentralization of stakers across the world by supporting solo stakers. The operation aims to offer out free machines and ETH to stake, and are currently open for applicants for their first cohort.
EtherFi also announces the date for mainnet launch as May 1st, bringing to Ethereum a protocol to quickly and easily set up an Ethereum validator without the need to struggle with the technical aspects.
Liquid staking protocol, Swell Network, launches their Beta, Seawolf, on Ethereum mainnet, enabling zero-fee staking on their platform for a limited time. The Beta will last for 30 days.
Yearn Finance’s basket of ETH LSDs, yETH, has passed the governance vote, with 100% of YFI holders voting in favor. The product will be deployed in approximately two weeks.
Cashmere Labs debuts their testnet on 10 testnet chains, allowing MEV protected swaps built on LayerZero’s omnichain technology.
Cross-chain modular liquidity layer, Catalyst, goes live, allowing any new chain to connect directly to Catalyst immediately on launch for cross-chain swaps.
Popular Ethereum wallet, Trust Wallet, reveals a vulnerability in their seed generation for users who generated their seeds via the browser extension between 14 - 23 November 2023, which resulted in more than $170K in funds lost. Trust Wallet intends to compensate affected users.
Omni Network introduces themselves to the space: an omnichain interoperability protocol designed to connect L2 solutions together to allow for seamless transfers and communication between the chains. The platform is secured by ETH restaking platform, EigenLayer.
LayerZero announces Essence, a project enabling the quick and easy set up of a validator in under an hour. This process traditionally takes months with a full team dedicated to devops and could quickly help new projects scale their validator sets.
Popular weighted automated market maker (AMM), Balancer, integrates Aave V3 pools into their Boosted Pools. Boosted Pools utilize idle liquidity in Balancer’s pools to generate yield on other platforms such as Aave to increase yield to Balancer’s liquidity providers.
SushiSwap’s claim portal is now live, allowing users affected by the RouteProcessor2 hack whose funds were successfully intercepted to reclaim their lost funds. For user funds that did not end up in this rescue contract, a separate portal for claims has been set up which is reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
L2s: Optimism Super Token List
Optimism announces the Optimism Super Token List in a partnership with Coinbase’s Base chain. This creates a central source of truth within Optimism’s Superchain stack to enable seamless bridging between the various Optimism chains and Ethereum.
Synthetix launches OP rewards for the coming 16 weeks, with 400,000 OP tokens up for grabs. Rewards can be earned and claimed via Synthetix integrated frontends, including Kwenta, Polynomial, Decentrex, dHedge and more.
Balancer fork, BeethovenX, launches Boosted Pools V2 on both Optimism and Fantom. Boosted pools allow idle capital in BeethovenX’s pools to be deposited in yield farms to provide liquidity providers with increased return on their investment.
MAI stablecoin issuer, QiDAO, expands to L2s, Arbitrum and Optimism, with MAI being added to money market platform, Aave, on both chains.
All-in-one decentralized exchange (DEX), Vertex, goes live on Arbitrum, trading, lending and borrowing, all in one place. Vertex offers spot and perpetual trading as well as a money market to their users, allowing universal cross-margin across users’ assets in all accounts.
Power perpetuals protocol, Numoen, introduces Numoen Nest, a unique solution to enable hedging of impermanent loss on Uniswap V3 positions. Numoen uses Power Tokens to counter the negative gamma of Uniswap V3 positions, allowing the position to stick closer to gamma neutral to reduce impermanent loss.
Arbitrum top DEX, GMX, integrates Chainlink’s new low-latency oracles, improving the reliability of price feeds on the platform and hence, its security.
Leveraged yield-farming platform, Rodeo Finance, releases their long-term roadmap, including automated vaults, delta-neutral vaults, governance plans, a future airdrop, flywheel model and more.
Decentralized social media platform, Lens Protocol, has announced Bonsai, an Optimistic L3 solution, designed specifically for Web3.0 social media, to process transactions and data at a much higher scale. The chain was renamed to Momoka shortly after, to avoid legal complications with another blockchain protocol with the same name.
ZkSync Era decentralized exchange, MerlinDEX, rug pulls — draining more than $1.82 million in liquidity from their liquidity pool. The platform was audited by Certik, casting doubts on the credibility of the team as well as new projects in the zkSync Era ecosystem.
Omnichain interoperability protocol, LayerZero, expands to Polygon zkEVM, allowing developers to easily build and link Polygon zkEVM to all of LayerZero’s 30 supported chains.
Coinbase’s L2 solution, Base, will be undergoing a hard fork on 4th May, after the original date was pushed back due to a misconfiguration in the sequencer.
Decentralized order book DEX, Brine Finance, launches in Beta. The DEX is powered by Starkware technology and is currently invite only for users who have received an invite code from the waitlist.
Avalanche: Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol
Avalanche sees the Cortina upgrade go live on mainnet, bringing easier X-Chain integration, simplified validator reward distributions as well as increased C-Chain gas limits which enables more complex transactions on the Avalanche C-Chain.
USDC issuer, Circle, launches the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) on Ethereum and Avalanche, allowing native transfers of USDC from Ethereum to Avalanche and back. The technology has currently been integrated into several bridges such as LayerZero, Hyperlane and Celer Network, among others.
Binance Smart Chain: Cheaper Transactions For All
Binance Smart Chain has lowered transaction costs from 5 gwei to 3 gwei, after the passing of a community proposal, making the chain cheaper than ever to use.
Cosmos: IBC-Enabled EVM RollApp
Cosmos-based chain, Router Protocol, introduces Tisperse, a simple and efficient way to distribute testnet tokens to multiple addresses to work around the limitations of traditional faucets.
Dymension, Celestia and Evmos collectively announce the first ever Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol-enabled Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) RollApp. Using the EVMOS token as its gas token, the RollApp uses Evmos’ Ethermint while relying on Celestia and Dymension for data availability.
Fintech-focused chain, Kujira, launches Ghost, their native money market platform where users can borrow Kujira’s stablecoin, USK, against the KUJI token.
Another Week, Another Airdrop
Governance aggregator decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), SpiralDAO, releases airdrop of their SPR token to holders of vote-locked AURA (vlAURA) and AURA liquidity providers. Claims are first come, first serve basis and are set at a fixed amount at 100 SPR.
Bridging infrastructure project, Socket, confirms a token with the opening of their bug bounty program. Technical users can attempt breaking Socket’s code to qualify for a portion of the rewards allocated to the bug bounty program. Non-technical users can use Socket-powered projects such as Bungee Exchange to potentially qualify for any future airdrops.
Markets push back, in an attempt to reclaim higher levels after the bearish move in the prior week. Builders just keep building. Stay tuned for next week’s edition, and keep supporting your favorite projects, degens!
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