Arbitrum announced a $50M incentive program, while Optimism's third airdrop goes live. Is another Layer-2 season incoming? Read on to find out more!
Balancer protocol undergoes a frontend attack, resulting in lost funds amounting to $240K, Arbitrum Foundation passes a proposal to disburse $50 million ARB tokens as part of an incentive program and finally, Eclipse introduces their Ethereum L2, powered by the Solana Virtual Machine and Celestia.
Massive week for DeFi! Let’s dive deeper into what went down in DeFi this past week.
Overview: Fed’s Hawkish Stance Sends Markets Lower
Total value locked (TVL) across all chains trend downwards slightly as the Fed sends markets lower on hawkish comments. Notable rises include Cosmos-based chain, Kujira, Telegram-backed blockchain, TON, and newly launched BNB Smart Chain L2, opBNB.
Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/chain-ranking/
Welcome to Alpha Central
MakerDAO cofounder, Rune, shares more about how the protocol is looking at governance via specialized decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) known as subDAOs as MakerDAO continues to grow into one of the largest DeFi projects.
GMX Intern with a quick list of protocols which meet the requirements for Arbitrum’s latest Short-Term Incentive Program which passed this week.
Chinchilla covers infrastructure projects and decentralized applications (DApps) and why interest (and investor money) has been so focused around infrastructure thus far.
Ethereum: Balancer Rekt
Weighted automated market maker (AMM), Balancer, suffers from a front-end attack, resulting in $240K in users' funds being drained. The domain has since been restored and is now safe for use.
Institutional on-chain credit platform, Centrifuge, partners up with Aave as their official partner to allocate part of the Aave treasury to real-world assets (RWAs) after a successful governance vote.
Cross-chain borrowing aggregator, Fuji Finance, shuts down after 2.5 years of operations, citing lack of product-market fit as the main reason. Users will have to close their positions and withdraw their funds by 31st December 2023.
DeFi project, Popsicle Finance, releases migration for their tokens, ICE and NICE, to the new token, WAGMI. Users can now migrate their tokens from any one of the six supported chains.
L2s: Arbitrum Short-Term Incentive Program Passed
Arbitrum passes a proposal for the Arbitrum Short-Term Incentive Program, which seeks to allocate 50 million ARB tokens to active projects in the ecosystem, in a bid to attract liquidity back to the chain.
Eclipse Foundation introduces Eclipse Mainnet, an Ethereum L2 built on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). The chain will utilize Ethereum as a settlement layer, SVM as the execution layer and Celestia for data availability.
Coinbase’s L2 chain, Base, introduces Pessimism, an open-source system designed to help secure chains on the OP Stack as well as other Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains. The system has been in place since the launch of Base and is now open to other chains for use.
GammaSwap officially launches on Arbitrum mainnet this week, enabling traders and market makers to hedge against their liquidity pool positions or to speculate on volatility of pools via the shorting of any liquidity pool position.
Arbitrum-based liquidity protocol, PoolShark, officially releases Limit Pools, bringing native limit orders to their existing AMM model.
Arbitrum-based algorithmic trading protocol, Tortle Ninja, goes live, enabling bundling of transactions to allow for complex spot and derivative strategies to users.
Kwenta staking V2 is now live. Users who have staked in the V1 will have to migrate their positions to continue earning rewards on their tokens.
Polygon: Quickswap Liquidity Hub
Polygon AMM, Quickswap, releases Quickswap Liquidity Hub, a layer built on top of the AMM layer designed to bring to users better execution prices, gas-free swaps and protection from maximal extractable value (MEV) attacks.
BNB Smart Chain: THORChain Expansion
Cross-chain settlement layer, THORChain, expands support to BNB Smart Chain, integrating support for BNB and BEP-20 assets on the protocol. Users can now deposit into liquidity pools or swap their assets from BNB Smart Chain via the protocol.
Linear Finance has been exploited, with liquidity being drained from PancakeSwap and Ascendex, resulting in the price of their stablecoin, ℓUSD, going to zero. The team has since put forward possible resolution strategies for a governance vote.
Solana: Jito x mrgnfi’s LST Drops
Liquid staking protocol, Jito, and money market platform, marginfi, come together to release LST, a token which gives users exposure to marginfi’s validator network as well as Jito’s MEV rewards, giving users the best of both worlds.
Cosmos: Canto Migrates to Ethereum as an L2
Cosmos-based chain Canto, introduces plans to migrate to a zero-knowledge powered L2, in a collaborative effort with Polygon Labs using their chain development kit (CDK). The chain aims to bring RWAs to the blockchain in a move dubbed as “neofinance”.
Finance-focused Cosmos chain, Injective, announces inEVM, a collaboration with Caldera to design an EVM chain with full interoperability across the Cosmos and Solana.
Another Week, Another Airdrop
Optimism announces the OP Airdrop #3, sending 19 million OP tokens to 31K unique addresses. The qualifying criterion for this airdrop is the delegation of OP tokens between January and July 2023. Unclaimed tokens from OP Airdrop #1 were also sent directly to eligible wallets in the same week.
Market remains depressed and some might even say boring, but builders gotta build and projects gotta ship. Stay tuned for next week’s edition!
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