Ethereum's Shapella upgrade successfully went live in a big week for DeFi — check out these and more in our weekly DeFi roundup.
In quite possibly the most anticipated upgrade for Ethereum since the Merge, the Shapella upgrade goes off without a hitch, unlocking withdrawals for Ethereum stakers. New exploits continue to plague the DeFi space, claiming more than $21 million in losses across various protocols. Finally, with Shapella completed, liquid staking derivative (LSD) issuers continue to prosper and ship new features for their users.
What a big week! Let’s see what went down this past week in DeFi.
Overview: No Selling on Shapella, Bulls Take Charge
Total value locked (TVL) across all chains surged this week, reaching its pre-FTX levels at $53.48 billion. The surge was driven largely by the removal of the cloud of uncertainty surrounding the Shapella upgrade, both around the upgrade and whether ETH stakers would withdraw to sell. Notable TVL jumps include zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) chains, zkSync Era and Polygon zkEVM, which continue to see weekly TVL growth in the high 40-50%.
Source: DeFiLlama
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Ethereum: Shapella Success
Major Ethereum upgrade, Shapella, goes off without a hitch, with the highly anticipated withdrawals finally being opened after years of lockup. Initially expected to be a bearish event with stakers withdrawing to sell, the expected sell pressure did not come, resulting in markets pushing higher.
Lending protocol, Euler Finance, opens up redemptions for affected users from the exploit on their protocol three weeks ago, after successfully reclaiming most of the funds from the hackers.
Multichain decentralized exchange (DEX), Sushi, also prepares a redemption plan of their own for users impacted by the RouteProcessor2 exploit the week prior. These funds were intercepted by white-hat hackers during the exploit, allowing for their safe recovery.
Decentralized institutional credit platform, Maple Finance, leaks the preparations for a US Treasuries lending pool, in a community call during the week as well.
Yield vault protocol, Yearn Finance, was exploited for $10 million via a flash loan attack via money market platform, Aave, due to a bug in the configuration of the iearn USDT (yUSDT) token. Fortunately, the exploit did not affect Yearn V2 vaults.
LSD protocol, Stader Labs, opens up their delegation program in a bid to decentralize the platform as well as to involve more community members in their governance process.
Sommelier Finance releases Real Yield ETH, a vault strategy which utilizes deposited ETH LSD tokens to be deployed across Aave, Compound and Uniswap V3 to generate additional yield on their tokens.
Yearn Finance releases their governance proposal for yETH, a basket of ETH LSDs for diversified ETH LSD exposure.
Voltz Protocol announces Voltz V2, bringing cross-DEX margin to the DeFi space. Voltz enables a single margin account to power trades on multiple DEXs at once.
Cron Finance introduces their time-weighted automated market maker (TWAMM), built on Balancer and based on Paradigm’s research paper on the mechanism.
Bridge aggregation protocol, Relay, launches V3, integrating various bridging solutions such as LiFi, Synapse and Squid Router into their service as well as introducing their “Bridge and Swap” service to Relay.
On-chain institutional financial product protocol, Ondo Finance, announces OMMF, a tokenized form of money market funds, on-chain. This brings low price volatility and the yield of money market funds to the DeFi space.
L2s: Lyra Rewards Program Goes Live
Arbitrum-based perpetuals platform, Rage Trade, upgrades their delta-neutral vault for GMX Liquidity Pool (GLP) tokens, allowing for a fully delta-neutral experience by pushing the hedge against GMX traders profit or loss up to 100% from the original 60%.
L2 options trading platform, Lyra, announces trading rewards for traders, with $150k in rewards up for grabs over the next two weeks on Arbitrum and Optimism. Traders are rewarded for each trade, with multipliers for staked Lyra, referrals and trader rank.
Multichain options protocol, Premia, re-vests unlocked team tokens for another 4 years, signaling their long-term vision and confidence in the future of the protocol.
Cross-chain liquidity protocol, Symbiosis, integrates with zkEVM chain, zkSync Era, bringing cross-chain swaps and additional liquidity pools to the L2 scaling solution.
One-click rollup deployment service, Caldera, integrates bridging solution, Hyperlane, to enable seamless bridging between Caldera-deployed rollups.
Decentralized key management platform, Lit Protocol, migrates to their own rollup, built on the Optimism tech stack. Lit Protocol was originally built on Polygon Mumbai testnet.
Multichain lending platform, Hundred Finance, has been exploited for $7 million on their Optimism assets. The team is currently investigating the situation.
Solana: Solend V2
Solana money market platform, Solend, launches phase 1 of Solend V2, adding three new features to the platform: borrow weights, Time-Weighted Average Price (TWAP) oracles and outflow rate limits. The changes will take effect on Monday, 17th April.
Solana meme coin, Bonk, launches Bonk Swap, providing greater utility for the BONK token via swaps, liquidity provision or betting on the platform.
Cosmos: Parallel is Live
Parallel goes live on Injective, bringing a new spot and perpetuals trading platform to the chain. Parallel also teased the upcoming launch of forex markets for the protocol.
Cosmos EVM-compatible chain, Kava, announces the launch date for the Kava 13 upgrade for 10th May. The upgrade will bring seamless bridging between the Cosmos and Ethereum via the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol as well as optimizations to the chain among others.
Terra Classic AMM, Terraport Finance, was exploited for $4 million, draining all liquidity pools and halting operations on the platform. 60% of the stolen funds have since been frozen in centralized exchanges (CEXs).
Another Week, Another Airdrop
Privacy-focused L1 blockchain, Namada, proposes an airdrop to ZCash token holders, in an alliance between ZCash and Namada, including bridging, liquidity pooling and grants between the two chains. The details of the airdrop have not been finalized yet.
Content-creation network, Access Protocol, releases details on their second airdrop campaign, which will have two separate parts, distributing 500 million tokens to selected users. The campaign will last until 20th May 2023.
Move-based L1, Sui, quells rumors of a SUI token airdrop as mainnet launch draws near. A token sale has since been announced on three CEXs, Bybit, OKX, and Kucoin, with a special sale price for selected early community members.
The market surges back to life as Bitcoin hits a 10 month high, despite fears of a recession in the traditional markets. Nevertheless, builders keep building. Stay tuned for next week’s edition, and keep supporting your favorite projects, degens!
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