Important DeFi News
Blur’s Season 2 airdrop went live, with 88% of the 300M $BLUR tokens already claimed. Additionally, 35% of these claimed tokens have been staked in the Blast contract to qualify for the upcoming Season 3 airdrop. Both users of the platform and $BLUR holders are set to receive equal shares in Blast's airdrop allocations.
Heco Chain Bridge and HTX was exploited for a combined loss of $100M. This exploit marks the fourth incident affecting platforms owned by Justin Sun, most recently with Poloniex being hacked for $100M.
$WLD experienced significant volatility over the week following news of its co-founder Sam Altman being removed as CEO from OpenAI and subsequently offered a position to lead Microsoft’s new AI team. He currently stands to be reinstated as OpenAI CEO once again.
$PYTH’s retrospective cross-chain airdrop went live, targeting over 75k wallets across 27 blockchains. Currently, 78% of the 255M $PYTH airdrop has been claimed, and the claim process remains open until February 18th, 2024
Eigenlayer, an Ethereum re-staking protocol, will soon allow users to delegate staked $ETH to the operators of EigenDA, securing its data availability network. The update is expected for the first half of 2024
unshETH has launched Liquid Blast $ETH, $blETH, a liquid wrapper for $ETH deposits into the recently launched Blast L2
Avalanche has been selected by Republic Note to launch its dividend-paying digital security token, offering investors exposure to a private equity portfolio of more than 750 assets. The product had raised more than $30M during its pre-sale
dYdX’s insurance fund was drained over the weekend for $9M, representing 40% of its total treasury, in a market manipulation attack involving $YFI
Circle has announced the Bridged $USDC Standard, a specification and process guide for deploying bridged $USDC on EVM blockchains that can be seamlessly upgraded to a native version in the future
Aave Companies has rebranded to Avara and will serve as the parent company over Aave, Lens, the $GHO stablecoin, and its other brands
Illuvium, a Web3 game studio, is set to launch its first game on the Epic Games store on November 28th
Neon, an EVM on Solana, is testing gas fee payments in alternative tokens starting with $SOL, $USDC, and $USDT. The feature is scheduled to go live on mainnet in Q1 2024
Evmos, an EVM built on Cosmos, is developing a mechanism to enable Cosmos tokens to be seamlessly used as ERC-20 tokens on its blockchain without the need wrapped token contracts
Sanctuary, a marketplace for NFT card game Parallel, is aiming for public launch by the end of November
LayerZero Labs has updated its block explorer, increasing granularity of transaction information, providing network and protocol analytics, and protocol insights
Seneca, an omnichain CDP protocol for yield bearing assets, has launched $SEN staking, earning stakers $WETH rewards from trading tax redistributions
Governance Proposals
Synthetix DAO is voting on a 20% fee share with V3 perp integrators paid in its own collateralized stablecoin, $sUSD. It is also voting on integrating Wormhole’s CrossChain Query to enable crosschain reads for V3, paving the way for more unified deployments as it expands to more chains
Cosmos DAO is currently voting to reduce the $ATOM inflation rate from 14% to 10%. The proposal is currently on track to pass with 40.5% in favor of it
ApeCoin DAO has received a proposal from Optimisim Foundation’s co-founder to build ApeChain on the Optimism Superchain
Synapse DAO is discussing swapping out tokens from its treasury that are irrelevant to daily operations for $ETH and be used to deepen $ETH bridge liquidity, simultaneously reducing the need for $SYN emissions for them
Aave DAO is discussing raising $GHO’s borrow rate from 4.72% to 5.22% in an attempt to restore its peg. It is also discussing establishing a safety module for $GHO to mitigate risks of potential shortfall events.
PancakeSwap DAO is voting on introducing $veCAKE to empower long term $CAKE stakers with increased governance influence
SuperRare DAO is discussing formalizing the RareDAO Foundation by carrying out its first council election and setting a $400k annual budget for its operations
News
Binance has pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the US, and is set to pay $4.3 billion in fines and completely exit the US markets. Their CEO Changpeng Zhao has stepped down and named Richard Teng as his successor, but will retain majority ownership of Binance. He is currently out on a $175M bond, and is set to appear in the US court on February 23rd 2024
The SEC has delayed its decision on Franklin Templeton’s and Global X’s spot $BTC ETF applications to early 2024. In other news, they have filed a lawsuit against Kraken’s parent firms, but the exchange has assured users that its products remain unaffected
Mt Gox cash repayments is set to commence repayments to its creditors soon, and will distribute 142k $BTC and 143k $BCH, among other assets
Fidelity has filed for a spot $ETH ETF with the SEC shortly after BlackRock’s recent submission for it. In other news, the SEC has delayed its decision on the Hashdex Nasdaq $ETH ETF to January 1st 2024
South Korea’s national pension fund, the world’s third largest by AUM, has purchased $19.9M worth of Coinbase shares in Q3 2023
Celsius will be pivoting to a mining-only company after the SEC’s feedback on its bankruptcy plan
Jump Trading and bridging protocol Wormhole, have recently parted ways with several high-ranking Wormhole employees leaving Jump to run Wormhole as an independent entity
Bittrex Global will be winding down operations and ceasing trading activity by December 4th
FTX creditor claims have increased as high as $0.65 as the outlook for recovery continues to improve
Anchorage Digital a US based crypto bank has launched custody and trading services for registered investment advisors
Coinbase has built an open source Onchain Payment Protocol currently supporting Ethereum, Polygon and Base
Kinto, an Ethereum L2, has migrated from Optimism’s OP Stack to Arbitrum Nitro’s tech stack
Paxos has formed an entity in Singapore to launch a new USD-backed stablecoin
Binance, partnering with Gulf Energy, has obtained approval from Thailand’s SEC to start a crypto exchange in the country
Tether has recently frozen 225M $USDT linked to a human trafficking syndicate