Important DeFi News
Curve Founder Michael Egorov has settled his entire debt position on Aave, and currently has $42.7M debt across other DeFi platforms
Celestia, a modular blockchain, has initiated their Genesis distribution of 60M $TIA tokens, representing 6% of the total supply. Eligible users can claim their allocations until October 17th. A third of the 60M token is allocated to developers and researchers, another third for active users of Ethereum rollups, and the final third for stakers and IBC relayers of the Cosmos Hub and Osmosis network
Optimism announced the sale of 116M $OP tokens worth $163M last week. The tokens are subject to a two-year lockup but can be delegated for participation in governance
Social finance continues to make waves, with projects similar to friend.tech launching on other networks such as Alpha on Bitcoin, post.tech live on Arbitrum, Fantech live on Mantle, and Friendzy on Solana. Meanwhile, friend.tech has made an ATH in TVL this past week, generating $30M in fees, making it the third largest crypto app by revenue over the past 60 days
Coinbase has open-sourced Base’s security monitoring system Pessimism, allowing other chains built on the OP stack to adopt it. They have also teased about the possibility of a $BASE token
69M in Arbitrum’s unclaimed $ARB airdrop worth $56.56M has been returned to the DAO’s treasury
Banana Gun, a telegram trading bot, has launched their revenue-sharing program. A referral link feature has also been added, with a 10% transaction fee sharing
Runes, a novel fungible token protocol on Bitcoin, has been announced by the inventor of the BRC-20 token standard
Linear Finance’s was exploited by a malicious ℓAAVE code that allowed unlimited minting of the token to be swapped for its $LUSD stablecoin. The community has since voted on permanently disabling all current liquid assets and release all staked $LINA back to its users
The Terra Classic community has voted to stop $USTC minting
OpenSea has launched Creator Studio, a no-code tool for creators to seamlessly launch NFT collections
Magic Eden has announced Open Editions, allowing creators to launch open-ended collections with flexibility on supply or time
Vesta Finance is set to unwind and distribute treasury assets worth $11.1M to $VSTA holders pro-rata at $0.526 per token
Gro DAO has successfully passed a proposal to unwind the Gro Protocol, distributing the treasury’s $5.37M to $GRO depositors
Spark Lend has passed a proposal to deploy on Gnosis network. The protocol is currently only available on Ethereum and is also proposing to deploy on zkSync and Polygon zkEVM
Notional V3 Close Beta is live on Arbitrum, featuring fixed and variable lending rates, and leveraged yield strategies
Lybra Finance now supports $wBETH for the minting of their stablecoin $peUSD
Stader Labs has launched its Liquid Restaked Token, $rsETH, on testnet
PancakeSwap has integrated Transak, an on-ramp crypto platform
Immunefi, a Web3 bug bounty service, has launched its on-chain bounty vault system to decentralize their platform
Othersidemeta, a Yuga Labs NFT project, has launched Season 1 Open Beta of their game Legends of the Mara. However, the servers were overloaded as a result of high activity
Governance Proposals
MakerDAO is polling to reactivate the Debt Ceiling Instant Access Module which will allow users to adjust the debt ceiling of RWA vaults within protocol parameters. The proposal is expected to essentially double MakerDAO’s allocation into US short-term treasury bills as the total debt ceiling of the relevant vaults is raised from 2.45B to 6B $DAI. This should in turn double the $MKR buyback rate, increasing buy pressure on the token in the near term. Since the start, Maker’s Smart Burn Engine has bought back and LP’d 11.8k $MKR. Meanwhile on its forum, discussion is ongoing about the deployment of Spark Lend on zkSync and Polygon zkEVM
Aave DAO is discussing reducing Safety Module incentives by 30%, from 1.1k to 770 $AAVE daily
dYdX DAO will be voting on its Launch Incentives program which could see $20M $DYDX distributed over 6 months when the V4 mainnet goes live
Bancor DAO is discussing retiring $vBNT, their current governance token, and making $BNT their official governance token
Osmosis is discussing deploying 20M $OSMO, worth $6.3M, from their treasury to stOSMO/OSMO pool to earn yield from their treasury assets
Polygon Labs has proposed for the Celo community to use Polygon's Chain Development Kit (CDK) to facilitate a planned Layer 2 transition on Ethereum
Next Week's Alpha
$5B of $BTC and $ETH options are set to expire on September 29th
Frax Finance V3 has completed its audit and has been hinted by its founder to be launching in the coming days, allowing its users to access US T-Bill yield on-chain through $sFRAX and FraxBonds
dYdX’s V4 mainnet is expected to launch next month, migrating to a Cosmos-based App Chain
Raft Finance, an LST-backed stablecoin protocol, will soon be available on mobile. The protocol is also set to launch their token $RAFT soon
Manifold Finance, is set to launch $mevETH, a liquid staking token, on September 29th
Radiant Capital, an Arbitrum Money Market Protocol, will expand to Ethereum on October 3rd
Mars Protocol, a lending protocol, is set to launch V2 in the coming week, featuring cross-collateralized trading vaults and high leverage trading strategies
Threshold, a stablecoin protocol backed by $BTC and $ETH, will be launching their stablecoin $thUSD soon
Ethereum’s Holesky testnet is expected to be live by September 28th
Debank unveiled its plans to introduce paid features on its platform, with the launch set for today
$OP is set to unlock 3.03% of the circulating supply worth $31.4M on September 30th
$ETH futures ETFs are expected to roll out in early October
News
The SEC has delayed Ark and Global X spot $BTC ETF’s decision to January 10th 2024
Mt. Gox’s repayment deadline has been pushed back by one year to October 31st, 2024
Mixin Network has suspended its services after being exploited for $200M, and has offered a $20M bounty to the hacker. Users can currently only access half of their assets
BlockFi, a bankrupt crypto lender, obtains legal approval for third amendment to their customer repayment plan. The crypto lender currently owes $10B to its creditors
A majority of Celsius creditors have voted in favour of a reorganization plan which will see debtors distribute about $2 billion worth of $BTC and $ETH to creditors. The hearing for this case is currently scheduled for October 2nd
Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade may be delayed to early 2024 according to its core developers
Microstrategy announced the purchase of an additional 5,445 $BTC at an average price of $27,053
Grayscale has filed for an $ETH ETF
Mastercard has added several projects to its Start Path Blockchain and Digital Assets program, LI.FI and Polytrade being among them
Venmo, a payment app will offer support for PayPal’s stablecoin $PYUSD
Google Cloud has added support for 11 blockchains into its BigQuery analytics service. These include Avalanche, Arbitrum, Cronos, Fantom, Near, Optimism, Polkadot, Polygon, Tron, Polygon Mumbai and Goerli
Chainlink’s CCIP has been deployed on Arbitrum
NFT project Pudgy Penguins’s Pudgy Toys to be sold in over 2,000 Walmart stores
UpBit, South Korea’s largest crypto exchange has temporarily suspended $APT deposits and withdrawals due to a system error that credited a scam token as legitimate Aptos tokens
Alchemy Pay, a crypto payment firm, has secured a US payment license
HTX, formerly Huobi, was exploited for 5,000 $ETH worth $7.9M. They are currently offering a 5% bounty for the return of stolen funds
Bybit will be suspending its services in the UK ahead of new crypto marketing rules set to be enforced from October 1st onwards
Nansen’s third-party security breach has exposed 6.8% of its user data
Consensys will be sunsetting its web3 developer tools Truffle and Ganache to focus on MetaMask Snaps and its SDK
Coinbase has secured an AML compliance registration with the Bank of Spain
Gemini, a crypto exchange, has invested $24M for expansion in India
Nine crypto exchanges in Taiwan are preparing to form a crypto industry association as Taiwan publishes its guidelines for crypto platform
Tweets of the Week
Explainer video on Ethereum Attestation Service by vasa
DWF Labs and Andrei Grachev: A History by Huma
Market Watch #2 by An Ape’s Prologue