Weekly Update - DeFi and Layer 1 & Layer 2 News (Week 35, 31/08/2022 - 06/09/2022)

Sep 07, 2022

This week's price and volume indices were negative at -4.42% and -15.98%, respectively, while the volatility index was positive at +30.46%.

Check the latest prices on Crypto.com/Price

The Bellatrix hard fork, the last major upgrade before Ethereum’s The Merge, was activated at epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain. The purpose of this upgrade is to ensure validators are producing updated Beacon Chain blocks that will set up the codebase ahead of The Merge. Now, the last step is Paris, which will trigger the migration from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake upon hitting a specific Terminal Total Difficulty of 58750000000000000000000 (expected between 10 to 20 September 2022).
Following the sanction on Tornado Cash in August, MakerDAO Co-founder Rune Christensen proposed an "Endgame Plan" to save DAI from regulatory capture. The plan would gradually reduce the exposure of real-world assets, with the eventual goal of turning DAI into a free-floating asset. The proposal has received divergent opinions from the MakerDAO community.
Kyber Network, the liquidity protocol on which KyberSwap is built, confirmed a front-end hack on 2 September. The attacker compromised the app’s front-end through the Google Tag Manager (GTM) script, which is generally used to track user activity and data for analytical purposes. Although Kyber identified the malicious codes and fixed them in a few hours, the hacker managed to move US$265,000 worth of Aave Matic interest-bearing USDC (AMUSDC) tokens in four transactions.

Overall, the L2 market TVL downtrend narrowed down, dropping by -2.38% in the last week. Optimistic rollup projects dropped by -1.37% and zero-knowledge rollup projects decreased by -4.36%. Ethereum’s TVL increased by +1.71%.

The TVL for all major optimistic rollup projects were negative last week, and Metis Andromeda declined the most at -4.28%.

In ZK rollup projects, StarkNet was under the spotlight as its TVL grew by +4.49%, followed by ZKSwap 2.0 (+0.8%). Loopring and dYdX saw a decline in TVL at -4.95% and -4.97%, respectively.

Crypto.com DeFi Research