Weekly Update - DeFi and Layer 1 & Layer 2 News (Week 12, 16/03/2023 - 22/03/2023)
Ethereum’s Shanghai hard fork scheduled for 12 April. Arbitrum Foundation launches its new ARB token and transitions to a DAO. MakerDAO votes in favour of increasing US Treasury funds to US$1.25B.
Weekly DeFi Index
This week’s market cap, volume, and volatility indices were negative at -4.15%, -8.19%, and -24.27%, respectively.
Check the latest prices on Crypto.com/Price
Derivatives liquidity protocol Synthetix reached US$490 million in daily trading volume for the first time on 17 March, according to Dune analytics. $479 million worth of trading took place on the Kwenta, a synthetic perpetuals trading platform.
News Highlights
The target date for Ethereum’s upcoming Shanghai upgrade is set for 12 April, as agreed by the core developers during their latest call.
The Arbitrum Foundation announced the launch of its new token, ARB, which will be airdropped to eligible community members on 23 March. ARB marks the official transition of Arbitrum to a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), and will give ARB holders voting rights on the future of Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova.
DAI stablecoin issuer MakerDAO has elected to increase funds allocated to its current US Treasury investments. This increases the DAO’s real-world asset (RWA) vault debt ceiling to 1.25 billion DAI ($1.25 billion)
A crypto wallet prototype has been found inside Microsoft Edge browser, suggesting the tech giant is experimenting with Web3. According to software research Albacore, Microsoft added code that integrates a non-custodial crypto wallet into its Edge browser.
Smart contract auditing firm BlockSec prevented a hacker from stealing $5 million worth of digital assets from decentralised lending protocol ParaSpace. BlockSec detected the exploit after the hacker failed in their first attempt to execute a transaction (which exploits a vulnerability in ParaSpace’s smart contract) because of insufficient gas fees.
A hacker is laying the groundwork to sweep 3 million ARB tokens from the upcoming Arbitrum airdrop, as reported by Arkham Intelligence. Transaction data suggests that a sweeper bot has been deployed to send Ether to 2,400 wallets, and the person seems to have taken hold of the wallets’ private keys as well.
Recent Research Reports
Research Roundup Newsletter [February 2023]: In this issue, we feature trending market insights and our analyses of the current state of the decentralised derivatives market.
Alpha Navigator: Quest for Alpha [February 2023]: Asset classes took a breather in February and sold off, although crypto bucked the trend. BTC and ETH options implied volatilities remain at subdued levels.
Overview of Decentralised Derivatives: Crypto derivatives dominate the industry, representing about 70% of the entire market. In this report, we shed light on derivatives in DeFi, their market overview, and some innovations in the space.
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