Last Week in DeFi - CRV Hacker Returns Funds, Base Mainnet Soon, MakerDAO Enhanced DSR, and More...

Recap: Week of July 31st

Product Launches 🚀

• GMX V2 Live
  GMX v2 beta is live on Arbitrum and Avalanche. The upgrade enables new markets, multiple collateral types, improved UX, low-fee swaps for traders, and new incentives for LPs.

• Term Finance Live
  Term Finance, a fixed-rate lending protocol, is live on Ethereum. Term uses a recurring auction process to provide certainty to borrowers and lenders.

• f(x) Protocol Live
  Built by AladdinDAO, leveraged ETH protocol f(x) went live on Ethereum. Users can supply ETH or stETH to mint fETH (stable ETH) or xETH (leveraged long ETH token).

• Pika V4 Full Release
  Perpetual DEX Pika v4 is fully launched on OP mainnet after a month-long of beta phase. Pika also launched the reward program on Aug 1 to incentivize LPs, traders, and PIKA stakers.

• Arkeo Testnet Live
  Backed by ShapeShift, Arkeo has launched its testnet to the public. Arkeo is a blockchain data provider similar to Infra and Alchemy.
  The initial airdrop of ARKEO will be spread amount a number of different groups.

• ZigZag Invisible Testnet
  ZigZag launches the Invisible testnet. Invisible is a privacy-enabled ZK-Rollup with an order-book exchange, allowing users to trade privately.

Project Updates 🚩

• MakerDAO EDSR Live
  MakerDAO passed the executive vote and implemented EDSR.

  The 8% DSR can now be accessed on Spark protocol.

• Arbitrum BOLD
  Offchainlabs announced Bounded Liquidity Delay (BOLD), a new protocol that enables permissionless validation for Arbitrum chains for enhanced decentralization.

• GNO Withdrawals
  Gnosis chain has completed its version of Shapella upgrade, enabling withdrawals on staked GNO.

• PancakeSwap Revenue Sharing Pool
  Pancakeswap launches revenue sharing pool. The feature allows Fixed-Term CAKE stakers to earn additional real yield from the trading fee revenues generated by PancakeSwaps v3 trading pairs. Rewards will be distributed on a weekly basis, with the first distribution starting on Aug 9.

• Trader Joe Reduces Swap Fees
  Trader Joe has reduced the base fee to swap three stable pairs on Arbitrum. The base fee has changed from 2 bps (0.02%) to 0.5 bps (0.005%).

• Trader Joe on Ethereum
  Avalanche-based DEX Trader Joe expands to Ethereum, supporting liquidity book & auto-pools.

• Wombat on Ethereum
  BnB-based DEX Wombat went live on Ethereum, enabling stable swaps, WOM bridging, and single-sided staking for LSDs & stables.

• Clearpool on Polygon zkEVM
  Institutional lending protocol Clearpool expands to Polygon zkEVM.

• Balancer on Avalanche
  Balancer is now deployed on Avalanche. Balancer will be hosting liquidity for four Avalanche LST protocols (Benqi, Ankr, Yield Yak, GoGoPool) to boost LST markets on Avalanche.

• Y2K Touch Vaults
  Y2K Finance launched Touch Vaults for non-pegged assets. These vaults can be directioned up or down.
  The first asset is $CRV at a "Touch Down" $.40 strike price.

• Helium Second Halving
  Helium’s second halving starts today, reducing the monthly issuance of HNT from 2.5 M to 1.25 M.

Governance Highlights 📝

• Proposal: Frax to Onboard RWA Partner
  Frax founder Sam proposes to onboard FinresPBC to be FRAX v3’s off-chain partner & custodian for FRAX v3 RWA assets.

• Abracadabra Retracts Rate Change
  Abracadabra was voting to mitigate CRV risk exposure to the protocol by implementing a collateral-based interest rate for two CRV cauldrons.
  The adjustment was controversial as it was to change hard-coded terms that should theoretically not be changed during a loan.
  The first vote did not pass and the DAO is running a second vote with revised terms.

• Approved: Celo L2 Transition
  Celo governance approved Celo's transition from an EVM L1 to an Ethereum L2.

Regulations 🏛️

• SEC Sues Richard Heart
  The SEC sues internet marketer Richard Heart, and his projects Hex, PulseChain, and PulseX, alleging he raised over $1B across three different unregistered securities offerings beginning in 2019.

• US IRS to Tax Staking Rewards
  The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued a ruling on Monday saying that "given rewards for validation activity on a PoS network should count the rewards as income in the year the investor gets control of those tokens".

Hacks/Issues 👾

• Curve Hacker Returns Funds
  Curve hacker has returned ~74% of stolen funds to Curve. However, the deadline for the hacker to return the rest has expired, and Curve has extended the county to the public.
  Alchemix and JPEGd, the other two victim projects of the hack, have received full returns.

  Meanwhile, Curve funder has sold 142.6M $CRV to 30 institutions/investors via OTC at a price of $0.4 and received $57m to repay the debts.

• Rugpull & Exploit on Base Pre-launch
  Base, Coinbase’s L2 built using OP stack, is still not live yet but there is already a rugpull. The dev behind Bald, a memecoin project on Base L2, removed 6,800 ETH (~$12.5m) from the BALD liquidity pool on LeetSwap, causing a liquidity crunch and a ~90% price drop on BALD. According to Nansen's analyst, Bald deployer's address seems to have “serious Alameda connections for sure.”

  LeetSwap, a dex on Base, halts trading after an exploit leading to a 340 ETH loss (~ $630k). This came after the Bald rugpull.

• Polygon zkSync Drama
  The Polygon Zero team posts an article saying that "Matter Labs (zkSync devs) recently released a proving system called Boojum that includes a substantial amount of source code that is copy-pasted from performance-critical components of the Plonky2 library" without the original copyrights or clear attribution to the original authors, i.e. the Polygon Zero team.

Upcoming ⏳

• Base Mainnet Soon
  Base L2 is now open for bridging. Base mainnet will launch on Aug 9, along with the Onchain Summer campaign where users can mint NFTs from leading companies.

• ETH Futures ETFs Filed
  Six firms (Volatility Shares, Bitwise, VanEck, Roundhill, ProShares, and Grayscale) have filed applications with the SEC for ETH Futures ETFs. The first ETH futures ETF could go live on Oct. 12, if the SEC does not deny the application.

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