Important DeFi News
$PEPE memecoin skyrocketed 1000x in 4 days, with a few traders making over $9M with a total cost of 0.61 $ETH. A MEV searcher, jaredfromsubway.eth, profited $4.31M by targeting retail users with sandwich attacks
Post-Shanghai Upgrade, LSDs like $frxETH and Agility experienced impressive growth, with $frxETH growing 14% and Agility's TVL increasing $467M over the week
A 579k $ETH ($1.1B) net outflow has occurred after the Shanghai Upgrade
$ARB reached an ATH in price, as it recorded more DEX volume than Ethereum and generated $700k in daily fees, enough to rank it as the fourth-largest protocol by daily fees
Frax Finance partnered with Paxos to reduce reliance on $USDC as $FRAX collateral and also established a new FRAX/USDP base pool on Curve
Synthetix Perps Optimism Trading Incentives program launched, offering up to 300k weekly $OP rewards to $SNX and $KWENTA traders for 20 weeks
Rocket Pool Atlas Upgrade went live, allowing $rETH withdrawals, higher node operator rewards, cheaper validator requirements, and increased $rETH capacity
$USDT market dominance reached a record high since April 2021 at 62%, as $USDC and $BUSD lost market share due to SVB bankruptcy and regulatory crackdowns
Ether Fi, a new LSD protocol, attracted $40.8M in TVL within 3 days of the announcement
A16z announced Magi, an Optimism Stack rollup client
Uniswap DAO has approved the launch of V3 on Polygon zkEVM
Conflux is deploying Uniswap V3 and joining the Curve Wars with $CFX bridged to Ethereum
Berachain raised $42m at a $420.69M valuation and plans to launch a public incentivized testnet soon
1inch launched on zkSync Era
$EOS's EVM Mainnet Beta went live
Palmswap, a derivatives DEX on BNB Chain, V1 went live
The Angle Protocol restarted after the Euler exploit, and $agEUR traded back to peg
Iron Fish, a privacy-focused L1 backed by A16z, launched its mainnet
Nitro Cartel's ALP Mainnet Beta went live, introducing a suite of DeFi strategies for Arbitrum users
Olympus DAO has voted to buy $ETH in order to rebalance its $OHM treasury
Uniswap mobile wallet is now available for Apple users
Popsicle Finance, a Uniswap V3 fork, went live on zkSync
Kaspa Currency upgraded to Rust, offering significant performance improvements
Maple Finance introduced the Cash Management Pool
Chronos partnered with Poison Finance, enabling users to trade synthetic assets
Jumper, a cross-chain DEX, introduced Bridge Insurance
Obol Network announced its Alpha Release
Merit Circle is launching Beam, a new gaming-focused subnet on Avalanche
Governance Proposals
dYdX is discussing a new approach for more effective rewards distribution
PancakeSwap is voting on reducing token inflation
Lido DAO has proposed using the $ARB airdrop to incentivize user activities on Arbitrum
Decentraland is voting on a $150k grant to integrate major e-commerce platforms
Angle governance is voting on restarting the distribution of $ANGLE incentives
$RARI is discussing a retroactive token airdrop for members active in governance
Agility is voting to reduce the Dinosaur Liquidity Mining rewards by 12%
Balancer governance is discussing deploying the protocol on Base
Next Week's Alpha
$crvUSD is rumored to launch very shortly, as increased GitHub activity and leaked screenshots suggest an imminent release
Arbitrum Incentives worth $200M will be airdropped to eligible projects in the next few days
Spark Protocol, $MKR's new lending product built on Aave V3, is expected to launch soon
$OP Bedrock Upgrade is expected to launch soon, reducing network fees and implementing zero-knowledge proofs
$GMX V2 is expected to happen soon, with synthetic assets and a revamped fee structure
$veYFI will launch soon, enabling protocol revenue sharing with stakers and improved governance
Blur season 2 ends in a week with an airdrop of over 300M $BLUR tokens to past users
Lukso L1 is set to go live on April 20th
News
SEC Chair Gensler refused to state if $ETH is a security in a congressional hearing
Coinbase obtained a Bermuda license and could launch an offshore derivative exchange as early as next week
Tesla $BTC Holdings were announced to be unchanged in Q1 2023
French bank Societe Generale launched a euro-pegged stablecoin on Ethereum
US House Committee published a draft version of a potential landmark stablecoin bill
UAE Securities Regulator will start accepting license applications from crypto firms
The SEC sued Bittrex, a co-founder and former CEO, and its foreign affiliate Monday
Chia Network submitted IPO registration to the US SEC
Institutional on-chain finance startup Fractal announced a $6M seed raise
Onramp launched its first spot $BTC trust with multi-party custody
Nike began selling digital boxes containing virtual sneakers on April 18th
Hashkey is set to launch a regulated exchange in the second quarter of 2023
NovaWulf plans to tokenize $2B in equity for Celsius assets following a takeover
Sotheby’s is set to auction 3AC’s seized NFTs
Trump dropped a second series of digital trading card collections, sending prices of the first collection downward by over 80%
Silk Road hacker was sentenced for committing $BTC fraud
Luno will stop serving Singapore customers on June 20
Mysten Labs paid $96M to repurchase FTX’s equity stake and the right to buyback $SUI tokens
Safemoon hacker struck a deal with developers to return $7.1M while retaining 20% of the stolen funds as a bug bounty
Bybit opened its global headquarters in Dubai
Tweets of the Week
PEPE wallets analysis by An Ape's Prologue
Top Ethereum Withdrawals by An Ape's Prologue
DEX overview by Winter Soldier
Perpetual Landscape comprehensive analysis by Thor Hartvigsen