DeFi needs appropriate regulation before moving to retail, says Fed Chair: Finance Redefined
Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week.
United States Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has given his verdict on the evolution of the DeFi market, claiming there is a definite need for robust regulation before the nascent market could expand to retail.
Maple Finance CEO believes that separating the risk from lending saved DeFi from the market crash. He added that crypto lending has operated as intended through the crypto winter because of the transparency.
Members of the Ooki DAO are discussing various ways to respond to the recent lawsuit filed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Another interesting turn of events from the DeFi ecosystem saw a Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot gain massive profits worth $1 million by seizing an arbitrage opportunity. However, it was tricked into authorizing a malicious transaction that drained the funds.
Top 100 DeFi tokens by market cap have a mixed week in terms of price action, where an almost equal number of tokens were trading in green and red on the weekly charts.
DeFi needs appropriate regulation before expanding to retail: Fed Chair Powell
United States Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has spoken out about the expansion of DeFi and its impact on the traditional finance ecosystem, calling for appropriate regulation.
During an event titled the “Opportunities and challenges of the tokenization of finance” hosted by the Banque de France on Tuesday, Jerome Powell said there were “very significant structural issues around the lack of transparency” in the DeFi ecosystem.
MEV bot earns $1M but loses everything to a hacker an hour later
In a Twitter thread, Robert Miller, who works at the research firm Flashbots, shared how an MEV bot with the prefix 0xbadc0de was able to earn 800 Ether (ETH), or around $1 million, through arbitrage trades.
According to Miller, the bot took advantage of a huge arbitrage opportunity that came when a trader attempted to sell $1.8 million in cUSDC through the decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap v2 and only got $500 worth of assets in return. The bot detected this chance and immediately sprung to action and gained massive profits.
Maple Finance CEO: Separating risk from lending saved DeFi from market crash
Maple Finance co-founder and CEO Sid Powell says that transparency has been the saving grace of DeFi amid the prolonged crypto market slump.
Speaking to Cointelegraph on the sidelines of the Converge22 conference in San Francisco, Powell noted that throughout the crypto winter, DeFi has continued to operate as intended while centralized finance (CeFi) has become “pretty inactive.”
Ooki DAO members explore options in response to CFTC lawsuit
Members of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) known as the Ooki DAO have started looking into an appropriate response to charges filed by the United States Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
On Sept. 22, the CFTC announced a $250,000 penalty and settlement with bZeroX, the creators of the decentralized lending platform bZx protocol, which suffered from code exploits in 2020 that led to hundreds of thousands in losses. In addition to this, the CFTC also filed a lawsuit against the Ooki DAO over similar alleged violations of digital asset trading laws.
DeFi market overview
Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total value locked registered a minor increase from the past week. The TVL value was about $56.28 billion at the time of writing. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView show that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a mixed week, with many tokens making a recovery toward the end of the week while a few others traded in red on the weekly charts.
Maker (MKR) was the biggest gainer, registering a 13% gain over the past seven days, followed by Chainlink (LINK) with an 8.8% gain. PancakeSwap (CAKE) continued its bullish momentum registering another 8% weekly surge.
Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.