DeFi should complement TradFi, not attack it: Finance Redefined

Published at: Jan. 20, 2023

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.

Following FTX’s demise, the DeFi space is up for a complete remodel as crypto users demand better security and compliance practices.

SushiSwap’s roadmap for the coming year includes the development of a decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator, a decentralized incubator and “several stealth projects.” All these projects combined can grow its market share 10x, said the CEO.

The co-founder and CEO of Ava Labs spoke with Cointelegraph at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on the future of DeFi and traditional finance (TradFi) and said DeFi should complement TradFi, not attack it. Another DeFi report suggests that decentralized forex could reduce costs by as much as 80%.

The top 100 DeFi tokens saw a second week of bullish price action, with a majority of the tokens trading in the green on the weekly charts.

SushiSwap’s new DEX aggregator will ‘10x our market share’ — head chef

Just a month after warning of a “significant deficit” in its treasury, the CEO of decentralized exchange SushiSwap has shared several planned updates to the platform, which he said are intended to “10x” its market share in 2023.

SushiSwap CEO, Jared Grey, laid out the plans for the DeFi platform in a Jan. 16 Medium post, saying it will focus on its product stack in line with prior plans to make Sushi more sustainable.

Continue reading

DeFi should complement TradFi, not attack it: Ava Labs CEO | Davos 2023

DeFi is moving from becoming a small niche within the financial industry to something TradFi is trying to incorporate.

In an interview with Cointelegraph at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Emin Gun Sirer, the co-founder and CEO of Ava Labs, spoke on DeFi’s role in TradFi ecosystems and what users can expect in a future where both are center stage.

Continue reading

Decentralized forex will reduce costs by as much as 80%: Report

If the foreign exchange market starts using DeFi protocols instead of the current centralized systems, the cost of remittances could be reduced by “as much as 80%,” according to a Jan. 19 paper jointly published by researchers at Circle and Uniswap.

The authors studied the trading activity of Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) and Euro Coin (EUROC) on Uniswap from July 2022 to January 2023. They found that the coins had $128 million in total volume, with trading volume as high as $8 million on some days.

Continue reading

Raydium exploiter moves $2.7M to crypto mixer Tornado Cash

In an alert, blockchain security firm CertiK reported that the Raydium protocol exploiter had sent 1,774.5 Ether (ETH) to the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer. The amount is worth around $2.7 million at the time of writing.

While security teams from various exchanges continue to combat the efforts of hackers, funds continue to flow to the sanctioned Tornado Cash.

Continue reading

DeFi market overview

Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total market value remained over $40 billion this past week, trading at about $44.9 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 bullish week, with nearly all the tokens breaking past multi-week highs.

Convex Finance (CVX) was the biggest gainer on the weekly charts, registering a 37% price surge over the last seven days, followed by Kava (KAVA) with a 34% surge. Synthetix (SNX) recorded a 29% surge on the weekly charts, while the rest of the tokens in the top 100 also saw bullish gains over the past week.

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.

Tags
Related Posts
The impact of Bitcoin hacking incidents on the crypto market
In the 2013–2017 period, 29 hacks occurred in the Bitcoin market where a total of 1.1 million Bitcoin were stolen. Noting that the average price for Bitcoin (BTC) in December 2020 exceeded $20,000, the corresponding monetary equivalent of losses is more than $22 billion, which strongly highlights the societal impact of this criminal activity. What did crypto exchanges do to address this problem? Nowadays, about 90% of exchanges use some kind of cold storage system, which means that digital assets are stored offline. Keeping Bitcoin offline considerably reduces the threat from hacking attacks. Related: Roundup of crypto hacks, exploits and …
Blockchain / Jan. 24, 2021
Jump Crypto replenishes funds from $320M Wormhole hack in largest-ever DeFi 'bailout'
On Thursday, Jump Crypto, a crypto venture capital firm that owns Certus One, the developer of the Wormhole token bridge, announced it had deposited 120 thousand Ether (ETH) into a Solana-Ethereum bridge that suffered a devastating exploit. The day prior, hackers fraudulently minted 120 thousand wrapped Ether (wETH) worth $321 million on the Solana (SOL) platform, then redeemed 93,750 wETH for ETH on the Ethereum network while swapping the rest for other altcoins on the Solana network. The cross-chain ETH-wETH is supposed to have an exchange ratio of 1:1 against one another. Therefore, unauthorized minting of wETH leads to significant …
Technology / Feb. 3, 2022
OpenSea planned upgrade stalls as phishing attack targets NFT migration
Just yesterday, OpenSea announced a smart contract upgrade, which requires users to migrate their listed NFTs from Ethereum (ETH) blockchain to a new smart contract. As a direct result of the upgrade, users that don't migrate over from Ethereum risk losing their old, inactive listings — which currently require no gas fees for migration. Major nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea has reportedly fallen victim to an ongoing phishing attack within hours after announcing a week-long planned upgrade to delist inactive NFTs on the platform. However, the urgency and short deadline opened up a small window of opportunity for hackers. Within …
Adoption / Feb. 20, 2022
STEPN impersonators stealing users' seed phrases, warn security experts
Peckshield, a prominent blockchain security firm, exposed the existence of numerous phishing websites for the Web3 lifestyle app STEPN on Monday. Hackers insert a forged MetaMask browser plugin through which they can steal seed phrases from unsuspecting STEPN users, according to Peckshield. When these cybercriminals obtain the seed phrase, they gain complete control over the STEPN user's dashboard where they may connect their stolen wallets to their own or "claim" a giveaway as per Peckshield. #PeckShieldAlert #phishing PeckShield has detected a bath of @Stepnofficial phishing sites. They insert a false Metamask browser extension leading to stealing your seed phrase or …
Adoption / April 25, 2022
Crypto hacks are set to hit all-time highs in 2022, analyst explains
Reducing the amount of hacking by improving cybersecurity should be considered a top priority for the crypto industry, said Kim Grauer, director of research of blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis. As pointed out by the firm, this year could outpace 2021 in terms of crypto stolen through hacks. The vast majority of these exploits have been targeting the field of decentralized finance. “This can't go on in the industry because people are going to lose faith in investing in DeFi platforms”, Grauer said in an interview with Cointelegraph. Unlike centralized exchanges, which have improved their resiliency to crypto hacks, decentralized protocols …
Blockchain / Oct. 19, 2022