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. After the Mango Markets exploit last week, Compound protocol paused the supply of four tokens as lending collateral to protect it against any price manipulation. Crypto staking protocol Freeway said one of its trading strategies “appears to have failed,” forcing the firm to halt services earlier this week. October continues to be dominated by DeFi hacks as another DeFi lockup protocol, Team Finance, lost $14.5 million during contract migration, despite an audit clearance. MakerDAO …

Governance tokens are a type of cryptocurrency that allow tokenholders to vote on the direction of a blockchain project. The primary purpose of governance tokens is to decentralize decision-making and to give holders a say in how the project is run. Governance tokenholders are usually more invested in the project’s success as they stand to gain or lose more, depending on the outcome. Community members can use tokens to influence the direction and features of a blockchain protocol directly. As such, it is possible to implement changes related to the user interface, vote on fees and reward distribution, or even …

Compound Treasury, a cash management solution for institutions powered by the Compound Protocol, announced on Sept.14 that accredited institutions can now borrow USD or USDC with fixed rates starting from 6% APR, using Bitcoin, Ethereum, and supported ERC-20 assets as collateral. Starting today, to meet the growing demand for liquidity, institutions can now borrow from Compound Treasury, using digital assets as collateral.https://t.co/xgDIep18Qa — Compound Labs (@compoundfinance) September 14, 2022 The Defi-backed company whose notable clients include crypto companies, fintech institutions, and banks, shared that the decision was made in response to recent market volatility, which has created a more robust …

Decentralized lending platform Compound has been plagued by a code bug in a recent governance proposal to update its price feeds. The code error has “temporarily frozen” the Compound ETH (cETH) market, causing cETH transactions to revert, but Compound Labs stated that despite the front end not working, “funds are not immediately at risk.” Compound Labs announced on Aug. 31 that the code bug came from Proposal 117: Compound Oracle Upgrade v3, which was implemented a couple of hours ago to update the oracle contracts on the Compound protocol to a new version that uses Uniswap V3 instead of V2 …

What are the disadvantages of CeDeFi? Currently, CeDeFi’s main downside is the high learning curve associated with its protocols because of their complexity. The concept is still young, and more intuitive and user-friendly interfaces are bound to emerge over time. CeDeFi also relies heavily on Ethereum, given that most CeDeFi protocols are still built on the Ethereum blockchain. If Ethereum fails, CeDeFi will likely fail as well. However, this risk is mitigated by the fact that other blockchains are beginning to adopt CeDeFi protocols. Another disadvantage of CeDeFi is that it’s still relatively new and unproven. While the sector has …

Cred Protocol, a decentralized credit scoring startup has unveiled the results of its first automated credit scoring system for users of decentralized finance (DeFi). Cred Protocol CEO Julian Gay outlined the results in a Twitter thread, which showed how Cred successfully utilized past transaction behavior on the Aave protocol to assess the creditworthiness of future borrowers based on on-chain behavior in the DeFi space. 1/ Over the last few months, we've been working to build one of the first credit scores for DeFi. Today, we're excited to share the results of our first credit score with the world! Read more …

Crypto lending platform Celsius has reportedly hired lawyers from Kirkland & Ellis LLP to advise on its restructuring options — the same firm that assisted Voyager Digital with its bankruptcy filing last week. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, the company has hired lawyers to advise on options, including a bankruptcy filing in place of the previously hired law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP. Kirkland & Ellis LLP describes itself as an international law firm that serves clients in private equity, M&A, and other corporate transactions, having been founded in 1909. The …

On Monday, decentralized finance, or DeFi, protocol Compound Treasury announced that it received a credit rating of B- from S&P Global Ratings. As told by the team at Compound, this represents the first time a major credit agency has issued a rating for an institutionalized DeFi protocol. The S&P Global Ratings' investment suitability scale ranges from AAA (extremely strong) to D (in default). A score of B- indicates the issuer can meet financial commitments, though vulnerabilities to business, financial and economic conditions persist. Regarding Compound's rating specifically, S&P Global cites the uncertain regulatory regime for stablecoins such as USD Coin …

For years, cryptocurrency advocates have touted the world-changing capability of digital currency and blockchain technology. Yet with the passing of each market cycle, new projects come and go, and the promised utility of these “real-world use case” projects fails to satisfy. While a majority of tokens promise to solve real-world problems, only a few achieve this, and the others are mere speculative investments. Here’s a look at the three things cryptocurrency investors can actually “do” with their coins. Lending Perhaps the simplest use case offered to cryptocurrency holders is also one of the oldest monetary applications in finance: lending. Ever …

ApeCoin's (APE) market valuation could grow by nearly 250% in the second quarter of 2022 as it breaks out of a widely-tracked, classic technical pattern. APE price "bull pennant" breakout underway On April 13, APE's price broke above the upper trendline of what appears to be a "bull pennant" chart pattern. Bull pennants appear when the price consolidates inside a triangle-like structure following a strong uptrend. Many traditional analysts consider them as continuation patterns, for they typically result in the price breaking out in the direction of its previous trend. As a rule, traders estimate a bull pennant's upside target …

Australian fintech company, Block Earner, has officially gone live, offering everyday investors a 7% fixed rate investment product by utilizing decentralized finance (DeFi) technology. Block Earner has already attracted attention from big names in the crypto industry, finalizing a $6.4 million seed funding round in December last year. It was led by Framework Ventures and joined by Coinbase Ventures, DeFi Alliance, LongHash Ventures, as well as crypto veteran Kain Warwick, the founder of Synthetix, an Australia-based crypto derivatives exchange. Jordan Momtazi, the co-founder of Block Earner, said in an interview to Cointelegraph that Australia’s current economic climate makes products that …