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 …

Ethereum (ETH) is setting liquidation records this week as a comparatively modest price uptick reveals how bearish the market has become. Data from on-chain analytics platform CryptoQuant confirmed that U.S. dollar-denominated short liquidations hit a new all-time high on Oct. 25. Two days, half a billion dollars of ETH shorts It is not just Bitcoin (BTC) causing bears severe pain this week — data from exchanges also shows that Ethereum shorters have suffered heavy losses. ETH/USD delivered fairly impressive gains on Oct. 25-26, rising from lows of $1,337 to highs of $1,593 on Bitstamp before retracing, according to data from …

As the crypto market shows signs of a gradual recovery, with Bitcoin (BTC) holding above the psychologically important $20,000 level after its initial crash to $17,600 in June, this month still sets a record low for an average daily aggregate product volume across all digital asset investment products. According to the report from CryptoCompare, published on Oct. 27, the average daily trading volume of institutional crypto products had fallen 34.1% — to $61.3 million in October. Almost all the products covered in the report recorded a large decline in average daily volumes, ranging from -24.3% to -77.5%. The downward trend …

During the frenzied bull run, transaction fees were running rampant. Over on the Ethereum blockchain, they hit eye-watering highs of $196.638 back in May — rendering the network unusable for most everyday consumers. The Bitcoin blockchain suffered from a similar issue the year before, accelerating to a record-breaking $300.331. When demand is high, it's easy for Proof-of-Work networks to get congested — prompting miners to prioritize the transactions with the highest fees. Here's the problem: high fees undercut one of crypto's most potent use cases — a decentralized way of offering peer-to-peer transfers. If sending funds from A to B …

Blockchain technology firm ConsenSys will spend $2.4 million annually to fund its newly launched MetaMask Grants DAO aimed at driving further development of the Web3 ecosystem. The fund will be led by MetaMask employees who will manage the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The DAO will be responsible for issuing grants to developers working outside of ConsenSys that are building products and services within MetaMask’s ecosystem and the wider Web3 space. The project will initially run for 12 months to assess its viability and success, with the DAO processing votes and proposals publicly through SnapShot on the Codefi Activate platform. ConsenSys …

Major cryptocurrency firm BitPay is expanding the scope of supported blockchain networks, preparing to debut payments in ERC-20 tokens on the Polygon network. BitPay and Polygon jointly announced on Oct. 26 the integration of Polygon on the BitPay app, allowing customers to spend Polygon-bridged ERC-20 tokens. The BitPay app is specifically preparing to support payments in tokens like Polygon-based USD Coin (USDC) later this week. USDC developer Circle originally launched the USDC stablecoin on the Ethereum blockchain, bridging it over to Polygon via the Polygon Bridge in June 2022. Polygon USDC is not the only Polygon-bridged token that is coming …

Ethereum's native token Ether (ETH) recorded better gains than Bitcoin (BTC) over the past 24 hours despite the latter finally rising above the key $20,000 level. Ethereum beats Bitcoin in risk-on rally On the daily chart, Ether jumped approximately 14% to reach its weekly high of $1,554 (data from Binance) on Oct. 26. Bitcoin underwent a similar rally but its week-to-date profits are just 6% by comparison. The ETH/BTC pair gained around 8%, climbing as high as 0.075 BTC on Oct. 26. The boom across the top crypto assets was synchronous with the U.S. stock market's winning streak since Oct. …

The latest earnings call from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, highlighted decreased search advertising spending from financial services and cryptocurrency subcategories. Alphabet released its earnings report for Q3 on Oct. 25, outlining a 6% increase in revenue totaling $69.1 billion in comparison to Q3 last year. Revenues were down slightly from Q2 2022, dropping from $69.7 billion. However the breakdown of revenues from Google Services, which includes its advertising earnings, showed that this segment increased from $58.8 billion to $61.3 billion over the past year. Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, noted particular strife in the financial and the cryptocurrency sectors …

Hong Kong and Singapore’s wealthy elite appear to be looking at digital assets with fervor, after a new report from KPMG suggesting over 90% of family offices and high-net-worth individuals (HNWI) are interested in investing in the digital assets space or have already done so. According to an Oct. 24 report from KPMG China and Aspen Digital titled “Investing in Digital Assets,” as much as 58% of family offices and HNWI of respondents in a recent survey are already investing in digital assets, and 34% “plan to do so.” The survey took the pulse from 30 family offices and HNWIs …

Ethereum’s long-awaited Merge took place in September, shifting it from a legacy proof-of-work (POW) model to the sustainable proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. Many observers expected Ether’s (ETH) price to respond positively as its daily emissions declined 90% with the halt of mining operations. However, the expected price surge never occurred. In fact, Ether has been down by over 7% since the upgrade. So why didn’t the Merge drive up the coin’s price? Post-merge ETH monetary policy Ethereum’s monetary policy was simply to reduce the token’s supply to 1,600 ETH per day. The PoW model, an equivalent of 13,000 ETH were …

On Oct 24, European cryptocurrency investment firm Coinshare published its Digital Asset Fund Flows Report, which revealed that digital asset investment products saw $5 million worth of cumulative outflows last week, in a continuation of what it calls an “apathetic period” that began in September 2022. Most notably, investment product volumes dropped to $758 million during the week, the lowest since October 2020 and far below the weekly average of $7 billion around this time last year when crypto markets were in an uptrend. Data in the report revealed that Bitcoin (BTC) investment products saw minor inflows of $4.6 million, …

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 …