Weekly DeFi Index

This week's market cap, volume, and volatility indices were negative at -5.88%, -32.83% and -39.16%, respectively.

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Chart of the Week

Uniswap reached new heights as it surpassed the 200 million milestone in unique transactions in June. This growth can also be seen in its total users over time, which now stands at 5.5 million, according to Dune data.

News Highlights

• Crypto.com now offers on-chain Staking in the Crypto.com App in select markets. Staking in the App allows users to conveniently put their idle assets to work and receive rewards as often as daily. Users also enjoy the flexibility of staking or unstaking their assets at any time, as Crypto.com does not impose a lockup period. Visit Crypto.com for more details.

• The Aave DAO community proposed to deploy its dollar-pegged algorithmic stablecoin gho (GHO) on the Ethereum blockchain. The proposal will introduce GHO through so-called ‘facilitators’, and will allow Aave v3 users to mint GHO against token holdings supplied to the platform.

• Layer-2 blockchain Shibarium is expected to launch after a Toronto conference in August, as confirmed by pseudonymous Shiba Inu developer Shytoshi Kusama in a recent blog post. The latest update comes after months of development on the Shibarium testnet, which has seen approximately 20 million transactions as of June.

• The amount of Ether (ETH) staked on Ethereum has grown significantly since withdrawals were enabled in April. Nearly US$45 billion, or 20% of ETH in circulation, was locked up and staked. For reference, about $29 billion worth of ETH, or 14.5% of ETH in circulation, was staked prior to the Shapella upgrade.

• Blockchain data reveals that stablecoin firms Circle and Tether froze over $65 million in assets linked to the recent multi-million dollar Multichain exploit that resulted in a loss of about $126 million worth of cryptocurrency. The move follows unexplained large outflows from the Multichain MPC bridge on 6 July.

• Digital asset manager Grayscale Investments announced in its latest update that it included Lido’s LDO token to its Grayscale DeFi Fund product, making it the second largest asset on the DeFi portfolio after Uniswap.

• DeFi protocol Arcadia Finance lost an estimated $455,000 in a recent hack, which was executed through a loophole in the code and allowed the hacker to drain funds from Arcadia’s Ethereum and Optimism vaults. Arcadia has paused the contracts as mitigation and contacted the hacker to recover the funds.

Recent Research Reports

• The Development of ZK Rollups: Zero-knowledge rollups (ZK rollups) are still in their nascent stage. However, as the technology evolves, various methods to achieve compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) have emerged.

• Layer-0: Infrastructure for Customised Blockchains: Layer-0 protocols form the infrastructure that customised Layer-1 blockchains can be built on. We explore notable projects like Cosmos, Polkadot, Avalanche, LayerZero, and zkLink.

• Alpha Navigator: Quest for Alpha [June 2023]: Asset classes finished the first half of 2023 strongly, with cryptocurrency in the lead. Decelerating US inflation readings could ease market concerns for the time being, while BTC options implied volatilities remain muted.

Recent University Articles

• Bitcoin NFTs - How the Ordinals Protocol Works: Learn all about what the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol is and how it works — from satoshis to inscriptions to NFTs.

• What Is Sharding? Sharding can improve transaction speed and scalability. Find out what it means and how it works.

• Bitcoin Scalability: Challenges and Solutions: This article explores the various challenges associated with Bitcoin’s scalability problem, with potential solutions that can still maintain the network’s security.

Disclaimer

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