Weekly Update - DeFi and Layer 1 & Layer 2 News (Week 3, 11/01/2023 - 17/01/2023)
Ethereum hits 500K validators, staked ETH passes 16M. Polygon completes hard fork to reduce gas spikes and chain reorg. Shiba Inu to launch beta release of Shibarium L2.
Weekly DeFi Index
This week's market cap and volume indices were positive at +16.94% and +83.54%, respectively, while volatility index was negative at -8.20%.
Check the latest prices on Crypto.com/Price
*DeFI index tokens: AAVE, BAL, CAKE, COMP, CRV, CVX, FXS, JOE, LDO, LINK, MKR, OSMO, REN, SNX, SPELL, SUSHI, UNI, VVS, YFI.
Frax Finance (FXS) is benefiting from the ramp-up of liquid staking and stablecoin narratives recently: FXS’s liquid staking derivative frxETH and its stablecoin FRAX have been on the spotlight lately for their use cases.
New Project Spotlight
Cronos released its v1.0 Galileo upgrade on 18 January. The mainnet upgrade will feature greater EVM and Cosmos interoperability (IBC incentivisation and IBC token transfer memo field), along with other performance enhancements and bug fixes. These include a generalised reduction of node startup time, mempool prioritisation for transactions per second (TPS) scaling, and optimised storage for full nodes.
As of 17 Jan 2023
Sources: DeFi Llama, Crypto.com Research
Note: TVL excludes governance token staking, staked LP tokens that one of the coins in the pair is governance token, borrowing, and vesting
As of 17 Jan 2023
Sources: CoinGecko, DeFi Llama, Crypto.com Research
News Highlights
Four months after the success of The Merge, staked ETH has achieved new milestones, having reached 16 million ETH deposited into the Beacon Chain staking contract and hitting 500,000 validators on its network. This is amid Ethereum’s latest ‘devnet 2’ release to help test and prepare for the upcoming Shanghai upgrade in March.
Polygon was upgraded on 17 January. Its mainnet “V0.3.1 hard fork” was meant to improve the network by reducing gas spikes and addressing chain reorganisations. It was also reported that Polygon began to test its zero-knowledge rollups ahead of a full integration with its mainnet.
The development team behind Shiba Inu announced a new beta release for its layer-2 network Shibarium, which will run on top of the Ethereum mainnet.
Solana acknowledged that their email service provider Mailchimp was breached on 12 January. The security incident involved an unauthorised actor who ‘accessed and exported certain user data’, exposing its users’ personal data such as email addresses, Telegram users, users’ names, and more. However, passwords and credit card information were unaffected, as confirmed by Mailchimp.
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