Hype does not always equate to greater adoption, as the on-chain data from the second quarter of 2022 shows Solana (SOL) surpassing Ethereum (ETH) in users’ daily transactions despite various drawbacks from both macroeconomic conditions and network outages. Throughout the second quarter, Solana’s daily transactions consistently increased, ending with more than 40 million daily transactions compared to Ethereum’s 1 million daily transactions between April and June, confirmed Nansen’s State of the Quarter Report. Solana’s significant increase in daily transactions was observed on daily non-vote transactions when compared to Ethereum — despite sporting higher volatility. On-chain data revealed that decentralized exchanges …

Decentralized exchange (DEX) GMX has reportedly suffered a price manipulation exploit from an exploiter who managed to make off with around $565,000 from the AVAX/USD market. The unidentified exploiter is understood to have capitalized on GMX’s “minimal spread” and “zero price impact” features to pull off the exploit, which impacted GLP token holders who provided liquidity in the form of AVAX (the Avalanche token) to GMX. GMX confirmed the price manipulation exploit in a Sept. 18 post on Twitter, but stated that the AVAX/USD market would remain open despite imposing a $2 million cap on long positions and $1 million …

Zircon Finance, an automated market maker (AMM) and a decentralized exchange on Moonbeam, announced the launch of a mainnet network to address investor’s challenges related to impermanent loss in decentralized finance (DeFi). Impermanent loss relates to a condition wherein investors lose assets they hadpreviously dedicated to providing liquidity to a liquidity pool for earning profits via yields. The mainnet network, dubbed Zircon Gamma, aims to counter such losses through single-sided liquidity over the Moonriver network, which tranches or splits risks between a volatile cryptocurrency and a stablecoin. For example, in the case of an ETH/USDC pool, Zircon allows Ether (ETH) …

As with many things in life, events are not siloed. When any type of event or action occurs, planned or unplanned, it causes changes and reactions to surrounding components. Think of a stone thrown into a pond creating ripples in the water while also altering the aquatic environment below the surface. This school of thought can also be applied to the Ethereum Merge. The Ethereum blockchain, with its native coin Ether (ETH), is a pillar of the crypto asset industry — an industry that has become increasingly mainstream with each passing year. Ether is the second most popular altcoin, with …

Disgraced cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network asked a court this month to return assets to its “custody clients,” but not to its “earn-and-borrow” customers. Wondering how to keep yourself in the former group when the crypto exchange you’re using goes under? Here’s a summary. What exactly is a “custody client?” It’s similar in principle to a savings account with a traditional bank — often repayable upon demand by the custodian. In this case, it’s Celsius that has a fiduciary responsibility. This type of account is kept separate from an “earn-and-borrow” account. It includes coins that can be transferred, swapped or used …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) has seen tremendous growth since its inception, expanding by more than 1,200% in 2021 in total value locked (TVL) and surpassing $240 billion in invested assets. While DeFi has since dropped to around $60 billion TVL as a result of wider macroeconomic trends, such as rising inflation, the seeds are in place for DeFi to reconfigure the foundations of our financial infrastructure when the next market cycle comes. Historically, the return to a bull market develops over a four-year trajectory. This time, a recovery in 2024 is highly feasible due to the maturation of monetary policy and …

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. The past week in the DeFi ecosystem saw major developments centered around the Ethereum Merge. Aave community proposed temporarily suspending Ether (ETH) lending before the Merge, citing the potential issue of high ETH utilization that may result in liquidations being hard or impossible and annual percentage yields (APYs) reaching negative figures. An industry expert shared his opinion on possible censorship vulnerabilities that the Ethereum network could eventually face in the wake of its transition …

KyberSwap, the decentralized exchange built on liquidity protocol Kyber Network, has offered a hacker 15% of the funds from a $265,000 exploit as a bug bounty. In a Thursday blog post, Kyber Network said a hacker had used a frontend exploit to pilfer roughly $265,000 worth of user funds from KyberSwap. The protocol said it will compensate all users for any missing funds related to the exploit, and directly addressed the hacker to give them an opportunity to return the funds in exchange for “a conversation with our team” and 15% of what was taken — roughly $40,000. “We know …

Decentralized crypto derivatives exchange dYdX says it has ended its short-lived and contentious $25 first deposit bonus promo, amid a wave of backlash over its facial recognition requirements for new users. The exchange however simply cited “overwhelming demand” as the reason for its short-lived promotional campaign, which ended on Sept. 1 “effective immediately.” Due to extremely overwhelming demand of the $25 deposit bonus promotion, we are ending the campaign, effective immediately. Thank you to the many thousands of new users that onboarded to dYdX today. We truly underestimated the amount of interest the campaign garnered. — dYdX (@dYdX) September 1, …

Many users on social media have been lambasting decentralized exchange dYdX over the identification verification process to receive a sign up and deposit bonus of $25. In a Wednesday blog post, dYdX announced that new users who deposited 500 USD Coin (USDC) for their first transactions could receive a bonus promotion of 25 USDC, provided they were willing to do a “liveness check.” According to the exchange, the verification process accessed a user’s webcam and “compares if your image has been used with another account on dYdX.” Though the giveaway was completely voluntary, many on Twitter implied the checks were …

A decentralized cryptocurrency (DEX) options exchange cut its own life short after unwittingly executing a command that closed its mainnet program and made it irrecoverable. OptiFi informed users that its platform had come to an unceremonious end after its development team tried to update its code on Aug. 29. According to the portfolio margining derivative DEX, the program incident also locked up some 660,000 USD Coin (USDC) on-chain. OptiFi's program has been closed by mistakes we made. TL;DR 1. We accidentally closed the OptiFi mainnet program and it's not recoverable 2. 661k USDC is locked in the PDAs, luckily 95% …

Warren Buffett raised eyebrows this week when his firm, Berkshire Hathaway, upped its exposure to United States Treasury bills. If you’re one of the few remaining bulls out there, Buffett’s flight to safety is concerning because it signals that the Oracle of Omaha would rather get 3% yield instead of playing the stock market. If equities go belly-up in the fall, as I’ve been predicting for months, expect Bitcoin (BTC) to follow. Looking at the numbers, Berkshire’s T-bill exposure grew to $75 billion at the end of June, up from $58.5 billion at the beginning of 2022. But, even with …