Ethereum's native token Ether (ETH) fell to as low as $950 on Uniswap—a decentralized crypto exchange— this June 13, about 20% lower than its spot rate across other exchanges. Over $130M ETH sold in six hours The incident happened at around 3:00 am UTC after a whale dumped 65,000 ETH for multiple "stablecoins," including USD Coin (USDC), Tether (USDT) and Dai (DAI). A piece of evidence noted that the whale sold its ETH holdings to pay off nearly $73 million worth of debt at Oasis.app, a DeFi lending platform. The duration of the sell-off saw ETH's liquidation price dropping from …

International payment processing giant Mastercard is expanding its payment network for nonfungible token (NFT) markets and Web3. The financial service provider announced that it has been working on expanding their payment networks to NFTs over the past year. The firm has partnered with a number of leading NFT marketplaces to allow 2.9 billion cardholders to directly make NFT purchases without buying crypto first. Currently, users need to buy crypto to bid on and buy NFTs. However, with the latest Mastercard partnership, billions of cardholders can now bypass the process of buying a transferring crypto to NFT marketplaces. The firm said: …

Unsecured lending protocol TrueFi has become the latest project to launch on Optimism, Ethereum’s popular layer-2 scaling solution, in a move that’s expected to boost demand from non-institutional lenders. By launching on Optimism, TrueFi’s lender community will have access to a faster and cheaper user experience, as well as gain exposure to a wider pool of retail lenders. “TrueFi users can now lend, borrow and launch portfolios on Optimism to enjoy dramatically reduced transaction costs and network speeds,” Rafael Cosman, co-founder of TrustToken, told Cointelegraph in a written statement. He further explained: “Since Optimism transactions are on average 77x cheaper …

Crypto prices have been exploring new lows for weeks and currently it's unclear what it will take to reverse the trend. Despite the downtrend, cryptocurrencies within the Polkadot (DOT) ecosystem began to rally on May 24 and have managed to maintain gains ranging from 10% to 25%, a possible sign that certain sub-sectors of the market are on the verge of a breakout. Here’s a look at three Polkadot ecosystem protocols that have seen their token prices trend higher in recent days. Acala launches a $250 million aUSD ecosystem fund Acala (ACA) is the leading decentralized finance (DeF) platform on …

Without fail, crypto has a way of humbling even the most self-assured and this market is definitely not for the faint of heart. Nonfungible token (NFT) investors have entered what appears to be a bear market and the recent chaos is also impacting community morale. The decline in NFT prices occurred as the United States Federal Reserve raised interest rates, Terra’s LUNA and UST-based platforms collapsed and traders came to terms with the reality that the entire sector could be in a bear market. Things aren’t as bad as they were in 2018, but the NFT market isn’t as seasoned. …

In May 2021, OpenSea closed out nearly $140 million in total volume. Fast forward a year and the most dominant nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace closed over $880 million in less than a week partially because of the Yuga Labs’ The Otherside mint. As a result of this mint, a fresh surge of liquidity was injected into the NFT ecosystem and as it stands the current NFT total market capitalization is over $19.4 billion. For the past two weeks, most of the market had seen little action, but this changed after the Otherside mint closed over $317 million in just three …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Fei Protocol offered a $10 million bounty to hackers in an attempt to negotiate and retrieve a major chunk of the stolen funds from various Rari Fuse pools worth $79,348,385.61 — nearly $80 million. On Saturday, Fei Protocol informed its investors about an exploit across numerous Rari Capital Fuse pools while requesting the hackers to return the stolen funds against a $10 million bounty and a “no questions asked” commitment. We are aware of an exploit on various Rari Fuse pools. We have identified the root cause and paused all borrowing to mitigate further damage. To …

Avalanche (AVAX) price is down more than 30% in April, but despite the negative price move, the smart contract platform remains a top contender for decentralized applications due to its scalability, low-cost transactions and its large footprint in the decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape. The network is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and unique in that it does not face the same operational bottlenecks of high transaction fees and network congestion. Avalanche was able to amass over $9 billion in total value locked (TVL) by offering a proof-of-stake (PoS) layer-1 scaling solution. This indicator is extremely relevant because it …

The decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem was filled with ups and downs —mostly the latter— this week, with two very distinct hack attempts and a heartbreaking departure of a DeFi veteran. In this week’s newsletter, we will also look at derivative exchange dYdX’s plans to go fully decentralized by the end of the year. The price momentum of the DeFi tokens remained neutral, with several tokens registering a bullish surge. However, the market volatility meant many of them couldn’t hold onto those gains. Hacker bungles DeFi exploit: Leaves stolen $1M in contract set to self destruct In a rare comedic bungle …

Sentiment in the cryptocurrency market is on the upswing after small gains from Bitcoin (BTC) and altcoins hint that the market could be in the process of a bullish breakout. A handful of altcoins are also finding momentum and a round of fresh partnership announcements appear to back the 40% gains seen in select assets on April 21. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the biggest gainers over the past 24-hours were Steem (STEEM), TrustSwap (SWAP) and 0x (ZRX). Binance lists STEEM The community-focused blockchain network Steem is the underlying chain for the social media platform Steemit, …

One of the main narratives of hope for cryptocurrency investors is that there will be a major shift in public perception that sparks a new wave of capital from retail and institutional traders. Unfortunately for these hopeful bulls, data indicates that the opposite has occurred for nearly a year, a fact evidenced by the declining rate of searches for the term Bitcoin (BTC) on Google. A similar pattern is seen when looking at the search interest for the top smart contract platform Ethereum (ETH), which saw its peak interest occur during the second week of May 2021, and has been …

The non-fungible token (NFT) market has been booming since the summer of 2021 and as NFT prices were sky-rocketing, the number of hacks targeting NFTs were also increasing. The most recent high-profile hack siphoned approximately 600 Ether worth of NFTs from Arthur0x, the founder of DeFiance Capital, and they were sold off on OpenSea. A 2022 Crypto Crime Report published by Chainalysis highlighted that the value sent to NFT marketplaces by illicit addresses jumped significantly in 2021, topping out at just under $1.4 million. There is also a clear increase in stolen funds sent to NFT marketplaces. Given the concerning …