Arbitrum Under Fire: DeFi Week April 2

Arbitrum again dominated the headlines after coming under fire for its first foray into decentralized governance, with its community rejecting a proposal that would allocate $1B worth of ARB to the Arbitrum Foundation. But a governance delegate revealed that the 750M ARB tokens were already designated to the Foundation, suggesting the vote was a mere formality. The community was already in uproar after discovering the Arbitrum Foundation offloaded more than $10M worth of ARB on the same day it airdropped the token to its users.

The markets continued to trend bullish throughout most of the week, with Ethereum trading above $1,900 for the first time since August 2022. Investors are regaining confidence in the sector, with LayerZero closing a $120M Series B funding round that propelled the cross-chain bridging protocol to a whopping $3B valuation.

And in this week’s podcast, Tegan Kline spoke with Carl Beekhuizen and Trent van Epps of the Ethereum Foundation to learn about how the KZG Ceremony is paving the way for Ethereum’s future EIP-4844 upgrade, also known as Proto-Danksharding. With EIP-4844 expected to bolster the scalability of Ethereum Layer 2s by orders of magnitude, you don’t want to miss this episode!

Enjoy!

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Premium Report

What’s Governance Worth? Ethereum Scaling Tokens Say Billions

The launch of Arbitrum’s ARB has brought the market value of the two biggest Ethereum scaling tokens to more than $2B collectively. Now some investors are raising a seemingly obvious question: What are these tokens for? It turns out the answer isn’t so simple.

https://thedefiant.io/investors-questions-rollup-token-valuations

Podcast

🕯️KZG Ceremony Duo Summons The Ethereum Road Map🕯️

This week, Tegan Kline spoke with the dynamic Ethereum KZG Ceremony Duo, Carl and Trent of the Ethereum Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Ethereum and related technologies.

Carl and Trent dove into the KZG ceremony, why it’s important for scaling Ethereum, the ETH roadmap, demystify jargon like Dank Sharding, IP 4844, and we talk about the culture of the Ethereum Foundation, why Ethereum has become a bit more adversarial with time, how they plan to continue scaling without sacrificing decentralization or censorship resistance and more.

Defiant Video

$33 Billion ETH Unleashed – Shanghai Upgrade

Ethereum is set to get its second major upgrade in 8 months. It’s happening on April 12 and It’s a big deal. The upcoming Shapella upgrade essentially finishes the work that began with The Merge by allowing users to withdraw Ether which they’d locked up to secure the network.

$10 Million Dump from Arbitrum Foundation

A couple of weeks ago, Arbitrum delighted the crypto world when it announced it would release a token on March 23. But now the project’s community is in uproar after the Arbitrum Foundation dumped 10M ARB on the open market to fund its establishment and operational expenses.

Find Yield Enhancing Solutions With Tranchess

Tranchess is a chess-themed DeFi protocol that expands the allure of liquid staking on Ethereum and BNB Chain. But what sets Tranchess apart from other liquid staking protocols like Lido or Rocket Pool? The answer lies in the word itself – tranche.

Friday

• ZkSync Rescues Gemholic After Botched Token Sale Gemholic, the team behind the GemSwap decentralized exchange, will be able to retrieve 921 ETH ($1.7M) raised in a token sale, after a bug in their smart contract resulted in the team losing access to the funds on Thursday.

• Gauntlet Flags Potential cbETH Liquidation Risk On Aave A large leveraged position using cbETH, Coinbase’s liquid staking token, has risk management firm Gauntlet sounding the alarm.

• Cryptosat Sends Message From Space To Help Scale Ethereum Cryptosat, a team of Stanford University academics building satellite-based blockchain nodes, has participated in Ethereum’s KZG ceremony by signing a file from space.

Thursday

• Treasury: ZK Proofs Can Be Boon Or Bane Of AML Compliance Zero-knowledge technology can rein in a non-compliant industry — or turbocharge money laundering and sanctions evasions, according to a new U.S. government report detailing the criminal use of decentralized finance.

• Arbitrum Amends Foundation Proposal After Failed Vote After the failure of its first governance proposal earlier this week, Arbitrum, the leading Ethereum Layer 2 network, has proposed new measures intended to limit the spending capabilities of its Foundation.

Wednesday

• ETH Crosses $1,900 For the First Time Since August ETH has crossed the $1,900 price point for the first time in nearly eight months as traders continue to price in the Shanghai and Capella upgrades, which will allow ETH stakers to begin to withdraw their tokens for the first time.

• Gem NFT Aggregator Rebrands As OpenSea Pro OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace by active users, has launched OpenSea Pro, an aggregator geared toward active traders, bringing together sale listings from 170 other NFT marketplaces onto one platform.

• Top Ethereum Teams Join Forces To Return MEV Profits To Users More than 30 teams representing the Ethereum ecosystem have joined forces to combat Maximal Extractable Value, on-chain arbitrage techniques that quietly siphon hundreds of millions of dollars from users’ trades.

• Optimism Freezes Code For Bedrock Upgrade Optimism, a popular Layer 2 blockchain, is on the cusp of launching its long-awaited Bedrock upgrade, which promises reduced fees and improved Ethereum compatibility.

Tuesday

• LayerZero Valued At $3B In Series B Investors bought into LayerZero Labs’ vision of an internet of interoperable blockchains, valuing the company at $3B in a Series B funding round announced Tuesday.

• New Generation Of Order Book DEXs Aim To Disrupt On-Chain Trading Ethereum’s growing Layer 2 ecosystem wants to disrupt the DEX sector, with Base and Matter Labs looking to host a new generation of decentralized exchanges powered by the limit order books familiar to traditional exchanges.

• PancakeSwap V3 Launches On BNB Chain and Ethereum PancakeSwap, the leading decentralized exchange (DEX) on the BNB Chain, has launched its V3 iteration on BNB Chain and Ethereum, featuring improved capital efficiency and an overhauled fee structure.

Monday

• Arbitrum Botches First Steps Toward Decentralization The effort to cede control of the Arbitrum blockchain to its community got off to a rough start over the weekend, as a botched governance proposal led to accusations that it’s all just “decentralization theater.”