🔵Base Goes Gangbusters: DeFi Week of August 6

Happy weekend Defiers!

The markets cheered PayPal’s unexpected launch of an Ethereum-based stablecoin. PayPal USD is issued in partnership with Paxos, with on-chain data indicating PayPal may have first started tinkering with the stablecoin in 2018.

The positive market sentiment also coincides with strong economic data from the United States, with traders tipping that interest rates will remain unchanged following next month’s Federal Reserve meeting.

Coinbase completed the mainnet rollout of its highly-anticipated Layer 2, Base, this past week. Activity on the network quickly surged, with Base already ranking as the second-most active L2 by 24-hour transaction volume.

With the memecoin markets cooling, DeFi degens converged on the newly launched social trading dApp, Friend Tech, to get their fill of wild volatility this week. The Base-based dApp allows users to speculate on tokens associated with public Twitter profiles, offering a novel way for degens to bet on the social reputation of prominent figures within the web3 ecosystem. Friend Tech boasted more than 12,000 active users within two days of launching, with many fortunes being quickly made and lost on the platform.

The total value locked in Spark Protocol, a lending protocol from the MakerDAO devs, surged from $57M to more than $400M this week. The move was driven by Maker upping its DAI Savings Rate to 8%, with DSR deposits also tripling to more than $1B.

Krapopolis, an animated series from Fox featuring web3 integrations, is set to debut in September. Viewers can vote on how the show’s plot evolves using NFTs, with participants also going in the running to be featured in the Krapolopolis as an animated character.

In regulatory news, the Federal Reserve is looking to expand its oversight over banks’ crypto activities. An Aug. 8 announcement said The Fed wants to expand its supervision of “novel activities in the banks it oversees,” including crypto custody, asset tokenization, engagement with stablecoins, and collateralized lending.

And in this week’s podcast, Erick Calderon, founder of Art Blocks, discusses the intersection between art and technology manifested in NFTs.

Enjoy!