📉 Fed + Tether + SEC Jitters: DeFi Week of June 11

Happy weekend Defiers!

The week began bearishly, with Bitcoin and Ethereum sinking to their lowest levels since March. The markets continued to bleed following the SEC filing lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance last week, before tagging a local low in response to the Federal Reserve’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged on Wednesday.

However, the SEC’s aggressive campaign of regulation-by-enforcement targeting web3 is irking lawmakers. On Monday, Republican Congressmen Warren Davidson and Tom Emmer advanced a bill seeking to replace the position of SEC chairman with six commissions tasked with rulemaking and enforcement.

The markets also experienced fear and uncertainty when the top stablecoin, USDT, slipped below its $1 peg on Wednesday. The move came the day before media outlets gained access to Tether’s 2021 financials, which revealed the stablecoin was heavily backed by Chinese securities at the time.

Concerns are also growing regarding a $60M stablecoin debt on Aave belonging to Curve’s founder, Michael Egorov. Although the position is backed by $176M worth of CRV tokens, risk management firm Gauntlet recommended that Aave freeze its v2 CRV market.

But the week didn’t just host bearish news, with several leading teams in the Ethereum ecosystem announcing or shipping new code.

The leading DEX, Uniswap, unveiled draft code for its v4 iteration on Monday. Polygon unveiled its vision for Polygon 2.0, a unified ecosystem of multiple chains designed to enable “infinite” scalability for Ethereum. EigenLayer, the hotly anticipated “restaking” protocol, also completed the first stage of its mainnet launch on Wednesday.

Competition is also heating up among NFT marketplaces despite the protracted downturn for nonfungibles. This past week saw Sudoswap launch its v2 platform, KrakenNFT opened its door to public users, and LooksRare unveiled a new liquidity mining campaign.

And in this week’s podcast, Alex Gluchowski, the co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs, takes us through all the latest regarding ZkSync and shares why he believes zero-knowledge rollups are the ultimate Ethereum scaling solution. Enjoy!

Enjoy!