Yearn Finance announced a merger with Akropolis, trailing a series of Yearn partnerships and recent ecosystem hacks.  Earlier this month, Akropolis lost $2M in an exploitation attack. This technical partnership highlights the permissionless nature of DeFi, where Akropolis could make the unilateral decision to integrate itself in the Yearn ecosystem. Akropolis enables under-collateralized lending protocol…

Aave’s Aims for a Seamless DeFi With Flash Loan-Driven V2 Aave, the third-largest DeFi lending protocol by assets, today unveiled its V2 revamp, where it leverages flash loans to make DeFi more seamless and composable. Aave’s V2 includes several enhancements of its lending products, many of which are powered by flash loans. Flash loans don’t…

Curve passed a unanimous governance vote to distribute $3M worth of protocol fees to CRV holders staked into the CurveDAO over the weekend. With just under 50% of all staked token holders voting on the proposal, the 100% majority vote signals strong alignment for the stablecoin AMM to distribute the 2.9M yCRV accrued to the Set converter over the…

Yearn Finance has partnered or merged with at least six different DeFi projects, three of which have been announced in just in the past four days. SushiSwap, Akropolis and Cover, were the latest protocols to combine forces with Yearn, while mergers with Cream, Pickle, and a partnership with Hegic were announced in the past two weeks. Rather than…

Coinbase and Binance plan to enable staking on Ethereum’s just-launched Beacon chain, and trading of their own ETH2 wrappers. The move is a sign that becoming an Ethereum validator is increasingly easy, and that soon many such tokenized versions of staked ETH will start circling the crypto market. “Coinbase customers will be able to convert…

The first phase, or Phase 0, in the transition to Ethereum 2.0/ aka Eth2.0/ aka Serenity successfully launched today. In this phase of the process a proof-of-stake chain, known as the Beacon chain, is now running. ETH holders can deposit (or stake) ETH in multiples of 32 and start accumulating staking rewards, thus becoming validators in...

There’s a new investment category rising in DeFi: yield optimized by risk level. At least two projects, Saffron Finance and Barnbridge, have started to offer investors the ability to earn differing yields in accordance with their risk tolerance. Barnbridge currently has $186 million in liquidity mining deposits just weeks after its launch on October 20th,…

If you follow the Defiant YouTube channel you’ll probably have spotted me doing some very unusual experiments around NFT ownership and digital art. It’s over an hour’s worth of content across the two videos but the TLDR is this —I had an itch to scratch, my best friend Simon Wan is a fantastic IRL artist...

The latest affected project in a series of DeFi exploits is Pickle Finance – an automated yield aggregator with a mission to make stablecoins stable. Over the weekend, a hacker was able to exploit Pickle’s code to transfer $19M worth of Dai to an ‘Evil Jar’, leaving most LP’s in a pickle. The project allows…

Yearn Finance and Pickle Finance today announced a merger where the teams are consolidating resources and technical stack. Just a few days earlier, Pickle was attacked and ~$20M Dai was drained (more on the attack below). The timing of the merger at the heel of a protocol attack highlights the seized opportunity these DeFi teams…