Aave continues to surpass expectations from an investment standpoint and in terms of progress in the underlying protocol, but on-chain data shows holders may be preparing to take profits. Aave recently achieved over $5 billion in total value locked, becoming only the second protocol to achieve this feat. Having nearly doubled in TVL within a…

Ethereum applications incubator ConsenSys has completed the transition to Phase II of their decentralized peer-to-peer trading system, AirSwap, enabling token-based governance. AirSwap said their token launch participants included over 9k people from 135 different countries. Now with Phase II completed, they’re aiming to push their network development further. AirSwap is now inviting users to stake…

The Spartan Group has announced the launch of its $50M Spartan DeFi Venture Fund aimed to back new founders and innovators in the DeFi space. The group has raised $30M of their targeted $50M. Investors include bankers and finance industry veterans who want to see DeFi succeed as the future of finance.  They pitch themselves…

Last week’s Yearn Finance hack has a DeFi user wrestling with an insurance protocol over a $1.7M claim. Twitter user kferretcrypto, who bought a claim provided by Nexus Mutual, an insurance protocol, in September, tweeted on Feb. 6 that the Yearn hack triggered a 1,000 Ether payout (or about $1.7M), by ArmorFi, an insurance aggregator…

Yearn Finance, the yield aggregator protocol which suffered the first major hack of 2021 last week, is healing, making its Dai savings smart contract available to users again, and compensating victims of its recent hack. Yearn has restored its yDAI vault and returned $9.7M in DAI funds to users who had their stablecoins deposited in…

The Tamagotchi x Pokemon web3 crossover Axie Infinity has broken the record for the largest NFT sale yesterday afternoon as a community member purchased a digital plot of land for 888.25 ETH, worth over $1.5M at the time of writing. The sale comes alongside the launch of Axie Infinity’s custom sidechain, Ronin, which launched last…

Tornado Cash passed its first governance proposal to make its native token – TORN – transferable yesterday afternoon. Tornado Cash offers a way for users to privately send funds between any two addresses using an anonymity pool, meaning tokens sent through the mixer can not be tracked between the sending and receiving address. It also…

DeFi is getting an unexpected and huge new backer: The Federal Reserve of St. Louis. “DeFi offers exciting opportunities and has the potential to create a truly open, transparent, and immutable financial infrastructure,” reads the latest report from one of the 12 regional Reserve Banks. The report cites  learnings from projects like Maker, Uniswap, Balancer,…

The NFT community has been taken over by thirst traps.  Sexy, sexy thirst traps like this one posted over the weekend: Source: Twitter And this one: Source: Twitter And here’s mine (which you can buy for $3.4k if you want): Source: Rarible You’re probably wondering why.  It seems like a joke, but there’s a deeper…