🌻 LSTfi Blooms: DeFi Week of May 28

Happy weekend Defiers!

This week, we dived into the frothy LSTfi sector. Liquid Staking Tokens now represent close to half of all staked Ether, meaning LSTfi is potentially a $17B market. New protocols combining LST with DeFi money legos are proliferating quickly, offering a variety of strategies for generating yield in addition to staking rewards.

Rocket Pool, the second-largest LST provider, is actively seeking out new DeFi integrations in its quest to eat into the dominance of its goliath rival Lido. Rocket Pool launched its LST token on the booming Layer 2 network ZkSync Era on Thursday, plugging rETH into Era’s $375M DeFi ecosystem.

The mystery of Multichain’s missing founder continues to leave the web3 industry anxiously waiting for updates. The bridging protocol holds $1.45B worth of assets, and services for 11 different chains have suffered interruptions so far. “One guy doesn't answer the phone for 24 hours, and suddenly everyone fears for billions of dollars potentially,” said Shahar Madar of Fireblocks.

While most leading crypto assets continue to trade within a tight range, Optimism’s native token is down 12% in seven days after a major unlock event allowed core contributors and investors to sell a quarter of the OP allocation from Wednesday. With OP’s supply more than doubling, the bloodshed could have been worse, but it remains to be seen whether the dust has settled.

Memecoin mania is still ongoing though, with a record number of wallets trading on Uniswap last month. More than half a million wallets executed trades on the decentralized exchange in May, beating out the previous record by almost 50%.

Moonbirds creator, Kevin Rose, caused uproar in the NFT community this week after asserting that Bought Ape Yacht Club investors who bought at the collection’s peak are worse off “dollar for dollar” than Moonbirds holders. BAYC enthusiasts were quick to point out that Bored Apes are trading at more than 500 times their mint price, while Moonbirds are priced at sub-mint levels.

And in this week’s podcast, Goldfinch co-founders, Blake and Mike, discuss how crypto is driving unprecedented access to capital worldwide.

Enjoy!

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