DeFi’s borrowing and lending rates are trending downwards, opening questions of what will happen to open finance if yields converge with those of traditional finance. Borrowing rates for USDC have declined to 2.5% and 3.1% on Compound and Aave, from over 15% three months ago, according to LoanScan. Lending rates have suffered similar compression, with…

There’s nothing to be afraid of with stablecoins. That’s the main message Randal Quarles, the vice chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve and a member of its board, delivered on June 28, surprising a DeFi community that’s become inured to getting dissed by the financial establishment. Quarles believes private-sector stablecoins are a worthy alternative to…

Whopping interest rates on offer from crypto lending platforms have been a big story over the last several months. Now Coinbase and Compound, two giants in the space, are wading in with their own reinventions of an old banking staple — the savings account.  The question is, are customers ready for the torque and complexity…

Kain Warwick, founder of derivatives liquidity protocol Synthetix, is back.  The founder had previously stepped away from the protocol to take on a “more passive role,” but has now declared his intention to run for the Spartan Council, an eight-member governance DAO that votes on and manages changes to the protocol. Warwick previously stewarded the…

Just 40 days after Ethereum’s hashrate hit an all-time high, the key metric has plunged 17% in the last 10 days, according to data from Glassnode, a blockchain and intelligence provider. That’s the worst drop in a 10-day span in Ethereum’s history. The cause: China, probably. Ever since the Chinese government in May started warning…

The value of SafeDollar (SDO), an algorithmic stablecoin intended to be pegged to $1, has dropped to zero after a $248K exploit on Polygon. In a post-mortem analysis published on June 28, SafeDollar reported it had lost $202K of USDC and $46K of USDT as a result of an attack on one of its pools…

The decentralized Ethereum exchange DeversiFi plans to launch a governance token called DVF. DVF will be distributed via an open and fair launch mechanism called DeversiFi Launch Market (DLM). The proceeds will be placed in a community-governed treasury. Tokenomics and further details on the DLM mechanism will be made available closer to launch.  While DeversiFi’s…

So, Friday, April 30, 2021 Hey dude, any thoughts on Bored Apes, the art looks cool. This was late April. My mind was very much not on NFTs, the overall market was just weeks away from what would turn out to be the top. I ignored it. And how I regret that now. Because BAYC…

SharedStake, a decentralized ETH2.0 Staking-as-a-Service protocol, is in disarray after a suspected inside job.  In a series of transactions on June 19 and June 23, a ‘rogue developer’ withdrew $500K worth of SGT, the project’s governance token, from the team’s allocation. These tokens were locked in a vesting contract and were meant to be unlocked…

It’s a he said-she said scenario, and it’s about more than $74M in ETH. Stakehound, a service which gives users a synthetic asset to trade for their staked Ether, has accused Fireblocks, a digital asset security firm, of losing 38,178 ETH. The Ether, worth $74.4M at the time of writing, is staked in the ETH…