📈DeFi Assets Outperform: DeFi Week of July 16

Happy weekend Defiers!

It was a bullish week for DeFi tokens, which make up half of the 10 best-performing assets among the top 100 crypto assets for the past seven days, despite the broader crypto markets pulling back.

DeFi assets were still riding high from last week’s ruling in the SEC vs Ripple case, when a U.S. court determined digital assets do not automatically comprise securities even if sold via a securities contract.

U.S. lawmakers are now preparing to review two important digital asset bills next Wednesday. The bills offer regulatory recommendations for stablecoins, guidance for determining when digital assets are securities, and propose a joint SEC-CFTC advisory commission.

Competition between Ethereum scaling teams continues to heat up, with Matter Labs shipping a new proving system for its flagship Layer 2, zkSync Era. Matter Labs said the new system improves decentralization by reducing provers’ computation load by 80%, adding that even CPUs can support the new system.

Polygon Labs published its final announcement outlining initial proposals for the “Polygon 2.0” roadmap. Polygon 2.0, a unified ecosystem of Polygon Layer 2s, will feature the project’s first foray into community governance, transitioning away from Delegated Proof of Stake. Polygon also announced it will replace MATIC with POL, a new token that would accrue staking rewards.

Lens, the social media protocol from Aave, launched its v2 iteration. The revamped protocol offers new functionality for developers, such as enabling external smart contract execution from within Lens v2.

MetaMask, the popular Ethereum wallet from Consensys, also hopes to court developers. In an exclusive interview, MetaMask told The Defiant its long-awaited Snaps protocol will launch before 2024. Snaps allows developers to build out new wallet experiences on top of MetaMask, such as cross-chain interactions with any network and advanced security features.

And in this week’s podcast, Nicolas Liochon, global lead for Linea at Consensys, walks us through what makes Linea different from other Layer 2 rollups.